The Esoteric Curiosa

Historionicus Obscura: Tuscany's First Lady Of Largesse: Anna Maria Ludovica de Medici!

2012-06-30T21:26:00.002-07:00

ANNA MARIA LUDOVICA

(‘The Last Of The Medici’)

Born 1667 – Died 1743

CHAPTER XXXI

THE MEDICI

By Colonel G. F. Young, C.B.

HE Electress Anna Maria Ludovica was seventy years old when her brother Gian Gastone died. Married at twenty-four to the Elector Palatine of the Rhine, she had filled an important position for twenty-six years up to the time of his death and her return as a widow to live with her father Cosimo. And during those years she had shown herself to be a woman of unusual ability. After her father’s death she had, during the fourteen years of her brother’s reign, lived more or less in retirement, not being on good terms with him, feeling shame at the degradation into which he sank during the latter part of his reign. Endowed with more energy and force of character than either of her brothers, she ruled well during the few years that her father had left the government in her hands, notwithstanding that she was considerably handicapped by the style of administration which he had established. As the result of her satisfactory control of affairs she had seen herself earnestly desired by the people of Tuscany as their future ruler, and had seen a decree passed by the Florentine Senate assuring the throne to her on her brother’s death; and she had also seen that decree spurned and overridden by the chief powers of Europe, herself and her ancient family insulted, and the independence of her country trampled upon. She was now to see the final stage in that process, and the inauguration of a foreign rule over Tuscany; even the promise that in any new government established she should be a member of the Council and have the rank and title of Grand Duchess being set aside.

It would all have been hard enough for an exceptionally proud woman like the Electress Anna to endure if the Austrian Grand Duke had proceeded to occupy in person the throne which her grandfather’s great-grandfather had created. It was made many times worse by the kind of rule which was set up.

Upon Gian Gastone’s death the new Grand Duke, Francis II, came to Florence and formally took possession of the state, but after a month or two departed to Vienna, and thenceforth left the government of Tuscany to be permanently administered (or mal-administered) by an agent, a certain M. de. Beauveu, who was given the title of Prince de Craon. Both he and his wife were persons of exceedingly low birth and manners; yet they assumed vice-regal airs, lived in the Royal Palace, and maintained a third rate kind of Court, the chief feature of which was its vulgarity. All posts in the new administration were speedily filled with Lorrainers, and the Tuscans had ocular demonstration at every turn that they were now under a foreign rule. The meanness, the corruption, and the degraded character of this collection of needy place hunters are graphically described in the letters of the first English ambassador ever sent to the Court of Tuscany, which show that as far as corruption in the administration was concerned, the country had gained nothing by the change.

With a Court of this description established in the Palace, there ensued a total decline in the dignity which even in the worst days of Cosimo III, and Gian Gastone had ever been accustomed to reign there. Horace Mann remarks on the entire inability of the new régime to maintain a due ceremony even on grand occasions, and says: ‘They seem to forget the example of the Medici, the ceremony of whose Court put it in their power to make a figure in things of more importance.’ Added to this the ignorance and want of taste of the newcomers in all matters relating to Art was colossal; and this, while especially irritating to the Florentines, often had the most ridiculous results. Among other demonstrations of this want of a quality which every Medici had possessed, the arrangement of the pictures in the Palace offered a conspicuous example. These were rearranged on a new principle, the two guiding rules of which were, first, the degree of freshness of the gilding on the frames, and, second, the position of the figures in the picture, which figures must not turn their backs towards the throne.

It was no wonder, the new Government being of this description, that the Electress Anna (the descendant of a race which even in their decay had still been distinguished) kept herself aloof from such a company. She occupied her own separate portion of the Palace, and had no relations with the new Grand Duke’s agent and his wife.

‘She lived retired; but it was a retirement of the utmost splendour. All that art and ingenuity could supply and money purchase the aged daughter of Cosimo gathered round her – jewels, precious metals, costly attire – the mass of these was immense.’

Moreover, she still continued to add pictures to the Uffizi Gallery. As a child she had known her great uncle, Cardinal Leopold, and had imbibed some of the ideals which animated him, and nearly all the pictures of the Flemish and German schools which the Uffizi Gallery possesses were added to it by her.

The amount that this daughter of the Medici spent in charity astounded the English ambassador; ‘1,000 zechins a month, often more.’ As three zechins made ₤1 sterling, this represented ₤4,000 a year, equal at the present value of money to considerably more; and even this, he says, she often exceeded. No wonder the poor wept inconsolably when she died. She continued to maintain to some extent the state to which she had been accustomed in former days. The poet Gray, who was presented to her in 1740, describes her as receiving him ‘with much ceremony, standing under a huge black canopy,’ and as ‘never going out but to church, and then with guards and eight horses to her coach.’

Thus did Anna Maria Ludovica de Medici maintain in all ways the name of her family. However much that name had suffered discredit through others, it suffered none through her. And whether in regard to ruling with ability, the encouragement of all forms of art, a generous liberality to the poor, or the maintenance of a proper dignity, she showed herself a worthy descendant of the best of those who had gone before.

The object, however, which chiefly engaged both her time and her money, was the completion of the family mausoleum. The work had somewhat languished during the reigns of Cosimo III, and Gian Gastone, but Anna Maria Ludovica applied all her energies and the greater part of her large income to completing it as far as possible during the few years of life that remained to her. Her health was failing; she knew she had but a short time; and she pressed on this work vigorously, giving to it as much as ‘1,000 crowns a week,’ and in her will leaving a large sum to be invested in order to provide a regular income for the completion of the building according to the original design. There is something both pathetic and fine in the sight of this lonely and childless woman, the last of her race, steadily labouring in the midst of disappointment, sorrow, and ill health, to complete the mausoleum of her ancestors before death should call her away to follow them.

The Parting Gift

But Anna Maria Ludovica did something more noteworthy than this. Her chief act was one as fine under the circumstances as anything the Medici did throughout their history. And by it she caused their sun, so long enveloped in dark clouds and impenetrable gloom, to shine out, as it sank, in one departing ray of most resplendent glory. She hated the new dynasty; she felt that her family had been grievously treated by not being allowed to leave the throne of Tuscany to whomsoever they considered had the best right to it; she felt herself still more grievously ill used in not being allowed to succeed her brother as Grand Duchess in her own right; while the sore feelings thus created were daily kept alive by the conduct of the ignoble Court occupying the Palace which had been built by her family and been their home for two hundred years. But at the same time she loved Tuscany; she was keenly mindful of her family’s long and honourable connection with that country; and she was determined that, whatever her father and brother had been, she at least would support that connection with honour to the very end. And so she made that splendid gift which should make her name ever honoured in Florence.

Far reaching memories and mingled feelings must have filled the mind of Anna Maria Ludovica as, last solitary owner of the greatest collection of art treasures in the world, she wandered through the long galleries of the Uffizi and the Pitti surrounded by this mass of pictures, statues, bronzes, rare gems, and other works of art, the earliest of them executed for Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo, the latest added to the collection by herself, and thought over what she had determined on doing with the great inheritance.

The convention between the powers which had assigned the throne to a foreign Prince had not touched the vast private property of the family, including the countless objects of art and other valuable things with which their palaces, villas, and picture galleries were crowded; and to all these she had succeeded on her brother’s death. The whole of this invaluable collection of treasures Anna Maria Ludovica now gave to the state of Tuscany forever, in the person of the new Grand Duke and his successors, on condition that none of it should ever be removed from Florence, and that it should be for the benefit of the public of all nations.

What the value of money of this truly Royal gift may be is probably beyond computation. It included, with much besides:

(a). The whole of the pictures and statues which were in the Uffizi Gallery, the Royal Palace, the Villa Medici at Rome, and the other villas of the family, and now forming the Uffizi and Pitti Galleries.

(b). The rare collection of gems and other objects of art, now in the Gem Room of the Uffizi Gallery.

(c). A great collection of cameos, engraved gems, and similar articles, now in the museum of the Bargello, and including the celebrated collection of coins and medallions of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the oldest in Europe.

(d). Statues and busts by Donatello, Verrocchio, Mino da Fiesole, and other notable sculptors, now in the museum of the Bargello.

(e). A great collection of bronzes, now in the museum of the Bargello.

(f). The New Sacristy, with the masterpieces of Michelangelo.

(g). The whole of the contents of the Library of the Palace, and the Medici Library in San Lorenzo.

(h). A large and important collection of Egyptian and Etruscan antiquities, now forming the chief part of the Egyptian and Etruscan Museums, the Etruscan portion being especially valuable.

(i). A valuable collection of majolica, Urbinoware, Faenza-ware, rare suits of armour, and curious valuable arms, now in the museum of the Bargello.

(j). A large collection of valuable tapestries, now forming the Galleria degli Arazzi.

(k). The valuable tables of pietra dura work, cabinets, and other precious furniture, now in the Uffizi and Pitti Galleries.

(l). The inlaid tables, valuable cabinets, tapestry, and other similar articles now in the Royal apartments of the Pitti Palace.

(m). The gold dessert service, gold and silver ornaments, rare china, valuable plate, crosiers and crucifixes in ivory and amber, the mitre with miniatures made of humming birds’ feathers which had belonged to Clement VII, priceless works in niello, handsome goblets and vases by Benvenuto Cellini, and many other heirlooms of the family, all now in the Treasure Room of the Pitti Palace.

(n). The reliquaries and other ornaments of the Grand Ducal chapel in the Pitti Palace.

(o). The immense Medicean wardrobe of costly robes and dresses for state occasions.

From Poggio Imperiale, from Castello, from Petraia, from Cafaggiolo, from Poggio a Caiano, from the Villa Medici at Rome, from every habitation that the Medici had occupied, poured in for many years afterwards this great collection of objects of art to be gathered in the galleries and museums of Florence in accordance with the terms of this gift; terms to which Florence owes it that these treasures have not been long since either dispersed, or removed to Vienna or Rome. The Medici themselves have passed away, but their works live on. And of all that they have left behind them as a record of the spirit which animated them, nothing can surpass that which a whole world enjoys through the gifts which was their last act, and which the traditions of their house and the principles implanted long before by its founder caused them to present to their nation, even when smarting under a sense of injustice and disappointment.

Speaking of this action, an Italian writer of the present day has said:

‘By this act the Princess Anna Maria, in securing to the country so much that was most notable of its art, acquired a truly imperishable title to the gratitude of Italy, and one which deserved to outweigh and make forgiven many faults of her ancestors.’

It is when one looks at the Florence of today, without manufactures or the business of a seaport and yet so prosperous a city, that one realizes what this gift (with all the others previously given by the Medici) has meant to her. That prosperity entirely depends on Florence’s power to attract visitors from other countries would cease. For her three great churches would not by themselves attract it; and even San Marco would be gone. So that Anna Maria Ludovica, little as she could have realized all that its consequences would be, by this parting gift in the name of her family did the very best thing she could have done to ensure the future prosperity of Florence. Yet in the city which her action has thus enriched her very name is almost unknown. No statue of her adorns any of its open spaces; no gallery or museum of all those which she has to a great extent filled, and protected from having their contents removed to other cities, has her name written over its doors or any bust or picture of her placed in honour on its walls. And thousands interested in art pass through Florence every season, or even leave that city after long residence there, without ever having heard her name.

Of the items included in this gift the last, the Medicean wardrobe, was not permanently retained. Some thirty years afterwards, in the time of the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo (the first of the Austrian Grand Dukes who was a resident ruler of Tuscany) it was broken up and sold. And some idea of the magnificence customary in what we now know as the Pitti Palace in the time of the Medici Grand Dukes is given us by the details of this sale, which on account of the mass of valuable things to be disposed of continued monthly for ten years. Napier says:

‘Nor was the ancient Medicean wardrobe, which had long reposed in idle splendour, more spared by the stern frugality of Leopold. . . . .Almost every residence of the Medici throughout Tuscany had its peculiar wardrobe, independent of the great magazine of Medicean splendour in Florence, and all were now exposed to public sale. Velvets, damasks, gold embroideries, chairs and mirror frames of massive silver, gold brocades, rich lace, fringes, and costly silken fabrics, were either sold to the public or condemned to the crucible. Gian Gastone’s state bed, embroidered throughout with a profusion of beautiful pearls and other gems, was picked to pieces, and many exquisite works in jewelry and precious metals, the symbols of Medicean taste and magnificence, were all broken up or otherwise disposed of to the amount of half a million crowns.’

Anna Maria Ludovica had not to endure for many years the daily mortifications resulting from the establishment of a foreign rule over her country. In 1742, five years after that rule had been set up; her health began to give way. She suffered much from dropsy, and felt that she had not much longer to live. Having still a large amount of personal property to dispose of, including her own wearing jewels, the contents of her wardrobes, the furniture of her rooms, china, plate, and nearly ₤2,000,000 sterling in money, she set about adding various codicils to the will which she had made some three years before. And desiring to leave some portion of her property to her next-of-kin, whoever he might be, she had drawn up for her a genealogical tree showing not only the historic Medici, the descendants of Giovanni di Bicci, of whom she was the last, but also the collateral branches of the family. By its means, retracing her family for some four hundred and fifty years, back to Salvestro, the grandfather of Giovanni di Bicci, she discovered that a descendant of Salvestro’s brother Giovenco, a certain Pietro Paolo de Medici, was her nearest of kin, though not, of course, a descendant of the historic Medici; whereupon she added a clause to her will declaring him her heir and leaving him a portion of her property. She only lived a few months after completing these final testamentary dispositions; and on the 18^th of February, 1743, at the age of seventy-six, Anna Maria Ludovica, the last remaining descendant of Giovanni di Bicci, passed away, and the family which he had founded, and which had had such a long and eventful history, was extinct.

The chief provisions of Anna Maria Ludovica’s will and its codicils are briefly detailed by the English Ambassador, Horace Mann, as follows:

(1). All her courtiers and servants to have their salaries for life.

(2). Pensions for her four executors.

(3). To pay the above pensions and salaries, a large sum of money deposited in the bank of Sta. Maria Nuvoa.

(4). To the Marquis Rinuncini (the principal executor) her lands in the State of Urbino, and a considerable legacy of much of the rich furniture in her Audience Room.

(5). Her china, half to young Rinuncini, and half to Coroni.

(6). To the Marquis Guadagni, to Siristori, and to Bardi (her other three executors) besides their pensions, very rich presents of silver.

(7). To Madame Uguccioni, her mistress of the robes, the whole of the contents of a room containing, besides many other things, velvet brocades, linen, etc., valued at 10,000 crowns, and a toilet service of gold.

(8). To all her maids-of-honour presents, and the usual fortunes in case of marriage.

(9). To the Austrian Grand Duke she left the whole of her own wearing jewels, ‘annexing them to those of the State of Tuscany, with which they are to descend. Their value in present money is supposed about ₤500,000. Besides this the Grand Duke is left heir to a thousand other things.’

(10). To her ‘piu prossimo agnato’ (nearest of kin), Pietro Paolo de Medici, 30,000 crowns; and as other pensioners die off, their pensions go to him and his heirs till the sum is made up to 100,000 crowns. Also jewels and plate valued at about 150,000 crowns.

(11). Presents in jewels to the Queen of Hungary (Maria Theresa), to Prince Charles, and to several Princes of Germany.

(12). Also a very large legacy to the Prince of Sulzbach (Elector Palatine). A codicil dated 7^th of October, 1739, provided that on the death of legatees who were given pensions under the will, ‘the portions of the estate set free by their death are to be invested by the executors in sound securities, and the interest of such investments to be devoted to carrying on, finishing and perfecting the Royal Mausoleum situated behind the choir of the venerable Church of San Lorenzo with the same excellence and preciousness employed up to the present, and on the plan of the models and designs which have been made.’

On the night of the 22^nd of February, a stately funeral, accompanied by every accessory which could heighten its melancholy grandeur, and surrounded by so great a mass of torches that they lighted up the entire street as the procession moved along, left the Royal Palace, and passed slowly down the Via Maggio, over the Ponte Sta. Trinitá, and along the Via Tornabuoni to the mausoleum behind San Lorenzo. ‘The body was conveyed in a sort of coach, quite open, and with a canopy over the head.’ It was the funeral given by the orders of the Austrian Grand Duke to her who had hoped to die Grand Duchess of Tuscany in her own right. This with solemn pomp, and amidst the tears of the many poor whom she had assisted, was laid with her ancestors in that mausoleum where none any more were to be buried, one who had maintained not unworthily the honour of her family, and whose tomb bears the inscription, ‘The Last Of The Royal Race Of The Medici.’

ERRATA

‘When in 1857 her coffin was opened, the body was found, wrapped in a silk sheet, under which was a handsome dress of violet coloured velvet. On the head was the Electoral crown, which was fixed to the head with a long silver pin. On the breast was a large gold medallion, with on one side her likeness and name, and on the other the sun irradiating the world, with the motto Diffuso lumine. Behind the head engraved on a plate of copper, was a long Latin inscription of forty-four lines describing her good deeds and high character, the sorrow she had had to bear in seeing all of her family die before her and their line brought to an end, her splendid gift to Tuscany of all the art collections of the family, and the fortitude with which she had endured her disappointments and sorrows.’ (Official Report on the examination of the Tombs in the Medici Mausoleum, 1857).

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‘Not To Know The Events Which Happened Before One

Was Born, That Is To Remain Always A Boy!’

East Meets West In The Time Of The Second Empire: Murat & Dadiani de Mingrélie!

2012-06-29T21:51:00.005-07:00

Dadiani & Murat Nuptials

By: Baroness von Suttner

One day toward the end of the winter I received from Princess Salomé a dispatch: ‘Enjoy my good fortune with me; I have just become engaged to Prince Achille Murat.’ On the same day she had sent me a card by mail, which I received a few hours later than the telegram. The little yellowed forty-year old card it still among my old papers. I reproduce it in full:

Princess Salomé Dadiani

de Mingrélie

Ma bien bonne Contesco, venez demain

à deux heures précises – vous passerez

La journée avec nous. J’ai une foule de choses

très pressées à faire et je m’adresse à

vous comme à mon amie dévouée, pour vous demander

votre aide. Ne M’oubliez pas auprès de Mme.

votre mere. Soyez bien exacte.

I joyously obeyed the summons – there is nothing in the world more interesting to young girls than an engagement – and found the whole house in happy excitement.

I was told how it all came about. The affair, contemplated during the preceding winter by the Empress Eugénie and the Princess Ekaterina, had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion the week before. The Emperor undertook to provide his nephew with an allowance of fifty thousand francs a year, which excellently comported with the bride’s similar income; he also agreed to pay the young man’s debts. – Well, yes, debts – it was known to the whole town that he was one of the most extravagant high livers in Paris. Among the diamonds of the then so celebrate ‘Belle Hélène,’ Hortense Schneider, were many jewels which Prince Achille Murat had laid at her feet. The Prince was regarded as one of the handsomest of the young people in High Society. The son of Prince Lucien and an American woman, he very much reminded one of an Englishman in his manner, in his accent, and in the blond type of his face. All this I knew from hearsay, before the news of the betrothal came to me.

I found the fiancée busily engaged in sending announcements of her good fortune to all her St. Petersburg and Parisian acquaintances, and I must needs help her address the envelopes. She was really happy. To be sure the whole affair was arranged by the relatives on both sides, and she had seen her fiancé only three or four times; but in those circles, especially in France, they are used to having marriages contracted in this way. And the dazzling appearance of her suitor when introduced to her had thrown a spell over her: she was genuinely in love with the young man, and heartily enjoyed the thought of becoming ‘Princesse Achille Murat.’

Now she had before her also interesting task of making up the trousseau, of superintending the appointments of little palais, in the Élysée quarter, and of receiving the wedding gifts, the first installment of which had appeared that very day in a ‘river of diamonds’ that her own mother had given her, and a pearl necklace which her fiancé had laid at her feet. So she had, as the old song puts it, ‘diamonds and pearls’; she had beautiful eyes as well, a twofold Princely crown, a hundred thousand francs of income, her nineteen years, and a handsome husband: ‘Darling, what more would you have?’ To me also all this seemed at that time like the pinnacle of human happiness, and I honestly rejoiced with my friend. Later, much later, I learned that there is something ‘more’ than all that, that there is a happiness which in its inward depth, even in very limited circumstances, is more radiant than any external glory, an affluence. Oh, my unspeakable married bliss. . . . .but I will not anticipate.

On that same day I became acquainted with Salomé’s fiancé; before that time he had been no frequent visitor at the house. The first call which he had made, a few days previously, had been connected with the ceremonious proposal for the hand of his chosen. ‘Chosen’ is the wrong impression; I should have said ‘the lady intended for him.’ He pleased me very well – twenty-one years of age, exceedingly tall and slender in figure, a thin blond imperial, dazzling teeth, faultlessly elegant and assured behavior. It must be confessed, not a trace of tenderness; as he preserved a severely correct, not to say chillingly ceremonious, behavior toward every one, so he did even toward his betrothed.

Every morning, from that time forth, came the traditional great bouquet of flowers, sent to the house by a messenger, and in the afternoon appeared the suitor himself to faire son cour for a brief hour.

The wedding was celebrated in the early days of May, 1868. A wedding which embraced three separate ceremonies, - first the civil service in the mairie, then a forenoon wedding according to the Catholic rite in the Tuileries, in the presence of the Emperor and Empress, and at nine o’clock that same evening in the Greek Church according to the Orthodox rite. I participated in this last ceremony as first bridesmaid. My function consisted in holding a crown over the bride’s head during the whole marriage service. An illustrious company filled the brightly lighted, flower decorated chapel. The bride’s toilets were of great magnificence. The bride wore a veil which had been made for her at Brussels, with her family arms, the Golden Fleece, woven into its fabric. It flowed down from a diadem of diamonds, the Empress Eugénie’s wedding gift. The bride’s mother was adorned with the stars and ribbons of various orders. Among the jewels that were here displayed, I was especially struck by the historic set of emeralds which the bridegroom’s sister, the celebrated beauty Anna Murat, the wife of the Duc de Mouchy-Noailles, had put on in honor of this solemn occasion.

And is it not to a certain extent humiliating that I myself on this occasion allowed the parade of toilets and jewelry to sink so deep into my mind that at this day I can still see it all? I will even confess that I remember what I myself wore, - a gown made by Worth, of white gauze over rose colored silk lining, garnished with innumerable little volants from the waist to the train – it is to be hoped that at that important and solemn hour when my friend stood before the altar to be dedicated to an unknown destiny, I thought of something besides those many little spangles’ but it is a fact that I still see the rose pink shimmer rippling through the white threads of the gauze.

After the wedding there was a small ball at the Princess’s. The innumerable volants had an opportunity to whirl around in the dance, and I remember that my partner in the first quadrille was a Prince Bourbon. The newly wedded pair had disappeared from the festivity early and unobserved. They had decided not to take a wedding journey; they took up their residence at once in their newly furnished petit hotel in the Rue de Pressbourg.

There I spent many hours. Salomé usually invited me to dinner, and I was expected to come an hour earlier so that we might have time to chat before the husband and the guests should appear. After dinner, especially when we three were alone, we usually went to some one of the so-called petit théâtres, which Salomé was not allowed to attend before she was married, and which it now gave her much amusement to become acquainted with. I ought not by rights to have been taken along either, being still unmarried; but, in the first place, now that I was twenty-four years old I was no longer included in the category of young girls, and in the next place, in the baignoire we were invisible to the general public.

