Anne Boleyn

Though I don’t write Tudor fiction, I am fascinated by Anne Boleyn. This anniversary gives me an opportunity to return to Gareth Russell’s gripping recounting of the downfall of the young Queen at Confessions of A Ci-Devant:

- 1st of May: an ominous Mayday

- 2nd of May: the Queen’s arrest

- 3rd of May: jailed at the Tower

- 4th of May: the public reaction to the scandal

- 5th of May: more arrests

- 7th of May: the comfort of faith

- 9th of May: the King wills it

- 12th of May: the trial of the Queen’s “concubines”

- 15th of May: Anne on trial

- 16th of May: final preparations

- 19th of May: the execution.

“Archbishops had knelt before her, foreign rulers had showered her with gifts, evangelicals had celebrated her as God’s Chosen Nymph and for a moment, all too brief, the world had been hers. Then, with a gradient of catastrophe so unparalleled it still has the power to boggle the imagination, she was dragged from her throne and a one thousand-roomed palace, to be left here, kneeling, alone, in the sawdust, waiting for the sword to strike at a neck that had once inspired poetry and glittered with diamonds,” writes Gareth.

A must-read.

Beau Sancy diamond

And sadly gone out of sight too. This week an anonymous bidder paid $9.7 million, several times the pre-auction estimate, for the historic stone, sold by Sotheby’s at its Magnificent Jewels and Noble Jewels auction in Geneva. Which means we will probably never see it again.

A few decades ago, the Louvre purchased its almost namesake, the Sancy. So I was hoping this would happen again. But no… The two diamonds are named after the same adventurer, Nicolas Harlay de Sancy. I did not find any evidence that both diamonds came from the same rough (but would welcome information to that effect.) They were both part of the French crown jewels, albeit at different dates and under different circumstances.

The Beau Sancy was purchased by King Henri IV as a gift for his second wife, Marie de Medicis. The Queen wore it as a finial to her crown during her coronation, as seen in this portrait by Frans Pourbus the Younger. An event that took place one day before the beloved King’s assassination. After Queen Marie’s drawn-out battle for power with her son, Louis XIII, her exile and dire financial difficulties, she sold the exceptional stone, which then passed successively to the Dutch, English and Prussian reigning families.

So indeed I would have loved for it to join its larger brother in the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre, or failing that, to be displayed for all to see in a museum.

Marie de Medicis, by Frans Pourbus the Younger

The Virgin and Child with St Anne, by Leonardo Da Vinci

To celebrate Mother’s Day, a Leonardo, The Virgin and Child, with Saint Anne. So here we have two mothers: the Blessed Virgin, of course, and her own mother, Saint Anne. You may admire the masterpiece at Le Louvre. At Leonardo’s death, the painting (oil on wood) was purchased by his last and most devoted patron, King François I. It then left the royal collections at some point, but was later reacquired by Louis XIII. It has remained part of the French royal, then national collections, ever since.

The composition is triangular, with Saint Ann as the summit. To the left, the Virgin is leaning towards the Child, himself preoccupied by the lamb, symbolizing the passion of Easter. Leonardo, as often, chooses an unusual image: Mary is sitting in her own mother’s lap. What better way to describe the bond of maternal love uniting three generations?

Two further notes: Sigmund Freud devoted an essay to this painting, where he discerned an upside-down vulture, supposedly linked to a childhood memory of Leonardo (not one of Freud’s most convincing theories.) Also a recent restoration triggered a heated controversy.

Demolition of the Bastille, by Hubert Robert

Truth be told, I miss the Bastille. The current column that stands where the old fortress towered above passersby seems very bland by comparison.

What a building the old Bastille must have been! But 18th century Parisians had a grimmer take than I on the fortress. It was used as a weapon and ammunition depot (the immediate cause of its storming on the 14th of July 1789) and its location was strategic: it controlled the entry to the unruly Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where riots could often become violent. In April 1789, shortly before Bastille Day, hundreds of people rampaging in a nearby wallpaper factory to protest a proposed drop in wages had been slaughtered by the Gardes Françaises, the French Guards, the riot police of the time. The memory of this bloodbath was still fresh in the minds of Parisians a few months later.

