Les Arts de Paris

Евгений Иванов "Огни большого города"

2008-06-29T19:58:56Z

Евгений Иванов
"Огни большого города"

Чаепитие в старом городе 30х40 см, масло, картон, 2008

Tea-drinking in old town 30х40 см, oil, cardboard, 2008

Coffee-house 30х40 см, oil, cardboard, 2007

The old walls 20х30 см, oil, cardboard, 2008

The night lights of the town 30х20 см, oil, cardboard, 2008

Ancient streetcars are unconcerned 30х40 см, oil, cardboard, 2008

The Night Cafe 30х20 см, oil, cardboard, 2008
Details / Фрагменты
http://www.yessy.com/eugeneivanov/index.html?i=23792&pic=3

Евгений Иванов "Супрематическая Черта Оседлости"

2008-04-12T22:06:57Z

Супрематическая Черта Оседлости

Josefov, 2003

Jewish Quarter, 2004

Light In the Window, 2005

The Jewish Quarter, 2005

Jewish Cemetery, 2005

The Spirit of the old town, 2005

The House Detached, 2006

Rest of the Jewish Quarter, 2006

Chanukah, 2007

Sad violinist, 2007

Border between light and darkness, 2007

Moon Synagogue, 2008

фрагменты работы крупнее
http://www.yessy.com/eugeneivanov/index.html?i=9409&pic=5

Eugene Ivanov. "La paire artistique"

2008-04-09T09:26:34Z

La toile / huile 80см x 65см 2004.

http://yessy.com/eugeneivanov

Les Arts Actuelles en France

2007-12-04T04:40:35Z

x-posted in france

La situation actuelle de la culture francaise—bien que je ne suis pas d’accord avec tout ce qui est ecrit ici (j’aime la theorie et le style philosophique des romanciers francais)—c’est meilleure qu’on croit aux pays anglophones :

Certain aspects of national character may also play a role. Abstraction and theory have long been prized in France's intellectual life and emphasized in its schools. Nowhere is that tendency more apparent than in French fiction, which still suffers from the introspective 1950s nouveau roman (new novel) movement. Many of today's most critically revered French novelists write spare, elegant fiction that doesn't travel well. Others practice what the French call autofiction — thinly veiled memoirs that make no bones about being conceived in deep self-absorption. Christine Angot received the 2006 Prix de Flore for her latest work, Rendez-vous, an exhaustively introspective dissection of her love affairs. One of the few contemporary French writers widely published abroad, Michel Houellebecq, is known chiefly for misogyny, misanthropy and an obsession with sex. "In America, a writer wants to work hard and be successful," says François Busnel, editorial director of Lire, a popular magazine about books (only in France!). "French writers think they have to be intellectuals."

Conversely, foreign fiction — especially topical, realistic novels — sells well in France. Such story-driven Anglo-Saxon authors as William Boyd, John le Carré and Ian McEwan are over-represented on French best-seller lists, while Americans such as Paul Auster and Douglas Kennedy are considered adopted sons. "This is a place where literature is still taken seriously," says Kennedy, whose The Woman in the Fifth was a recent best seller in French translation. "But if you look at American fiction, it deals with the American condition, one way or another. French novelists produce interesting stuff, but what they are not doing is looking at France."

French cinema has also suffered from a nouveau roman complex. "The typical French film of the '80s and '90s had a bunch of people sitting at lunch and disagreeing with each other," quips Marc Levy, one of France's best-selling novelists. (His Et si c'Etait Vrai... , published in English as If Only It Were True, became the 2005 Hollywood film Just Like Heaven starring Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo.) "An hour and a half later, they are sitting at dinner, and some are agreeing while others are disagreeing." France today can make slick, highly commercial movies — Amélie, Brotherhood of the Wolf — but for many foreigners the taint of talkiness lingers.

How to make France a cultural giant again? One place to start is the education system, where a series of reforms over the years has crowded the arts out of the curriculum. "One learns to read at school, one doesn't learn to see," complains Pierre Rosenberg, a former director of the Louvre museum. To that end, Sarkozy has proposed an expansion of art-history courses for high schoolers. He has also promised measures to entice more of them to pursue the literature baccalaureate program. Once the most popular course of study, it is now far outstripped by the science and economics-sociology options. "We need literary people, pupils who can master speech and reason," says Education Minister Xavier Darcos. "They are always in demand."

Sarkozy sent a chill through the French intelligentsia last summer by calling for the "democratization" of culture. Many took this to mean that cultural policy should be based on market forces, not on professional judgments about quality. With more important adversaries to confront — notably the pampered civil-service unions — Sarkozy is unlikely to pick a fight over cultural subsidies, which remain vastly popular.

But the government may well try to foster private participation by tinkering with the tax system. "In the U.S. you can donate a painting to a museum and take a full deduction," says art expert Boïcos. "Here it's limited. Here the government makes the important decisions. But if the private sector got more involved and cultural institutions got more autonomy, France could undergo a major artistic revival." Sarkozy's appointment of Christine Albanel as Culture Minister looks like a vote for individual initiative: as director of Versailles, she has cultivated private donations and partnerships with businesses. The Louvre has gone one step further by effectively licensing its name to offshoots in Atlanta and Abu Dhabi.

A more difficult task will be to change French thinking. Though it is perilous to generalize about 60 million people, there is a strain in the national mind-set that distrusts commercial success. Opinion polls show that more young French aspire to government jobs than to careers in business. "Americans think that if artists are successful, they must be good," says Quemin. "We think that if they're successful, they're too commercial. Success is considered bad taste."

At the same time, other countries' thinking could use an update. Britain, Germany and the U.S. in particular are so focused on their own enormous cultural output that they tend to ignore France. Says Guy Walter, director of the Villa Gillet cultural center in Lyon: "When I point out a great new French novel to a New York publisher, I am told it's 'too Frenchy.' But Americans don't read French, so they don't really know."

What those foreigners are missing is that French culture is surprisingly lively. Its movies are getting more imaginative and accessible. Just look at the Taxi films of Luc Besson and Gérard Krawczyk, a rollicking series of Hong Kong-style action comedies; or at such intelligent yet crowd-pleasing works as Cédric Klapisch's L'Auberge Espagnole and Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped, both hits on the foreign art-house circuit. French novelists are focusing increasingly on the here and now: one of the big books of this year's literary rentrée, Yasmina Reza's L'Aube le Soir ou la Nuit (Dawn Dusk or Night) is about Sarkozy's recent electoral campaign. Another standout, Olivier Adam's A l'Abri de Rien (In the Shelter of Nothing), concerns immigrants at the notorious Sangatte refugee camp. France's Japan-influenced bandes dessinées (comic-strip) artists have made their country a leader in one of literature's hottest genres: the graphic novel. Singers like Camille, Benjamin Biolay and Vincent Delerm have revived the chanson. Hip-hop artists like Senegal-born MC Solaar, Cyprus-born Diam's and Abd al Malik, a son of Congolese immigrants, have taken the verlan of the streets and turned it into a sharper, more poetic version of American rap.

Therein may lie France's return to global glory. The country's angry, ambitious minorities are committing culture all over the place. France has become a multiethnic bazaar of art, music and writing from the banlieues and disparate corners of the nonwhite world. African, Asian and Latin American music get more retail space in France than perhaps any other country. Movies from Afghanistan, Argentina, Hungary and other distant lands fill the cinemas. Authors of all nations are translated into French and, inevitably, will influence the next generation of French writers. Despite all its quotas and subsidies, France is a paradise for connoisseurs of foreign cultures. "France has always been a country where people could come from any country and immediately start painting or writing in French — or even not in French," says Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian whose movie based on her graphic novel Persepolis is France's 2008 Oscar entry in the Best Foreign Film category. "The richness of French culture is based on that quality."

And what keeps a nation great if not the infusion of new energy from the margins? Expand the definition of culture a bit, and you'll find three fields in which France excels by absorbing outside influences. First, France is arguably the world leader in fashion, thanks to the sharp antennae of its cosmopolitan designers. Second, French cuisine — built on the foundation of Italian and, increasingly, Asian traditions — remains the global standard. Third, French winemakers are using techniques developed abroad to retain their reputation for excellence in the face of competition from newer wine-growing regions. Tellingly, many French vines were long ago grafted onto disease-resistant rootstocks from, of all places, the U.S. "We have to take the risk of globalization," says Villa Gillet's Guy Walter. "We must welcome the outside world."

Jean-Paul Sartre, the giant of postwar French letters, wrote in 1946 to thank the U.S. for Hemingway, Faulkner and other writers who were then influencing French fiction — but whom Americans were starting to take for granted. "We shall give back to you these techniques which you have lent us," he promised. "We shall return them digested, intellectualized, less effective, and less brutal — consciously adapted to French taste. Because of this incessant exchange, which makes nations rediscover in other nations what they have invented first and then rejected, perhaps you will rediscover in these new [French] books the eternal youth of that 'old' Faulkner."

Thus will the world discover the eternal youth of France, a nation whose long quest for glory has honed a fine appreciation for the art of borrowing. And when the more conventional minds of the French cultural establishment — along with their self-occupied counterparts abroad — stop fretting about decline and start applauding the ferment on the fringes, France will reclaim its reputation as a cultural power, a land where every new season brings a harvest of genius.

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1686532,00.html

Dites-moi, ou dans le monde Anglophone dirait un ministre d’éducation, "Nous avons besoin de gens littéraires, d’étudiants qui se spécialisent en raison et en discours"?