My friend seemed to feel very happy; at least she was always cheerful and in good humor, and took delight in all the festivities and receptions that were held in her honor in the circle of her new family, at Court, at her husband’s parent’s, at the Mouchys’. She took me with her to her relatives, and so I shared in many of these entertainments. But the season soon drew to an end, summer was upon us, and society scattered.

The young couple went first for a few weeks to the ducal Château de Mouchy, and planned to be at Baden-Baden for the rest of the season. Hereupon I urged my mother that we too should go to Baden-Baden. During the last part of the time I had greatly neglected singing lessons in the Duprez school; it was becoming clearer and clearer to me that I had not such great talent as I had imagined, and I hoped in my secret heart that a sojourn in the great world’s splendid watering place, where I should be included in my friend’s circle, might perhaps turn my fate in a different and happier direction. My mother may have cherished the same hope, or else she felt a drawing to the trente-et-quarante bank in order once more to test whether the old gift of divination might not make its appearance even now; in brief, we started off for Baden-Baden.

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘Whoever said History was boring,

was certainly not of the Esoteric ilk!’

The Esoteric Wordsmyth For Enriching The Esoteric Vocabulary!

2012-06-29T21:51:00.002-07:00

ESOTERIC WORDSMYTH

Princess Ekateriné Dadiani

Princess Ekateriné Dadiani (Georgian: ეკატერინე დადიანი, née Chavchavadze born March 19, 1816 - died August 13, 1882 was a prominent 19th century Georgian aristocrat and the last ruling princess of the Western Georgian Principality of Megrelia in southeastern Europe. She played an important role in resisting the Ottoman influence in her principality and was at the center of Georgian high society, both inside the country and abroad.

Ekateriné was born to a distinguished Georgian noble family from Eastern Georgia. Her father was Prince Alexander Chavchavadze, a notable Georgian general and a godchild of Catherine the Great of Russia. Her mother was Princess Salomé Orbeliani, a great-granddaughter of Erekle II (Heraclius II) of Eastern Georgia. Her younger sister Princess Nino was married to Aleksandr Griboyedov, a famous Russian playwright, composer, and diplomat. Ekateriné's older sister Princess Sophie was married to Count Alexandr Nikolai, the minister of education of Imperial Russia.

On December 19, 1838 Ekateriné married the Hereditary Prince of Megrelia, David Dadiani, who in two years became monarch of the principality after the retirement of his father, Levan V of Megrelia. In 1853 David died and Ekateriné quickly assumed the responsibilities of her late husband, rising from relative obscurity. Recognizing her as regent of Megrelia on behalf of her son Prince Niko, Nicholas I of Russia assigned her a regency council which included the brothers of her late husband, Prince Gregory and Prince Constantine.

During the Crimean War, Turks sent a considerable force to Megrelia, occupying significant parts of the principality and forcing Ekateriné to flee for security reasons. She soon received a threatening letter from the commanding Turkish general Omar Pasha demanding her surrender, as well as the transfer of her son's principality to the Ottoman Empire. Refusing to dignify Pasha's letter with an answer, Ekateriné assumed control of the Megrelian forces and organized successful counter-attacks which inflicted serious damage on the invading Turks.

Princess Ekateriné Dadiani de Mingrélie

Mother of Princess Salomé

The Crimean War soon ended in 1856 with the Treaty of Paris and Princess Dadiani was re-instated as regent, receiving an invitation to the coronation of Emperor Alexander II of

Russia

. She attended the ceremony with her children, as well as her sister, Nino. According to the Russian memoirist K.A. Borozdin, Ekateriné retained "the luster of her beauty" and looked extraordinary in her "original and richly decorated costume." The memoirist, like many others in modern-day

Georgia

, refers to Princess Dadiani as the "Megrelian Queen" and states that at the coronation ball everyone was "delighted with (Ekateriné), her sister, children, and entourage."

In 1856 Ekateriné left the Megrelian principality to General George Dadiani and moved to live in Tsarskoe Selo, the residence of the Russian Imperial Family, where she became one of the "ladies of the court." In 1857 she was forced to return to Georgia because of the peasant uprising organized by a Megrelian smith, Uta Miqava. On May 12, the rebels took control of the province's capital Zugdid, forcing Princess Dadiani to request help from Russia. Having already effectively annexed Eastern Georgia, Russia eagerly intervened, subdued the uprising, and asked Ekateriné to move to Saint Petersburg on the pretext of facilitating her children's education and upbringing there. Her departure and the establishment of a "temporary" Russian military authority in Megrelia marked the de facto abolition of the principality.

After moving to Russia, Ekateriné kept her private salon in Tsarskoe Selo open to the Georgian and Russian intelligentsia. After living there for nearly ten years, she moved to Paris where her daughter Princess Salomé already lived with her French husband, Prince Achille Murat. In the final years of her life, Princess Ekateriné moved back to Western Georgia, then officially part of the Russian Empire, and lived there to the end. She was interred in the medieval Eastern Orthodox monastery of Martvili.

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘Whoever said History was boring,

was certainly not of the Esoteric ilk!’

Esoteric Essays, Tales & Miscellaneous Papers With Nash Rambler: Yankee Aristocratic Bibliophile, The Honorable Ptolemy Fogg, Waxes On About The Shelving Of Books!

2012-06-28T22:22:00.005-07:00

TOLEMY Jasper LaPlante; one of the innumerable Foggs, a tribe of ancestral and golden finger tipped; two legged thoroughbreds who inhabit the shores of America, The United Kingdom, and Continental Europe, was like most Foggs, lacking a very precious gift in his mental and emotional mien, that of sense.

For Ptolemy, on his side, did not possess that most valuable quality as mentioned before, however, his lack of purpose on this score was of a double lashing. He was far more proud than a Fogg has any occasion to be. On that pinnacle of rank, if on any height imaginable, a man may permit himself to think simply of his position, and to form no over-estimate of his own grandeur. Unfortunately, Ptolemy was very proud indeed, and believed devoutly that he himself and his family tree; overshadowed the world. He thought it made an appreciable difference to the very sunshine; and as for his county under his shadow, he felt towards it as the old gods might have felt towards the special lands of which they were the patrons tutelary. He expected incense upon all the altars, and a sort of perpetual adoration. It would have pleased him to have men swear by him and his bibliophile knowledge and dedicate libraries in his honor, had such things been in accordance with modern manners and recognition of his valuable position; he would have felt it to be only natural. He liked people to come into his presence with diffidence and awe; and though he was frank of accost, and of elaborate affability, as a gentleman is obliged to be these days, talking to the commonalty almost as if he forgot they were his inferiors, he never did forget the fact, and it offended him deeply if they appeared to forget it in word or deed.

Ptolemy, the only child of a rich Boston merchant, Mr. Rupert Fogg was eighteen when the heroic struggle for the maintenance of The Union was nearing its decisive and inevitable issue. He was then a student at Harvard University. He told his parents that he wished to go to war as so many of his fellow-students had done. They refused to give him permission, not because they were loath to part with him, but because his health was very delicate. Not least among the many glories of Massachusetts was the alacrity with which her sons rushed to the front when the integrity of their country was menaced, and no father or mother, no sister or sweetheart, appeared to grudge the lives of those dearest to them when they were sacrificed in order that the Union might be preserved. Young Ptolemy Fogg’s parents opposed his going to battle not because he might fall, but because he might die or be incapacitated for fighting before reaching the front.

Ptolemy was too much imbued with the spirit of the University which was thoroughly belligerent, as well as too much in earnest to endure being thwarted in his project. Accordingly, he suddenly left Harvard without giving notice to his parents in Boston, and enlisted in a regiment which had been raised to reinforce the Army of the Potomac under General Grant. He saw little fighting, being taken prisoner during one of the battles in the Wilderness and dispatched to the Confederate prison in Richmond.

Though Ptolemy had not achieved anything, he had done his best, and displayed plenty of pluck. But his parents were in the right. His chest was then very delicate, and the exposure to which he had been subjected as a private soldier, followed by the hardships he had to undergo as a prisoner, prostrated him on a bed of sickness. His life was in danger from a severe attack of inflammation of the lungs. He recovered sufficiently to permit of his removal to his Northern home immediately after Grant captured Richmond, yet it seemed as if his days would be few or that he would never be other than a confirmed invalid. Happily he had an untainted constitution, so that consumption did not take remorseless hold of him. Careful nursing aided his complete recovery.

Far more trying than the near miss of consumption, was the shock caused by his father’s sudden death in Virginia, whither he had gone to look after some property which he had bought there before the war. His father’s death was the more unexpected because he was a hale man who had never suffered from illness. Perhaps had he been more delicate he might have lived longer. His recklessness in neglecting an attack of fever was the cause of his premature decease. Ptolemy’s mother did not long survive her husband. She had been an invalid for many years, and his death was a blow from which she never rallied. Thus, shortly after attaining his majority, Mr. Ptolemy Fogg was his own master.

Succeeding to a great deal of wealth at a very young age, he had spent enormously in his youth, keeping up the state and splendour which he thought were necessary to his rank, with which he still thought necessary though his means were now straitened. And it cannot be denied that he was angry with the world because his means were straitened, and felt it a disgrace to the country that a member of one of its most ancient families should be humiliated to the necessity of discharging superfluous footmen and lessening the number of book acquisitions for his precious library. He thought this came, like so many other evils, of the radicalism of the times. Foggs did not need to retrench when things were as they ought to be, and a strong paramount Government held the reins of State. Ptolemy Fogg, however, retrenched as little as was possible. He did it always under protest. When strong representations on the part of his agents and lawyers induced him against his will to cut off one source of expense, he had a great tendency to burst into another on an unforeseen occasion and a different side – a tendency which made him very difficult to manage and a great trouble to all connected with him.

As one would imagine, Ptolemy considered himself a very superior person in almost everything that radiated in relation from his being, and nowhere was this more apparent than when it came to his opinions, countless though they were, on the business of books.

Ptolemy could talk by the hour on this beloved subject, enlarging on his frequent visits to salerooms and bookstores, his baffled longings, his deluded hopes, his rare trouvailles of precious books which had escaped the lynx eyes of dealers. It was not uncommon to tell his audience how he had journeyed to London to see the Blenheim library collection of the Duke of Marlborough go under the hammer, and to Padua, there silently to adore a ‘Catullus’ on vellum. Such a literary devotion enabled him to abound in anecdotes of book collectors, past and present, from Bussy-Rabutin to Charles Nodier, and reveled in recounting how much value, more or less, depended on an infinitesimal difference in the margins of an Elzevir.

Additionally Ptolemy Fogg was an eccentric bibliophile. His library of thousands of volumes consists almost exclusively of presentation copies, to judge by the inscriptions in them. On the title page of the ‘Nouvelle Heloise’ one finds; ‘To my old comrade, Ptolemy Fogg – J.J. Rousseau.’ In ‘Childe Harolde’ appears; ‘To Ptolemy, an offer of admiration from Byron.’ Moliere sends ‘to my excellent friend Fogg, this first copy of Tartuffe’ and actually there is a volume in which one may see: ‘To you, my dear Ptolemy, I dedicate the ‘Cid’ – Corneille.’ It only remains to be added that these inscriptions are all in Fogg’s own handwriting. Yet he actually takes pride in showing the library to his friends – or did until he found one day a copy of the Pentateuch in which some visitor had written: ‘A token of esteem to my old schoolmate Fogg – Moses.’

To the imagination, in the setting here of his rich library, this picturesque gentleman might be the last thing in the world in which he thrives, a man of books, a bibliophile. Though a bibliophile and a man who makes of book collecting an exact science, if one were to scrutinize his shelves, he would find the library as miscellaneous and democratic as the museum; the aesthete, Arthur Symons, shoulders the soldier of fortune, Richard Harding Davis.

Rather than continue on myself, I will turn it over to the vainglorious one, Ptolemy himself, to share his views on the arrangement of library shelves, both of his own and those of the public realm, we find him comfortably seated before a roaring fire in the labyrinthine Jacobean library of his Boston mansion on Beacon Hill. It is in the early years of the Edwardian era, around 1903 – 1904.

An Early 20^th Century Esoteric Shares

His Views On The Arrangement Of Library Shelves

P.J.L. Fogg

Many years ago I can remember a time when the arrangement of my books gave me no trouble. There was a corner, rather remote and dusty, for volumes of memoirs; another corner, still dustier and farther away, for certain inherited tomes. Near at hand, under the evening lamp were my shelves of contemporary novelist, poets, and writers of essays, or calf skin bound editions of letters. All this I found quite simple and convenient. Any clever person could have made a fairly accurate guess at my interests and character by observing the geographical distribution of the various ‘classifications’ and by measuring their respective distances from my study chair.

For several years I lived at ease in this age of innocence. . . .and then I got married. Things have never been the same. Almost immediately I was brought for the first time to consider books as furniture. It was pointed out to me that some of my best bindings were hidden away in obscure corners while certain broken-backed favorites usurped their rightful places on just those shelves to which a visitor’s eye would most certainly stray. The well-dressed parvenus were, therefore, advanced to places of honor and my old companions were banished into outer darkness.

Since that day my library has not had a year of peace. I have tried a dozen different schemes of classification, striving to find a compromise between my own notions of literary merit and my wife’s excellent taste in bindings. None of these has really worked. A main defect in each and all has been the difficulty of remembering where aesthetics leaves off and where system begins. I realize, however, that I have had to work under peculiar disadvantages, and so I set down here a few of my unrealized ideals for the benefit of those who may have a freer hand.

It is fundamental, I suppose, that shelving systems are devised for the convenience of readers rather than to display the ingenuity of professional cataloguers. Their primary purpose is to bring the right reader and book together with the least possible loss of time. But here, as in so many other human concerns, one is confronted by the troublesome fact that there are many different sorts of readers. Any good arrangement of books, therefore, must conform to one or more of the chief lines of variation may be.

Well, among others, there is the chronological. Most of us are astray in time. . . . and considering how the centuries have been stirred and beaten together to make that hasty pudding which we call modernity; it is no wonder. Think of the procrastinating Greeks and belated Elizabethans who go up and down Fifth or Park Avenue, trying to look at home in the twentieth century but in reality about as happy as the menagerie polar bear on a torrid August day. If we could declare a universal ‘home week,’ think of the jostle and press there would be on all the raying roads of time. Much of our modern unrest is simply nostalgia, and many of our unhappiest moderns have merely got lost among the years. Only the libray stands between them and utter misery. To find one’s home in space, one may travel; but if one is looking for his real temporal habitat he must have books. What chance is there for him, however, while our libraries remain mere disorderly chronological heaps, ancients and moderns promiscuously piled? Things would be simpler for the home seeker, he would feel less like an idle vagrant, if our shelves were so arranged as to constitute legible maps of time.

I once found a book shop in which this principle had been followed. The long and narrow room was lighted by a large window in front and by another much smaller one at the far end, in which a potted geranium held up its transparent leaves. Midway between the two windows was a place of deep shadow. The walls were tapestried with books from top to bottom – phlegmatic folios squatting along the floor and nimble twelvemos crouched against the ceiling. Nearest the front window were the books of recent date, the age of the volumes increasing with the shadows so that as one went down the room he advanced almost literally into the Dark Ages. Contented inhabitants of the twentieth century needed to take only a step or two from the door in order to find the books that were for them, but all others were invited to explore the shadows, which would seem their native element. I saw that the real bibliophile would stride swiftly out of the glare of the front windowed modernity into the cool twilight of the eighteenth century, and from there I could imagine him sinking down and down through the ages. . . . .until he be brought up against the geranium. By the assistance of such a chronological Baedeker he could go at once to his own century, even to his particular decade, without fumbling or hesitation. He could find his temporal home.

This was a beautifully simple solution of the shelving problem, but it would not accommodate to all readers. You cannot divide all human beings cleanly – that is, without leaving awkward reminders – into ancient, medieval, and modern. Another of the important lines of variation is what we may perhaps call the climatic. By this I mean that readers may be separated, roughly, into three classes, torrid, temperate, and polar. Notoriously, many of the infelicities of literary intercourse are due to mismatings, as of a polar person with a torrid book, or vice versa. The attempts of librarians to solve this difficulty by eliminating the torrid book altogether, or keeping it under lock and key for their own private edification, are doomed to failure as long as there remain torrid persons in quest of their literary ilk. And this is likely to be a very long time.

I suggest, then, that our libraries might well be arranged on the plan of a mountain in the Andes or Himalayas, one of those systematic piles of climates upon which one passes swiftly from equatorial to arctic conditions. For such a vertical arrangement it might be well to house our larger libraries in skyscrapers. Then one could go up and down in an elevator in search of the shelf corresponding to his exact temperature. Once he had found this, he might be denied the use of any books outside his degree of latitude. This method would be at least a simple and convenient as the chronological. It would solve at one stroke the whole problem of book censorship by mere segregation. It would bring Sappho and Elinor Glyn, for example, very close together – perhaps on the same shelf.

In this last suggestion there is a hint for a totally different method of arrangement. Why should we regard only the convenience of readers and never the welfare, not to say the happiness, of the book themselves? No imaginative person who spends much time among his books can think of them as only so many masses of dead and inert matter. They become for him, rather, as time goes by, faint personifications of the men and women who wrote them. The copy of Doctor Johnson in strong brown calf, for example, that has been dozing on one’s shelf these two decades, has grown year by year – or so one fancies – more ponderous-bellied, more blear eyed, more dogmatic and more addicted to the use of tea. One treats that book with a certain deference, as though it could resent any indignity put upon it with a right Johnsonian vigor. One places it beside Edmund Burke and Sir Joshua Reynolds, where it will be at ease. Well, and what prevents our showing a similar delicacy even to this Christina Rossetti in pale blue cloth? Shall we do justice only to the strong? Is it fair to her, is it even decent, to leave her in a corner with this great bulking Rabelais?

I know a man who arranges his books solely according to size. This blundering excuse for a method has produced upon his shelves a heart breaking state of affairs which could not have been much worse if inspired by active and intelligent malice. His set of Thoreau is lodged beside Lord Chesterfield. His copy of Sterne’s ‘Sentimental Journey’ is wedged between two volumes of John Wesley’s ‘Journal!’ I need not harrow the readers’ sympathies with further gruesome details. Suffice it that the man who owns this torture chamber is really a kind man at heart, but a little dull. He has never imagined the talk that would – or would not – have gone on between Wesley and Sterne if those two eminent clergymen had been seated for their sins side by side at some London dinner table. He has never in any moment of agonized fancy seen Lord Chesterfield stepping into the hut at Walden Pond and suffered for both parties to that strange colloquy. Perhaps, therefore, we should not blame him. Most cruelty is due to the lack of imagination.

Consider also the heartless tyranny of the alphabet. A library arranged according to the initial letters of its author’s names is, to any right minded person, a chamber of horrors. Nothing in the present chaos of book shelving methods prevents Sappho from standing beside Savonarola and Miss Elinor Glyn beside William Ewart Gladstone. What can Keats find to say to Immanuel Kant? Do Gertrude Atherton and St. Augustine represent our notion of a congenial couple? Shakespeare and Shelley, Bacon and Bagenot, are not so bad, but in general the alphabet makes strange shelf-fellows. It is, one fears, a fact that in hundreds of libraries throughout our land Felicia Hemans, that precise blue-stockinged lady, is lodged beside Heinrich Heine, the irreverent Jew. And when one thinks of Miss Amy Lowell standing cheek by jowl with Longfellow he feels like rushing out to found a society for the prevention of cruelty to books.

We should have a system both convenient and humane if our libraries were arranged according to the principle of consanguinity. It should be possible to place books on the shelf with the same delicate attention to obscure likenesses and hidden antipathies that a skillful hostess shows in seating her guests at table. Gathering one’s literary guests from all the dark backward and abysm of time, one has them, to be sure, at his mercy, but there is a certain lack of finesse, not to say of courtesy, in setting down the pagans among the Puritans and Plato by Ezra Pound.

Many tentative groupings leap to mind as one considers the possibilities of this method. The ‘Lamentations Of Jeremiah’ should be separately bond and placed beside the ‘Spoon River Anthology’. Or should the poems of George Crabbe go there? Mr. Dooley should be given a chance to bring Socrates down to date. There would be solid satisfaction in placing side by side the works of Lucian, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Mark Twain – four kindred souls whom the centuries have unjustly kept apart. The suggestion is so exciting to the fancy that one can almost hear the peals of laughter that would ring from cover to cover of the group, and see the volumes rock and reel upon the shelf.

As one sits planning all this there steals over him a thrilling sense of power. The congenial spirits of the great past, he sees, have been too widely sundered from one another. Carlyle would have been a happier man with Dean Swift always just round the corner. In thinking of the talk there might have been between Horace and Max Beerbohm, between Montaigne and Charles Lamb, between Dr. Johnson and G. K. Chesterton, one begins to realize the golden opportunities that have been missed. Given such materials – the wise and witty, the pleasant and the profound of all the world – he feels that he should be able to arrange them more economically than history has done. Reason reminds him, to be sure, that nothing can be done now for those lonely ones who are far beyond the reach and need of any social mediation, but reason has had its run at shelving systems and should have learned humility. There is a real delight, however fanciful, and a kindness, at least to one’s self, in these corrections of the more obvious absurdities of chronology, in these shadowy introductions of natural friends who had the misfortune to live; it may be, three thousand miles or three thousand years apart.

And so, if I am ever again given free swing in a library, I shall pull literary history to pieces and build it nearer to the heart’s desire, striving to raise the shelving of books from the level of a blundering science to that of a delicate art. I shall ignore the alphabet, telescope the centuries, and juggle the meridians. The result will look like chaos come again to most observers, but to me at least it will be beautifully intelligible, a map of my mental travels, my contribution to criticism and learning. I shall try to bring together at last those who were born to be friends but who could never meet. By the arrangement of that library I shall do all I can to atone for the most flagrant injustices of the past.

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘Obedience is in my opinion a word that should have no existence.

Yes, you can command it. The institutions of society have made you,

tho’ liable to be misled by passion and prejudice, like others, the head of

a family; and I confess it is almost natural for minds not of the highest

order to value even the errors whence they derive their importance!’

The Esoteric Wordsmyth For Enriching The Esoteric Vocabulary!

2012-06-28T22:22:00.002-07:00

ESOTERIC WORDSMYTH

Cadency

In heraldry, cadency is any systematic way of distinguishing similar coats of arms belonging to members of the same family. Cadency is necessary in heraldic systems in which a given design may be owned by only one person (or, in some cases, one man) at once. Because heraldic designs may be inherited, the arms of members of a family will usually be similar to the arms used by its oldest surviving member (called the "plain coat"). They are formed by adding marks called brisures, similar to charges but smaller. Brisures are generally exempt from the rule of tincture.

Arms Of H.R.H. The Duke of Cambridge

In heraldry's early period, uniqueness of arms was obtained by a wide variety of devices, including change of tincture and addition of an ordinary. See Armorial des Capétiens and Armorial of Plantagenet for an illustration of the variety.