The Bastille was also a prison, in particular for those jailed under a lettre de cachet, without a court order and sometimes for life. All but the frailest of the inmates had been evacuated a few days before the 14th of July. Thus the Marquis de Sade had been shipped in the middle of the night, in the nude and without his beloved library, to another to another fortress, the Chateau de Vincennes (this one is still standing and a must-see, by the way.)

A few years earlier, all of the accused in the scandal of the Affair of the Necklace, including the Cardinal Prince of Rohan and Jeanne de Valois, the false Countess de Lamotte, had also been the guests of the fortress. So many memories, often tragic ones, were linked to the huge walls…

I will let Gabrielle de Montserrat, the heroine of Mistress of the Revolution, take you along for a tour of the fortress, now a tourist attraction, in the wake of its storming:

The demolition of the Bastille was decreed. I joined the crowds that hurried to visit the fortress while it was still standing. I did not approve of the violence that had followed its fall, but, as almost everyone in Paris, I rejoiced to see the place destroyed. It had been the symbol of the arbitrary detentions of the Old Regime, of the dreaded lettres de cachet. I had not forgotten that I had been threatened with one myself.

I did not regret leaving Aimée at Vaucelles, for the huge round towers reeked of putrefaction. Some contained windowless cells, locked with double doors three inches thick. No air could penetrate there and the straw on the floor, thick with human wastes, had turned to manure. The worst dungeons were located below river level. Prisoners there had lived in a foot deep in water year round. Their torments were increased by the fear of drowning during the floods of the Seine every spring. I saw torture instruments and iron cages, six feet square, one containing a complete human skeleton. After that descent into hell, it felt odd to see the light of day again and to enjoy the warmth of the sum on one’s face.

The Bastille: the nterior

Outside the fortress, all was cheerful. Little temporary cafés, sheltered under striped tents, sprang up in the summer heat. The site had become a fashionable excursion in spite of the dust and noise of the demolition. I bought Aimée a game of dominos made from the old stones of the Bastille, which had been turned into all sorts of mementos.

One final note: Revolution or no Revolution, the Bastille was doomed. Under Louis XVI, an extensive plan of renovation of Paris was underway, as attested by the demolition of the houses built on the bridges of the city. The Bastille was a “gothic” anachronism, incompatible with the King’s idea of a modern metropolis.

Nonetheless, happy Bastille Day to all!

Placede la Bastille today, photograph by Kaihsu Tai

For the King, the trade paperback cover

On July 5, on the day after my birthday! Here is a preview of the trade paperback cover, very similar to that of the hardcover. And a link to the book trailer. More news soon…

Drouais: Madame-du-Barry

Madame du Barry, née Jeanne Bécu, has often been derided or hated, or both, by many of her contemporaries, something that has left its mark on her image to this day. Her lowly origins (she was the natural daughter of a maidservant and an unknown man) did her no favors with the aristocracy.

Yet her father, whoever he was, made sure she received a decent education in a convent. She became a maidservant like her mother, then a shopgirl, before her beauty came to the attention of a nobleman with a shady reputation, Jean-Baptiste du Barry, who made her his mistress en titre. Like many young women of great beauty and little means at the time, Jeanne became a courtesan. One of Jean-Baptiste’s friends, the Maréchal Duc de Richelieu, in turn impressed by her loveliness, had the idea to introduce her to Louis XV.

The King, in his late fifties, was lonesome, saddened by a series of deaths: his wife, Queen Marie Lesczynska, his son and heir, the Dauphin Louis-Ferdinand, his daughter-in-law the Dauphine Marie-Josèphe of Saxony, his grandson, his beloved twin daughters, Babette and Henriette, and his best friend (she had long ceased to be his mistress) the Marquise de Pompadour. Louis XV decided to make young Jeanne his companion. Though now a widower, he apparently never contemplated marrying her, as his predecessor Louis XIV had done with Madame de Maintenon. He nevertheless gave her a luxurious apartment at Versailles and intended her to become an official member of the Court.