_lutetia @ 2007-10-26T02:28:00

2007-10-25T23:34:13Z

hello!
my name is sinikka, i'm 25 and living in finland. this seems like a lovely community.
i am currently reading tropic of cancer by henry miller and am in love with the book. and the filthy paris he describes so perfectly.

nice to meet you all!

colette

henry miller

anais nin

The Count of Montecristo online reading community

2007-08-06T18:22:09Z

Hi everybody!

For those of you who read Italian, I just opened apuntate, a community where we read and discuss books together chapter by chapter.

The first novel running is The Count of Montecristo, Alexandre Dumas père’s most famous novel (starting today!), an engrossing story of love, betrayal and vengeance… if you’re interested, feel free to join us and spread the word! :)

Cocteau!

2007-04-16T15:49:36Z

Please!
Be so kind to help me!
I am writing a diploma on the theme: "Jean Cocteau, his film "The blood of a Poet"". I try to find any suitable information about Cocteau in internet but all facts I found are very general(. Maybe some of you know some wonderful sites where I can look for information about his as a writer and as a director? Or maybe u are fond of Cocteau and u can tell me a lot about him?
Hope, u will answer me.
Thanks a lot!!!
It's very important for me!

Ils Haissent les Catholiques Autant Que Les Francais et les Mussulmans

2006-12-25T18:16:43Z

x-posted in france, our_europe, muslim_america and viva_intifada

Many people in Anglo-phonic countries have difficulty identifying the deep bias in our journalism against both France and France’s traditional religion. But this bias, though subtle and insidious, is extremely powerful politically, and a lot of Frenchmen, I fear, are flummoxed by it, too.

It is complicated by Amerika’s traditional anti-Catholicism and, nowadays, by her inflexible and adamant championship of Zionism in the Middle East—which is also, I might add, a by-product of the millenarian Protestant Fundamentalism as rampant here as Islamism is in the Arab world.

Here are two articles from a British magazine that is obviously “neo-conservative” in its political sympathies. They play directly into the bigotries of what are obviously their largest readership—“bien-pensant” Amerikans. I’ve drawn your attention, with bracketed comments, to the places where the writers bare their obvious prejudices.
Soyez en garde contre eux!

John Gray
AN AMBIVALENT AUTHORITY
Alexis de Tocqueville: Prophet of Democracy in the Age of Revolution

By Hugh Brogan (Profile Books 724pp £30)

In 1927 Paul Valéry wrote that Europe dreams of being ruled by an American Commission, and for many Europeans America is still seen as having an enviable freedom from the burdens of the past. There may be few who would now want to be subject to American rule but there are still many who see America as standing for a kind of freedom and equality to which Europeans can still only aspire. It is a view as common on the left of politics as on the right. There seem to be plenty of ex-communists and former Trotskyites who regard the United States with a loyalty and reverence of a sort they once reserved for the Soviet Union, and who round on critics of US policies as enemies of progress. Right across the spectrum of opinion America is seen as the supreme modern society, which more than any other embodies the future.

If any one writer can be said to be responsible for this view, it must be Alexis de Tocqueville. This acutely observant, high-strung French nobleman has been hugely influential in disseminating the idea that America is the country in whose path all others are bound - sooner or later, one way or another - to follow. Tocqueville's Democracy in America is a classic not only on account of its insights into American life but because it suggests that the dilemmas faced by America are those that will confront European countries in future. Chief among these is reconciling personal liberty with democracy. Tocqueville understood democracy as being at bottom the acceptance of human equality rather than any one type of government. He was afraid that in breaking with the complex hierarchies of Europe America could fall into a type of mass conformism, and he feared the same could happen in Europe itself as it shook off its feudal inheritance. The trend towards democracy was benign and irreversible, even providentially ordained, but it carried with it a threat to freedom of mind and action.

Toqueville's classic relies for much of its interest on his view that America is not a singularity but an exemplar of the main trends of modern development. He presents this view without much in the way of argument, and in fact many of the experiences he reports testify to America's abiding difference from other countries - he was as dumbfounded by America's intense religiosity as most Europeans are today, for example. Hugh Brogan gives a vivid account of the ambivalent responses America evoked in Tocqueville when - for reasons that are still not entirely clear - he made his celebrated tour in 1831-32. Brogan shows how often the sometimes clairvoyantly far-seeing French aristocrat viewed the country through the prejudices of his class and time. It might be thought that Tocqueville is by now a rather familiar figure, but he emerges anew from Brogan's consummately skilful presentation as an intricate and in some ways contradictory personality. Blessed with a naturally inquiring turn of mind, he was also plagued by doubt, and struggled almost to the end of his life to sustain his Catholic faith.

[It was not the “religiosity” in general that “dumbfounded” Tocqueville, but the peculiarly Protestant TEMPERAMENT of the American religion that unnerved him. What he puts his finger directly on is how ill-disposed that particular religious disposition is to brook the compromises necessary to maintain republican democracy. Tocqueville’s skeptical, civilized and very urbane Catholic faith—which he had no “struggle” to “sustain,” pace Johnson—is, on the other hand, very capable of managing democracy. This is pure anti-Catholic—and subtly anti-French—bias, which will rear its ugly head in the next article, as well.]

A sensitive man, Tocqueville was also capable of a harshness that grates on our ears nowadays. One of his aims on his American tour was to investigate the prison system - then as now a core American institution - with the help of his friend, Gustave de Beaumont. Writing of a prisoner in solitary confinement in Philadelphia, he notes that the man was healthy, well clothed, well fed, well bedded. 'However, he is deeply unhappy; the wholly mental punishment inflicted on him fills his soul with a fear far deeper than that of whips and chains. Is it not thus that an enlightened and humane society should punish?' Here Tocqueville was not harking back to feudal cruelty. He was writing as one of the progressive thinkers of the time - as he did when he wrote condoning the savagery that accompanied the conquest of Algeria.

[The “savagery” that “accompanied the conquest of Algeria” will prove to have been miniscule, compared mathematically to the “savagery” that has accompanied the “conquest of Fallujah.” Although BOTH are thoroughly reprehensible, there is little difference between the hubristic self-righteousness of the rhetoric used to justify both: the French were bringing the “backward Arabs” the “benefit” of 19th century “progress” and the Amerikans have been bringing the Iraqis “democracy.” BOTH are WORDS used to justify MURDER.]

As Brogan notes, Tocqueville may never have been able to shake off a certain nostalgia for the ancien régime. He was always caught between a past that never wholly lost the qualities of an idyll and a revolutionary present whose upshot was uncertain. But he was the reverse of a reactionary, and embraced what he believed to be enlightened and modern with a righteous enthusiasm.

It is hard to do justice to the artistry with which Brogan renders this complicated character. Tocqueville's friendships and ambitions, his passionate and anxious marriage, his restless cyclothymic personality as a result of which he passed regularly through moods of melancholy and elation - all this is beautifully brought out. His lifelong attachment to his devoted friend Beaumont, to whom he wrote begging him to visit when he was dying in Cannes, is charted with great subtlety. Brogan's delicate touch does not desert him when he recounts Tocqueville's exchanges with Arthur Gobineau, the intellectually gifted but repulsive author of the two-volume Essay on the Inequality of Man, which was to have a baleful influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a kind of encylopedia of racism. The book is also rich in delightful vignettes, as when Tocqueville is described drinking in the Gothic scene of Oxford at night. Though I have read Tocqueville on and off over many years, I felt as if I knew the man behind the writings for the first time. Brogan has given us a masterly reconstruction of the European milieu by which Tocqueville was formed, and the definitive biography of one of the nineteenth century's most representative thinkers.

It is a study of the life not the work, but Hugh Brogan's book leaves the reader with some fascinating questions about Tocqueville's view of America. Would he not be appalled by the power of fundamentalism in the US today? Tocqueville seems, at the end, to have been a believer; but like most European intellectuals at the time he aspired to be reasonable, and believed being modern went with growing rationality.

[Note, please, the ordinary neo-Protestant bigotry of the Anglo-Saxon mind, which presumes that it is almost IMPOSSIBLE to be a “believer,” and also be “reasonable” or “rational.” This is a verifiable cultural indicator—obvious to ANYBODY ABLE TO LOOK FOR IT WITH AN OPEN MIND—that the Protestant de-sacramentalizing of ordinary religious life in the West has led to disdain of spirituality itself. This is what the Muslims notice about us INSTANTANEOUSLY, and it is what they cannot accept about the West—cannot accept if they are to remain faithful to their own Revelation.]

It is hard to imagine him being other than horrified by the spectacle of a country a quarter of whose population rejects Darwinism and lives in expectation of Armageddon. If he were confronted with it as it is at the start of the twenty-first century, would Tocqueville change his view of America? Or would he revise his beliefs about what it means to be modern?

[Or would he acutely observe that the fervour of a heretical fundamentalist religiosity has unnecessarily pitted Amerikan REASON against Amerikan FAITH, to yield a MONSTER that is IMPLICIT in the original heresies?]

It is impossible to tell. Still, it is not difficult to envisage this inquiring thinker concluding that America is not the paradigm of modernity he imagined it to be but a one-off experiment, which seems destined to remain different from Europe and the rest of the world.

[No, what it is is a “one-off” aberration in the history of Christian civilization, but one that no other genuine spirituality can tolerate, and which the genuinely spiritual civilizations left in the world—in particular Latin Catholicism and Islam—instinctively perceive as being the palpable manifestation of the work of the “Anti-Christ.”]

http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/gray_12_06.html

Daniel Johnson
J'ACCUSE
Betrayal: France, the Arabs, and the Jews

By David Pryce-Jones (Encounter Books 171pp £20.99)

As I write, it is exactly a year since the desolate banlieues of France erupted in an orgy of violence, on a scale which had not been seen for generations. At the time, these riots were blamed on social exclusion. Since then, it has become clear that the rioters are not just 'immigrants' or 'youths', but are first and foremost Muslims. When they set light to a car, their cry is often: 'Allahu akhbar!' ('Allah is great!')