Systematic cadency schemes were later developed in England and Scotland, but while in England they are voluntary (and not always observed), in Scotland they are enforced through the statutorily required process of matriculation in the Public Register.

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘Whoever said History was boring,

was certainly not of the Esoteric ilk!’

'Daisyian' Bon Mots! What The Newpapers Said About Princess Daisy!

2012-06-27T16:21:00.005-07:00

. . . . . .’ it is the perfectly charming portrait of DAISY PLESS, H.S.H. Princess Henry of Pless, which rivets the attention and causes exclamation! She is pretty, Pless her! Miss CORNWALLIS WEST, but now a DAISY, now a Princess, came up as a flower at Ruthin Castle, and in 1891, Prince Henry of Pless, says the brief narrative written by A. Bull (an example of a bull and no mistake), wooed and won the beauty of the Season, lucky ‘Arry Pless! and then Prince ‘Arry took his bride to Fürstenstein, in Silesia, a fine Schloss, with beautiful gardens and terraces, - in short, a Pleausance!’

‘I must tell you, that a new star is in the ascendant in the world of beauty. This is Princess Hans Henry of Pless, a girl barely nineteen, who was married about a year ago. She is the daughter of a lovely mother, Mrs. Cornwallis-West, and her father is a great Welsh landowner. Princess Pless is like her name, ‘Daisy,’ being infantinely fair, with wondering blue eyes, and she looks even younger than she is. Men are raving about her, while her husband, a fine looking Prussian officer, seems to enjoy the sensation she causes when he takes her about. He belongs to the Coaching Club, and she always adorns his box seat.’

‘A craze for concealing their powder boxes from the vulgar gaze seems to have spread among English society women. It dates, so far as can be learned, from the appearance of Princess Daisy of Pless, daughter of Mrs. George Cornwallis-West, at a dinner in London one night with a bracelet formed of a tiny gold watch on the one side and an equally diminutive flat gold box, studded with emeralds on the other. The flat receptacle, it appeared, contained Her Serene Highness’s supply of powder and a little puff which to dab it on face and neck.’

‘The Moroccan imbroglio has brought the name of Princess Henry of Pless, a former English beauty, prominently to the front. The Princess is said to be in the diplomatic employ of the German Emperor and a strong factor in keeping the diplomatic corps of Germany informed as to the moves contemplated by Great Britain. The rumor has gained credence through the favoritism shown her by German Royalty and the elaborate entertainments she gives from the English Embassy, where she and her German husband, the Prince of Pless, mingle freely with both the German and English members of the diplomatic corps.’

‘Princess Henry of Pless, the beautiful English wife of a German Royalty, is again enjoying unpopularity with her subjects. She is too English at heart, they say. She hunted and shot in the Royal Park at Fürstenstein, during the summer, as many of her countrywomen do at home, and so shocked the nobility and gentry of the neighborhood. The latter would prefer that their liege lord’s consort maintain a pretty Court full of decorum and stiff etiquette. The Princess, who is a sister of the Duchess of Westminster, and one of the most beautiful women in Europe, laughs at the idea. The fact that Prince Henry of Pless is Chancellor of the Black Eagle and one of the greater German magnates does not prevent him sharing his wife’s love for England. Fürstenstein is seldom without one or more English guests. The Prince and Princess are high in favor of the King and Queen of England. The Kaiser, too, admits them to his intimacy. Both Edward and Wilhelm stood godfather to their son and heir two years ago. Fürstenstein, in fact, is a most pleasant meeting ground for British and German Royal society.’

WHY THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PRINCESS

IN EUROPE STOPPED FLIRTING

The Atlanta Constitution

January 21, 1912

One of the saddest shocks that ever depressed the spirits of the noble and aristocratic gallants of Europe is the news just now whispered in semi-royal circles that the lovely English Princess of Pless has resolved to quit flirting.

But why? Why deny herself an amusement with her so innocent, at which she has become an adept unrivaled among the noble ladies of England, France, or Germany? Those same whispers give the answer: the Princess’ two older sons are beginning to take notice.

Mere infants though they are, they cannot help observing the joy her bright glances paint on favored masculine faces, and the sadness that fills the bosom of those to whom she shows indifference. They know how it is themselves. Her pretty, ingenuous face and her graceful girlish figure are irresistible.

The Princess adores her little Princes. In a few years they will be young gallants, striving for the favor of some noble, flirtatious siren. When they are encouraged only to be repulsed, what grief! What agony of mind and heart!

So the Princess of Pless will flirt no – more and to plant a distaste for the pastime in all the fair bosoms of her acquaintances she has written – and is about to publish for private circulation only – a little book on ‘The Sin Of An Innocent Flirtation.’

What book on that subject could have more authority? This sister of the Duchess of Westminster, daughter of Cornwallis-West, prettiest of noble ingénues, darling among debutantes and heartbreaker from that launching, has flirted since her days of short dresses. She couldn’t help it.

The present King of England, when he was the Duke of York, caused his Duchess furious spasms of jealously by the eagerness with which he responded to the Princess’ flirtatious glances. He had to sail away on his ship, the Crescent – and the Prince of Pless had to carry his pretty bundle of danger back home to Germany.

Prince Henry’s realm is a rich one, capitalizing him to the extent of at least $25,000,000. His beautiful Princess surrounds herself with a gay court of admirers, and she has remained so high in the graces of the Kaiser that her opportunities for flirting have been all that the most flirtatious heart could desire.

But now its all over. The charming Princess, by her example and by the little book on the sins of flirtation she has written is doing her best to put a general stop to that pleasant but disquieting little game.

What a sale a book by the Princess of Pless on her former pet amusement would have, if published! But it never will be circulated outside of a choice circle of Royal and noble boudoirs. It is with all sorts of persistence and vows of secrecy that the following paragraphs have been obtained, which most appropriately might be headed:

Maxims Of A Reformed Flirt

Flirt not at all: to flirt is to deceive, and to deceive is to sin.

Flirting is a feminine art: it is practiced upon men for amusement, and for brief personal triumphs. Men do not flirt – they only seek to devour.

The flirtation that ends in yielding lips to lips was no flirtation at all; it was from the start a potential surrender. The true flirt never surrenders.

Flirtations with their husbands is the chief cause of jealousy in wives; because wives then, being unable to flirt with their own husbands, are in a combat which finds them weaponless.

Habitually to flirt is to cause one’s heart to wither; that is the penalty for causing other hearts to ache.

Flirting is least reprehensible when practiced upon men no longer youthful; they are ever easier to fool than boys, and suffer much less.

Flirting is safe to the extent of being cowardly; the true flirt avoids the soft charms of moonlight and is shocked at the suggestion of a tête-à-tête with the object of her attack.

If men were not blind they would never for a moment be deceived by the blank cartridges of a flirt’s armory.

Only women understand that the glances, the sighs, the equivocal half confessions of a flirt bear no resemblance whatever to the soft and gentle aspect of her whose heart is prepared to yield.

Even though it be the stupidity of men that makes flirts of women, women being the mothers of all men, are not guiltless when they flirt.

The flirt who practices her art upon a susceptible youth to the wining of his fresh young heart creates a cynic, and a menace to the sex which she thus injures.

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘A learned ‘place’ where books, ancient scrolls, and all types of

artifacts and texts, come together in a vast bastion of learning,

to offset a vast sea of ignorance, to invite growth in the esoteric mind!’

The Esoteric Wordsmyth For Enriching The Esoteric Vocabulary!

2012-06-27T16:21:00.002-07:00

ESOTERIC WORDSMYTH

Star Chamber

The Star Chamber (Latin: Camera stellata) was an English court of law that sat at the royal Palace of Westminster until 1641. It was made up of Privy Counsellors, as well as common-law judges and supplemented the activities of the common-law and equity courts in both civil and criminal matters. The court was set up to ensure the fair enforcement of laws against prominent people, those so powerful that ordinary courts could never convict them of their crimes. Court sessions were held in secret, with no indictments, no right of appeal, no juries, and no witnesses. Evidence was presented in writing. Over time it evolved into a political weapon, a symbol of the misuse and abuse of power by the English monarchy and courts.

In modern usage, legal or administrative bodies with strict, arbitrary rulings and secretive proceedings are sometimes called, metaphorically or poetically, star chambers. This is a pejorative term and intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the proceedings. The inherent lack of objectivity of any politically motivated charges has led to substantial reforms in English law in most jurisdictions since that time.

The court took its name from the "Star Chamber" or "Starred Chamber" which was built in the reign of King Edward II specifically for the meetings of the King's Council, though the origins of the name of the room itself are unclear.

The first reference to the chamber is in 1398, as the Sterred chambre; the more common form of the name appears in 1422 as le Sterne-chamere. Both forms recur throughout the fifteenth century, with Sterred Chambre last attested as appearing in the Supremacy of the Crown Act 1534. No clear etymology can be found for the name of the chamber; the most common explanation, dating to the later 16th century, is 'because at the first all the roofe thereof was decked with images of starres gilted'. The ceiling of the chamber in which the court convened was supposedly painted with a representation of the night sky, including stars, so that the accused could gaze upon the decorated ceiling and contemplate his place in the universe. Historian John Stow, writing in his Survey of London (1598), noted 'this place is called the Star Chamber, because the roof thereof is decked with the likeness of stars gilt ...' The chamber's description is regarded as the most likely explanation for its name by the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary.

William Blackstone, a notable English jurist writing in 1769, speculated that the name may have derived from the legal word "starr" meaning the contract or obligation to a Jew (from the Hebrew שטר (shetar) meaning 'document'). This term was in use until 1290 when Edward I had all Jews expelled from England. Blackstone thought the 'Starr Chamber' might originally have been used for the deposition and storage of such contracts] However the Oxford English Dictionary gives this etymology "no claim to consideration". Other etymological theories mentioned by Blackstone on the use of star, include the derivation from steoran (steer) meaning "to govern", it was a court used to punish (crimen stellionatus) (cozenage) or the chamber was full of windows/

The Court evolved from meetings of the King's Council, with its roots going back to the medieval period. Contrary to popular belief, the so-called "Star Chamber Act" of King Henry VII's second Parliament (1487) did not actually empower the Star Chamber, but rather created a separate tribunal distinct from the King's general Council.

Initially well regarded because of its speed and flexibility, it was made up of Privy Counsellors, as well as common-law judges, and supplemented the activities of the common-law and equity courts in both civil and criminal matters. In a sense, the court was a supervisory body, overseeing the operations of lower courts, though its members could hear cases by direct appeal as well. The court was set up to ensure the fair enforcement of laws against prominent people, those so powerful that ordinary courts could never convict them of their crimes.

Another function of the Court of Star Chamber was to act like a court of equity, which could impose punishment for actions which were deemed to be morally reprehensible, but not in violation of the letter of the law. This gave the Star Chamber great flexibility as it could punish offenders for any action which the court felt should be illegal even when in fact it was technically legal; however, it also meant that the justice imposed by the Star Chamber could be very arbitrary and subjective, and allowed the court to be used later on in its history as an instrument of oppression rather than for the purpose of justice for which it was intended. Many crimes which are now commonly prosecuted such as attempt, conspiracy, libel and perjury were originally developed by the Court of Star Chamber, along with its more common role of dealing with riots and sedition.

Star Chamber sessions were closed to the public. King Henry VII used the power of Star Chamber to break the power of the landed gentry which had been such a cause of problems in the Wars of the Roses. When local courts were often clogged or mismanaged, the Court of Star Chamber became a site of remittance for common people against the excesses of the nobility.

Under the leadership of Cardinal Wolsey (the Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor) and Thomas Cranmer (the Archbishop of Canterbury) (1515-1529), the Court of Star Chamber became a political weapon for bringing actions against opponents to the policies of King Henry VIII, his Ministers and his Parliament.

Although it was initially a court of appeal, King Henry, Wolsey and Cranmer encouraged plaintiffs to bring their cases directly to the Star Chamber, bypassing the lower courts entirely.

The Court was used extensively to control Wales, after the Laws in Wales Acts 1535–1542 (sometimes referred to as the "Acts of Union"). The Tudor-era gentry in Wales turned to the Chamber to evict Welsh landowners and protect themselves, and in general protect the English advantages of the Laws in Wales Acts.

Court sessions were held in secret, with no indictments, no right of appeal, no juries, and no witnesses. Evidence was presented in writing.

The power of the Court of Star Chamber grew considerably under the House of Stuart, and by the time of King Charles I, it had become synonymous with misuse and abuse of power by the King and his circle. King James I and his son Charles used the court to examine cases of sedition, which meant that the court could be used to suppress opposition to royal policies. It came to be used to try nobles too powerful to be brought to trial in the lower court.

King Charles I used the Court of Star Chamber as Parliamentary substitute during the eleven years of Personal Rule, when he ruled without a Parliament. King Charles made extensive use of the Court of Star Chamber to prosecute dissenters, including the Puritans who fled to New England.

On 17 October 1632, the Court of Star Chamber banned all "news books" because of complaints from Spanish and Austrian diplomats that coverage of the Thirty Years' War in England was unfair. As a result, newsbooks pertaining to this matter were often printed in Amsterdam and then smuggled into the country, until the ban was lifted six years later.

In 1641, the Long Parliament, led by John Pym and inflamed by the severe treatment of John Lilburne, as well as that of other religious dissenters such as William Prynne, Alexander Leighton, John Bastwick and Henry Burton, abolished the Star Chamber with an Act of Parliament, the Habeas Corpus Act 1640. The Chamber itself stood until demolished in 1806, when its materials were salvaged. The door now hangs in the nearby Westminster School. and the historic Star Chamber ceiling, with its bright gold stars, was brought to Leasowe Castle on the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire from the Court of Westminster, along with four beautiful tapestries depicting the four seasons.

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘Whoever said History was boring,

was certainly not of the Esoteric ilk!’

'Between You & I' The Countess Shares Her Aristocratic Views!

2012-06-26T10:52:00.001-07:00

ADY MAYBURY (gratified by being asked for advice on a wet afternoon): - ‘Oh, on the whole, don’t you know, I do say Cannes. Beaulieu appears to me a craze and nothing more; Monte Carlo, with unmarried girls, you cannot dream of. At those other places, Costebello, San Remo, and so forth, you would be bored to tears; and Mentone, don’t you know, I have found to be both triste and not cheap, as one hears alleged.’

‘When my darling boy, Anthony, so completely outgrew his strength at a very critical age, we made the great mistake of going to Mentone instead of Cannes. Sowerby – my cousin, don’t you know – had advised it so strenuously; confessing, afterwards, when the mischief had been done, that his only reason was he thought it would be so convenient for the pigeons and the tables, neither of which we desired, of course! I do think it is a most tedious and difficult journey, however you envisage it. Maybury was to follow us; but did not. The two maids – we only took two – were worse than useless, leaving my elder girls, Harriett and Jane, to do all the work. Ellen, my youngest daughter – she was but a child – had a violent headache. And Frederick (the one who deceived us so cruelly about his height!) having asseverated that he had acted as courier-valet in one of his places – we immediately found it to be totally false. The law should really be altered with regard to the willful deception practiced by servants. I tell Maybury it is exactly the sort of measure which the Lords should take up, and I am sure would win everybody’s gratitude. My boy caused me acute mental agony by leaving the train whenever it stopped – making us think each time that he had been left behind, and, when we had bowed to the inevitable, perhaps an hour afterwards, coming lounging along the corridor as though it was the most natural thing in the world. It appeared that the engine was furnished with an instrument for cutting the wind in front, and this completely subjugated his imagination, don’t you know. That, and a weird kind of private saloon, covered with snow and ice, which joined the train in the night, was all he cared to discuss. To the scenery he was quite oblivious.’

‘I think the discomfort of those dining-cars is too great. The manner in which they come and put things on your plate banishes appetite. But what are you to do? One is compelled to submit. My girls and I secured a table for breakfast, with Tony close by. On the other side there was a large party, who made far too much noise for a public place. There was a tall man in an astrakhan cap, which he did not remove; and his companion, with large diamonds in her ears – a thing I do greatly detest – leaned forward, don’t you know, rubbing her hands together in that foreign fashion when expecting food, which I have always thought conveys such a suggestion of greediness. Is it not so? The waiter came lurching with an omelette – just grazing Anthony’s cheek with the dish – and my boy thrust him from him violently. He flares up instantly if he thinks his dignity is assailed. But, the train swinging with an appalling jerk round that dangerous curve near Marseilles, his chair flew from under him, and he and the man both rolled upon the floor, the omelette passing through the air to the other end of the car.’

‘The lady with the solitaires burst into uncontrollable laughter – the fou rire, you know crying, Oh, da, da, da, and beating upon the table with a spoon, her eyes streaming and repeating, Oh, oh! Raoul Britannia! I heard the phrase distinctly. I looked fixedly at her. Don’t you know, it did strike me as in such execrable taste. The man in the cap flushed, endeavouring to restrain her, frowning, and opened conversation with me, obviously desiring to make some amend – inquiring one’s destination, and so forth. He spoke English correctly, but with a curious accent. I responded very coldly, but he persisted. The woman lit a cigarette directly the meal was over, and I sent the girls back to our compartments. My maid brought me my dressing bag – with rosewater to put in the finger bowl –and I purposely turned the label – we have them printed, towards the other table, thinking it was just as well that they should know who one was, and that the name and so forth might check him. He read it immediately – I am quite sure of that – and he said, We also go to Mentone. One will hope to meet again. Oh, I said frigidly, Mentone is a very large place. We are somewhat birds of passage. I frankly admit that I can be frigid when I like, and I was so then. What are you to do, with one’s girls with one? It is so important. Can one be too careful?’

‘I think it was after Cannes that Anthony said, that chap in the cap must be a son of a gun of a swell. There was a crowd round his saloon, with soldiers and old boys who must have been consuls and mayors. At Nice it was the same thing, only they were naval uniforms, from the French squadron at Villefranche. At Mentone we heard at once that he was the reigning Prince of Wittenberg, and his sister – the wife of an Austrian Archduke – going to occupy the entire first floor of the Hotel St. Claude. Don’t you know, are not boys annoying at that age? If, instead of worrying about the prow of the engine, he had simply communicated who the private saloon belonged to, it would have saved so much distress.’

‘I really was upset. I have a horror of the ridiculous. I sat with closed eyes in our apartments at the Britanniques trying to fix them. It was so provoking! I was unable to get an Almanach de Gotha. It appeared that there were only two in the whole of Mentone, and both copies had been purchased within half an hour of the arrival of the train. But by really taxing my memory it all came back to me – the Wittenberg Princes – quite one of the grandest families in Europe, of fabulous wealth, though not territorially powerful – the sister’s marriage – most unhappy. Harriett was reading the visitors’ list and did not find a soul we knew. Now that is a thing which you never have to envisage at Cannes. Except the Cranlakes – at the St. Claude! she cried, laughing. I am sure they are the same! It was a quite impossible family with whom my eldest son, Milkington, became foolishly lié at Homburg. Jane, in a fit of depression, said, I know it is going to be triste.’

‘The weather was abominable – mistral and rain – and Tony at once developed a Riviera throat; the doctor ordering him to wear flannel round his neck night and day. The young men on that coast are such dandies, and, dearly as I loved him, I was not proud of him in his bandage. Jane said, if you only had some of Milkington’s big hunting stocks, you could hide it. I suppose, he said proudly, Anthony Pendleby need not be afraid of wearing what he chooses, and I could not but admire him for it. He always speaks of himself in the third person when deeply moved, and I do think that feeling that one is somebody, after all, don’t you know, gives such splendid self-reliance. He was very restless, so we sent him in a closed landau to the St. Claude to find out if the Prince had a book accessible – in the hall or where. It would, naturally, be necessary to inscribe our names on the first opportunity.’

‘That’s all right, said Tony. It was lying on the porter’s table – no end of a book, red morocco. I wrote all our names. I said, I told you to inquire – no more. You have no experience in such matters. It was very reckless. Did you put Countess of Maybury, or Lady Maybury, or what? Of course not, he said, I put Harriett Maybury, Jane Pendleby, and so on; and on the right day. I’m not a fool! Then, I said, you have made us conspicuously ridiculous. He protested, I tell you there wasn’t a title given in all the book. It was plain Mary Bates, John Smith, and so on. Besides’, he said with heat, it is degrading to make such a fuss about a potty little Prince – and he went out into the garden in the pouring rain.’

‘I was shaken by what he said, don’t you know. New modes are always creeping in, yet it seemed too wildly improbable to believe; but, however, unfortunate, one could hardly go and correct the error. Driving next day, we met the Prince, muffled in furs, on a motor, coming down the hill from the Cap at fully sixty miles an hour. He blew a blast on his horn, and, as he flashed by, it seemed that he positively glared at me through his blue goggles. Immediately afterwards we passed the Cranlakes, who greeted us effusively, waving their arms, and calling out to their driver to stop. Oh, allez toujours, I said to our coachman. What can they mean, Harriett said, by hailing us as though we were old friends.’

‘I made quite light of it to my girls, but I really suffered, don’t you know, as the days ran on and neither the Prince nor the Archduchess took the very slightest notice. I have such a horror of the ridiculous. I suppose I asked a hundred times in the hall for cards for us, thinking some mistake had occurred. You know how careless they are. But there were none, except from the Cranlakes – of all people in the world. What can possess them? Jane said. The whole thing was too annoying. Honestly, it kept me awake all night. One does not expect incivility from such a quarter. After all, one has a right to look for different treatment; and, socially speaking, don’t you know, the Prince dominated the whole place. What society it afforded emanated from him. He was like the sun with the planets. He revolved round everything. One did not quite care to be excluded from his rays. Naturally one checked overtures from the people in the hotel, and, except for the very pushing conduct of Mrs. Cranlake, one was left alone. It was, indeed, a triste fortnight; and when the girls heard of the splendid entertainment which the Prince was about to give – with special trains from Cannes, and all the Royal personages on the Riviera coming – they suffered.’

‘My poor little Ellen passed a sad birthday, really pining for suitable companions of her own age. Mrs. Cranlake had astonished us beyond words by asking us all to déjeuner in honor of the day, and promising Ellen a white cake which she should cut herself. I refused by the porter, through the telephone. The woman must be mad! said Jane. You must understand she really was beyond the pale. At Homburg there were truly terrible tales about her. Well, that afternoon she came up to me, her face on fire, in the public library, having lost all control of herself, and abused me like a cab-driver. I’ve a bone to pick with you, Lady Maybury – her daughters tried to stop her without avail – I am going to have this out, here and now. Let me tell you to your face, if you were not actuated by friendly feeling, I consider your writing all your names in my birthday book a piece of consummate impertinence.’

‘Was it not too dreadful – that wretched boy’s blunder? I apologized – I could do no less – and fled. I fled and sped, don’t you know, straight to the St. Claude, which was topsy-turvy with preparations for the Princely fete of the morrow, and I wrote our names in the right book this time. It might be too late; one dared not hope otherwise. Still I did hope and trust that my girls would not be made to suffer through their brother’s willful folly. But it was the sickness of hope deferred. Nothing happened.’

