your-disobedient-servant

[your-disobedient-servant]

[your-disobedient-servant]

tmi stands for tell me immediately

[your-disobedient-servant]

Fop o' the mornin' to ya!

[your-disobedient-servant]

what are your favourite fun facts about burrs time in Europe?

Where do I even START?

Well, there's all the usual stuff about his inability to keep hold of an umbrella and his attempt to light a candle with a pistol (though in his defence he really was very sleep-deprived at the time).

Then there's his straightforward attitude to problems. The door of his lodgings is locked because it's the middle of the night? Fine, he breaks the door down and is then slightly grumpy that nobody offers him dinner. The glass in a window is too bad to see the parade out of? Fine, he breaks it and then conscientiously pays the surprised landlord for repairs on the way out.

Then there's the threesome with Vanderlyn. I am never forgetting his threesome with Vanderlyn and Flora. Or his cheerful comment that nothing restores him after too much sex like a hot bath. Or the time he fled town at the crack of dawn to avoid getting any more entangled with a beautiful baroness.

And then there's the odd moments of very sweet and stupid generosity. The two times he got tickets to take a friend to a popular exhibition and then gave them away and had to avoid the friend, until finally he got a third ticket with her name written on it so that he couldn't give it away. When he was utterly impoverished, with only two half pennies to jingle - and gave them to a friend's child.

And let us not forget the sheer chutzpah of his legal argument that Britain couldn't deport him because he'd been born a British citizen...

I COULD GO ON

[your-disobedient-servant]

I've been in some sort of torture nexus learning latin for the past week and spinoza has been the only copium I could access.

[your-disobedient-servant]

All 18th century men look like this to me

[your-disobedient-servant]

I hate this myth that it was super common for adult men to marry 13-year-old girls in the 18th century. It's just plain untrue. No you weren't an old maid by 16. It was not common to have 5 kids by the time you were 20. The average marriage age for women was early 20s. It was not that uncommon for older teens to get married but 13 was unusually young.

[your-disobedient-servant]

Why do every fictional medias depicting d'Eon being Marie Antoinette's friend yet d'Eon hates Louis XVI. How historical d'Eon truly feels about Antoinette asides getting dress from her?

I think it mostly has to do with both Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI's place in pop culture in general. Marie Antoinette is often portrayed very sympathetically while Louis XVI doesn't always receive the same grace. It has very little to do with the real history.

Historically d'Eon generally wrote quite favorably about both of them but she wasn't a close personal friend of either. She cites both as having supported her transition:

If certain modern philosophers do not approve of my conversion, it is because they do not believe in God, the law, or the King. God forgave me, the living law vindicated me, and the legal systems in England and France awarded me full rights to wear a dress. Louis XV and Louis XVI were my patrons, the Queen who is the daughter of the Caesars had me dressed in her court by Mademoiselle Bertin; the very woman who dresses the Queen did not turn up her nose at dressing Mademoiselle d'Eon grandly.

~ The Maiden of Tonnerre, p134

Being able to say that the King and Queen supported her gave d'Eon an element of credibility within 18th century society. While the dresses Mademoiselle Bertin gave her weren't really to her personal style, the fact that the Queen's ministre des modes had dressed her was an example of royal support for her transition.

However she doesn't offer Marie Antoinette ladies-in-waiting quite the same praise. D'Eon felt at odds with the over-the-top fashion world of Versailles. She describes the expectations of performative femininity that women of the court were expected to uphold as oppressive:

It was then that a new theater of confusion and glory opened before me and swallowed me alive in my skirts at Versailles, where I was kept as an honorable prisoner of war in the household of Madame and Mesdemoiselles Genet, ladies-in-waiting to the Queen, who endeavored to have me emulate their dress, their work, their conduct, and their virtues. They had to please both their mistress, who was a sovereign, and their husbands, who dominated them. For I who have neither husband, nor master, nor mistress, I would like to enjoy the privilege of obeying only myself and good sense. Far from wanting to surpass these women, I did not even seek to be their equal. These ladies worked together to make me assume their moral standards, their habits, their fashions, their pastimes, and their activities. If I don’t imitate them in all respects, I am criticized and blamed wholly, although I am only partly to blame. What torments me is that they often have me get dressed three times over before I am deemed worthy of going with them to the château, whereas I would vastly prefer to remain peacefully in my robe near a fire reading or writing. Aspiring to live in the good graces of these women, even if I am not forced to keep up with them, I am obliged to agree to whatever might bring me closer to them. They have removed me from the sites of my former freedom to weigh me down with the golden chains of my new slavery, which they embellish with the high-sounding words: decorum required at Versailles. In the name of this decorum they have me play all the roles necessary to teach me how to behave at all times like an important noblewoman, whereas in reality I am only a zero in the pecking order of the Court, and I would rather be on the outside than on the inside. I prefer the sun and the wines of Tonnerre (Chablis and Veaumorillon) a hundred times more than the shade of Versailles and the water of Arceuil, Villedavré, and Passy, which are good only for giving me colic and a face the color of cheese, yellow or pale like an Englishwoman returning from the waters of Bath or Bristol. I have not adapted very well to all these fine arrangements nor to all the perfect details that the little women at a great court are capable of creating. But these ladies, to bring me to my predetermined point of perfection, make me suffer martyrdom so as to transform me into an elegant woman. In winter, as in summer, I find myself dressed in a muslin with my arms uncovered up to my elbows, my shoulders bared, and my chest covered with a gauze so light and transparent that it is not worth wearing or even mentioning. I have a difficult time getting used to revealing what I hid for so long. These lovely ladies speak to me about their dresses, their hair, and their finery without ever mentioning their love, which I can tell they dream about night and day. This amused me for a while; now it bores me. But you know that time and necessity bring many changes to the unhappy fate of our lives, and in the eyes of society the female sex is as changeable as the moon. Do you honestly believe, Madame, that with my style of life and my personality, I am well suited to a life filled with having a good time, dressing, undressing, chatting, sewing, and embroidering all day long with the vestal virgins of the Court!

~ The Maiden of Tonnerre, p16-17

[your-disobedient-servant]

1730 William Hogarth - Dudley Woodbridge in His Chambers

(Speed Art Museum)

[your-disobedient-servant]

Coat

c. 1770-1799

The National Museum of Norway

[your-disobedient-servant]

Since I talk about the difference between history as a hobby and as professional research reasonably often, here are books I think you should read if you want to think more about how history is created:

Time’s Monster: How History Makes History by Priya Satia

Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe by Hayden White

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History by Michel-Rolph Trouillot

The Past is a Foreign Country by David Lowenthal

Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense by Ann Laura Stoler

Dust: The Archive and Cultural History by Carolyn Steedman

If other people have books they would consider key, please add them. It might be good to start a longer list.

[your-disobedient-servant]

In my f[l]op era. Is this anything

[your-disobedient-servant]

'man's suit made from velvet + silk, france, 1800' in taste the fashion: a celebration of luxury + creativity - paola buratto caovilla (2001)

[your-disobedient-servant]

My favorite moments in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary are those when you just see him give up.

Whether it's disliking the word, not knowing why it exists, having confusion over a certain meaning, or just having no idea what the heck it even is, Johnson always managed to have some sort of retort for it. But my favorite over all is when he just pulls etymology out of thin air, such as his idea from where the term "spider" comes from:

This is what happens, when you employ one singular guy with major motivation issues to make an entire English Dictionary.

[your-disobedient-servant]

people sometimes lament the “decline” of satire but in the 18th century people were just churning out reams of political cartoons featuring a tiny little man next to a giant brutish woman and the tiny man is saying Lady Mary O Do Not Crush Me To Death and the giant woman is saying I Am Going To My Women’s Group To Discuss Politicks. I Have Six Lovers And One Is A Papist.

and the caption is something like If The Poor Should Be Suffered To Vote.

[your-disobedient-servant]