[THAT makes them “Muslim”? Right, so if I claim that, because I am “good Jew,” I have a right to burn out a Palestinian Arab settlement, because “God told me to” in Exodus. The terrible bias against Muslims—and, later, against Catholics—starts really EARLY in this piece of journalistic crap!]

The violence, moreover, is endemic and ubiquitous. In 2005, there were 110,000 incidents of urban violence, including 45,000 vehicles burnt out. This year, there has been an average of over 100 incidents a day. Since the riots supposedly subsided last January, some 3,000 police officers are reported to have been injured. France is quite deliberately being made ungovernable.

This 'French intifada' was merely the culmination of a process that has turned many suburbs into no-go areas for the police and increasingly for non-Muslims too. In particular, the Islamist rabble-rousers who are behind the insurgency have incited their followers to attack Jews, who are now outnumbered by Muslims in France by at least ten to one.

How has it come to this? In this devastating indictment, the cri de coeur of an Englishman who loves France but is exasperated by the French, the background to this breakdown of civil society gradually emerges. David Pryce-Jones has discovered the explanation in the archives of the French foreign ministry, known after its imposing headquarters, the Quai d'Orsay. The corps diplomatique who have run this institution like a private club - known to initiates simply as 'la carrière' - are responsible not only for the decline of French prestige abroad, but also for creating the conditions for the unfolding catastrophe at home.

[I think “French prestige abroad” is REALLY “French prestige in Anglophonic countries.” I’ve lived in India and Sri Lanka for a long time, and I can tell you that NO Western country is so well respected there—and particularly by Muslim nations—as France is. This is an egregious, but typical Anglo-Saxon distortion of the truth.]
Like so many misfortunes, this one has its origins in the megalomania of the Bonaparte clan. For more than two centuries, since Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, French diplomacy has been gripped by a delusion of grandeur: the idea of France as une puissance musulmane, 'a Muslim power' - a phrase that has a new and sinister echo now.
French diplomats, determined to outdo their British and German rivals in great-power politics, were also convinced that France had a special mission civilisatrice in the Islamic world. Yet their sentimental orientalism was entirely compatible with an institutional anti-Semitism that is documented in shocking detail by Pryce-Jones. The rise of Zionism transformed this anti-Semitism from a mere prejudice, odious perhaps but peripheral to foreign policy, into a distorting mirror which motivated and reinforced the fatal misjudgements that have led France to its present predicament.
The French had pretensions to be the protecting power for all Catholics in the Middle East, and…

[Please note the refusal to admit the crying need for “protection” of Catholic populations in the Middle East, and that no other country beside France was willing to shoulder this responsibility. The two English Archbishops visit to Bethlehem this Christmas WOULD stand in mute testimony of the abandonment of Catholic Christian populations in the Middle East to the hate-filled machinations of the Zionists and the “Islamists” IF the Anglo-Saxon reportage of it could be accurate and full—but it never will be.]

…they saw Zionism as a competitor - one, moreover, that was associated in their eyes first with German and then with British interests…

[No, they most certainly DID NOT see “Zionism as a competitor” for protector of Arab Catholicism in the Middle East. The very idea is ludicrous!—And it could only be believed by English-speaking readerships.]

…In response to what it saw as an impudent demand for a Jewish homeland, the Quai d'Orsay 'effectively launched the Arab nationalist movement' on the eve of the First World War.

Some of this book makes uncomfortable reading for Catholics, because several of the most outré orientalists who have controlled French policy in the last century turn out to have been Tartuffes of the worst kind. Pryce-Jones devotes a whole chapter to the curious case of Louis Massignon, who was the Arabist guru of the Quai d'Orsay both before and after World War II. Massignon's faith was a bizarre confection of Catholic and Islamic mysticism, and he ended up as a Melkite priest.

[“Bizarre confection” indeed! It is likely that this provincial British twit has never heard of Charles de Foucauld, someone who was first re-connected to his ancestral Catholic faith by his encounter with Muslim spitituality:

http://www.charlesdefoucauld.org/en/biograb_en.htm ]

Though he was married, it was the homoerotic attractions of Arab boys that evidently drew him to the East…

[Ah, yes, don’t forget to get THAT into your miserable diatribe: “Those FRENCH; they’re ‘different’ from US sexually, too!” Yes, you puritanical ass-hole, and I bet they’re glad of it, too!]

…He enjoyed cloak-and-dagger espionage, alternating between the robe and turban of an Egyptian imam and the habit of a Franciscan. He liked Lawrence of Arabia - as Pryce-Jones comments, 'they were two of a kind' - but enjoyed correcting the Englishman's Arabic grammar.

[I guess no “correct-thinking Englishman” will ever be able to forgive the great Lawrence for reminding them of how they betrayed their brothers-in-arms of the desert campaigns of World War I.]

Massignon's influence was similarly pernicious. Put in charge of French propaganda to the Muslim world, he dedicated himself to building a Franco-Islamic 'bloc' or 'entente' and worked hard to scupper the Zionist project. His conversation and writings are riddled with rage against 'the ignominy of the Jews', and he even had the temerity to tell Martin Buber that Israel must stop 'Atlantic speculators' from exploiting Arab oil.

[ Would that THAT effort had succeeded! But hold on, for a minute: doesn’t THAT imply that Massignon was trying to facilitate a degree of COORDINATION between Arabs and the early Zionists? But, of course, we’ll pass rapidly over that possibility and not even credit it!]

…Though he died in 1963, Massignon anticipated much of the contemporary French critique of the Zionist-Anglo-Saxon alliance.

Other pre-war intellectuals played an equally nefarious role in this episode of the betrayal of French rationalism - what Julien Benda called 'la trahison des clercs'. Pryce-Jones singles out Paul Morand, Jean Giraudoux and Paul Claudel: all writers, all senior officials at the Quai d'Orsay, all virulent anti-Semites. It is hard not to see the present prime minister and littérateur, Dominique de Villepin, as their spiritual descendant, when he describes Israel as 'a parenthesis in history'.

[I bet what Villepin means is that, through their imprudent system of foreign alliances, the Zionists are turning THEMSELVES into a “parenthesis in history.”]

The one brief phase of rapprochement between post-war France and Israel, during the mid-1950s, took place despite the Quai d'Orsay, which was kept in the dark about defence and nuclear co-operation. The Suez operation was doomed partly because the ministry had to be kept out of the loop. Even the then foreign minister, Christian Pineau, had to tell colleagues: 'Above all, not a word to the Quai d'Orsay!'

Under General de Gaulle, France reverted to its traditional 'Muslim policy' and imposed an arms embargo on Israel. After the Six Day War in 1967, de Gaulle set the tone for future French statesmen by calling the Jews 'an elite people, self-assured and domineering' with 'a burning ambition for conquest'. He ignored Raymond Aron, who warned that de Gaulle had opened 'a new era in ... anti-Semitic history', and instead echoed the old Quai d'Orsay motto of France as a 'Muslim power'.

[I myself have heard numerous Jews refer to Israelis as a “warrior race. Seems to me “le grand Charles” wasn’t far off the mark here. But I don’t think he was talking about Hasids or very many of the religious Jews I've known, either.]

Thereafter, Israel looked to America, while France recklessly encouraged a succession of Muslim leaders who proved to be implacably hostile to the West, from Gaddafi to Saddam Hussein. It was the French who turned Yasser Arafat into a figure on the world stage and tolerated his terrorists in their midst. And it was the French who enabled Ayatollah Khomeini to launch his Islamic revolution from a suburb of Paris.

[The French have traditionally harboured MANY political refugees, but it doesn’t mean they've approved of all their politics.]

The cynicism, corruption and arrogance of all four presidents since de Gaulle - Pompidou, Giscard, Mitterrand and Chirac - have reinforced the déformation professionnelle of the Quai d'Orsay. Far from buying France influence in the Muslim world, the 'Arab policy' has merely imported the conflicts of the Middle East onto the streets of Paris.

[ And I’m willing to bet that the “conflicts of the Middle East” will be solved ON “the streets of Paris” before they’re solved anywhere else. For a long time, it looked like they’d first be solved “on the streets” of London, but, my fine British twit, you can thank your Amerikan poodle Tony for foreclosing that likelihood.]

Only now, when the country is in the grip of an Islamist jihad, has Chirac acknowledged that anti-Semitism - the existence of which in France he had long denied - is so serious that 'an attack against a French Jew is an attack against France'.

[And when has Tony Blair said, “An attack against a British Muslim is an attack against Britain”?]

It is David Pryce-Jones's great merit to have documented the conflict between this affirmation of the rights of French Jews at home and their denial abroad by French foreign policy.

[For God’s sake, WHEN will ever be able to distinguish, in our discussions of Amerikan and European NATIONAL INTERESTS, between Jews who live in our countries and Zionists? If we don’t learn SOON to be able to do this, then the foreign policies of every one of our countries are going to be held hostage to the interests of an increasingly APARTHEID state.]

…Whether the French public will heed this English indictment of their political class is more than doubtful, but Betrayal should resonate among those for whom Zola is still not a footballer but the author of J'accuse.

http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/johnson_12_06.html

Please, for the sake of both Arabs and European and Middle Eastern Catholics, may the “French public” NEVER heed “this English indictment” of their “political class”!

_lutetia @ 2006-11-27T17:20:00

2006-11-27T07:50:54Z

My art history exam is in two days.
We have been learning about Courbet, Manet, Monet and their roles as artists in eighteenth century Paris.

French culture appears to me, steeped in mystery and grandeur.