‘I will tell you what I did at noon next day, and you will say I was entirely right. I drove alone to the St. Claude, and demanded to see Count Steglitz, his chamberlain. He was a bald-headed man who I perfectly remembered in the dining car. I introduced myself, and, linking my arm in his, drew him forth into the garden under the orange trees. Count Steglitz, I said, in the words of a quaint old English proverb, I have a bone to pick with you, and I explained the whole malentendu. He was very embarrassed and kept reiterating Ach so! Ach so! I apologize to His Royal Highness for the delay, I said, with tears in my eyes – and indeed I was deeply moved, and I appeal to his generosity to you also, Count; I am their mother. In common fairness, should my girls be made to suffer? He was a shy, embarrassed creature, don’t you know, but a heart of gold, and I do not think tears were far off with him either.’

‘At five o’clock that afternoon he brought the Royal invitation cards in an open fiacre – bidding us all to the ball. There was a separate card for Mr. Anthony Pendleby, and, scribbled upon it, in what I afterwards came to know as the Archduchess’s own hand, these words, Il n’y aura pas d’omelette.’

I must say I thought it exceedingly gracious, and spirituelle also.’

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘The Aristocrat Of Blogs
For Minds That Are Not Primitive’

The Esoteric Wordsmyth For Enriching The Esoteric Vocabulary!

2012-06-26T10:51:00.001-07:00

ESOTERIC WORDSMYTH

Allodial Title

Allodial title constitutes ownership of real property (land, buildings and fixtures) that is independent of any superior landlord, but it should not be confused with anarchy as the owner of allodial land is not independent of his sovereign. In common legal use, allodial title is used to distinguish absolute ownership of land from holding by feudal tenure which restricted alienation and burdened land with the tenurial rights of a landholder's overlord or sovereign.

True allodial title is rare, with most property ownership in the common law world—primarily, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Republic of Ireland—described more properly as being in fee simple. In particular, land is said to be "held of the Crown" in England and Wales and the Commonwealth realms. In England, there is no allodial land, all land being held of the Crown; in the United States, all land is subject to eminent domain by federal, state and local government, and subject to the imposition of taxes by state and/or local governments, and there is thus no true allodial land. Some states within the US (notably Nevada, and Texas) have provisions for considering land allodial under state law, but such land remains rare. The constitution of the state of Minnesota states, "All lands within the state are allodial and feudal tenures of every description with all their incidents are prohibited." Some Commonwealth realms (particularly Australia) recognize native title, a form of allodial title that does not originate from a Crown grant. Some land in the Orkney and Shetland Islands, known as udal land, is held in a manner akin to allodial land in that these titles are not subject to the ultimate ownership of the Crown.

In Scotland, allodial land is land that is held absolutely, i.e. without a superior or other hierarchical tenure. Effectively all land in Scotland is now allodial following the abolition of the feudal system, although this expression is not generally coined, and the term "ownership" is used.

In France, while allodial title existed before the French Revolution, it was rare and limited to ecclesiastical properties and property that had fallen out of feudal ownership. After the French Revolution allodial title became the norm in France and other civil law countries that were under Napoleonic legal influences. Interestingly Quebec adopted a form of allodial title when it abolished feudalism in the mid-nineteenth century making the forms of ownership in Upper and Lower Canada remarkably similar in substance.

Property owned under allodial title is referred to as allodial land, allodium, or an allod. In the Domesday Book it is called alod

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘Whoever said History was boring,

was certainly not of the Esoteric ilk!’

The Art Of Travel: Victorian Luxury On The Cunarder's So Grand That Even Americans Travelers Are Impressed!

2012-06-25T07:20:00.003-07:00

ON AN ATLANTIC LINER

By: Charlotte O’Conor Eccles

O the wearied dweller in cities there is something peculiarly soothing and delightful in the restfulness of ocean travel. The absence of posts and postmen, whose rat-tat so often means worry, the pure, bracing air, the trifling incidents of daily life onboard, all please one because of their novelty.

The dread of sea-sickness, of course, is what frightens many would-be voyagers, but on a huge Atlantic Liner like the Campania of the Cunard Line, or her sister ship the Lucania, the disagreeable motion is felt comparatively little. Many, indeed, who have agonized on smaller craft and shorter pastime for the double journey, with coal and provisions of all sorts, requires an outlay of about ₤10,000 before a farthing’s profit is made, some notion of her size begins to dawn upon the stay-at-home.

Luxury of shipboard accommodation can scarcely go further than on the Lucania and Campania, which resemble each other so closely in fittings and appointments that what is said of one may be taken also as referring to the other. One important point is their perfect ventilation. In the passages leading to the staterooms are ventilating fans, that force a constant current of fresh air through these regions, and thus to a great extent obviate that nauseating odor of mingled oil, tar, paint, and heated metal, sages find a journey to New York a pleasure all through. The only drawback on such a trip is that the ‘ocean greyhounds’ are so fleet. They arrive at their destination almost too soon, except, perhaps, for the ever anxious business man; yet, such are the contradictions of humanity, that, were they slower, passengers who now lament their speed would probably grumble.

Our first illustration, representing a bird’s eye view of the Campania in its entire length, gives but a faint idea of its actual vastness. To realize this, one should stand by it in dock, and see it towering above one like a monster hotel set afloat by some unknown agency. When we learn that the ship is built to accommodate 1,400 passengers, besides a crew of 400, and that to fit her out each that composes the ordinary atmosphere of steamers.

The dining room in the first class saloon is an enormous apartment, 100 ft. long by 62 ft. wide, reached by descending the grand staircase, with its panels of teak and frieze of Japanese gold paper. There are four rows of tables running fore and aft. The revolving chairs, each topped by a carved lion, the insignia of the company, present some difficulty to the inexperienced traveler, as, in order to get in or out, they – the chairs – must all be turned the same way. Naturally, like most of the furniture, they are fixed in their places. In rough weather, a wooden framework is placed on the table, with receptacles for glasses, etc, which are thus kept from precipitating themselves into the diner’s lap, however, the breeze may blow. The walls are of old Spanish mahogany, and the huge sideboard, twenty-five feet long, is of the same lustrous wood. For lighting and ventilating the saloon, there is a central well carried right through the upper and promenade decks, the covering being thick beveled glass in teak framing, hinged to admit air.

‘The First Class Dining Saloon is placed on the main deck, and is an apartment of immense size, the length overall being about 100 feet, and the breadth 62 feet. The general style of the Dining Saloon suggests the Italian. The walls are in old Spanish mahogany, of a design at once chaste and effective.’

‘The upholstering is in dark red figured frieze velvet, and the curtains are in keeping, and here it may be interesting to note that there is a set of curtains suitable to the general scheme of decoration, for both summer and winter, for all the public and several of the private saloons.’

‘An important feature is the height of this room, which is 10 feet throughout, and even this extra foot to the usual height will be a welcome concession to comfort in insuring better ventilation. Another feature is the want of uniformity in the saloon, an advantage gained owing to the fact that various air and ventilating shafts, stairways to lower cabins, partial bulkhead, etc., break up the area.’

‘They detract from the appearance of size, which is not a disadvantage, but, by judicious planning, a large number of nooks and corners have been secured, where, by arrangement small parties may dine regularly in almost complete seclusion, instead of being mixed in the general company. Indeed, sauntering through the saloon, the belief grows upon one, that those seeming excrescences, with their immense bevelled mirrors, or richly carved panellings, are the result of careful planning, with the object of satisfying the desire of small parties.’

‘There are four tiers of large tables running fore and aft, with the usual style of revolving chair, having carved on the back the lion rampant holding a globe in its forepaws, the well known insignia of the Cunard Company. Accommodation is provided for the whole of the first-class passengers in this saloon, while a small saloon adjoining is specially provided for the children and servants of first-class passengers. This enables all the passengers to dine at one hour, instead of in two groups, as is nearly always the case in large steamers.’

‘The sideboard instead of having the usual marble top with brass rail, is entirely of Spanish mahogany, in keeping with the general finish of the saloon, and, as it is 25 feet long, it presents a handsome appearance with its great expanse of bevelled mirrors. The public rooms on the promenade deck being of unusual size, the dining saloon is designed purely as a salle manger, and the great necessity of perfect ventilation has been fully recognised.’

‘The system adopted is somewhat novel. Each of the side-lights in the saloon, of which there are 20 on either side, is of exceptional size and diameter, and by the use of Utley's patent ventilator, which we shall describe later, the inlet for air can be left open no matter how rough the sea may be. This ensures a constant supply of fresh air entering for the whole length of the saloon. The outlet is provided for by oval ventilating shafts through the saloon roof, thence by passages and shafts to shade deck, where also the ventilators may be left open under all conditions.’

‘For lighting as well as ventilating the saloon there is a central well which is about 24 feet long by about 16 feet broad, and is carried right up and through the upper and promenade decks, the covering just above the line of the shade deck being a curved dome of stained glass with an outer casing of thick glass in teak framing, hinged to open for purposes of ventilation.’

‘The extreme height from dining room floor is about 33 feet. The woodwork of this well is decorated ivory, white relieved, with gold lines in the mouldings. The pilasters above the line of promenade deck are richly carved and surmounted with a frieze all round. The outer side of the well, that forming part of the walls of the drawing room, is of cedar stiles in the lower part, with a dado moulding, while the upper part is panelled, with heavy clear bevelled glass mounted in sashes, each swinging on a centre pivot, and all made to lock in position, a commendable departure from the hitherto largely adopted practice of leaving the upper part - that above a ballustrade—open.’

‘This will be a relief to the passengers who indisposed to enjoy the luxuries of the table, a condition which unfortunately does present itself to many who "go down to the sea in ships," when they will prefer the solace of the cheery fireside of the drawing room. Thanks to the precaution taken,. there cannot come to them unpleasant reminders of the penalty of their weakness in the fragrant odours which float up the well from the dining saloon below.’

The drawing room is even more attractive, with its arched mirrors, its mantel and over-mantel in satinwood, its cozy corners, blue tiled hearth, brass fittings, and soft couches. The prevailing tints are delicate bluish grey and a soft pale terra cotta. The walls are lined with satinwood relieved by cedar mouldings. The ceiling of old ivory tint and gold is coffered, and has groups of electric lamps arranged in alternate panels.

The well I have already mentioned occupies the centre of the drawing room, giving the effect of a conservatory. It naturally divides it at each side into a corridor, lined with satinwood and closed off if desired by portieres of heavy silk brocade. At the other end of the saloon is a grand piano, and in a recess a fine American organ, both instruments being much requisitioned, especially toward the end of each voyage, when a concert is usually got up amongst the passengers and the proceeds devoted to the Sailor’s Home in Liverpool and New York. As there are often well-known artists onboard, these concerts are often most successful. The settees, ottomans, and so forth are upholstered in rich velvets and brocades of artistic hue.

‘The fireside is one of the most charming features of the beautiful drawing room, which is an unusually large apartment, 6o feet long by 30 feet broad, and is well lighted, not only from the large square windows looking on to the promenade on either side of the ship, but from the well which pierces the promenade deck in the centre of the saloon, and from two cupolas, one in the centre of that part of the saloon forward of the well, and the other in the part aft.’

‘The general effect, too, is greatly enhanced by the roof which has a rise in the centre. The two views of this saloon give an excellent idea of the admirable taste with which its decorations have been carried out. The " ingle-neuk" is quite an unusual feature of the drawing room. or perhaps a return to the homely conditions which formerly obtained, without any of those discomforts which Dickens has narrated in his inimitable style.’

‘It is at the forward end, the mantle and overmantle are both in satinwood, richly carved, w ith 3 arched mirrors, all in keeping with the general scheme of decoration of the room, which is in the renaissance style ; the grate is of brass, and the hearth is laid with Persian tiles. A feeling of cosiness is contributed by two lounges fitted on either side of the fire-place, with an ottoman in front, while the subdued light through the stained glass cupola completes the charming effect.’

‘Comfort is suggested by the arrangement as well as by the whole apartment. The walls are lined with satinwood relieved with cedar mouldings, the frieze panels being of plane tree. The ceiling is in pine, decorated in light tones, old ivory prevailing, with a little gilding. The electric lamps are arranged in alternate panels forming the centre of a pattern, and not on the beams, as is usual.’

‘The steel stancheons which support the roof are encased with satinwood pillars richly moulded and carved. There are 2 porches, and these connect with a passage on either side to staterooms forward on the promenade deck. These porches are also of satinwood, with stained glass panels, and rich brocade portiere curtains hung across the entrances.’

‘At the after end of this saloon is a grand piano, and into a recess has been fitted an American organ, the casing being of satinwood, with cedar wood panels. These were supplied by Messrs. Paterson, Sons & Co., of Glasgow. Like the other furnishings it is of satinwood, the polished top and panels of which show the beautifully rich clouded figure of the wood in fine contrast to the duller surface of the cedar. Both instruments are specially protected from damp and moths, the stools in each case being made receptacles for music.’

‘The settees, ottomans, &c., with the chairs for the card tables, are upholstered in rich velvets and brocades of various colouring, which together with the rich Persian wove carpet which covers the floor, and the delightful variety and irregularity of the furniture, give the room a very attractive appearance. Two arched vestibules lead from this charming room into the landing of the grand staircase already described.’

Passing through the drawing room, one reaches the library, a room twenty-nine feet in length and furnished in the Renaissance style. Its shape is that of a half-moon, and all round are arranged dainty double Davenports, with ample accommodation for the writing of letters. The bookcases, the lower part of polished amboynas’, and the upper of beveled glass set mahogany, are filled with popular literature, novels, books of travel, adventure, biography, etc. The apartment is well lighted by many small square windows of plate glass, curtained with brocade. Nothing attracts more attention than the ceiling, in two shades of ivory white, the electric lamps taking the form of rosettes of beaten copper in the centres of alternate panels.

‘The library is on the promenade deck, convenient to the grand staircase. It is 29 feet long by 24 feet broad, and the general effect suggests French Renaissance. In the bookcase volumes suited to all classes of readers are arranged. The lower part of the case is enclosed with hinged doors having Amboyna panels, partly carved, as are also the plasters.’

‘The upper part has glass doors and mahogany astragals. A carved covet surmounts the whole, and it is worked into the ceiling. Comfort is suggested by the two large ottomans in the centre of the room. Writing tables and iv chairs are arranged close to the walls.’

‘The room is finished in richly - carved mahogany with Amboyna panels. The roof, which highly ornate, is painted in two shades of ivory, the electric lamps, which take the form of rosettes in beaten copper, being the centre of the pattern in each alternate panel. The floor is laid with oak parquetry, with a large richly-coloured Turkey carpet in centre. The seats are upholstered in Mecca and blue velvet ; the curtains are of rich brocade, in harmony.’

‘The tout ensemble of the library is very elegant and comfortable, and reflects, along with the other public rooms, great credit to the artists who carried them out—the Fairfield Company the dining saloon, staircase, and well, while Messrs. Wylie and Lochhead, of Glasgow, decorated and furnished the drawing room, smoking room, and library, besides the upholstery throughout the ship.’

The smoking room, naturally the masculine stronghold, is a model of its kind, being some forty feet long, with a bar at one end and situated on the promenade deck. A young couple to whom expense is no object might do worse before furnishing a house than study the colouring and appointments of the Lucania with a view to copying them on dry land. What could be cozier, for instance, for Edwin than such a smoking room on a smaller scale and minus the bar? Its bronze dog grate looks so comfortable, with its dark blue tiles and artistic fittings. The over mantel is of carved, fumed oak, while the easy chairs and reposeful couches are upholstered in natural pigskin. The furniture and fittings are in the Jacobean style, and all round are snug little recesses where small parties may gather to enjoy a pipe and take a hand at whist or poker.

‘The smoking room has powerful counter attractions--material and otherwise. This apartment is about 40 feet long by 32 feet wide, and situated on the promenade deck aft, with a bar at one end. There is the same feeling of homeliness here in the fire burning brightly in the bronze dog grate, the flames dancing in the dark blue tiles of the hearth and cheeks.’

‘The beautifully carved fire-place and over mantel are in excellent keeping, the woodwork being entirely of fumed oak, while the upholstering is in pigskin of the natural colour, which is certain to improve with wear. The style is of the Jacobean period, with the tables and chairs to suit. The whole tone is subdued and suggestive of elegant ease and comfort.’

‘All round the smoking room are arranged small alcoves or recesses, each with little tables and chairs around the sides, so that here again, small parties may be formed to enjoy the comforts of the soothing pipe, or more elegant, if not more enjoyable cigar, or even—but tell it not in Gath !-- to take a friendly hand in that innocent game (not entirely unknown on the Atlantic) except poker.’

‘There are four different entrances or exits, two from the fore end leading to the ship where the staterooms are arranged, and one on either side leading on to the promenade deck, while a stairway leads to the deck below. In both drawing and smoking rooms it may be noted blowers are fitted, and these can be drawn to cover in each case the entire fire-place.’

The staterooms are of great variety, from the simplest to the most elaborate. Some consist of an entire suite, bedroom bath room, and sitting room, but all are carefully arranged with a view to comfort and convenience. Small shelves, racks, trinket drawers, book racks, and so on are provided everywhere, and in the more expensive quarters regular beds supplant berths.

The bath rooms are beautifully fitted with baths of white marble having hot sea water laid on. In fact, all the luxuries of our latter day civilization have been accumulated for the benefit of the transatlantic voyager.

‘The distinctive feature of the great majority of the state rooms is their great height, which approximates to to feet. This, of itself, insures satisfactory ventilation, while jalousies are adopted wherever practicable, and, in addition, Utley's system of ventilation is adopted, as we shall describe later on, so that even in the case of those rooms which are not close to the shell of the ship, the air will be changed frequently.’

‘The beds throughout the ship are entirely of iron. The old type of wooden berth, which was more in keeping with the vessels of 20 or 30 years ago, has been entirely superseded, not only for passengers, but for officers, crew, and firemen. The beds in the state rooms are of Hoskin's " triptic" type, which combine lightness with strength. The upper bed, with all its bedding folds up against the bulkhead, so that in the event of a smaller number of passengers being on board, than is contemplated, in the ordinary course of events, there will always be much more room for those who are travelling.’

‘The lee board, while framed in iron, has carved mahogany panels, and a new feature has been adopted in this respect which will add greatly to the comfort of the passengers. In the old type of wooden berth the lee hoard extended the whole length of the berth and formed the front of a sort of box, in the act of getting into and out of which—especially if one occupied the upper berth—the passenger had to perform something approaching an acrobatic feat. The result was not always comfortable, nor the spectacle elegant.’

‘In the modern arrangements the lee board extends only one half the length of the bed, and it can be easily fixed at either end or in the centre, so that while the ship is in a sea the passenger has all the advantage of the arrangement, and has freedom of movement either out of or into the berth. Experience has shown that this length of lee board is sufficient for protection.’

‘The profusion of small shelves, trinket drawers, book racks, &c., in the state rooms certainly suggest that the designer had an intimate knowledge of the essential requirements of passengers especially of ladies, whose love of cupboards, etc.. is almost proverbial. There is a large wardrobe in each room, and, of course, the usual wash. stand, life-belt, racks, hooks, etc. The general rooms are fitted in mahogany, and upholstered ith plush or velvet, while the fittings are electro-plated. Electric light and electric call bells add to the very complete sum of comfortable surroundings.’

‘There are rooms to suit all tastes in the ship. A large number of single berth cabins are, as we have said, provided, and many double cabins, together with several three or four berth rooms, while family apartments are provided in addition to magnificently appointed suites on the upper deck. Several of these ensuit rooms are fitted in the most beautiful satinwood and mahogany. They are arranged as parlour and bedroom, the parlour being fitted with table, couch, and chair, on the model of a lady's boudoir, with suitable decorations.’

‘In the bedroom is a handsome brass-furnished bedstead with over-hangings. There are toilet arrangements in the most excellent style, with all the etceteras desirable. While these suites of rooms will form the highest attraction, there are, on the same deck, a large number of superior rooms, although not associated with the same luxuries. They are fitted on the lines of the better class of state rooms, but panelled in hardwood instead of being painted, and supplied with patent collapsible bedsteads. The bedstead is capable of being extended to form a double bed, and when a single bed the front rail may be collapsed to form a couch or settee.’

Americans are accustomed to a degree of luxury in their hotels and on their railroads to which we are not as yet habituated in this country, and when it is said that they never cease to admire the perfection of the fittings on the most modern of the Cunard fleet, the statement in itself betokens a high degree of comfort. Everything harmonizes, everything is appropriate, and the traveler who can find anything to grumble at must indeed be difficult to please.

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘Whoever said History was boring,

was certainly not of the Esoteric ilk!’

The Esoteric Wordsmyth For Enriching The Esoteric Vocabulary!

2012-06-25T07:20:00.001-07:00

ESOTERIC WORDSMYTH

Paris Bourse

The Paris Bourse (or "Bourse de Paris" in French) is the historical Paris stock exchange, known as Euronext Paris from 2000 onwards.

Historically, stock trading took place at several spots in Paris, including rue Quincampoix, rue Vivienne (near the Palais Royal), and the back of the Opéra Garnier (the Paris opera house). In the early 19th century, the Paris Bourse's activities found a stable location at the Palais Brongniart, or Palais de la Bourse, designed by architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart.

From the second half of the 19th century, official stock markets in Paris were operated by the Compagnie des agents de change, directed by the elected members of a stockbrokers' syndical council. The number of dealers in each of the different trading areas of the Bourse was limited. There were around 60 agents de change (the official stockbrokers). An agent de change had to be a French citizen, be nominated by a former agent or his estate, and be approved by the Minister of Finance, and he was appointed by decree of the President of the Republic.

Officially, the agents de change could not trade for their own account nor even be a counterpart to someone who wanted to buy or sell securities with their aid; they were strictly brokers, that is, intermediaries. In the financial literature, the Paris Bourse is hence referred to as order-driven market, as opposed to quote-driven markets or dealer markets, where price-setting is handled by a dealer or market-maker. In Paris, only agents de change could receive a commission, at a rate fixed by law, for acting as an intermediary. However, parallel arrangements were usual in order to favor some clients' quote. Moreover, until about the middle of the 20th century, a parallel market known as "La Coulisse" was in operation.

Until the late 1980s, the market operated as an open outcry exchange, with the agents de change meeting on the exchange floor of the Palais Brongniart. In 1986, the Paris Bourse started to implement an electronic trading system. This was known generically as CATS (Computer Assisted Trading System), but the Paris version was called CAC (Cotation Assistée en Continu). By 1989, quotations were fully automated. The Palais Brongniart hosted the French financial derivatives exchanges MATIF and MONEP, until they were fully automated in 1998. In the late 1990s, the Paris Bourse launched the Euronext initiative, an alliance of several European stock exchanges.

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘Whoever said History was boring,

was certainly not of the Esoteric ilk!’

'Vale': Alexander Charles Robert Vane-Tempest-Stewart 9th Marquess Of Londonderry

2012-06-24T09:49:00.003-07:00

Alexander Charles Robert Vane-Tempest-Stewart

9th Marquess of Londonderry

7.IX.1937 – 20.VI.2012

The 9th Marquess of Londonderry, who has died aged 74, was an unconventional aristocrat who suffered more than his fair share of misfortune and heartbreak.