_lutetia @ 2006-11-02T06:48:00

2006-11-02T12:48:02Z

Salut a tous
J'suis de Saint-Petersbourg. En janvier je serais a Paris.
Qu'est-ce que vous me conseillez de voire, visiter etc?
Je voudrais préciser qu'en ecrivant une thèse sur la philosophie francaise du XVII siècle j'tiens a voir les hoteles particuliers ou les chateaux ou les precieuses, les jansenistes et les autres "personages" typique pour ce temps-la ont vecu ou ont passe quelques jours de leurs vies.
Aussi j'envie de trouver quelques bouquinistes pour acheter des livres assez récentes sur ce theme
Merci

Aucun Trait de la Reine

2006-10-22T03:56:11Z

x-posted at france

Last night, I saw the Sofia Coppola costume drama about the « Qu’ils mangent du gateau » half of the life of the last great Sovereign of «l’Ancien Regime. »

>

Despite the brilliant shots of Versailles and the splendid, historically realistic sets, and despite the fact that the wonderful 80s music doesn’t jar nearly so badly as I thought it would with the Rameau and the Lully pieces, the film is still a fiasco for one specific reason: its leading lady thoroughly lacks the regal hauteur, the majestic presence of the scion of Hapsburg and Lorraine who was able to make mincemeat out of Fouquier-Tinville, the person about whom Mirabeau said that she was “the only man” in Louis XVI’s entourage. Instead, we’re treated to Kirsten Dunst’s insipid smirks during her seduction scene with Fersen.

As one of the reviewers has said, the film is such a monument to pleasure that even the smallpox that kills Rip Torn as Louis XV is kept off the screen. I think the French booed it at Cannes because it almost completely omits the tribulations that deepened the character of this princess and made of her the greatest of royalist heroines.

Also, there’s no sense whatsoever in this film of why the French, among all the Europeans, were the most deeply worshipful of their sacral monarchy—which must, in part, account for the violently emotional reaction of the mobs of Revolutionaries against their suzerains, once they felt they’d been betrayed by them.

But here’s a reviewer who doesn’t agree with me at all:

http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/104366,WKP-News-marie20.article

This thing was supposedly based on Lady Antonia Fraser’s biography, but, if so, I wonder how Coppola would DARE to suggest that the Dauphin was fathered by Fersen. That suggestion DOES “trivialize” the very things that this “Queen of Trivialities” DID take seriously—her divine right and royal lineage.

Jour de la Morte de la Reine

2006-10-16T12:21:44Z

x-posted in france

Aujourd’hui, il y a deux cent treize ans, la dernière reine de l’Ancien Régime, Marie Antoinette d’Autriche et de Lorraine, est montée sur l’échafaud, Place de la Concorde, Paris.

A ce moment-ci, il commence à être intérêt renouvelé pour cette figure historique—surtout aux pays anglophones. Peut-être c’est parce que les Anglophones se rendent compte qu’ils sont, eux-mêmes, à la fin d’un epoch privilégié et qu’il y aura une dette à payer pour les excès du siècle passe. Aussi, pour les historiens de la féminisme, Marie Antoinette n’est plus la nullité que ceux du passe ont pense, mais, au contraire, une femme courageuse et décisive.

Le film de Coppola qui fera son début en Amérique vendredi prochain, est critique dans cet article par l’historienne de la haute couture qu’a preferee Marie Antoinette :

After several seasons of polished and demure looks, presumably aimed at bringing out their customers' inner Stepford Wife, fashion designers have launched a pair of altogether different trends. The first of these proposes that women abandon their pretty little dresses for an array of unreservedly hard-edged, mannish creations that, in the words of New York Times reporter Ginna Bellafante, leave "no room for ambiguity about [their wearers'] power and aggression." The second vogue, ushered in by the Cannes debut of Sofia Coppola's flimsy but stylish biopic, Marie Antoinette, has been described as a "Marie Antoinette moment." This look features oversized, flamboyantly colored puff pieces (Yves Saint Laurent's hot pink "carnation cape," Lanvin's billowy, lollipop-red baby-doll dress) and accessories festooned with spangles, crystals, and ostrich feathers galore.

Faced with these two, seemingly irreconcilable aesthetics may well lead fashion followers to ask: What gives? Is it really possible to be a take-no-prisoners power dresser and a frilly fashion queen at the same time?

Selon Caroline Weber, les sculptures representent la reine mure mieux que les peintures :

On a practical level, the answer may well be no. History, however, suggests a different response, at least if one takes a closer look at Marie Antoinette's own relationship to fashion. In my forthcoming book, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, I have tried to dispel the erroneous, shopworn idea -- upon which Coppola's film, for instance, relies -- that the French queen's extravagant clothing choices reflected her self-absorbed, "let them eat cake" frivolity. As is now well known, Marie Antoinette never uttered that notorious zinger, which had been attributed to various French sovereigns for more than a century before her arrival at Versailles in 1770. Much less well known is the fact that her signature costumes -- like the frothy, candy-colored frocks, towering, feather-sprigged hairdos, and sparkling gemstones reprised in 2006's fall collections -- represented daring bids for political power. In Queen of Fashion, I demonstrate how, defying the well-established conventions that governed queenly appearance, she used clothing to combat her enemies and cultivate an aura of unshakable strength.

Cette reine aimait bien les costumes unisexuelles:

When the Austrian-born Archduchess Marie Antoinette was married off at age fourteen to France's future king -- crowned Louis XVI in 1774 -- her overriding duty was to give the kingdom an heir. But for her first seven years at Versailles, her cripplingly shy (and, according to some, genitally malformed) husband refused to consummate their marriage. Because so many people at Versailles opposed the Franco-Austrian alliance that her marriage had been designed to solidify, Marie Antoinette's failure to get pregnant left her vulnerable to countless court intrigues. The most damaging of these sought to annul Louis XVI's marriage and send his "barren" wife back to Vienna in disgrace. Despite her young age, Marie Antoinette understood that this course would destroy Franco-Austrian relations, and thus that it behooved her to secure her position through other means. Taking a lesson from her husband's and her own great, seventeenth-century ancestor, Louis XIV, for whom magnificent costumes had proven a famously effective tool of absolutist domination, the young queen turned to fashion to bolster her prestige. Detracting her subjects' attention from her childless state, she reinvented herself -- as my friend and colleague Pierre Saint-Amand has written -- as the nation's first "supermodel, its ruling diva, the queen of glamour."

To that end, Marie Antoinette rebelled against the stodgy, outmoded costuming strictures of Versailles, which, by remaining virtually unchanged from generation to generation, were meant to signify the timeless transcendence of the Bourbon reign. Unlike previous queens of France, who had stayed hidden away at their husbands' court, Marie Antoinette scandalized her fellow courtiers by making weekly trips to Paris, which was eighteenth century Europe's undisputed capital of style. There, she met some of the city's most celebrated designers, whom she enlisted to outfit her in a variety of eye-catching, experimental ensembles. These ranged from startlingly androgynous, man-tailored jackets and breeches to mile-high pouf coiffures decorated with intricate landscapes and military battle-scenes, and from sweeping, jewel-encrusted gowns with which she upstaged her husband at public appearances to risqué peasant-girl shifts that she sported at her private country retreat. Whether dressed up or dressed down, Marie Antoinette conveyed an image of absolute autonomy and power -- of a woman who could do, wear, and spend just about anything she pleased.

Le « Style Louis XVI » en meubles et architecture est mieux designe le “Style Marie Antoinette”:

As Marie Antoinette herself recorded, this astute piece of self-marketing went a long way toward convincing the French public that she actually had real influence in her husband's government -- for, like Louis XIV before her, her sartorial flights of fancy bespoke an unrestricted access to the royal coffers. Yet unlike Louis XIV, of whom, as a male ruler, such aggressive ostentation was expected, Marie Antoinette's bold posturing scandalized many of her subjects. France was, after all, a country where the royal consort had traditionally stood as little more than a docile, retiring companion (and breeder) of kings. Alarmed by her apparent rise to power, the queen's adversaries at court began spreading unflattering tales about her narcissism, her financial recklessness, her ruinous addiction to fashion.

La Reine en costume d’un hussar:

These, of course, are precisely the stories that culminated in the myth of "let them eat cake," and that Coppola's Marie Antoinette -- whose opening scene shows a feather-headed Marie Antoinette saucily licking cake off her fingers -- so lamentably perpetuates. And gossip of this sort dealt the queen a devastating public-relations blow. When massive social unrest erupted in 1789, for instance, angry hordes descended on Versailles calling for Marie Antoinette's -- not her husband's -- head. The burgeoning revolutionary media then took up this call with a vengeance, describing her outfits as signs of her treacherously self-indulgent nature. By the time she was imprisoned in the Conciergerie in August 1793, her detractors seemed to take great pleasure in punishing her for her alleged crimes of fashion. Unlike other well-born inmates of the Conciergerie, who were allowed to retain sumptuous wardrobes, Marie Antoinette was forced to give up all clothes except for the tattered dress on her back. One cruel jailer even insisted that she unstitch by hand the royalist fleurs de lys embroidered on her chamber's wall-hangings.

As when she had occupied the throne, however, Marie Antoinette had no intention of letting her enemies beat her, and costume remained her preferred weapon of choice. Before she and Louis XVI were stripped of their powers in August 1792, she insisted on wearing her most aggressively spectacular diamonds to meetings with hostile revolutionary officials -- as if to remind this group of men, whom she dismissed as "a pack of madmen, idiots, and brutes," that there would always be an unbridgeable chasm between them and her royal self. To add insult to injury, she adamantly refused to wear the tricolor ribbons and cockades that revolutionary public adopted as privileged emblems of liberty, fraternity, and equality. In this embargo, she was virtually alone, as other, more politically opportunistic members of the court made the tricolor and similar revolutionary insignia (like jewelry set with the stones from the demolished Bastille prison) a regular part of their daily costume. Unlike the more craven members of the aristocracy, Marie Antoinette never dreamed of compromising with the forces that sought to lay her low.

La Souveraine:

Even when revolutionary leaders beheaded her husband in January 1793, she did not back down. Upon learning of his death, her very first act was to commission a full wardrobe of regal black mourning clothes for herself and her children -- notwithstanding the fact that wearing mourning was illegal, for the newfound French republic had declared it illegal to wear mourning for the late king. Because of its monarchist overtones, in fact, Marie Antoinette was forbidden to wear this dress to the guillotine; apparently, republican chieftains feared that her widow's costume, which smacked of royalist martyrdom, would cause the public to sympathize with her and try to prevent her execution. Yet even when stripped of her widow's weeds, the fallen queen trounced her foes. According to her serving-girl in the Conciergerie, she had kept a pristine, lily-white slip dress -- the instantly recognizable color of the Bourbon fleur de lys -- hidden in her cell throughout her incarceration. It was in this politically charged outfit, which reduced the crowds around the scaffold to an awestruck silence, that she was guillotined in October 1793.

From the beginning to the end, then, Marie Antoinette's fashion statements were an intrepid and highly consequential form of power dressing. Like the dark, defiant get-ups that are coming into vogue this fall, they left "no room for ambiguity" about her defiance, her courage, and her utter unwillingness to accept defeat. Sadly, Sofia Coppola's film misses a huge opportunity by ignoring these qualities and offering yet another variation on the insipid, pastry-devouring party girl of legend. Still, the queen's fearless clothing choices merit consideration today, and not just among the devotees of high style. In an age when brave, independent thinking is in short supply both on and off the runway, a resurgent "Marie Antoinette moment" can only be a salutary trend -- whatever kind of dress that moment prescribes.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/caroline-weber/let-them-eat-lace-marie-_b_28701.html

Review of Weber’s book in the New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/060925crat_atlarge

Review of the Coppola film in The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/movies/13mari.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1160742276-kNOV52ikNDBO4EFPrga7OQ

“Tete de Marie Antoinette”:

Casanova Et Compagnie Chez le Bourreau

2006-10-09T03:55:38Z

Some of this is wrong; Louis XV was not present at the quartering of Damiens—the
atrocity of which so repulsed him that he refused to discuss it with courtiers who traveled to Paris to witness it. However, it is perfectly true that Casanova attended with a party of demi-mondains:

Damiens, a muscular fellow, was to be slowly tortured to death, building to a climax when each of his limbs would be yanked off by lashed horses, then his still living torso and head would be tossed upon a bonfire. This zealot had made the mistake of trying to kill the French king and failing.

While tens of thousands of commoners crowded the Place de la Greve in Paris on April 28, 1768, aristocrats by the dozens rented rooms overlooking the place of execution. Here, refreshments could be discretely served.

"Executions are intended to draw spectators," commented contemporary Samuel Johnson. "If they do not draw spectators, they do not answer their purpose." It was considered patriotic to witness the pain of a man who had tried to hurt their Louis XV. Included among the renters was would-be aristocrat Giacomo Casanova, who had decided to throw a small party to impress his fiancee and her family.

His party, unthinkable today, was commonplace then. This was the era of "Dangerous Liaisons", a few scant decades before the French Revolution.

Forty-two-year-old Casanova invited his 17 year-old fiancée, her wealthy devout guardian (who happened to be plump, sour-faced and sixtyish), a prostitute posing as the "niece of the pope" and a handsome young Italian, living on his charm and speaking no French. Picture the group; picture their elegant attire, the yards of silk and linen, the jewels.

The women stood in the front row at the only window, bending far forward, resting their elbows on the window sill so the men behind could see over them. The party lasted four hours during which very little small talk could be heard over the prisoner's screams.

Damiens was chained to a strong wooden table, his right hand slowly burned to the bone with sulphurous fire. The executioners gouged various parts of his body with red-hot pincers. Long straps were then wound up the length of his arms and his legs. Each heavy strap was attached to a rope tied to a strong horse. The horses were whipped but Damiens was an extremely muscular man and they couldn't yank off his limbs. For more than an hour, the horses were beaten and Damiens screamed in almost unrelenting agony.

Casanova, in his memoirs, recounts that the women never once turned their heads, but he says that he found himself after a while unable to watch so he turned his eyes away and just at the moment noticed that his young Italian friend had lifted up the voluminous dress of the devout older Frenchwoman in front of him.

Casanova marveled at the audacity and appetite of his friend, and then later at his endurance. Since women in those days did not wear between-the-legs underwear but rather sheafs of petticoats, an amorous act was quite feasible. As Peter the Great had remarked a half century earlier when a woman fell in front of his carriage and her legs spread as she attempted to avoid getting crushed by his horses, "The gates of Paradise are open." For the next two hours, Casanova noted the faintest rocking motion. Casanova studied the devout old lady and her face looked frozen, lips pursed, teeth clenched. Was it anger? Passion? Fear? Casanova was certain that this respectable lady above all did not want the "niece of the pope" or her own young relative to know what was happening, i.e., that she was being politely raped.

The executioners added two more cart horses but Damiens' limbs still would not come off. A little conference was held, the king consulted and it was agreed that the torturers could slash a few muscles and tendons to speed the process. After another hour and a half of the horses straining, a leg came off, then the other. They slashed his shoulder, and his arm came off. He screamed unearthly screams throughout. Casanova's friend, Tiretta, bobbed throughout.

After Damiens' final limb was off, the little party left in a carriage. Tiretta looked amazingly cheerful and composed. The older woman, however, looked furious and when she stepped down from the carriage, pointedly snubbed Tiretta, saying "Au Revoir" to everyone else. Over dinner that night, Casanova queried Tiretta who informed him that "the act was consummated four different times." (Tiretta, in his brief stay in Paris, had already earned the nickname "Monsieur Six Times"--from another Parisienne who had also spread word of the ample size of Tiretta's manhood.)

The next day Casanova was summoned to the older woman's house. Apologizing for her unchristian rage, she demanded revenge. Sly Casanova offered that the penniless Tiretta would marry her. She declined. Casanova, noting that her beauty was partly to blame, then offered that Tiretta would apologize to her. She started to cry, told Casanova he was missing the point. "You are thinking of a crime, which, with an effort, one could reasonably find a suitable amends but what the brute did to me is an infamy, which I would love to stop thinking about since it's driving me crazy."

Casanova, being Casanova, began to realize what had happened, i.e., a rear entry of a more painful sort. He struck a deal with Madame that Tiretta would be delivered to her home and that she could do anything to him short of kill him. (Casanova would be secretly hidden at her house to act as mediator if the need arose.)

Casanova met Tiretta and, and with comic sternness, explained the punishment. Tiretta mildly defended himself. "I don't say she's lying but? in the position in which I stood, it was impossible for me to know which apartment I was moving into."

The windup? Tiretta spent an evening alone in a room with Madame and the next morning she announced that she was putting him on retainer at her country estate with a generous yearly salary and a clothes allowance. "If you only knew how he much loves me," she enthused to Casanova, who had been busy as well the previous evening, taking the virginity of Madame's beautiful young relative.

The Place de la Greve, where Damiens' blood flowed, was eventually replaced as the main execution spot by the newly named Place de la Revolution. There, Louis XVI was guillotined and once again many small parties were thrown, this time by commoners, in rooms overlooking the square. And I wonder if any of the party-goers had the audacity to mirror Tiretta and slip it into the patriotic Frenchwoman perched in front of him. And, if so, did he move into her upstairs "apartment" or her downstairs? And did he time his "petite mort" with the king's "grande mort" and the royal head falling into the basket? We will never know, but I would like to believe some hardy Frenchman did just that. "Allons, enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé."

http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1297/zacks/essay.html

Ce petit joujou, fabrique par un groupe de voyous, doit être la chose la plus bizarre en rapport de cet événement dont j’ai jamais entendu dire:

http://www.museocriminologico.it/cavalli_uk.htm

Mitford's Pompadour and Waugh

2006-09-23T19:10:17Z

X-posted in marchmainhouse

Madame de Pompadour: Eminence without honor
The Hudson Review
Tess Lewis

A skillful woman knows how to mingle pleasure with the general interest and, without boring her lover, contrives to have him do what she wants.
-Mme. de Tencin

[S]uch a combination-that of the genius of a Richelieu in the body of a Pompadour are not, perhaps, in the order of things possible.
-Sainte-Beuve, "Louis XV"

A review of several biographies of the one called at Versailles “Mama Putain”:

Posterity has not been kind to Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV's spectacular mistress. But then, neither were her contemporaries. There was no official role for the king's maitresse en titre, yet, aside from offering obvious physical and aesthetic benefits, she performed the crucial function of political lightning rod. As the editor of the eighteenth-century courtly almanac, Science des personnes de la cour, pointed out, the kings' favorites are a "shield against hatred," a target of all attacks and reproaches for mistakes and misfortune. However, Louis XV's fifty-nine-year reign was marred by such a dire series of mistakes and misfortune that even as notable and notorious a mistress as Madame de Pompadour could not shield him enough. Louis le Bien-aime (the well-loved) declined to le Bien-hai (the well-hated) halfway through her two-decade tenure as mistress from 1745 until her death in 1764.

The Marquise de Pompadour, nee the bourgeoise Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, shouldered much of the blame for France's "Reversal of Alliances" from Prussia to Austria and the resulting disastrous Seven Years War, as well as for the kingdom's recurrent financial difficulties. Yet, well before she had transformed herself from "necessary friend" to de facto prime minister, defamatory verses, known as poissonades, were gleefully recited throughout Paris and the Court.