The Telegraph

June 20, 2012

He inherited his title and family estate in County Durham on the death of his father in 1955, when he was just 18. But after devoting much effort to renovating the huge family mansion, Wynyard Park, the costs became overwhelming and in 1987 he was forced to sell the house and its 6,800-acre estate to the property developer Sir John Hall — later Chairman of Newcastle United football club.

Inheriting the family titles in late adolescence had denied Alistair Londonderry a university life, so he created one for himself, becoming proficient in French, Italian and German, and knowledgeable about European literature. An authority on Franz Liszt, he became an accomplished pianist, studying in

America

under Egon Petri, and was an early patron of John Ogdon and Leslie Howard.

Lord Londonderry was entertaining company, with a penchant for dreadful puns, but he also suffered from bouts of depression. Yet though his life was scarred by tragedy, he never succumbed to self-pity.

Alexander Charles Robert Vane-Tempest-Stewart, always known as Alistair, was born on September 7 1937, the son of Robin Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, heir to the Londonderry title and Unionist MP for County Down between 1931 and 1945. His mother, Romaine, was a brewer’s daughter. He had two older sisters, of whom the younger, Annabel, became better known as Lady Annabel Birley and later Lady Annabel Goldsmith, wife of Sir James Goldsmith and mother of Jemima Khan.

An ancestor, Sir Piers Tempest, fought alongside Henry V at Agincourt. However the Marquessate, a title in the peerage of Ireland, was created in 1816 for Robert Stewart, who had represented County Down in the Irish House of Commons. Stewart had already been created Baron Londonderry in 1789, Viscount Castlereagh in 1795, and Earl of Londonderry in 1796, to which the 3rd Marquess would add the (English) titles of Earl Vane and Viscount Seaham.

The second Marquess, better known as Lord Castlereagh, was the man who secured the passing of the Act of Union between England and Ireland and who, as British foreign secretary, played a major role in the reconstruction of Europe after the Napoleonic wars. He later became insane and cut his throat with a penknife, obsessed by the fear that his enemies were plotting to accuse him of sodomy.

Of Alistair Londonderry’s more recent forebears, the most colourful was his grandfather, the seventh Marquess, minister of education at Stormont in 1923 and a man once described as “the sort of grandee who makes you wonder why there was no British revolution”. Wealthy from Durham coal, he was a serial philanderer who sired three children by his mistress, as well as five by his wife Edith (also known as Circe), a famous socialite.

At Londonderry House in Park Lane, the Londonderrys hosted glittering receptions and in 1931 the Marquess achieved cabinet office as Secretary of State for Air (allegedly because of the Marchioness’s ascendancy over the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald, who proclaimed himself her “attendant ghillie”). In the mid 1930s, however the Marquess put himself beyond the pale by making a series of visits to Hitler (whom he pronounced “very agreeable”) in a forlorn personal crusade to extend the policy of appeasement even further than Neville Chamberlain’s cabinet was prepared to contemplate. Pilloried as “The Londonderry Herr”, he died in a gliding accident in 1949 and was succeeded by his son, Alistair’s father.

Lady Annabel Goldsmith recalled an idyllic, privileged childhood spent at the family’s Irish seat, Mount Stewart, by Strangford Lough in County Down, and at Wynyard, in the care of fleets of nannies and under-butlers. Young Alistair, who suffered from a stutter as a child, was educated at Eton, where he founded a jazz band called the Eton Five. But in 1951, when he was 14, his mother succumbed to mouth cancer and his father embarked on a rapid descent into chronic alcoholism, eventually succumbing to liver failure in 1955.

The Londonderry’s had been immensely rich, owning more than 50,000 acres, a colliery empire and three other houses in addition to Wynyard, Mount Stewart and Londonderry House. But by the time Alistair inherited the title, mismanagement, taxation and the nationalisation of the coal mines had taken their toll. Londonderry House was sold to Hilton Hotels and later demolished, while Mount Stewart, which had been bequeathed by the 7th Marquess to his daughter, Lady Mairi Bury, Alistair’s aunt, was subsequently handed over to the National Trust.

The 9th Marquess launched his career somewhat unpromisingly with a letter to ‘The New Statesman’ attacking the monarchy. He criticised members of the Royal family for “flashing their toothpaste smiles, displaying their latest hairdos and exhibiting their deplorable taste in clothes.

“I have met the Queen a number of times,” he went on, “and I find her voice a pain in the neck.” This immature tirade brought a stern reprimand from his grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness, who expressed herself horrified by her grandson’s “vulgar, silly, and childish” outburst. Days later Lord Londonderry issued a grovelling apology for his “bad manners”.

The same year he became secretly engaged to a 16-year-old blonde beauty called Nicolette Harrison, the daughter of a stockbroker. When they married in 1958, he and Nicolette, a vision in her Norman Hartnell satin gown, were hailed as an example of the new unstuffy aristocracy. The bride was barely 17 and the groom not quite 21.

They had two daughters and a son who, as heir to the Londonderry title, was initially styled Viscount Castlereagh. When the baby was 18 months old, however, blood tests established that he was not, in fact, Lord Londonderry’s, but the son of Georgie Fame, a Lancastrian weaver’s apprentice-turned-pop star whose hits included The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde. Nicolette had fallen in love with him after spotting him on Top of the Pops in 1964 and had begun an affair.

The story featured on newspaper front pages for days. Fame was named as co-respondent in the Londonderrys’ subsequent divorce in 1971 and the following year he and Nicolette were married. They had another son together but in 1993 Nicolette committed suicide by jumping off Clifton Suspension Bridge.

In 1972 Lord Londonderry married Doreen Wells, former principal dancer at the Royal Ballet, but happiness continued to elude him. After 17 years his second marriage, too, ended in divorce and more discomfort was to follow when Lady Cosima Somerset, whom Lord Londonderry publicly accepted as his daughter by his first wife, claimed that her biological father was the nightclub pianist and writer Robin Douglas-Home, nephew of the former prime minister and a close friend of Princess Margaret who had killed himself with an overdose of pills in the 1960s.

In the 1960s Alistair Londonderry bought a house in Tuscany, which he renovated and where he did enjoy great happiness. After the sale of Wynyard Park, he moved to Dorset.

Although he held the title of Marquess for longer than any of his eight predecessors, Lord Londonderry never took his seat in the House of Lords (where his coat-hook in the cloakroom bore his English title Earl Vane), and nothing gave him greater satisfaction than to be told that he did not “look like a lord”.

Lord Londonderry is survived by the two daughters of his first marriage and two sons by his second. His eldest son, Frederick Aubrey Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, born in 1972, succeeds to the title.

The 9th Marquess of Londonderry, born September 7, 1937, died June 20, 2012.

Robert Stewart, 1st Marquess of Londonderry

1739-1821

Lady Frances Pratt

d. 1833

Charles William Vane, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry

1778-1854

Lady Frances Anne Emily Vane-Tempest

d. 1865

George Henry Robert Charles William Vane-Tempest, 5th Marquess of Londonderry

1821-1884

Mary Cornelia Edwards

d. 1906

Charles Stewart Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 6th Marquess of Londonderry

1852-1915

Lady Theresa Susey Helen Talbot

d. 1919

Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry

1878-1949

Hon. Edith Helen Chaplin

1879-1959

Edward Charles Robert Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 8th Marquess of Londonderry

1902-1955

Romaine Combe

d. 1951

Alexander Charles Robert Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 9th Marquess of Londonderry

1937-2012

Doreen Patricia Wells

1937-

Frederick Aubrey Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 10^th Marquess of Londonderry

1972-

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘Whoever said History was boring,

was certainly not of the Esoteric ilk!’

The Esoteric Wordsmyth For Enriching The Esoteric Vocabulary!

2012-06-24T09:49:00.001-07:00

ESOTERIC WORDSMYTH

Wynyard Park,

County Durham

Wynyard Park, sometimes known as Wynyard Hall is a large country house in County Durham, England. The house used to be the family seat of the Vane-Tempest-Stewart family, Marquesses of Londonderry, an Anglo-Irish aristocratic dynasty, but it was sold in the 1980s.

Designed by Philip Wyatt and built 1822-28, the entrance front has 13 bays with a 6-column giant Corinthian Portico. The Entrance Hall looked like that of Mount Stewart, the family's estate in Northern Ireland. It has a coffered segmental tunnel vault with apses at both ends and in the middle. There was a large crystal chandelier suspended from the ceiling. The main octagonal centre hall extends the full height of the house and has a dome with caryatids around it and a skylight. There is also a mirrored Drawing Room with a gilded and painted ceiling, and a vast ballroom similar to that of the family's London residence, Londonderry House.

The family wing of the mansion was nicknamed the Dukes Wing as it was named after the Duke of Wellington and his visit. This side of the house also held the Duke's Gallery, where the family housed their famed art collection when not in London.

As one first sees the house you can see many statues in the entrance court outside the house and in the distance there is an Obelisk. The vast obelisk, 127 feet (39 m) high, commemorates the visit of the Duke of Wellington in 1827.

At its height in the 19th century, the Wynyard Estate occupied 7,000 acres (2,800 ha) in Teesside.

The Statue Gallery The Hall, Wynyard Park

The grounds today include a 15-acre (61,000 m2) ornamental lake, a walled garden, two entrance lodges, three cottages, a former racing yard, and productive farmland.

The mansion was started by Benjamin Wyatt and completed by Philip Wyatt for the third Marquess of Londonderry, a famous coal magnate and founder of Seaham Harbour. The Marquess spent the then enormous sum of £130,000 to build and furnish the House. In 1841, just as the mansion was being completed, a fire broke out and gutted the house; it was later restored and remodelled by Ignatius Bonomi.

There had been a house on the site since the Middle Ages, and the 3rd Marquess incorporated parts of an earlier 18th century building into his house.

In the 19th century, George Vane-Tempest, who became Earl Vane in 1854 and the 5th Marquess of Londonderry in 1872, owned vast estates: 27,000 acres (11,000 ha) in Ireland and 23,000 acres (9,300 ha) in England and Wales; he also sat in the House of Commons as a Member of Parliament for 26 years.

Upon the death of the 5th Marquess in 1884 his eldest son, Charles, became the 6th Marquess; it was the 6th Marquess's wife, Lady Londonderry, who was the model for the famous Lady Roehampton in Vita Sackville-West's The Edwardians.

The estate remained in the Londonderry family until 1987, though it was let as a training school for teachers from 1945 until 1960, during which time it lost most of its original contents through sales and breakages.

The estate was sold in 1987 to Sir John Hall, along with 5,000 acres (2,000 ha). Hall spent £4 million to restore the house, hiring Rupert Lord to oversee the restoration; he later moved his company headquarters, as well as his home, into the mansion. The estate, comprising the house and 780 acres (320 ha) of parkland, was listed for sale in July 2002 for £8 million. It is now a four-star hotel.

The Prince and Princess of

Wales

(later King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra) were frequent visitors to Wynyard. It was at Wynyard that the Royal Council was held in the early nineteenth century.

Travel Review:

Wynyard Hall

Yorkshire Evening Post

Saturday 2 June 2, 2012 09:01

It has welcomed royalty – and now Katie Baldwin visits a historic house for a weekend of pampering

In 1947, the then Princess Elizabeth visited Wynyard Hall.

Over the intervening years, that young princess has become the second-longest reigning British monarch.

And the stately home where she once surprised trainee teachers has also proved its longevity.

Situated between Middlesbrough and Darlington, the hall sits in the midst of the stunning Wynyard Park.

Parts of the parkland now house a super-exclusive village packed with luxury mansions, where former residents include football stars like Alan Shearer.

But they pale into insignificance compared to the hall itself.

The former ancestral home of generations of the Marquis of Londonderry, Wynyard Hall is impressive.

An ancient bridge takes visitors to the front of the house with its portico and rows of imposing columns.

Grand doesn’t really do it justice.

Inside a small entrance hall makes way to an impressive centre hall complete with chandeliers and a domed glass roof.

The hall, which dates from the 1800s, is a little reminiscent of a smaller Harewood House.

It stayed in the Londonderry family until 1987, when it was bought by former Newcastle United owner and businessman Sir John Hall.

Initially he moved his home and business headquarters in, but in 2007 the Hall family decided to create a four-star hotel.

After more multi-million pound refurbishments, Wynyard Hall Country House Hotel opened the following year.

There are just 16 bedrooms in the hall but that small number was easy to understand when we saw the size of ours.

The Vane Tempest suite was generously proportioned in every way and boasted stunning views over the ornamental lake.

Ah yes, yet more impressive views, taking in a sweeping terrace around the side of the house.

Exploration

It begged further exploration – so off on a stroll around the grounds we went.

Despite it being a sunny spring morning, we hardly encountered anyone else in the quiet countryside.

Walking around the house we came across the Grecian and Roman Temples, which are among the listed features of the gardens.

Further away from the hall are many remnants of is former life, including the dairy, the Wild Garden and the water lily tank.

Around every corner there was something else to see, from walled gardens to ancient gates to peek through.

Later we discovered that one stop on our stroll was to be the site of Sir John’s next project, to create one of the world’s biggest rose gardens.

Work hadn’t started yet, but the plans for the garden were another sign of the hall’s ongoing development.

One of the most recent additions is the newly-opened spa at Wynyard.

In the hall’s former boathouse, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect location than this hideaway at the edge of the hall’s lake.

The conversion has been carried out with real panache, with all the facilities you’d expect within a setting which nods to its former life.

We started our afternoon of relaxation with a drink in the sun room, looking out over the lake. With its retro decor, wearing period dress and twirling a parasol felt more apt than the robes and slippers we were donning.

But our road test of the spa showed it was well and truly in the modern world.

First we tried the rasul mud chamber, said to be an “ancient Arabic cleansing ritual” using “medicinal chakra muds”.

Not sure about the chakras, but the mud was fun – in a private steam room we were given bowls of different muds for body, face and hair and left to smear them on. Contrary to my holiday companion’s ribbing, the mud was for that purpose only and hadn’t been dug up from the edges of the lake.

Then we had 45 minutes in the steam room while the mud weaved its magic on our skin.

A shower later and we were mud-free and silky smooth.

Other facilities were equally impressive, including the salt inhalation room, the sauna and – not for the fainthearted – the drench bucket of icy water.

We didn’t use the outdoor vitality spa, a hydrotherapy pool set on a deck with views across the lake, but we put it on our must-do list for next time. That, and trying out some of the many face and body treatments on offer.

Appetite

After all that hard work relaxing, we’d built up plenty of appetite for dinner.

Wynyard’s Wellington Restaurant is sumptuously decorated and with a live pianist it made for an inviting place to while away the evening.

The food has been awarded two AA rosettes and it certainly lived up to them. From the amuse bouche to the tiny loaves of bread served with the cheese board, attention had been given to every detail.

Yet the staff managed to avoid the stuffiness which can be a feature of formal dining and were only too happy to chat.

Highlights were numerous but the caramel brulee with popcorn and popcorn ice cream was mouth-wateringly good.

Wynyard Hall is very popular with weddings – they took place on both nights of our stay – and it’s easy to see why.

With its outstanding setting, gorgeous backdrops and not to mention its own private chapel, it is a venue fit for any bride.

Or, as history proves, fit for any queen.

Factfile

For further details, contact Wynyard Hall on 01740 644811.

Visit www.wynyardhall.co.uk for information about all the hotel’s facilities.

The Spa at Wynyard Hall offers face and body treatments using products by Elemis and Karin Herzog, including the chocolate anti-aging detox facial and the Elemis coconut rub and milk wrap.

BareMinerals make-up and Jessica Nails manicures, pedicures and Geleration nails are also available.

For a limited period the hotel is offering a night’s stay, five-course evening meal, breakfast and up to two hours in the Spa Experience for £99 per person (based on two people sharing, subject to availability).

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘Whoever said History was boring,

was certainly not of the esoteric ilk!’

Commoner, Empress, Princess! Soraya In Her Own Words; The Challenge of Transitioning From Public To Private Life!

2012-06-23T13:42:00.002-07:00

Squinting against the bright Bermuda sky, her hair tousled by wind and salt spray, Princess Soraya of Iran rode the choppy waters of Hamilton Harbor as she had ridden also the sharp crest of fate. Eight years ago she had been an Iranian commoner. Then suddenly she became and for seven years remained Queen of Iran, enjoying the splendors of Royalty and the love of her devoted husband, the Shah. Last week, at 25, she was a cast-off Queen, divorced because she was unable to bear the Shah an heir, now seeking solace and diversion in another world.

She had stayed briefly in New York before sailing to Bermuda with her mother and her younger brother.

Soraya is, by any standards, a remarkable woman, charming and unpretentious, fluent in four languages, a fine athlete. In Bermuda she kept to a busily casual schedule, yet amid eddies of attention she remained isolated – free but emotionally still tethered to a life neither she nor the Shah had wished to abandon. ‘There are many things I must think about,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what I am going to do.’

Settled into a comfortable cottage, overlooking Hamilton Harbor, Soraya took up the traditional tourist pleasures. She slept late most mornings, then had a leisurely breakfast. She had learned to water ski while vacationing on the Caspian Sea five years ago and she now went at it again with a graceful skill professionals could – and did – applaud. She swam, sunbathed on the pink sand, watched yacht races and took tea at the posh Coral Beach and Tennis Club. Usually, even when she went nightclubbing, her only companions were her mother Eva and her brother Bijan, who will enter the Colorado School of Mines this summer. The Princess went through her activities with an air of reoccupation. But one day she went fishing as the guest of an avuncular American, and for almost the first time she showed flashes of pleased animation.

Excerpt From

SORAYA

The Autobiography Of

Her Imperial Highness Princess Soraya

It happened shortly after my divorce from the Shah in March of 1958. I was then living in my parents’ home outside Cologne, and one day I decided to drive into town, for the first time, and go shopping.

As I was simply dressed no one took any notice of me, but in the main street I suddenly discovered that I no longer knew how to walk properly. I kept bumping into people and had to apologize again and again. My eyesight was good and my legs were all right. But as Empress I had simply forgotten how to move in a crowd.

For wherever the Empress may go, she comes to expect that others will humbly make way for her. Of course during the years of Royalty, I had frequently walked along the Via Veneto in Rome or down the Champs Elysées in Paris. Yet on such occasions I had been accompanied by courtiers who had seen to it that the way was cleared for me.

Now I was quite alone, and when it came to crossing the street I really panicked. I no longer knew how to reach the other side without being run over by the streams of cars. I felt as a person might who had long been locked up and forgotten how to behave when at liberty.

Driving was even worse. Whenever I had driven myself in Teheran, I had always been preceded by outriders who stopped the traffic for me. I had no need to bother about the red or green lights, and at that time there were no other road signs in Persia.

Now I found myself in a maze of signs telling me that this was prohibited and that dangerous. One morning I drove with my secretary into town, in a small Opel without a CD plate. As I was trying to park, a policeman came up and said crossly:

‘Can’t you see the notice? You’re not allowed to stop here.’

‘The lady is a stranger,’ my secretary explained. ‘She’s the former Empress of Persia.’

‘Nonsense,’ the man said gruffly, ‘Your driver’s license, please.’

When he saw who I was he suddenly sprang to attention, his jaw dropped, and he went away.

In fact I had no idea how to park a car, how to drive into a filling station, how much gas to ask for, or how often the oil should be changed. I had no choice, but to engage a driving instructor and learn it all again from the beginning.

For seven years my life at the Court of Teheran had been lived, as it were, in cotton wool. I was literally not allowed to do anything. For example, it would have been regarded as beneath my dignity for me to pour out a cup of tea for a guest. There was always a lady-in-waiting present, ready to carry out such little tasks. Any step that was likely to bring me into contact with the outside world had first of all to be approved by some authority or other. Sometimes it seemed to me that I was nothing but a marionette.

Nor had I the slightest financial freedom. Since as Empress I was not supposed to carry money, any purchases I might make were paid for by an equerry. I never saw a hotel bill, and I did not know how to order a meal or what to tip. For a long time after my divorce, I felt so unsure of myself in such matters that I always left them to my mother.

Ordinary people smile at such embarrassments, but then my life has not been ordinary. When, at the age of eighteen, I married the Shah, my natural progress toward independence and self-sufficiency was rudely interrupted. In many respects I remained half a child, and when I returned to the normal world this caused me all sorts of difficulties.

I suddenly felt utterly useless. In Teheran I had had my round of duties, and I had done a great deal of social work of which I am still proud. Now I was all of a sudden confronted by a huge void. For a while I seriously considered whether I should not attempt to find salvation by working for Dr. Albert Schweitzer. If my parents, who were worried about the state of my health, had not objected, I should probably have gone off then to Lambarene.

It may be that I found the change in my situation particularly difficult to take, owing to the fact that Court life had altered my entire character. As a young girl I had been a lighthearted creature who liked to laugh and did so frequently, and who did not rack her brains about the future of the world. I was talkative, a chatterbox even, and I trusted my parents and my school friends completely.

As a result of my marriage I found myself living in surroundings which scarcely permitted genuine human relationships. I was shut in a sort of golden cage, and all I heard reached my ears, as it were, at secondhand. Of course people repeated to me what this person or that was supposed to have said behind my back. But how could I know whether what I was told was in fact the truth? Most of the people to whom I gave audience were intent on promoting their own interests. Nobody ever tells the honest, unvarnished truth to a woman in the position that had been mine.

I thus gradually lost touch with reality. I believe that Princes and Princesses who have spent their entire lives in such an artificial atmosphere can never form a true judgment of what their fellow human beings are thinking and doing. They may see many people and read countless dispatches, but real life will remain for them something quite alien.

While I attempted to pierce the courtiers’ masks, I was myself constantly under observation. My every gesture and my every word were regarded as important. My closest friends would repeat in the town what I had said in private, and I dared not even relax in front of the servants. I soon learned to weigh every word before it passed my lips.

As a result of his whole education the Shah was far better trained at this than I was. I never saw him completely open and relaxed if there were a third person present. I was later to observe the same with Queen Elizabeth of England. In her case, after so many generations of monarchy, it is presumably inborn. She received us at Buckingham Palace in the friendliest fashion, yet I was conscious of an inner reserve which I never managed to penetrate. It was as though she were separated from her surroundings by an invisible wall.

If one has so exceptional a position in life it is impossible to remain natural. As time went on I, too, quite unwittingly became a sort of actress. From morning to night, I played a part, and since it was always the same part, it gradually became second nature to me.

That was why I felt lost when the red carpet was suddenly pulled away from under me. After my divorce I would have liked to hide in a corner. I had not wished to mix with society, and I wanted to see only my closest and most trusted friends. Many people thought that this was pride on my part. Since they had never lived in a Court, they could not imagine the nature of the psychological crisis through which I was passing.

My change was all the more drastic for me in that – unlike the Shah’s first wife – I did not come of a Princely family. Mohammed Reza tried to secure my social position by giving me the rank of an Imperial Princess when we parted. But the only people who really stood by me at that time were my parents, and I had no refuge other than their home and the circle from which I had first come.

All the same I believe I should soon have overcome this feeling of panic if only I had been left in peace. But the public is pitiless. Soon enough wherever I went I was surrounded by crowds and gaped at as if I were a film star. Women such as Sophia Lorne or Brigitte Bardot have no right to complain when they are treated in this fashion. They knew what they were letting themselves in for when they chose their careers. I, on the other hand, found myself the victim of the crowd’s curiosity entirely against my will. I had lost the protection of my Imperial guards, but I was apparently not allowed the right to lead a normal private life.

I found this to be the most unpleasant aspect of my changed position. I still shudder when I think of what happened in Genoa shortly after my divorce.

My mother had suggested that we go to Bermuda together, in order to get away from the immediate past. Since she does not enjoy flying, we had booked cabins on the Constitution. When we arrived at the station in Genoa a sea of human beings was waiting on the platform, for somehow or the other the Italians had learned that we were on the train.

At first my mother did not wish to leave the train at all. But three carabinieri came into our compartment and said that they would escort us in safety to the exit. They had overestimated their powers. Before we knew what was happening the crowd broke over us like a tidal wave. We were jostled and squashed by all these people until we feared we would be suffocated. Many of them were climbing onto the others in order to get a glimpse of us. The policemen had no idea what to do, and I shouted to my mother:

‘Take care, don’t fall, or you’ll be trampled to death!’

A few seconds later, she had vanished. I had no idea where she was, and now I became seriously worried. A carbiniere near me yelled at the top of his voice; ‘La mamma! La mamma!’ Unfortunately, this proved quite useless.

Meanwhile, the ‘mamma’s’ hat had been knocked off her head, and one of the Italians had picked her up in his arms. She kicked and fought, for nothing like that had ever happened to her before. ‘Let me go,’ she shouted. ‘Let me go!’ But the man took no notice, and carried her to the exit. Only when he had put her down, quite gently, in a waiting car did she realize that he was an official in civilian clothes.

The photographers pursued us all the way to our hotel. As if this were a Hollywood film of the silent days, our driver cut corners, zigzagged, and shot down side streets in an attempt to shake them off. We clung to our seats, and when at last we reached our destination both my mother and I were near to breaking point. And this was only the overture to a systematic persecution which for years on end was to poison my existence.

On the way to Bermuda, I had heard that several families, whom I had counted among my best friends, were already trying – only a few days after my divorce – to present a daughter or a niece to the Shah as my possible successor. They regarded my misfortune as an opportunity to increase their own influence at Court.

The four room bungalow which we had rented at the Newstead Guest House in Bermuda was right beside the ocean. We had no neighbors, and for many weeks we saw no one save the guesthouse’s staff. This was an ideal refuge for a woman in my mental state.

When I came back to Germany from Bermuda I found that my name had meanwhile become the center of a political controversy. Mohammed Reza had complained to the Bonn government about certain articles which had appeared in the German press in connection with the divorce. As a result the Foreign Ministry had tabled the so-called ‘Soraya Bill.’ This bill proposed to make it a punishable offense to insult foreign heads of state. It never became law. The only result of the debate was to make me once again the object of the public’s curiosity.

My fear of meeting people increased in consequence. Luckily there are a few country clubs near Cologne which are not open to the public and where I could ride and swim without being disturbed. And on the occasions when I could not avoid going into town, I tried to disguise myself as best I could.

Once I wore a red wig with a fringe and long hair at the back, and a pair of spectacles. Thus disguised I went to the Domplatz, hoping that I would be taken for a student. Unfortunately it did not work. I had scarcely set foot in a shop before I heard one woman say to another:

‘Do you think that red hair suits Soraya?’

When summer came, and I was still feeling depressed, my mother took me aside one day and said:

‘It’s high time that you were mixing with people again, child. You’re too young to go on sitting around the house all day and sighing. How about making a trip to Spain? You’ve lots of friends there.’

I knew that my mother was right. If I didn’t wish to become a permanent melancholic I must simply force myself to venture out into the world once again.

On the way to Madrid we stopped in Biarritz, where the bullfighters Luis Miguel Dominguin and his brother-in-law Antonio Ordóñez were introduced to us. This encounter did not help to restore any shaken self-confidence. On the very next afternoon Dominguin was gored in the bullring. Twenty-four hours later we attended a corrida in San Sebastián, in which Ordóñez took part.

We sat in the stand of honor, and Antonio, as is customary, appeared in front of my box and took off his hat to show that his bull would be sacrificed to me. It was a pitch-black, thousand pound animal of the Miura strain. Half flattered, and half worried, I watched the duel between man and beast.

At first all went well. Bull and matador performed their ritual, ballet like dance upon the sand. The banderilleros planted their shafts in the beast’s neck, and Ordóñez led it through a series of short, sharp passes until at last the bull stopped still. It was snorting angrily. At this moment Ordóñez began to draw his sword from beneath his muleta, but as he had raised it to deliver the mortal thrust the bull suddenly turned his head and buried its right horn deep in Antonio’s left leg. The crowd, screamed, and the hero of the afternoon had to be carried from the ring on a stretcher.

I was utterly downcast. Generalissimo Franco, who was seated in the next box, was also clearly upset. He did not move, his eyes fixed on the ring. Why should it have to be my particular bull that had caused such mischief? I told myself that within forty-eight hours I had brought ill luck to the two best matadors of Spain. Since that occasion I have frequently attended bullfights, but no matador has ever risked sacrificing his bull to me again.

From San Sebastián I drove to Madrid, and later to Baden-Baden for the autumn races. Then came Christmas at St. Moritz, where I was once again accompanied by my mother. The very thought of finding myself along an unaccompanied in some railway station or airport continued to fill me with terror.

All the same I was beginning slowly to recover, I was accepting invitations, and I went dancing. Even though my heart was often not in what I was doing. I tried my best to master my moods. By so doing I now really aroused the press. It seemed to be expected that I should remain in mourning, and from the very first evening when I appeared once again in public with a male escort I became game for all the journalists.

I have no prejudices against newspapermen. The Shah and I had always made a point of giving interviews to foreign correspondents. We knew that they were in a considerable measure responsible for the friendly reaction that we always got when traveling abroad, and we appreciated this. We counted many journalists among our personal friends. The New York editor Fleur Cowles, for instance, was an entertaining and intelligent woman whom I often enjoyed meeting.

But as an ex-Empress I now made the acquaintance of a type of newspaperman I had never met before. So far as I can judge it consists of scandalmongers of both sexes. For these people my private life was a sort of serialized novel in which something new must happen with each week’s installment. And when they had nothing new to report, they fell back on their imaginations.

They invented quarrels between my parents and myself. They alleged that I could remarry only with the Shah’s permission. They made up love affairs for me, such as with a certain South American millionaire, ‘Baby’ Pignatari, whom I had met only once in my life.

A mass-circulation Paris weekly created the special job of ‘Soraya reporter’ for a member of its staff. A young man was employed the whole time, to follow me about. Wherever I went, be it Rome, Athens or Manhattan, I could rely on finding him in my hotel lobby. His employers might well have saved themselves his travel expenses, for his articles were always nonsense.

One in St. Anton I was traveling on the funicular up to the ski runs. The cabin was so crowded that it was hardly possible to move. Suddenly I noticed that my persecutor from Paris was standing next to me. He began to speak to me, but I interrupted him brusquely:

‘Why do you keep pestering me?’

To my left a flash bulb went off. One of his colleagues had climbed up the side of the cabin and had immortalized the moment with his camera. A few days later the snapshot appeared in the Paris weekly, with the caption:

‘Our special reporter in animated conversation with Soraya.’ And then followed an article containing all the latest news about myself which I was supposed to have confided to him.

The photographers preferred to surprise me when I was dancing or seated, at a table with a gentleman. The impression was thus created that I spent almost every evening in a different night club. In fact, I frequently did not go out at all for weeks on end, but this of course the public could not know, since when I stayed at home I was not photographed.

Many of the pictures were not taken in night clubs, but at private parties or in a hotel restaurant. We were usually sixteen or twenty who sat down to dinner, and of course each lady had her male escort. But on my photographs the other people were always cut out, so that it looked as though I had been dining alone with whatever man was seated next to me.

Of course there were, from time to time, men who were genuinely interested in me, and of them I shall have more to say later. This, incidentally, seems to me quite normal for a young woman of my age, and it is surely the opposite that would have been unnatural. Yet if I so much as danced a few times with the same man the papers spoke at once of the forthcoming engagement, even though he and I might well have discussed nothing more intimate than the weather.

If the truth be told I do not particularly care for night clubs, and if I had my way I would scarcely ever go to them. But when one is dining out, and after the meal the others suggest going on, it is hard to be a spoilsport. Even if you would rather go home, out of simple good manners one goes, at least for a little while.

Once, in the South of France, I ran into a man I had known slightly in St. Moritz. He was called Alfonso Tobón and was a friend of the husband of Princess Ashraf the Shah’s sister.

‘I see you’re letting your name be used on gramophone records these days,’ he remarked with a laugh.

I thought I must have misheard, and I stared at him in bewilderment.

‘Didn’t you know?’ He sounded surprised.

‘There’s a picture of us both on a gramophone record. The title of the song is Soraya.’

I had never heard of this record. It turned out that it was made by the Paris gramophone firm of Odeon. The jacket bore a photograph that showed me dancing with Mr. Tobón. Apparently somebody had decided that it would be a smart idea to degrade the ex-Empress to the level of a pop singer.

I was very angry. My mother and I set off for Paris at once, in order to take immediate legal action on the spot, against the manufacturer of this record. Their defense was that my name was no more protected by copyright than was the name Margaret. Yet in all Europe there was no other woman called Soraya, and besides, it was my picture that appeared on the jacket. The judge decided that the reference could not possibly be anyone other than me, and he forbade any further sale of the record. Of course by then a great many copies had been sold, and there was no way I could have them withdrawn from circulation.

Meanwhile ever crazier reports about my private life were being published. Whole lists were printed of the men with whom I was supposed to have flirted. To judge by these, I had surely beaten even Catherine the Great’s world record. Unfortunately, there were enough women who read this drivel and accepted it all as gospel truth. Since their own lives seemed to them so dull, they sought consolation in this fantasy world in which there were women like me ‘to whom things happened.’ I believe this is a malady of our time. Whose profound causes are really the concern of the psychoanalysts.

Even my mother once witnessed how virulent this malady can become. She had a woman friend whom she saw almost every week. Naturally they talked about me, so that this woman was kept currently informed about my comings and goings.

One afternoon when she came as usual to tea she appeared to be in a remarkably excited mood. She was carrying some obscure weekly paper, and she said to my mother:

‘Have you seen what you daughter has been up to in Rome?’

The story was that as the result of unrequited love I had taken an overdose of sleeping pills, and the doctors had had to pump out my stomach.

‘Why do you show this thing to me?’ my mother asked quietly. ‘You know quite well that there’s not a word of truth in it.’

In fact, this friend was well aware that there could not possibly be anything to this magazine’s story, yet even she had allowed her longing for the sensational to overcome her good sense.

Perhaps only those who have suffered a similar fate can realize what pain this constant symphony of lies caused me. What I now felt was no longer the panic of terror of the first few months, but a feeling of deeper hopelessness. I began to doubt my own identity. Who was I, when all was said and done? Would they ever let me find my own true self once again, or was I condemned to be forever the idol of the masses dream world?

I settled at Munich in early 1961, and it was in the spring of that year that my parents made the acquaintance of a lawyer by the name of Dr. Erich Lichtenstein. They were worried about the state I was in, and they asked him if he could help to save me from my persecutors. Although he was a corporation lawyer he promised to see what he could do.

In the course of the next ten months, Dr. Lichtenstein systematically dealt with all the periodicals which published lies about me. Dozens of German, French, Italian and other periodicals – known collectively in the trade as the ‘Soraya Press,’ were told to deny or to correct false statements that they had made about me. In the worse cases damages were asked.

The results were astounding. Scarcely a single publisher was prepared to go to court. A few paid damages without even being asked. Others published lengthy false statements that they had made about me. All promised to stop persecuting me from now on. So I was at least given the chance to draw breath.

By this time more than three years had passed since the divorce. Gradually I began to learn the truth of the saying that time heals all wounds, and my lawyers’ success also helped to raise my spirits. With the summer of 1961 I first began to believe that at last I was really ‘over the hump.’ My joie de vivre had come back, and with it my old sense of adventure.

Occasionally I would drive to Mittersill, which is near Salzburg, for the weekend. Prince Hohenlohe and his wife received paying guests in their castle. Among them were the Princes’ Charles and Armand d’Arenberg, members of the French aristocracy.

Armand invited us all to come and shoot over his estate at Menetou-Salon in October. This fitted in very well with my own plans, which were to visit friends in Palm Springs a little later in the autumn, and before going to America there was a little shopping I wished to do in Paris.

Then I learned that the Shah and Farah Diba were arriving in France for a State Visit in October. However there seemed to no danger that our paths would cross. The date arranged for the official reception in Paris was earlier than Prince d’Arenberg’s shooting party.

I was therefore utterly amazed by what met my eyes when, after three days’ duck shooting, I arrived in Paris. On every newspaper kiosk the same headlines shouted the same story: ‘Soraya’s Shocking Bad Taste; Of A Duel Between Empresses, Of Soraya’s Challenge To Farah Diba.’

What was the reason for all this excitement?

Once their State Visit was over the Shah and his new wife had stayed in France privately, as the guests of friends. They were at this moment in the Château de Champs, near Paris, and I had assumed that they would not be returning to the capital. As it happened they did come into Paris once or twice, after I had arrived at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée.

This coincidence marked the start of a new campaign directed against myself. I was accused of lacking in tact, and it was said that I had come to Paris because I was jealous of Farah Diba. The most outrageous report of all appeared in the newspaper Paris Presse:

‘The Shah of Iran and the ex-Empress Soraya had a meeting alone together not far from Paris. This had been kept secret. The meeting can be dated as during the weekend of October 15-16. On the Saturday afternoon the Shah left with the Empress Farah in Paris and drove himself, in this Facel-Vega, allegedly to Chelles. In fact, according to our source, he met Soraya later that day somewhere between Chelles and Menetou-Salon.’

What could I say? Many of my contemporaries had fixed ideas about me which it would be extremely difficult to put right. Shortly after this I was talking to some Californian friends. I told them about my problem. They suggested, in my interest:

‘Why don’t you write a book and get the record put straight once and for all?’

“I don’t like to plead my own cause,’ I said. ‘Besides, people would only believe half of what I wrote.’

I had recently read a number of volumes of memoirs, the authors of which were known to me personally. I had been disappointed to note that almost all those books gave the impression of considerable vanity, as well as of self-deception, on the part of the writers. To my mind, such books are valid only when they are written with absolute sincerity – and because of my position I was reluctant to do this.

But my friends insisted. They said that any case had an importance which far transcended any personal fate. They were of the opinion that my experience reflected many of the contradictions of the age in which we live. And finally they persuaded me to undertake this task.

Queen Scheherazade, my legendary predecessor, beguiled her listeners into the magical world of the thousand and one nights. As a modern young Persian woman I have no caves filled with treasures nor magic lanterns nor flying carpets to offer. Yet my marriage gave me the possibility of observing Iran’s history from the highest vantage point, and, as would any other woman, I saw much that men habitually ignore. So I, too, have a tale to tell. And I am convinced that the simple truth will prove far more interesting than all the fairy stories that have been woven about me and my life.

Looking Back And Looking Forward

While I was writing these memories, I found the work a sort of liberation. For the first time I felt that I was succeeding in overcoming the past, and by so doing, much has become clear to me.

I almost feel as though my past life now lay before me, itself an open book. It contains much that is beautiful – and much that is painful, but even of this I would not have missed one hour. I do not believe that I exaggerate when I say it is precisely the most difficult years of my life which have helped to make me more mature.

I am more aware now than I used to be that external circumstances are constantly changing – as countless people nowadays know – but that thus a certain development takes place within us, rather as tree which grows with the passing seasons. The scenery is not identical with ourselves; it represents a task which we must solve.

I face the future with confidence and interest, whatever it may be. For whatever life brings us, be it good or evil – it remains as the life that we love.

Apart from the desire to achieve a perspective for myself, I had another motive for writing this book, another end in view. I wanted people at last to see me as I really am. For years my image has been so traduced in so many periodicals that I wished her to try and present myself truthfully.

I regard myself neither as a tragic figure, ‘the Princess with the sad eyes,’ as I have often been called, nor yet as a pleasure hungry globe trotter. I am, quite simply, a young woman who would like to have the right granted to all other young women of living her private life as a normal human being among other human beings.

Inherent in this is my desire to find an occupation, or at least some form of work for the future. That was why I attempted in 1961 to collaborate with the English motor car manufacturer York Noble. My desire for sensible activity of some sort or the other is all the stronger because, during my period as Empress, it was my habit to work regular hour’s everyday.

I realized long ago that a high position is not the prerequisite to the fulfillment of one’s duties as a human being. No matter where fate my place us, we can always give our best. In the old days I was proud of the important social work I did. Today I am glad when I can make a modest contribution to another person’s happiness. I believe that it is always due to weakness in himself when somebody believes he is unhappy. He does not realize that every life, even the most difficult, is filled with possibilities.

This is at least one weakness to which I need not plead guilty. I have rediscovered all the little joys of life, and there are so many of them: a walk, a bowl of flowers, the wind on the waves, a conversation with good friends. I enjoy traveling through unknown countries. I am fond of sport because It requires both concentration and skill, and like reading serious books as well as detective stories. Actually everything is of interest. Indeed I would say that one is only really alive when one is open to all impression and is prepared to laugh too.

I only desire the understanding of the outside world for my wish to enjoy my life in this way. Must one be at all times in deadly earnest in order to count as a serious person? To my mind, both earnestness and gaiety should balance each other out in equal measure.

I find the world beautiful once again, thank God, and every human being should be free to enjoy it.

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘A learned ‘place’ where books, ancient scrolls, and all types of

artifacts and texts, come together in a vast bastion of learning,

to offset a vast sea of ignorance, to invite growth in the esoteric mind!’

The Esoteric Wordsmyth For Enriching The Esoteric Vocabulary!

2012-06-23T12:45:00.001-07:00

ESOTERIC WORDSMYTH

Mullion

A mullion is a vertical element that forms a division between units of a window, door, or screen, or is used decoratively. When dividing adjacent window units, its primary purpose is to provide structural support to an arch or lintel above the window opening. Its secondary purpose may be as a rigid support to the glazing of the window. When used to support glazing, they are teamed with horizontal supporting elements called "transoms".

In the commercial door industry, the term is also applied to a piece of hardware that divides the opening of a pair of doors.

Stone mullions were used in Armenian, Saxon and Islamic architecture prior to the 10th century. They became common across Europe in the Romanesque architecture, with paired windows divided by a mullion, set beneath a single arch becoming a fashionable architectural form. The same structural form was used for open arcades as well as windows, and is found in galleries and cloisters.

In Gothic architecture windows became larger and arrangements of multiple mullions and openings were used, both for structure and ornament. This is particularly the case in Gothic churches where stained glass is set in lead and ferramenta between the stone mullions. Mullioned windows of a simpler form continued to be used into the Renaissance and various Revival styles.

Late gothic mullioned window at Sutton Place, Surrey, c. 1525, illustration by Joseph Nash, c.1840

Mullions may be made of any material, but wood and aluminum are most common, although glass is also used between windows. I.M. Pei, in his design of JFK Airport's Terminal 6 (National Airlines Sundrome) used all-glass mullions, unprecedented at the time.

Mullions are vertical elements and are often confused with transoms, which lie horizontally. The word is also confused with the "muntin" (or "glazing bar" in the UK) which is the precise word for the very small strips of wood or metal that divide a sash into smaller glass "panes" or "lights".

A mullion acts as a structural member, and it carries the dead load of the weight above the opening and the wind load acting on the window unit back to the building structure. The term is also properly applied to very large and deep structural members in many curtain wall systems.

When a very large glazed area was desired before the middle of the nineteenth century, such as in the large windows seen in Gothic churches or Elizabethan palaces, the openings necessarily required division into a framework of mullions and transoms, often of stone. It was further necessary for each glazed panel, sash or casement to be further subdivided by muntins or lead cames because large panes of glass were reserved primarily for use as mirrors, being far too costly to use for glazing windows or doors.

In traditional designs today, mullions and transoms are normally used in combination with divided-light windows and doors when glazing porches or other large areas.

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘Whoever said History was boring,

was certainly not of the esoteric ilk!

A Traveling Artistic Exhibition On Two Feet! ‘I Want To Be A Living Work Of Art’

2012-06-22T10:21:00.003-07:00

The American Review Of Reviews

1915

This illustration is a portrait of the well-known Marchesa Luisa Casati-Stampa, portrayed in Persian costume. The striking personality of the sitter, the gorgeousness of her attire, and the sumptuous richness of the accessories give the artist admirable opportunity for the exercise of his peculiar gifts! Of this the critic speaks as follows:

‘He has so well succeeded in unifying the effectively expressive and the elegantly decorative in a recent portrait of the Marchesa Luisa Casati-Stampa, dressed in a rich Persian costume, that is worthy of the honor of being placed beside the other glorious images which have been made on canvas, on paper or in wax by Boldini and Bakst, Martini and Troubetzkoy, of the alert, and supple figure, the refined aristocratic grace, of this intellectual Lombard gentlewoman.’

Vissi d’Arte, Vissi d’Amore

Though my list of Esoteric favorites is indeed beyond an incalculable limit, I must be honest and declare that by far the one ranking at the top of my Esoteric Pantheon has always been the Marchesa Luisa Casati-Stampa! Without doubt, this glamorous vision was beyond unique, they simply don’t make her kind anymore, in fact, I believe most sincerely she was a ‘one off’: richer than Croesus, gloriously semi-sane, with outrageous taste in friends, art, décor, clothes, houses, pets and lovers. A fine balance of éclat and eccentricity! The Marchesa was the most flamboyant and dramatic character to flit through the early 20th century European beau monde, or any century I would wager. Those who worshipped at her shrine of ‘decadence’ were a veritable who’s who of the aristos, aesthetes, artists, bons vivants, poets, dancers and dandies that made the early 20th century’s art scene what it was: ‘totally, utterly, and delightfully mad!’ Within the last decade there has been a dramatic resurgence with interest in this incredible Esoteric, an interest that will no doubt increase amongst the Esoteric set!

‘Casati’s total self-possession ensures no one could mistake her costume for anything as banal as a sight gag. But it’s not just an arresting image, it’s also a visual metaphor for the Marchesa herself. The water trickles through the fountain but there is no trickle-down effect. The lifeblood is self-contained, not there for our thirst but for our wonder, and once the droplets have danced in the light they flow back into the source. The rest of us can but be hypnotized by the whirl.’

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘A learned ‘place’ where books, ancient scrolls, and all types of

artifacts and texts, come together in a vast bastion of learning,

to offset a vast sea of ignorance, to invite growth in the esoteric mind!’

The Esoteric Wordsmyth For Enriching The Esoteric Vocabulary!

2012-06-22T10:21:00.001-07:00

ESOTERIC WORDSMYTH

Prince du Sang

A ‘Prince du Sang’ or a ‘Prince of the Blood’ was a person who was legitimately descended in the male line from the monarch in France; the rank of Prince du Sang was the highest held at court after the immediate family of the King during the Ancien régime and the Bourbon Restoration. A Prince du Sang or a Princesse du Sang had to be a legitimate member of the reigning dynasty which after 1589, was the House of Bourbon. In the Kingdom of France, this appellation was a specific rank in its own right, of a more restricted use than other titles.