The financiers enrich themselves,
All the Poissons [Fish] are getting big,
It is the reign of the scoundrels . . .
A little bourgeoise,
Raised to be a slut,
Brings everything down to her level
And makes the court a slum…

In fact, many of the cruelest poissonades, such as one alluding to leukorrhea, a gynecological malady from which she suffered, were undoubtedly written by her most dangerous enemy in the court, the Comte de Maurepas. This Minister of the Navy and Secretary of State in the King's Household had long been jealous of the King's favor and was widely suspected of having poisoned the King's previous mistress, Madame de Chateauroux. Even with the help of the sinister chief of police, Nicolas Berryer, and his cabinet noir, in charge of steaming open all correspondence and preparing reports and extracts for her and the King, Madame de Pompadour was rarely able to discover the poems' authors with any certainty. A strong suspicion became grounds enough for a sentence of exile or even life imprisonment in the Bastille.

The Marquise, certainly, had her flaws, but these flaws were simply not great enough to warrant the relentless maligning of her reputation in her lifetime and after her death. She was extravagant and acquisitive, but also one of the few royal patrons at the time who paid her bills generously and in full. She created an entire porcelain industry in Sevres that fed the court's hunger for fashionable novelty, not to mention a great number of craftsmen's families. And Louis XV, easily bored when not hunting, demanded constant distraction. So, if the budget for Menus Plaisirs, or court entertainment, increased sixfold from 400,000 livres a year under Louis XIV to the 2,500,000 needed to support Madame de Pompadour's theatricals, galas, and soirees, the fault is not hers alone.

She also put a great deal of energy and of her own money into founding the Ecole Militaire, a school to train the sons of impoverished aristocrats as military officers. This was money she earned, it is true, as income from estates given to her by Louis XV, though they were financed by her mother's lovers and reverted to the crown after her death. The school turned out many well-trained officers, among them Napoleon Bonaparte, and greatly strengthened the French army by the turn of the century.

Madame de Pompadour valued loyalty above all and was blind to the weaknesses of those who were loyal to her, pressuring Louis XV to appoint her followers to positions for which they were not always qualified. Yet there were not always many competent alternatives. Nor had there been for some time. The King's great-grandfather, Louis XIV, was traumatized as a child by the Fronde civil war in which Parlement tried to restore the constitution that Cardinal Richelieu had destroyed. To prevent the aristocracy from exerting any power again, Louis XIV had done all he could to reduce most of the court nobility from statesmen to fawning courtiers. Under his reign, courtiers were compelled to stay at Versailles and follow an exacting and rigid daily schedule. Their only hope for gaining favor or influence was through flattery. Prospects under Louis XV were not much better. Had Madame de Pompadour not monopolized Louis XV’s attention and trust for her favorites, the Duc de Richelieu would have lobbied for his. Richelieu was a man with as much ambition but less talent than his great-uncle the Cardinal, and, having previously wielded influence over Louis XV by supplying him with mistresses whom he could himself control, like his friend the Duchesse de Chateauroux, the Duc was, from the beginning, one of the Marquise's main rivals.

Competition for the King's ear and mind and heart was ruthless. Louis XV was shy, secretive, indecisive, and depressive. As the gloriously partisan Sainte-Beuve noted, "It has often been said-but never often enough, that his was the most vacant, the most contemptible, the most cowardly of the hearts of kings." Anyone who gained his favor could gain great leverage. But one could never quite rely on his favor. When Madame de Pompadour's lady-in-waiting inquired about the King's reaction to another marquise's bid for her position, the Marquise replied, 'You don't know the King, my dear-if he was going to put her in my room this very night he'd still be cold to her and friendly to me in public." Yet, loyal as ever, she insisted that it was not his fault, but due to his upbringing, "for by nature he is good and frank." Louis XV also enjoyed undermining his most trusted advisors. For several years, he pursued a clandestine diplomacy, which was often at odds with official foreign policy, through his distant cousin and his mistress's implacable enemy, the Prince de Conti. This secret du roi was an ineffectual scheme meant in part to secure the Polish throne for Conti and in part to maintain contact with France's former allies despite the European states' ever-shifting allegiances. But most importantly, it offered Louis the thrill of deception and a private realm, inaccessible to Madame de Pompadour and his ministers. So while Madame de Pompadour could influence the King's decisions, they were, in the end, his to make.

Le “Bien-Aime’s” desk, from which he conducted “le secret du roi”:

As for the Marquise's middle-class origins that were making "the court a slum," Madame de Pompadour was far more cultured and refined than most of the courtiers. She had exquisite taste and a flawless grasp of the Court's byzantine code of conduct. Aside from a few bourgeois expressions and a directness of speech which Louis XV found refreshing, and which time polished away, she raised rather than lowered the Court's general tone. It should be noted that the snobbish M. de Maurepas conveniently forgot his own father's bourgeois origins, while Madame de Pompadour never denied or abandoned the Poissons.

Perhaps her greatest ability was to refashion herself continuously as the times and the King's moods changed. Madame de Pompadour retained the trust and affection of this notoriously fickle man for fifteen years after she stopped sleeping with him, an unusual twist in a career as mistress. Five years of sexual relations with this satyr of a King were all that she could manage, given what she called her "cold temperament" and her numerous health complications. (The aphrodisiacs with which she tried to self-medicate-chocolate fortified with triple vanilla and ambergris, truffle and celery soup, and crawfish, merely made her gain weight and feel ill.) A shrewd reader of men, she increased Louis's emotional dependence upon her as their physical intimacy lessened and couched her withdrawal in ostentatious piety, hoping to lessen the public's and the deeply religious Queen Marie Leszcinska's objections to her.

Madame de Pompadour announced her changed relations to the Court and the world beyond through art works presenting her as a goddess of friendship rather than Venus. She was masterful in her use of portraits and sculptures both to advertise and to solidify her position at Court. Her favorite painter, Francois Boucher, outdid himself when painting her portraits. Boucher was widely known not to be particularly good at capturing a likeness, but exactitude, of course, was not the point. Madame de Pompadour reined in his propensity to load up his canvases with bare-bottomed cherubs and designed settings with props that revealed the breadth and sophistication of her intellectual and artistic interests. In her earlier portraits, she is most often pictured in sumptuous dresses, wearing a cameo of the King on her wrist and surrounded by musical instruments and scores, architectural drawings, the works of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and the Encyclopedistes, a portfolio of her own engravings, and a globe. Later, she is presented as a rather dowdy vestal virgin or as an elegant but staid matron demurely working on her embroidery.

The historical tide of her reputation, however, is turning. Two new biographies and a recent monograph on Madame de Pompadour's portraits make valiant and convincing attempts to redeem her name and her cultural legacy. Nancy Mitford's 1953 biography was a forerunner in this trend and remains the most engaging of all the biographies. Sparkling with wit and delightful asides, it captures most tangibly the key to Madame de Pompadour's success: immense charm and indomitable self-confidence. The two recent biographies are historically more reliable and circumspect than Mitford's, and, if not quite as entertaining, are still eminently readable. Christine Pevitt Algrant's deeper political analysis and greater social and historical context give her version more complexity than Evelyn Lever's, which focusses most intently on the Marquise's intimate life. Lever is so eager to stress Madame de Pompadour's heroism and self-sacrifice in loving so selfish and thoughtless a man as Louis XV, that she does not fully acknowledges the extent to which the Marquise not only relished the trappings of her vicarious power but was increasingly addicted to them.

In addition, two exhibits centered on Madame de Pompadour's artistic discrimination opened in London last fall: a selection of her portraits was on display in the National Gallery, and period porcelains, furniture and fabrics were gathered at the Wallace Collection in order to reproduce the luxury and beauty with which she surrounded herself.

Still, the National Gallery's choice of historian Colin Jones to write the text for their lavish catalogue illustrates the ambivalence that has skewed assessments of her person and her role from the very beginning. Condescending and judgmental, Jones repeatedly insists that Madame de Pompadour was not a connoisseur, but an insatiable consumer, and carefully qualifies those statements that might be read as complimentary. "[E]ven though many parts of her collections were unrivalled in quality, Pompadour was less a collector-a term that denotes choice, selection, and discrimination-than a cultural accumulator." She was, according to Jones, simply in the right place at the right time-"a moment of perfection in French art"-with a very big checkbook and a genius for self-promotion. It is true that Madame de Pompadour's taste ran to the decorative arts and that, aside from a few portraits by Boucher and Francois-Hubert Drouais, there are no masterworks in either London exhibit. Nonetheless, the fact remains that she cultivated a particular style and recognized quality within her areas of interest. And while it took several lawyers more than a year just to draw up an inventory of her estate upon her death, splendor was the hallmark of Louis XV's reign. She was expected to furnish her many houses and estates, among them what is now the Elysee Palace, in a suitably extravagant fashion as Louis XV was a frequent visitor. She also did not merely hoard the 3,525 volumes that made up her library, but read many of them quite carefully.

More disturbing in Jones's text are the implicit denigrations. He asserts that, once her sexual relationship with the King ended, "in fact the marquise continued to play a role in the king's sexual life through conniving in the secret supply of virginal ingenues for the royal pleasure." She was aware of the King's private brothel, the Parc-aux-Cerfs, but most biographers and historians dismiss the charges that she procured young women for him as malicious court gossip. Given the precarious nature of her position, she could hardly have insisted Louis curb his sexual gluttony. The most she could do was have an unofficial mistress dismissed if she became too powerful or disrespectful, a tactic to which she resorted only rarely and which, for the most part, consisted of threatening to retire to one of her estates. The ravishing sixteen-year-old Marie Louise O'Murphy, who, like her three sisters, was offered by her mother to the highest bidder, for example, was banished from the Parc-aux-Cerfs when the Marquise heard that she had asked the King about his "vieille cocotte" (old flirt). ("La Morphise" was ultimately married off to a respectable, but impoverished, nobleman.) Even Jones admits to the lack of hard evidence that Madame de Pompadour was a procuress, but only in an aside 100 pages after his initial charge. On the other hand, the Duc de Richelieu, who not only procured several of Louis's mistresses, but advised them on how best to manipulate him, did not "connive," according to Jones, but "facilitated" the King's encounters.

It is a positive relief to turn to Elise Goodman's study of Madame de Pompadour's portraits, which, although decidedly sympathetic, strives to be balanced. Goodman portrays Madame de Pompadour's many role models, from Louis XIVs mistresses Mesdames de Maintenon and Montespan to the most important eighteenth-century salonnieres, Mesdames Geoffrin and du Deffand. Goodman also examines the influence the Marquise had on the art of "intellectual portraiture" in her measured calibration of this femme savante's impressive intellectual and artistic accomplishments. Given Louis's animosity towards writers in general, and towards the anticlerical philosophes in particular, Madame de Pompadour could only promote them indirectly. Yet she continued to read them and plead their causes for much of her life. Even after the ingeniously self-destructive Voltaire had left Versailles in disgrace for the enemy court in Prussia and Diderot's and D'Alembert's Encyclopedie was being regularly censured, Madame de Pompadour prominently featured the former's Henriade and the latters' fourth volume in her official portrait of 1755 by Maurice Quentin-Latour. Despite the narrowing of her mind as her political hubris grew, the superlatives Madame de Pompadour's contemporaries showered upon her were not mere flattery.
The transformation of Miss Fish into the pre-eminent left-hand Queen of France, although inconceivable to many who witnessed it, has in retrospect an aura of inevitability. In 1721, JeanneAntoinette was born to the reasonably wealthy Francois Poisson, steward to the powerful Paris brothers. Between the two brothers-Paris de Marmontel, the Court banker and main creditor to the State, and Paris-Duverney, the army supplier-they controlled their country's fate, but so discreetly one historian has called them "black holes in the history of the eighteenth century." They ardently admired the beautiful Madame Poisson and extended their protection to her daughter. Like many upper-class daughters, Jeanne-Antoinette was sent to a convent school at the age of seven. However, one year later, she suffered one of the many bouts of debilitating illness that plagued her throughout her life, and her mother brought her home. Madame Poisson then took Jeanne-Antoinette to a fortuneteller who predicted she would become the King's mistress. This prophecy struck Jeanne-Antoinette, she told Voltaire, "with the force of a thunderbolt." Only daughters of the oldest and noblest families, the noblesse de robe, were considered suitable for the King's company. [The “oldest and noblest families” were la noblesse de l’epee.--edouardalxandre] Elevating a merchant's daughter to this exalted position represented nothing less than an upheaval of court mores and stability. Nonetheless, "Reinette's" (Queenie's) ambitions were set. (In gratitude, she left six hundred livres to the clairvoyant in her will.)
Another of Madame Poisson's many influential admirers, the fermier general, or collector of indirect taxes, Charles-Francois Le Normant de Tournehem, then took over Jeanne-Antoinette's education. Nothing was too good for this morceau du roi (King's prey). She was coached in elocution by an actor from the Comedie Francaise and the dramatist Crebillon. The opera star Jelyotte taught her singing, and she became an excellent harpsichord player. She was well read and versed in all the arts, including the no less important social arts of conversation and of entertaining. Under such bienveillance and blessed with extraordinary looks, talents, and a gentle disposition, Reinette was assured of a grandiose destiny.

Jeanne-Antoinette's marriage at twenty in 1741, arranged by "Uncle" Tournehem to one of his reluctant but impoverished nephews, M. Le Normant d'Etioles, finally gained her a level of respectability that overshadowed her mother's dubious past. The doors opened to Paris' most prestigious salons, where she impressed even the most jaded and discerning of philosophes and put a few finishing touches on her already outstanding education. As for M. d'Etioles, after her enormous dowry reconciled him to the match, he soon fell in love with his wife. She soon began to say, in a joke that eventually lost its humor, that she would never leave him, except, that is, for the King.

The Chateau d'Etioles was not far from the King's favorite hunting grounds in the forest of Senart. Madame d'Etioles would place herself conspicuously in the King's path, dressed in pink and driving a light blue phaeton or dressed in blue and driving a pink one until she was warned away by a friend of the Duchesse de Chateauroux. However, the stars were soon realigned. Late in 1744, Madame de Chateauroux's unexpected and excruciating death opened a brief window of opportunity for the lovely bourgeoise. Louis XV's interest was piqued by reports he most likely heard from his valet Lebel, who had once enjoyed Madame Poisson's favors. In February 1745, an invitation to an extravagant masked ball celebrating the Dauphin's marriage to the Spanish Infanta was duly sent to Madame d'Etioles. M. de Tournehem conveniently sent his nephew abroad on business. Within days of the ball, if not on the same day, Jeanne-Antoinette became Louis's mistress.

”Le Bien-Aime” in coronation robes:

Louis knew he had won the "most charming woman in France," but mere commoners were not admitted to Court. In order not to lose a minute of her company, he needed to grant her a title. A defunct marquisate was dug up, and Paris de Monmartel, always happy to have the King in his debt, advanced the funds. First, however, Madame d'Etioles needed to master the language, etiquette, and subtle gradations of rank in ce pays-ci, as initiates called the Court. A simple slip like saying louis en or instead of the more rarefied louis d'or could be cause for disgrace. Knowing the shading of everyone's family tree was not enough. Mitford notes.

Variations of esteem were expressed in the curtsey. A movement of the shoulder practically amounting to an insult was a suitable greeting for the woman of moderate birth, badly married and with a bad cook, while the well-born Duchess with a good cook received a deeply respectful obeisance. Few women, even those brought up to it, managed this low curtsey with any degree of grace.

So, while the King spent the summer of 1745 fighting skirmishes in the War of the Austrian Succession, Jeanne-Antoinette closeted herself at Etioles for several months with Voltaire, the exquisitely refined Abbe de Bernis, more courtier than cleric, and the Marquis de Gramont.

By the time the King returned victorious from Fontenoy and the old Princesse de Conti, deep in debt, had been pressured into sponsoring the new Marquise, Madame de Pompadour was ready to run the gauntlet. And she did, flawlessly. Had Louis not been at the height of his popularity, riding a wave of victories, his flagrant defiance of Court hierarchy might have been more effectively opposed. But Louis XV's subjects were still willing to forgive him a great deal. Madame de Pompadour worked hard to establish herself in those early years. She assiduously courted the Royal Family and made some headway with the Queen, who had resigned herself to the contempt previous favorites had shown her. The King's children, however, called her maman putain (mommy whore) and tirelessly intrigued against her.

Madame de Pompadour's sphere of influence was at first limited to staging and starring in plays for Louis and a privileged few, organizing expeditions to Louis's many chateaux and country estates, hosting intimate dinners for twenty at which the Court's constricting formalities were relaxed to the point where the King himself brewed and served the coffee, and encouraging his passion for building. All the while, she was suffering from her fragile constitution, repeated miscarriages, the machinations of her enemies, and the effort to be unfailingly cheerful and radiant. Within two years, she had quietly but firmly extended her domain. She played to Louis's weaknesses and compensated for them, making herself ever more indispensable in his public and his private life. He willingly ceded many burdens of governing to her. All petitions were routed through her. She received diplomats, ambassadors, generals and courtiers great and small at her morning toilette, dispensing and withholding favor, and passing favorable requests on to the King. Later, as fitted her new-found piety, she received such petitions at an embroidery frame.

However, as the Marquise consolidated her position at Court, Louis's once impregnable popularity suffered some serious blows. Despite the peace accord of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, in which France ceded what little it had won at the cost of so much bloodshed, taxes were still high. Crops had failed several years in a row, and famine regularly struck various parts of the country. Hungry peasants came to Paris looking for food and remained on the streets. Police Chief Berryer's men routinely rounded up vagrants and sent them off to colonize Canada. Often too zealous -they were believed to be paid by the head--police would gather children off the streets. When a child of a respectable family disappeared without a trace in 1750, riots, spurred by rumors that the children's blood was being drained to cure leprous princes, broke out in several of the city's districts. Louis, incensed by his subjects' lack of affection, responded by building the chemin de la revolte, a road bypassing Paris, so that he would not have to drive through the city on his way to his favorite retreat, Compiegne. This did not endear him to the Parisians.

In addition, Parlement was bickering with the Church, openly defying the King's authority, and refusing to sanction the increase in taxes needed to rebuild the military and to maintain the Royal Household's standard of living. Madame de Pompadour was blamed for most of this. But the crowning perfidy, in the eyes of the people, was yet to come with the Reversal of Alliances.