Louis Antoine Henri de Bourbon, Duc d'Enghien

2.VIII.1772 – 21.III.1804

The rank of Prince du Sang was restricted to legitimate agnatic descendants. Those who held this rank were usually styled by their main Ducal peerage, but sometimes other titles were used, indicating a more precise status than Prince du Sang.

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘A learned ‘place’ where books, ancient scrolls, and all types of

artifacts and texts, come together in a vast bastion of learning,

to offset a vast sea of ignorance, to invite growth in the esoteric mind!’

'Early Mae;' Before The Mdivani! The Truth About Mrs. Robert Leonard!

2012-06-21T11:48:00.003-07:00

THE TRUTH ABOUT MAE MURRAY

A Few Explosions Of Several Theories

By Delight Evans

Photoplay Magazine

To begin with, everything, or nearly everything that has ever been written about her is wrong.

They have said she is Irish. She isn’t.

They have said she cultivates persistently the mental attitude of a boarding school child who only went to a theater once or twice – and then to see Julia Marlowe and E. H. Sothern in their Shakespearean repertoire.

They say she has a perpetually innocent and injured expression with which she seems to say: ‘Where do babies come from?’

They’re all wrong.

Mae Murray was really born Mae-somebody-else. She reminds me of the child of Continental parents who, at the rather immature age of ten, has seen all the best pictures – in the galleries – heard all the finest music, met all the best people. She has Latin rather than Celtic blood in her veins. When Lasky wanted to star her, he picked parts for her to go with the invented biography which made her a Murray. The original idea was, I believe, to exhibit her bee-stung lip and her shining hair and her Follies figure to the world in a series of Irish plays, like ‘Sweet Kitty Bellairs.’

When Mae Murray started out to make a name for herself, she was undoubtedly a very young girl with only one object and ambition; definite, material success. She says herself she supposes she was ‘just a fluff.’ She prospered. Any girl with bee-stung lip and a retrousse nose and trusting eyes – not to mention two perfectly grand hosiery advertisements – was bound to prosper. She started when she was fifteen. Before she was twenty she had won fame in the national institution of beauty, the Follies, in the popular midnight performances of Manhattan, on the roofs, and had become known as ‘The Nell Brinkley Girl.’ And that wasn’t all. She had wit enough and initiative enough to use the dancing craze for all it was worth. She was the naïve proprietress of a Manhattan restaurant which coined money.

Altogether her characterization in ‘On With The Dance,’ – Sonia could not have been easy for her to do, -having seen so much of material Manhattan, and its dance palaces, and its Pekingese – both dogs and humans – she must have had to exercise her perspective and her sense of humor strenuously before she could give such a degree of reality to that little dancer. She settled, I believe, in this Fitzmaurice production, all those arguments about whether Mae Murray could act. The advertisements were misleading; it was Mae’s acting and not Mae’s dancing or Mae’s costumes that you most appreciate.

See her in the studio. She reminds one of nothing more or less than a particularly apt child, with a penchant for learning and an age old understanding. She always has a sort of listening expression; her eyes droop and she purses her mouth in an earnest, and gratifying attention. That pout is natural, not affected.

See at her home. She is the puppet princess, the marionette mistress of this pastel apartment of hers. She has wide lounges that you sink into, and silk and lace imitations of umbrella trees with cushions beneath, and soft pastel rugs and hangings. You can tell, by glancing from Miss Murray to her apartment furnishings, just what came with the apartment and what she put into it. A wolfhound named Reno is a good dog and a gentle dog – the only wolfhound whose acquaintance I ever cared to cultivate.

Some woman once said she loved to see Mae Murray walk. This woman probably thinks Mae was born with a walk like that. This woman doesn’t know that Mae practices walking and practices dancing every day of her life. She has a consuming energy that seldom lets her rest a minute. If she’s not dancing she’s reading; and she loves to entertain.

She has a wholesome awe of great people – particularly authors. She said she’d always been afraid of them until she went to a party which was attended by several very distinguished literary gentlemen. She found them good fun and wanted to see them again. They all wanted to dance with her.

She is married, you know. I don’t just say married; her husband occupies a large place in her scheme of things. Since Robert Leonard first directed her at Universal, she has included him in her artistic as well as personal plans. And it has always been her wish to continue this partnership of theirs in business as well as in domesticity.

Her costumes are all very carefully planned. She believes that instead of focusing the audience’s attention on one particular costume, an actress should rather see that her costume is so much in character and keeping with her personality that the audience barely notices it. It should harmonize, never astound.

Mae Murray has found her métier. She doesn’t belong in any dramatic chorus. She will be distinctly original or she will not be anything at all. She is not a New York butterfly, flying from couturier to tea and from tea to dinner dance. You see, her profession is dancing and while she still loves to dance – in a restaurant or at a private party – and steps out for this express purpose several times a week, the illusion is gone, while perhaps the best part of the glamour remains. She is rather a reincarnation of one of those French ladies who used their charms to direct the destinies of nations, having all the time a very definite purpose behind their frivolity.

Mae Murray, in the future, will select her own plays. She is tired, she says of playing the eternal ingénue, and will be quite obdurate in her demands for intelligent parts calling for characterization. Stage plays will be studied and good books read, for she has promised her public she will give them only the best, now that she is her own boss, and she intends to make good.

The nicest thing I know about her I promised not to tell. But since the personality of any person even a celebrity, may best be described by actions, not ideas, I am going to break my promise.

Mae Murray is not a reformer. She is too busy to bother about her neighbor’s morals or her fellow man’s business. But not long ago something happened to make her change her serene philosophy and reflect rather more seriously on life and what it’s all about.

She went down to the East Side of New York City for first hand instructions as to the Russian dance she had to perform in ‘On With The Dance.’ She went to a settlement. She stayed, talked to children, and became genuinely interested in them. She went back again and danced for them. And gradually she got to know their families – the mother of one of them gave her a shawl to use in her picture – and she met their grown-sisters, girls in their late teens and twenties, who worked in the factories and sweat-shops – girls who had so little pleasure that their lives were merely a series of early-to-bed and early-to-rise and work like – everything. Mae got busy.

With the aid of Frances Marion and her chaplain husband, she planned a club for these girls. She invited them all to her house and saw that they had a good time. She does all she can to make their lives a little less barren – and if you suggest to her that she is doing a charitable thing she will turn blazing eyes to you and say indignantly:

‘It isn’t charity – I like them.’

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘Whoever said History was boring,

was certainly not of the Esoteric ilk!

The Esoteric Wordsmyth For Enriching The Esoteric Vocabulary!

2012-06-21T11:48:00.001-07:00

ESOTERIC WORDSMYTH

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are characters in William Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. They are courtiers who are set by the king to spy on Hamlet, using their claimed friendship with him to gain his confidence. The characters were revived in W. S. Gilbert's satire Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and as the alienated heroes of Tom Stoppard's absurdist play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Rosencrantz ("rosary") and Gyldenstjerne/Gyllenstierna ("golden star") were names of Danish (and Swedish) noble families of the 16th century; records of the Danish royal coronation of 1596 show that one tenth of the aristocrats participating bore one or the other name. James Voelkel suggests that the characters were named after Frederick Rosenkrantz and Knud Gyldenstierne (cousins of Tycho Brahe), who had visited England in 1592.

The majority of characters in Hamlet have unlocalized classical names, in contrast to the "particularly Danish" ones of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The names were common in the court of Frederick II and Christian IV, and also at the University of Wittenberg, an institution where Hamlet is mentioned as having studied (he refers to them as "my two schoolfellows").

In Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern first appear in Act II, Scene 2, where they attempt to place themselves in the confidence of Prince Hamlet, their childhood friend. The smooth and courtly language they employ immediately establishes them as sycophants. In reality, however, they serve as spies for the corrupt King Claudius, Hamlet's uncle, who usurped the throne and constantly attempts to check his nephew. Hamlet welcomes them as "excellent good friends", but, seeing through their guise, comments that they won't "deal justly" with him about their mission. Realising that he lacks allies except for Horatio, Hamlet gives a well-known speech on depression to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

In Act III, Hamlet drops the pretense of friendship, coldly dismissing the two in Scene 2 by his only use of the royal "we" in the play. To his mother, he comments in Scene 4 that "I will trust [them] as I will adders fang’d".

When Hamlet kills Polonius, Claudius recruits Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to escort Hamlet to England, providing them with a letter for the King of England instructing him to have Hamlet killed. (They are apparently unaware of what is in the letter, though Shakespeare never explicitly tells us so.) Along the journey, the distrustful Hamlet finds and rewrites the letter, instructing the executioner to kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern instead. When their ship is attacked by pirates, Hamlet returns to Denmark, leaving Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to die; he comments in Act V, Scene 2 that "They are not near my conscience; their defeat / Does by their own insinuation grow". Ambassadors returning later report that "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead."

As agents of the corruption infecting the court, the two toadies contribute to setting up the confrontation between Hamlet and Claudius. Shakespeare expects the audience to appreciate the poetic justice of their deaths: while they are very likely ignorant of the deadly contents of the letter they carry to England, and are to that extent innocent victims of Hamlet's retaliation; they are seen as having received their just deserts for their participation in Claudius's intrigues.The courtiers always appear as a pair, except in editions following the First Folio text, where Guildenstern enters four lines after Rosencrantz in Act IV, Scene 3.

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘A learned ‘place’ where books, ancient scrolls, and all types of

artifacts and texts, come together in a vast bastion of learning,

to offset a vast sea of ignorance, to invite growth in the esoteric mind!’

'A Right Royal Close Martial Shave!' A Love Match Predicted To End In Shambles!

2012-06-20T21:38:00.003-07:00

ROYAL ROMANCE

ENDS UNHAPPILY

Couple Considered Happiest

Among European Royalty Seek Divorce

ANNOUNCEMENT A SURPRISE

Grand Duke Cyril Braves Czar’s Displeasure

To Wed True Love – Unhappiness Results

The Telegraph-Herald

July 27, 1907

Berlin, July 27. – The announcement that a divorce is contemplated between the Grand Duke Cyril, eldest son of the Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia, and his wife, who was divorced from the Grand Duke of Hesse six years ago, has come as a distinct shock to their many friends. The coupled have been married about two years and have one daughter. They have frequently been mentioned as among the happiest Royal couples of Europe.

Their marriage, in October, 1905, was the culmination of a love romance of many years’ duration. The Grand Duchess Victoria Melita is the daughter of the late Duke of Edinburgh, brother of King Edward. Cyril and Melita were boy and girl lovers when both of them were in their teens. There were political objections to their marriage, and Melita was compelled to become the wife of her cousin, the Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse. The marriage turned out to be extremely unhappy and ended in divorce.

As soon as the divorce had been announced, Grand Duke Cyril, who had carefully avoided the Hessian Court after Melita’s marriage, immediately appeared at her maiden home in Coburg and renewed his ardent declarations of love. Melita hesitated to marry again because this step would have made it impossible for her, under the terms of her divorce, ever to see her only child, the little Princess Elizabeth, to whom she was passionately attached. Princess Elizabeth, however, who lived with her father, was poisoned while visiting the Emperor and Empress of Russia. Her tragic death removed Melita’s scruples regarding remarriage, and she consented to become Cyril’s wife.

But there were other obstacles, among them the prohibition of the Czar. Cyril and Melita are first cousins and the marriage of relatives of this degree is prohibited by the Russian State Church. When the marriage of the couple was announced the Grand Duke Cyril was immediately summoned to Peterhof to receive the full weight of the Czar’s displeasure. He was deprived of his rank as aide-de-camp to the Emperor, of his commission in the army, of his uniform, his orders, and other honors, and was excluded from Russia.

But Cyril and Melita were indifferent to the Czar’s displeasure. Far from being hurt they rejoiced in being able to live a free, untrammeled life according to their own desires. It seemed to their friends that they had reached the end of their troubles and vicissitudes, and that, like hero and heroine in some fairy tale, the would live happily ever afterwards. Hence the general surprise occasioned this week by the announcement that a divorce is contemplated. And it is learned, moreover, that their differences began almost immediately after the wedding.

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘A learned ‘place’ where books, ancient scrolls, and all types of

artifacts and texts, come together in a vast bastion of learning,

to offset a vast sea of ignorance, to invite growth in the esoteric mind!’

The Esoteric Wordsmyth For Enriching The Esoteric Vocabulary!

2012-06-20T21:38:00.001-07:00

ESOTERIC WORDSMYTH

Sublime

(Philosophy)

In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublīmis) is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation.

The first known study of the sublime is ascribed to Longinus: Peri Hupsous/Hypsous or On the Sublime. This is thought to have been written in the 1st century AD though its origin and authorship are uncertain. For Longinus, the sublime is an adjective that describes great, elevated, or lofty thought or language, particularly in the context of rhetoric. As such, the sublime inspires awe and veneration, with greater persuasive powers. Longinus' treatise is also notable for referencing not just Greek writers such as Homer but also biblical sources such as Genesis.

This treatise was rediscovered in the 16th century, and its subsequent impact on aesthetics is usually attributed to its translation into French by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux in 1674. Later the treatise was translated into English by John Pultney in 1680, Leonard Welsted in 1712, and William Smith in 1739 whose translation had its fifth edition in 1800.

The development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality in nature distinct from beauty was first brought into prominence in the 18th century in the writings of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, and John Dennis, in expressing an appreciation of the fearful and irregular forms of external nature, and Joseph Addison's synthesis of concepts of the sublime in his The Spectator, and later the Pleasures of the Imagination. All three Englishmen had, within the span of several years, made the journey across the Alps and commented in their writings of the horrors and harmony of the experience, expressing a contrast of aesthetic qualities.

John Dennis was the first to publish his comments in a journal letter published as Miscellanies in 1693, giving an account of crossing the Alps where, contrary to his prior feelings for the beauty of nature as a "delight that is consistent with reason", the experience of the journey was at once a pleasure to the eye as music is to the ear, but "mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair". Shaftesbury had made the journey two years prior to Dennis but did not publish his comments until 1709 in the Moralists. His comments on the experience also reflected pleasure and repulsion, citing a "wasted mountain" that showed itself to the world as a "noble ruin" (Part III, Sec. 1, 390–91), but his concept of the sublime in relation to beauty was one of degree rather than the sharp contradistinction that Dennis developed into a new form of literary criticism. Shaftesbury's writings reflect more of a regard for the awe of the infinity of space ("Space astonishes" referring to the Alps), where the sublime was not an aesthetic quality in opposition to beauty, but a quality of a grander and higher importance than beauty. In referring to the Earth as a "Mansion-Globe" and "Man-Container" Shaftsbury writes "How narrow then must it appear compar'd with the capacious System of its own Sun...tho animated with a sublime Celestial Spirit...." (Part III, sec. 1, 373).

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3^rd Earl of Shaftesbury with his brother Maurice, in a 1702 painting by John Closterman designed to illustrate his Neo-Platonist beliefs.

Joseph Addison embarked on the Grand Tour in 1699 and commented in Remarks on Several Parts of Italy etc. that "The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror". The significance of Addison's concept of the sublime is that the three pleasures of the imagination that he identified; greatness, uncommonness, and beauty, "arise from visible objects" (that is, from sight rather than from rhetoric). It is also notable that in writing on the "Sublime in external Nature", he does not use the term "sublime", but uses terms that would be considered as absolutive superlatives, e.g. "unbounded", "unlimited", as well as "spacious", "greatness", and on occasion terms denoting excess.

Addison's notion of greatness was integral to the concept of the sublime. An art object could be beautiful but it could not rise to greatness. His work Pleasures of the Imagination, as well as Mark Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination (1744), and Edward Young's poem Night Thoughts (1745), are generally considered the starting points for Burke's analysis.

Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime was developed in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). Burke was the first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. The dichotomy is not as simple as Dennis' opposition, but antithetical to the same degree as light and darkness. Beauty may be accentuated by light, but either intense light or darkness (the absence of light) is sublime to the degree that it can obliterate the sight of an object. The imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror by what is "dark, uncertain, and confused." While the relationship of the sublime and the beautiful is one of mutual exclusiveness, either one can produce pleasure. The sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a fiction.

Burke's concept of the sublime was an antithetical contrast to the classical notion of the aesthetic quality of beauty as the pleasurable experience described by Plato in several of his dialogues (Philebus, Ion, Hippias Major, and Symposium) and suggested ugliness as an aesthetic quality in its capacity to instill feelings of intense emotion, ultimately creating a pleasurable experience. Prior to Burke, the classical notion of the ugly, most notably related in the writings of Augustine of Hippo, had conceived it as lacking form and therefore as non-existent. Beauty was, for St. Augustine, the consequence of the benevolence and goodness of God's creation, and as a category had no opposite. The ugly, lacking any attributive value, was a formlessness in its absence of beauty. For Aristotle the function of art forms was to create pleasure, and had first pondered the problem of an object of art representing the ugly as producing "pain." Aristotle's detailed analysis of this problem involves his study of tragic literature and its paradoxical nature to be shocking as well as having poetic value.

Burke's treatise is also notable for focusing on the physiological effects on the sublime, in particular the dual emotional quality of fear and attraction noted by other writers. Burke described the sensation attributed to the sublime as a "negative pain" which he called delight, and which is distinct from positive pleasure. Delight is taken to result from the removal of pain (caused by confronting the sublime object) and is supposedly more intense than positive pleasure. Though Burke's explanations for the physiological effects of the sublime experience (such as tension resulting from eye strain) were not taken seriously by later writers, his empiricist method of reporting from his own psychological experience was more influential, especially in contrast to Kant's analysis. Burke is also distinguished from Kant in his emphasis on the subject's realization of his physical limitations rather than any supposed sense of moral or spiritual transcendence.

Kant, in 1764, made an attempt to record his thoughts on the observing subject's mental state in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. He held that the sublime was of three kinds: the noble, the splendid, and the terrifying.

In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant officially says that there are two forms of the sublime, the mathematical and the dynamical, although some commentators hold that there is a third form, the moral sublime, a layover from the earlier "noble" sublime. Kant claims, "We call that sublime which is absolutely great"(§ 25). He distinguishes between the "remarkable differences" of the Beautiful and the Sublime, noting that beauty "is connected with the form of the object", having "boundaries", while the sublime "is to be found in a formless object", represented by a "boundlessness" (§ 23). Kant evidently divides the sublime into the mathematical and the dynamical, where in the mathematical "aesthetical comprehension" is not a consciousness of a mere greater unit, but the notion of absolute greatness not inhibited with ideas of limitations (§ 27). The dynamically sublime is "nature considered in an aesthetic judgment as might that has no dominion over us", and an object can create a fearfulness "without being afraid of it" (§ 28). He considers both the beautiful and the sublime as "indefinite" concepts, but where beauty relates to the "Understanding", sublime is a concept belonging to "Reason", and "shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of Sense" (§ 25). For Kant, one's inability to grasp the enormity of a sublime event such as an earthquake demonstrates inadequacy of one's sensibility and imagination. Simultaneously, one's ability to subsequently identify such an event as singular and whole indicates the superiority of one's cognitive, supersensible powers. Ultimately, it is this "supersensible substrate," underlying both nature and thought, on which true sublimity is located.

In order to clarify the concept of the feeling of the sublime, Schopenhauer listed examples of its transition from the beautiful to the most sublime. This can be found in the first volume of his The World as Will and Representation, § 39.

For him, the feeling of the beautiful is pleasure in simply seeing a benign object. The feeling of the sublime, however, is pleasure in seeing an overpowering or vast malignant object of great magnitude, one that could destroy the observer.

Feeling of Beauty – Light is reflected off a flower. (Pleasure from a mere perception of an object that cannot hurt observer).

Weakest Feeling of Sublime – Light reflected off stones. (Pleasure from beholding objects that pose no threat, yet themselves are devoid of life).

Weaker Feeling of Sublime – Endless desert with no movement. (Pleasure from seeing objects that could not sustain the life of the observer).

Sublime – Turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from perceiving objects that threaten to hurt or destroy observer).

Full Feeling of Sublime – Overpowering turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from beholding very violent, destructive objects).

Fullest Feeling of Sublime – Immensity of Universe's extent or duration. (Pleasure from knowledge of observer's nothingness and oneness with Nature).

Hegel considered the sublime to be a marker of cultural difference and a characteristic feature of oriental art. His teleological view of history meant that he considered "oriental" cultures as less developed, more autocratic in terms of their political structures and more fearful of divine law. According to his reasoning, this meant that oriental artists were more inclined towards the aesthetic and the sublime: they could engage god only through "sublated" means. He believed that the excess of intricate detail that is characteristic of Chinese art, or the dazzling metrical patterns characteristic of Islamic art, were typical examples of the sublime and argued that the disembodiment and formlessness of these art forms inspired the viewer with an overwhelming aesthetic sense of awe.

Victor Hugo touched on aspects of the sublime in both nature and man in many of his poems (Poems of Victor Hugo). In his preface to the play, Cromwell, he defined the sublime as a combination of the grotesque and beautiful as opposed to the classical ideal of perfection. He also dealt with how authors and artists could create the sublime through art. Both the Hunchback and Notre Dame Cathedral can be considered embodiments of the sublime as can many elements of Les Misérables.

The last decades of the 19th century saw the rise of Kunstwissenschaft, or the "science of art", which was a movement to discern laws of aesthetic appreciation and arrive at a scientific approach to aesthetic experience.

At the beginning of the 20th century Neo-Kantian German philosopher and theorist of aesthetics Max Dessoir founded the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, which he edited for many years, and published the work Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft in which he formulated five primary aesthetic forms: the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic, the ugly, and the comic.

The experience of the sublime involves a self-forgetfulness where personal fear is replaced by a sense of well-being and security when confronted with an object exhibiting superior might, and is similar to the experience of the tragic. The "tragic consciousness" is the capacity to gain an exalted state of consciousness from the realization of the unavoidable suffering destined for all men and that there are oppositions in life that can never be resolved, most notably that of the "forgiving generosity of deity" subsumed to "inexorable fate".

Thomas Weiskel re-examined Kant's aesthetics and the Romantic conception of the sublime through the prism of semiotic theory and psychoanalysis. He argued that Kant's 'mathematical' sublime' could be seen in semiotic terms as the presence of an excess of signifiers, a monotonous infinity threatens to dissolve all oppositions and distinctions. The 'dynamic sublime', on the other hand, was an excess of signifieds: meaning was always overdetermined.

According to Jean-François Lyotard, the sublime, as a theme in aesthetics, was the founding move of the Modernist period. Lyotard argued that the modernists attempted to replace the beautiful with the release of the perceiver from the constraints of the human condition. For him, the sublime's significance is in the way it points to an aporia in human reason; it expresses the edge of our conceptual powers and reveals the multiplicity and instability of the postmodern world.

According to Mario Costa, the concept of the sublime should be examined first of all in relation to the epochal novelty of the digital technologies, and the technological artistic production: new media art, computer-based generative art, networking, telecommunication art. For him, the new technologies are creating conditions for a new kind of sublime: the technological sublime. The traditional categories of aesthetics (beauty, meaning, expression, feeling) are being replaced by the notion of the sublime, which after being natural in the XVIII century, and metropolitan-industrial in the modern era, has now become technological.