Snuffbox of Choiseul, one of La Pompadour’s proteges:

Frederick the Great had repeatedly outsmarted the French diplomats by honoring agreements only when they suited him. His declaration that "If we can gain anything by being honest men, why then for heaven's sake, let us be honest; but if we can gain something by being knaves, then let us be knaves," sums up much of his foreign policy. He also enraged the Marquise by referring to her as Petticoat III (Petticoats I and II being Maria-Theresa and the Empress Elizabeth of Russia) and by calling the wolfhound who slept in his bed (and shared his grave) his Pompadour. Louis himself chafed under the alliance with Prussia that had been reinforced by the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. In the fall of 1755, the Empress Maria-Theresa, equally obsessed with recovering Silesia, which Frederick had captured in 1740, and with humiliating him, saw her chance. Foreign ambassadors were forbidden to meet with the King alone at Versailles, and Louis's ministers, especially his Minister of War, the Comte d'Argenson, were all pro-Prussia. By having her ambassador propose an alliance through Madame de Pompadour, the Empress secured herself an ally at Versailles and got a hearing that would otherwise have been impossible. The Marquise used all her resources to push the hesitant Louis into joining ranks with Austria and abandoning Prussia. In the spring of 1756, the Reversal of Alliances was made public, a few months after Frederick revealed that he had already abandoned France by signing a secret treaty with her archenemy, England.

“Le Bien-Aime” as victor of Fontenoy:

With England steadily encroaching on France's colonies and capturing or sinking its ships, war had been looming for years, but the few deterrents were no longer sufficient. Madame de Pompadour entered the diplomatic fray with zeal and daily sent advice to the French generals, who, after the first victorious year, suffered defeat after defeat. Perhaps her most harmful contribution was to persuade the King to dismiss the Comte d'Argenson and the Foreign Minister Rouille and replace them with her inexperienced proteges. Although d'Argenson had proven himself treacherous, he at least commanded the army's respect. By the end of the war in 1763, France had gained nothing and lost a great deal.

The Seven Years War exhausted Madame de Pompadour as much as it exhausted France. She had been living beyond her physical means for years, but this final strain proved too much. She died, drawn and wasted, at forty-two, within a year of the peace accord.

Five years before her death, she complained in a letter that she had always wanted the grande niche, and was displeased that she had to make do with the petite as it did not suit her temperament. In fact, she sacrificed everything for the greatest niche that was possible for a woman in eighteenth-century France but could not appreciate it. Her position was, as Sainte-Beuve has written, "eminent but little honourable," and all her efforts and qualities could not make it so.

Madame de Pompadour did no more harm than the ministers who surrounded her, and, on balance, probably more good. She was simply more visible. And that visibility was her triumph and her undoing.

MADAME DE POMPADOUR: A Life, by Evelyne Lever. Trans, by Catherine Temerson. Fanrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.00. MADAME DE POMPADOUR: Mistress of France, by Christini; Pevilt Algrant. Grove Press. $27.50. THE PORTRAITS OF MADAME DE POMPADOUR: Celebrating the Femme Savante, by Elise Goodman. University of California Press. $45.00.
MADAME DE POMPADOUR, by Nancy Mitford. New York Review Books. $12.95p.
MADAME DE POMPADOUR: Images of a Mistress, by Colin Jones. National Gallery Company. $35.00.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4021/is_200307/ai_n9278536/pg_1

The one by that inimitable stylist Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh’s friend, is by far the best. There is some evidence, in the Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, edited by Charlotte Mosley (New York: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1996), that Waugh gave Mitford some advice concerning the composition of biographies for a cultivated but non-academic audience:

Piers Court,
Stinchcombe

February, 1953

Darling Nancy:
On no account a novel. A popular life like Strachey’s QUEEN VICTORIA, to be enjoyed by Honks [Cooper] and Pam Barry. Plenty of period prettiness. Write for the sort of reader who knows Louis XV furniture when she sees it but thinks Louis XV was son of XIV and had his head cut off. There is no limit to the amount of knowledge YOU must have. The question is how much to impart. Aldous Huxley fails in this matter of taste, particularly in Devils of Loudon, he can’t resist giving irrelevant information. But I’m sure your artistic taste won’t fail you.
I write from memory, but I think it is fair to say Madame de Pompadour’s influence in politics was disastrous. The defeats of 1759 were her defeats. But I daresay historians have changed their views since I stopped studying.
As far as I remember, the Parlements were King’s Courts like our royal courts temp. Henry II, designed to break the power of the feudal courts. By Louis XV time I think the feudal courts had not much more power than the English J.P.s. All authority IN THEORY emanated from the throne, but the Parlements soon became practically hereditary themselves. The noblesse de robe (from whom incidentally most of the best Jansenist came) were a group of wealthy and learned families who shared out the legal appointments among themselves. But Toqueville will tell you all this, I am sure.
Strachey, in Q.V., knew all the politics of the reign inside out and just drew on his knowledge here and there when it was necessary for his portrait. It is like the knowledge of anatomy that is necessary for drawing a clothed figure—but I suppose that with your views of art you won’t admit that it is necessary.
I imagine Mme. de P.as Phyllis de Janze. I imagine Phyllis did, too.

Love,
E.

And the description, from the Goncourts’ Journal of THIS portrait
:

«Et maintenant allez au Louvre, et regardez le portrait de La Tour. Dans la fleur et la poussière de vie du pastel, une toute autre femme vous apparaîtra. Habillée d'un satin blanc où courent les branchages d'or, les bouquets de roses et les fleurettes, robe d'argent aux grandes manchettes de dentelles s'ouvrant au coude, au corsage fleuri d'une échelle de rubans dont le violet pâle est tendre comme le calice d'un pavot lilas, madame de Pompadour est assise sur un fauteuil de tapisserie, dans une attitude familière qui retrousse un peu sa jupe et laisse voir un bout de jupon de dentelle, et sous le jupon deux pieds qui croisent l'une sur l'autre deux mules roses au haut talon. Sa main droite appuie à peine, d'un geste qui voltige, sur le papier d'un cahier de musique qu'elle tient de l'autre main, le bras plié et accoudé sur une console. Un œil de poudre est jeté dans ses cheveux. Son regard n'est point au cahier de musique; doucement distrait, il semble écouter quelque joli rêve, tandis qu'un demi-sourire d'une sérénité délicieuse, errant sur ses lèvres, rayonne sur tout son visage . Derrière elle, c'est une tenture bleue, coupée de baguettes dorées qui encadrent sur un côté un panneau de peinture : une marche de paysans dans un chemin de montagnes. Auprès d'elle, sur un canapé, une guitare encore frémissante dort sur un cahier de musique. Sur la console où son coude repose, des volumes reliés en veau, comme des livres d'usage et des amis de tous les jours, montrent, à portée de sa main, la compagnie de son esprit : c'est le Pastor fido, sorti des presses d'Elzevir en 1659, la Henriade, vendue à sa mort sous le n° 721 de sa bibliothèque; le tome III de l'Esprit des loix [sic] et le tome IV de l'Encyclopédie. À côté d'une sphère, un livre à couverture bleue à demi ouvert, portant sur le dos : «Pierres gravées», laisse pendre sur la console au pied d'or une gravure au bas de laquelle on lit : Pompadour sculpsit, et ces mots : «Représentation de la situation où est le graveur en pierres fines et des divers instruments…» Au bas, un carton noué de bleu et armorié aux trois tours, est le carton de l'Œuvre gravé de madame de Pompadour. Quelle image adorable de la favorite, peinte et vivante dans sa beauté spirituelle, dans les amitiés de son intelligence, dans le règne de ses goûts! Toutes ses choses qui l'entourent et qu'elle aima lui prêtent leurs séductions, leur reflet et leur lumière. Portrait magique! qui semble personnifier sa mémoire, et figurer la charmante immortalité qui lui restera : l'immortalité de l'Art.»

_lutetia @ 2006-08-31T19:57:00

2006-09-01T02:58:58Z

Bonjour! I'm looking forward to following this community.

Rock clubs in Paris

2006-08-30T08:03:55Z

Salut! :o)

I'm going to Paris for a couple of days at the end of September. Can you recommend any good clubs where they play rock and alternative?

_lutetia @ 2006-07-23T12:26:00

2006-07-23T10:51:31Z

As I promised, here are pictures of Paris (especially "la butte Montmartre", where there is "le Sacré Coeur"). I took these photos during my last trip in Paris, on January. With a friend of mine, Amandine, we spent a week in Paris, in a "auberge de jeunesse" (I don't know the English for that: it's a kind of hotel for the youth).

Houses at Montmartre

le Sacré Coeur

my favorite point of view of the Sacré Coeur : from the bottom of the hill where there is the "manège"

the view from our room... we were lucky!

view from le Sacré Coeur, in sepia

another view of the Sacré Coeur, a sunny day this time

The "manège", in sepia

stairs leading to Montmartre

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

2006-07-20T20:19:39Z

Je voudrais vous faire partager mon enthousiasme pour la poétesse romantique Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786 - 1859. Voici un lien qui vous fera découvrir certains de ses poèmes: http://poesie.webnet.fr/auteurs/desborde.html

Personnellement, j'aime beaucoup "la couronne effeuillée"

Charles Baudelaire

2006-07-18T11:17:08Z

The book I'm reading at the moment has some entertaining anecdotes about Baudelaire and I thought I'd share some of them with you.

On another occasion he had ordered a steak with great care. When the proprietor asked him if it was all right, the following transpired:

On one occasion I had a cold in the head, and Baudelaire and I were strolling on the boulevard about five o'clock when he suddenly wanted to eat; it was too early; I agreed anyway, on condition I went home and got another handkerchief.

how many times will you have to blow

I have often said that Baudelaire was one of the rare men in whose company I never knew boredom. I seriously believe he was the only one. With him the conversation never flagged.

_lutetia @ 2006-07-16T22:54:00

2006-07-16T21:08:45Z

Bonjour! I'm new in livejournal and in this community, so... I introduce myself: I'm Mademoiselle J.M., I'm French (that's why my English is not very good! Sorry for that!), I don't live in Paris but Strasbourg (which is also a pretty city!). I will post here photos of Paris and Strasbourg I took, but later because I have to put them in my computer first... I only have got this one for the moment: le moulin rouge, taken in sepia. Se you soon!