There has also been some resurgence of interest in the sublime in analytic philosophy in the last 15 years, with occasional articles in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and The British Journal of Aesthetics, as well as monographs by writers such as Malcolm Budd, James Kirwan and Kirk Pillow. As in the postmodern or critical theory tradition, analytic philosophical studies often begin with accounts of Kant or other philosophers of the 18th or early 19th centuries.

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘A learned ‘place’ where books, ancient scrolls, and all types of

artifacts and texts, come together in a vast bastion of learning,

to offset a vast sea of ignorance, to invite growth in the esoteric mind!’

'Between You & I' The Countess Shares Her Aristocratic Views!

2012-06-19T07:15:00.003-07:00

ADY MAYBURY (is pacing up and down the terrace of a country house with a very dear friend): - ‘Oh, do not contemplate it. If you ask me, I say, do not do that, whatever you do. Do not put the Channel between your daughter and yourself. If a girl is visiting in

England

– anywhere – you have control of her, don’t you know. The sea does not roll between us. It is so important. I have had such bitter experience, and that is why I urge it so strongly.’

‘My second daughter, Jane, insisted on going to stay with the St. Evremondes at their château near Bayonne, one September. Anastasie St. Evremonde had been with the Duchess at Birmingham House, and she and Jane plotted it all out during Ascot week. You know what girls are. The St. Evremondes, don’t you know, and the La Tour de Thorencs – one knew all about them, both the Marquis and the Duke – cousins, of course, of the Vieille-Roches, of Roche-Noire. But all the men of those families are – well, they are Frenchmen. Anastasie has represented that the men would be at the Manoeuvres, and so forth, and that none of them ever came to Bayonne; the mother had written to me, but I objected at once. Not to be dreamed of, I said. . . .Well, I submitted; but I did not like it. I sent Parkinson with her – she has been with us quite a number of years. She traveled to Paris with the Rossdales, who would drive her across to the Gare d’Orléans and put her in the train. But, as I told Harriett, my eldest girl, you know, I had a premonition of evil. . . .’

‘She would not return. When she wrote – and it was only a line or two – ignored what one had said with real emphasis. Anastasie seemed to have dropped into the background. It was all Lucie now – one that I had not heard of, and who was not at Birmingham House. Lucie rode with her; Lucie and she were going out on bicycles before the déjeuner and by moonlight after dinner; Lucie had given her a quantity of books to read, opening up food for reflection, and so forth. It was quite evident to me that Lucie had obtained an influence, don’t you know. My dear old housekeeper, who was at Pendleton when Maybury brought me home, and who I like, don’t you know, as well as trust, told me, from Parkinson’s letters home, what Jane never troubled to say, that it was truly a magnificent pile, carried on in quite the grand old style – chasseurs, postillons, and all that sort of thing, which has forever fled from England – and a chapel where Mass was said everyday by their own priest. Then, in a moment, it flashed upon me – the danger of the whole thing.’

‘Maybury, I said, they will make Jane go over to Rome and be a nun. You know the women of those families are all devotes – as a protest against the behaviour of the men. This Lucie will use her influence and work upon her mind and compel her to take the veil. You know what girls are, at her age – ready to take up anything which appeals to their imagination. She should never have been permitted to go. Maybury wrote that night, giving her one clear week before he arrived at Bayonne to fetch her. Her father, I must say, when once roused, don’t you know, is a tower of strength. She stayed one night at the Bristol with the Rossdales, and brought back three lead-lined cases of Paris frocks within the week. Would you believe it? The cases alone – only good for firewood, as Murchison said, which we do not burn in Hill Street and is a positive drug at Pendleton naturally – cost four hundred francs. Simply extortion; and yet, don’t you know, honestly, a relief, because I felt we had been in time. Had she really desired to be a nun, she would not have done such a thing.’

‘In the name of reason, her father said next day, what had happened to Jane? I do not recognize her! The words fell like a bombshell, because it was exactly what had been in all our thoughts. I do think girls at a certain age are like wax – impressionable beyond belief. Her laugh was changed; she shrugged her shoulders incessantly; had queer little gestures with her hands; and persisted in saying, Ça marchera, a catch word, don’t you know – at the end of her remarks, sat down to the piano to play a gavotte, she snapped her fingers in a most surprising manner like a castanet accompaniment. I implored her to cease, and Lord Sowerby came in and sat blinking at her like an owl – he is my cousin, but, as you know, a most trying young man. She went across, sat by him, and made him laugh to tears – he never smiles as a rule – but how I had not the remotest conception. I just caught the phrase, Ça marchera – no more.’

‘I cannot say how I suffered. Really and truly the mental distress nearly made me run down. I had so prided myself on keeping my girls simple, different, don’t you know, from the new style. I am old-fashioned, I frankly admit, but I do think with young people's innocence and unwordliness are like the bloom upon hothouse grapes, and I had sought so hard for them to retain it. My dear mother used to say yaller and korfy, although they had quite gone out in her time, and I seriously considered – I was very thoughtful as a girl – about keeping it up – as a family tradition. It seemed almost cowardly to drop it. After all, noblesse oblige, still has some meaning. To the girls I have always said, Be not the first by whom the new is tried. I do think that is a truly excellent proverb. I insist on the final 'g' (which must return to the language some day), and tell them it will be a comfort to them in their old age. I mean that they will not have the reproach of being old-fashioned like their grandmother; and I set my face against the bicycle until it was universal. As to the handshake, Harriett came to me with tears in her eyes when it first appeared years ago, and said, Mammy dear, do you wish me to make myself conspicuously ridiculous? May I not go with the tide? I remember I sat under the trees opposite Stanhope Gate one hot Sunday – it was the year of the first Jubilee – watching and pondering all day long; and, just as a new moon was rising over Apsley House, I gave in. Be it as you wish, I said to Harriett, but for my sake do not do it extravagantly. But what really unnerved me, don’t you know, was the astounding succès of Jane with a certain set from which I have ever kept aloof. I do not like them, and I have never concealed it. We have never basked in those Smiles – don’t you know – and do not care to be taken up and dropped as Caprice commands. After all, good gracious, why should one? Besides, on too many occasions they have treated the girls with the greatest unfairness – leaving them out when they should have been asked. But now, if you please they could do nothing without Jane. She was bidden to everything. Lady Hyacinth Potter was quite a leader among them – she has completely dropped out since – and insisted. I did not like it – it is so invidious! But I submitted.’

‘In February came Lady Hyacinth’s red cotillion – such nonsense! – and Harriett, with whom I thoroughly sympathized, was wounded to the quick; it is too mean and underhand not to ask me, she said; will you ask her to ask me? Ask her yourself, said Jane. But Harriett would not – not until the very afternoon, when she wrote herself to Hyacinth, saying, very prettily I thought, that if there was no objection she really and truly desired to be present. We had sat down to dinner that night before any reply came, and then it was Harriett’s own note doubled over, with these words scribbled on the back; Yes, you may come if you can bring a man. The man must not be Lord Sowerby. Could anything be more insulting? However unfortunate, he is our cousin. Harriett shed tears of mortification – when my darling boy, Anthony, who had completely outgrown his strength, volunteered to go. The men were to wear red coats, and so forth; but he could use one of Milkington’s hunt coats if he could find one.’

‘Jane’s appearance that night distressed me beyond words. She was in bright red, all over spangled and red lace, with beads falling down from the corsage like the mane of a Russian poodle. Her hair was dragged down over her ears, and her eyes were half closed in a straight line, giving a positively Chinese effect. How had she done it? It was impossible to see, but it was not natural. Underneath her pearls she had swathed her neck with the red lace, and, you know, it somehow gave one a most painful impression of nudity – there is no other word for it. The whole thing brought back to my mind, in a flash, one night in Paris years ago, when we dined with poor Monty Whitefield of the Embassy, and went to the Gymnase, where he pointed out a person in a loge of the name of Passe-partout. Suddenly, when Harriett was in despair at the impossibility of providing Tony with black breeches – he declined to contemplate the footmen’s – Jane snapped her fingers loudly and cried out, He shall have my bicycle kit, Ça marchera!’ My dear child, I said, it is not a masquerade. He cannot go as a girl. What do you mean? She flushed crimson and would not utter. I pressed her, and she wept.’

‘Now it only shows how little one may really know of what is going on under one’s own roof. Jane’s room was a revelation in its altered aspect. There were Indian clubs, with which she had damaged the ceiling; one of those expansive machines in a corner – a new winged looking-glass; the doors of the wardrobes flung wide; her maid busy with a litter beyond belief; cigarette boxes, half-smoked cigarettes, and French novels everywhere. I turned the girl out of the room, and Jane flung herself on the couch, sobbing, face downwards, exactly as she used to do as a child – on the floor, anywhere, when her governess reproved her. Who gave you these books? I cried. Lucie, she said. Who taught you to smoke? Lucie. Of course it could not rest there. I went through the wardrobes, don’t you know, exactly like a raid of the police, and presently came upon what I dreaded – the whole kit, as she termed it. Loose satin breeches, black spun silk stockings with the face of a clock embroidered in white on the ankle, the hands indicating the hour of one; a skin tight jersey with a velvet collar and a preposterous bow at the back of the neck, representing a gigantic moth; and a sort of leather plastron and belt, to wear beneath in lieu of the ordinary arrangements. Can you conceive my feelings? The hat I never saw. Tony rushed in and tore the knickerbockers from my hands. The very thing! he shouted. Jane, without looking up, sobbed out, Good - Ça marchera! Then I locked the door. Who instigated you to this? I cried. Lucie, she said, for the diamond frame. On your honour, I cried, did Lucie also wear them? Of course, she said.’

‘At that moment an enormous photograph on the dressing table caught my eye. It was a man in helmet – French dragoon uniform – moustache brushed up to his eyes. I rushed across. There was an inscription in English – these words – ‘Now, at present, and for always, the good old pal, your little Lucie! I had the truth at last. It was Lucien de St. Evremonde, invalided from the manoeuvres – the eldest son. I demand to see your face, I cried, leaning over her, and shaking her by the shoulder. She was sobbing convulsively. He is the only man in the wide world, she sobbed. Brave as a lion, gentle as a lamb.’

‘Harriett came beating at the door, saying she must go without Jane. She could not consent to spoil all her prospects of a happy evening by delay. I do think young people are a little inconsiderate and selfish on such occasions. I am not going, said Jane.’

‘I had sunk into a chair, envisaging the whole situation, don’t you know. After all, he was the eldest son – if it must be so. But then it was Jane gave me what my boy would call the knock-out blow. He was married already. A cousin, my child sobbed. Not worthy to buckle on his spurs! Miserable ménage! Oh, mammy, mammy! she moaned, I am hard hit, but I shan’t die of it. I’m not a fool. I shall get over it, Ça marchera, quand meme!’

‘Che sarà, sarà, I replied with inexpressible sadness. Have you ever observed that when deeply moved and anyone addresses you in a foreign tongue you reply in another. I remember once in Genoa station, when they were rushing us about to catch a train that should have started hours ago, I talked German to everybody. But I ask you, am I not entirely right when I urge you so strongly not to contemplate it?’

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘The Aristocrat Of Blogs For Minds That Are Not Primitive’

The Esoteric Wordsmyth For Enriching The Esoteric Vocabulary!

2012-06-19T07:15:00.001-07:00

ESOTERIC WORDSMYTH

Chasseur

Chasseur [sha-sur; Fr. sha-sœr] (a French term for "hunter") is the designation given to certain regiments of French light infantry (Chasseurs à pied) or light cavalry (Chasseurs à cheval) troops, trained for rapid action.

This branch of the French Army originated during the War of the Austrian Succession when, in 1743, Jean Chrétien Fischer was authorized by the Marshal de Belle-Isle to raise a company. It was called Fischer's chasseurs.

The Chasseurs à pied were the light infantrymen of the French line. They were armed the same as their counterparts in the regular line (Fusilier) infantry battalions but were trained to excel in marksmanship and in executing manoeuvres at high speed. The other light infantry unit type, the voltigeurs, specialised in skirmishing and advance screening of the main force. The chasseurs could also be called upon to form advance guards and scouting parties alongside the voltigeurs.

The Chasseurs à cheval, a type of French light cavalry date from 1779. For much of their history these regiments were generally not held in as high esteem as their infantry counterparts, or the identically armed (but much more lavishly uniformed) hussars. They were frequently used as advance scouting units providing valuable information on enemy movements. Both Napoleon's Imperial Guard and the Royal Guard of the Restoration each included a regiment of Chasseurs à cheval.

During the French occupation of

Algeria

, regiments of Chasseurs d'Afrique were raised. These were light cavalry recruited originally from French volunteers and subsequently from the French settlers in North Africa doing their military service. As such they were the mounted equivalent of the Zouaves.

The modern French Army comprises bataillons of Chasseurs à pied (mechanized infantry : 16e BC),Chasseurs-Alpins (mountain troops : 7e, 13e, 27e BCA) and regiments of Chasseurs à cheval (1er-2e RCh and 4e RCh : light armored regiments). In addition one regiment of Chasseurs d'Afrique (training unit : 1er RCA) has been re-raised to commemorate this branch of the French cavalry. Since May 1943 there has been a "Régiment de Chasseurs Parachutistes" (1er RCP).

Bataillons de chasseurs are light infantry units created after 1838. Some of these battalions were converted to specialized mountain units as Bataillons de Chasseurs Alpins in 1888, as an answer to the Italian Alpine (Alpini) regiments stationed along the Alpine frontier.

Régiments de chasseurs are units of the "Arme Blindée Cavalerie" : armoured units. The basic organic unit is called regiment and not bataillon to avoid confusing cavalry and infantry chasseurs.

The airborne infantry units called Régiments de chasseurs parachutistes were created in 1943 with airborne troops from the French Airforce (GIA or Groupe d'Infanterie de l'Air), who were transferred into the Army.

Chasseurs Alpins are the elite mountain infantry of the modern French Army. They are trained to operate in mountainous terrain and to undertake urban warfare.

Although the traditions of these different branches of the French Army are very different, there is still a tendency to confuse one with the other. For example when World War I veteran Léon Weil died, the AFP press agency stated that he was a member of the 5th "Regiment de Chasseurs Alpins". It was in fact the 5th Bataillon.

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘A learned ‘place’ where books, ancient scrolls, and all types of

artifacts and texts, come together in a vast bastion of learning,

to offset a vast sea of ignorance, to invite growth in the esoteric mind!’

From The 'Dashboard' Of Nash Rambler: Waxing On With Regard To ‘The Nature Of The Esoteric Beast!’

2012-06-18T08:35:00.003-07:00

REETINGS to you my fellow Esoteric; Nash has returned and in full force to his commitment of providing a fully established Rota of topics for the Esoteric Curiosa, an adventure, designed for the like minded Esoteric.

My respite from continual daily blogging gave me the break I needed and a bit of lessened pressure on the trail of the pursuit of excellence. No end of satisfaction came from my self-imposed break from the daily grind, albeit one I much enjoy.

When one is hyper-focused on the minutiae of quality; it often appears to this Esoteric Editor that the wording of subjects falls short of acceptance, if not the subject altogether. It is human nature perhaps to be over critical with regard to one’s output, especially when under the scrutiny of a worldwide Esoteric audience with high expectations. This is a trait I have partnered with my entire life and it seems the older I get, the more pronounced it becomes! Once I reach the stage of saturation, all signals point to stepping back and surveying the situation.

Historically May always seems to be the stopping point along these lines and this past month served as no exception. However, the break was not complete; as I knew beforehand I could not keep myself fully detached over the self prescribed time away from my Esoteric platform! Old habits do die hard for sure where I am concerned, and posting about 'Important Nothingness' is something that I take very seriously and find it almost impossible from which to achieve a clean break, no matter how temporary!

It is my firm belief that the very nature of the Esoteric is such that their inner will drives them to share whatever ‘golden nugget’ of information that they discover, a sort of intellectual gossip session of educational advancement. For those of us who thrive on knowledge, the garnering, culling and sharing of such arcane subjects becomes in some ways an addiction. For most, it is the catalyst or jumping off point from which all of us leap without fear into the vast unknown of available information that our expanding world offers to us today via the World-Wide-Web! Growing up for me, it was always the footnotes that provided the most scintillating information to feed my aggressive appetite to learn, now we have the luxury of unlimited access within which to refresh our little gray cells for all that we crave!

As I have mentioned ad nauseam in the past, simply the best part of this Esoteric endeavor is that I am sharing and disseminating knowledge to my fellow Esoteric; and in such a way, ideally, they are able to fulfill long hoped for facts and information that has eluded them in the past. Any Esoteric worth their salt has many ‘Eldorado’s’ for which they search, often in vain, until one small piece of information unlocks the path to fulfillment of an even deeper understanding of the facts and in some cases the fiction in relation to their goal! Independent of the civilization in which it lived and by which it was nourished; the past temptingly grows towards our present, a detailed litany of clauses within clauses and parentheses within parentheses ad infinitum! This is, was and in all likelihood will remain the driver that promotes the growth of The Esoteric Curiosa. Essentially, this is ‘The Nature Of The Esoteric Beast!’

From time to time, I like to share with all of you the comments I receive with regard to how The Esoteric Curiosa is received around the world, a few of my favorites are noted below!

All My Esoteric Best,

WORD ON THE ‘NET’ ABOUT THE ESOTERIC CURIOSA

‘Entertainingly Bizarre, Deliciously Archaic, and Insanely Addictive!’-Russell Mead

‘The best way to spend a rainy afternoon!’-Darcy Sinclair

‘Without doubt one of the best blogs on the web, if not THE best! Every post is an opportunity to cast adrift from the realities of today and embark on a sublime journey into times past!’-Conrad Spreckels

"The one place I go for any ‘footnote fodder’ I require! If it is not posted, I can always reach out to Nash for help! In so many ways he is an expert on anything and everything of an esoteric nature or has great insight to where I can find it if he does not possess the answer!’-Astrid Tengholm

‘A real inspiration to all of us fellow bloggers, who are striving to provide a quality experience for our readers at large!’-Anonymous

‘A splendidly named site where the most sublime and inspiring tidbits of information are shared! If Pepys or Proust were alive today, no doubt they would subscribe!’-Ben Massingbred

‘A brilliant and aesthetic presentation of information that you never knew you were interested in until you read about it on The Esoteric Curiosa!’-Rachel Osgood

‘Unutterably fascinating! Whenever I am bored I head straight for The Esoteric Curiosa to improve upon my vast repertoire of useless information, and I mean that in the best of terms!’-Erika Marquandt

‘The Esoteric Curiosa is most definitely the Esoteric Cream of the Crop when it comes to blogs!’-Marc Blevins

‘If we did not possess a Nash, we would have to create him! Otherwise think of what we would miss out on in relation to esoteric falderal!’-Jane Bosquant

TOP TEN POSTINGS FOR ALL TIME

ON THE ESOTERIC CURIOSA AS OF 6/18/2012

(1). Has Pippa Middleton Found Her Own 'Prince,' Jan 25, 2011: 727,870 Pageviews

(2). Noble ‘Kitten’: Lady Kitty Spencer, Dec 18, 2010: 164,765 Pageviews

(3). A ‘Queen’ In A Gilded Cage: Bessie Wallis Warfield, Apr 23, 2010: 137,614 Pageviews

(4). Future ‘People's Princess?,’ Apr 17, 2010: 93,892 Pageviews

(5). Is Waity Katie One Step Closer To Wearing A Tiara?, Nov 2, 2010: 47,457 Pageviews

(6). Then & Now: T/L Andrea Doria, Nov 20, 2009: 33,491 Pageviews

(7). Climbing The Esoteric Book Shelf: The Mystery Of Lewis Carroll, Apr 16, 2010: 32,981 Pageviews

(8). ‘Queen Of The Factory!’ The Wasp Ascendancy Princess, Oct 24, 2010: 29,000 Pageviews

(9). ‘Shaking The Family Tree!’ Derek Nicolas Somerset, Nov 1, 2009: 24,795 Pageviews

(10). Rags To Riches: Natalia Vodianova, Hon. Mrs. Justin Portman, Dec 18, 2009: 19,587 Pageviews

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘A learned ‘place’ where books, ancient scrolls, and all types of

artifacts and texts, come together in a vast bastion of learning,

to offset a vast sea of ignorance, to invite growth in the esoteric mind!’

The Esoteric Wordsmyth For Enriching The Esoteric Vocabulary!

2012-06-18T08:35:00.001-07:00

ESOTERIC WORDSMYTH

Table of Ranks

The Table of Ranks (Russian: Табель о рангах; Tabel' o rangakh) was a formal list of positions and ranks in the military, government, and court of Imperial Russia. It was introduced in 1722, during the reign of Peter the Great, while he engaged in a struggle with the existing hereditary nobility, or boyars. The Table of Ranks was formally abolished by the Bolshevik government on November 11, 1917.

The Table of Ranks recognized three fundamental types of service: military, civil and court, dividing each into 14 ranks (grades). It determined position and status of everybody according to service (sluzhba) rather than according to birth or seniority, as mestnichestvo did. Thus theoretically every nobleman, regardless of birthright, started at the bottom and rose to the highest rank that his native ability, education and service devotion to the state's interests would allow. Everybody had to qualify for the corresponding grade to be promoted; however grades 1 through 5 required the personal approval of the Emperor.

Despite the initial resistance from noblemen, many of whom were still illiterate in 18th century and shunned the paper-pushing life of the civil servant, the eventual effect of the Table of Ranks was to create an educated class of noble bureaucrats.

In 1767 Catherine the Great bought the support of the Bureaucracy by making promotion up the 14 ranks automatic after seven years regardless of position or merit. Thus, the bureaucracy was populated with time servers.

Achieving a certain level in the Table resulted in acquiring that or another grade of nobility. A civil servant promoted to the fourteenth grade was endowed with personal nobility (dvoryanstvo), and holding an office in the eighth grade endowed the office holder with hereditary nobility. Nicholas I raised this to the fifth grade in 1845. In 1856, the grades required for hereditary nobility were raised to the fourth grade for the civil service and to the sixth grade for military service. The father of Vladimir Lenin progressed in the management of people's education up to the rank of Acting Civil (State) Councilor (действительный статский советник) (1874), which gave him the privilege of hereditary nobility.

The origins of the Table lie in Russian military ranks, which were extensively modified by Peter the Great with the addition of many distinct ranks and specialties. The first variant of the Table included definition and placement of as many as 262 civil and military positions. By the end of the 18th century, these were removed in favour of universal grade rank (классный чин). Retinue titles (Russian: Свита Е. И. В.) such as General-Adjutant, Fliegel-Adjutant, etc., were not placed in the Table, as they were personal courtesy titles of the Emperor's aides-de-camp.

With occasional revisions, the Table of Ranks remained in effect until the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The Esoteric Curiosa

‘A learned ‘place’ where books, ancient scrolls, and all types of

artifacts and texts, come together in a vast bastion of learning,

to offset a vast sea of ignorance, to invite growth in the esoteric mind!’