That was impossible given the young women’s social origins. So a husband of ancient and unimpeachable nobility had to be found for her. Alas, the obvious candidate, her former lover, Jean-Baptiste du Barry, was already married. No matter, his brother, Guillaume, Comte du Barry, was not, and he promptly wed lovely Jeanne before returning post haste to his Southern provinces, his sizeable and pressing debts paid by the King.

The next step was to find a noblewoman willing to present the bride officially at Court. Louis XV was hard pressed to find a lady prepared to assume that part. But he did, eventually. The Comtesse de Béarn, crushed under a mountain of debt, allowed herself to be persuaded, for ample consideration. Even though, she called in sick a few times before going through, with much reluctance, with the ceremony. A rather comical episode, which I may tell here one of these days.

This portrait was painted at that time. I do not intend a full biography of Jeanne here. Suffice to say that Marie-Antoinette, who arrived at Versailles the following year, loathed the favorite, for complex reasons of politics, personal rivalry, morality and religion. It took the insistence of her mother, Empress Maria Theresa, for the young Dauphine to finally agree to address Jeanne, which she did in a single sentence, a rather insulting one at that. “Il y a bien du monde à Versailles aujourd’hui.” There is quite a crowd at Versailles today. Jeanne had to be content with it.

The rivalry between the two ladies could have gone on for decades, for the King was hale and hearty (and very much enamoured of his favorite.) But the scourge of the times, smallpox, finished him in a matter of days in 1774. Following Louis XV’s death, Jeanne was imprisoned in a convent by order of Louis XVI, the new King, a move that had to do both with personal animosity and political reasons. After two years, she was freed and allowed to return to her estate of Louveciennes, where Madame Vigee-Lebrun would later paint three portraits of her, now middle-aged, on the eve of the French Revolution. She never returned to Versailles.

An apocryphal correspondance of Madame du Barry was published the death of Louis XV, to accredit the notion that she had worked in a brothel (she never did), that she was vulgar (she was not.) In fact, whatever her faults, Madame du Barry was a woman of taste, an active and discerning patroness of the arts.

To go back to the painting, no word yet as to where within Versailles the new acquisition is to be displayed. Madame du Barry’s own upper-floor apartment would seem like an obvious choice, but it is not always open to the public.

And many thanks to The Art Tribune for the news.

Marie-Antoinette's wedding

For details on the marriage certificate, misspellings, ink stains and all, see this post, and also this one on 18th century bridal attire.

Enjoy!

French country house, with cat

This comes from the blog Inspiring Interiors, to which I subscribe, just because it lifts my spirits to find a tour of a beautiful place in my inbox every morning.

The images come from one of my favorite decoration sites, Art & Decoration. I purchase the (monthly) paper magazine too.

Enjoy!

Jan Gossaert Virgin and child

Gossaert stays away from traditional, static representations of the Virgin and Child, and show us Christ standing in His mother’s lap, and nuzzling up to Her. The artist mingles the Flemish tradition, with its use of vibrant colors, and elements of classical Roman architecture, memorialized by the marble columns in the background.

Note two of Gossaert’s trademarks: his virtuosity in the treatment of textures and fabrics (Mary’s hair, the embroidery on Her bodice, and the almost sheer veil) and his skill at expressing human emotion. See the sadness on the Virgin’s face and the tenderness of Christ’s gesture.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Napoléon first thinks of the Tsar’s sister for his new Empress. But the Russian monarch is reluctant to enter into such an alliance, and Napoléon turns his sights to one of the daughters of the Emperor of Austria, Archduchess Maria Luisa. The young woman (she is but 18) has been brought up to hate and loathe Napoléon, but, in spite of her fears and misgivings over her great-aunt Marie-Antoinette’s fate, she is pliable.

Wedding of Napoleon and Marie-Louise: the religious ceremony

I already wrote about Marie-Louise’s arrival in France and the dire welcome extended to her by Caroline Bonaparte, one of Napoléon’s sisters. As for the wedding itself, it takes place, not at Notre-Dame or any of Paris’s many great churches, but at the Louvre, in the Salon Carré. If you know only one room in the Louvre, this is the one, for it houses to this day Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and the Madonna of the Rocks, among other masterpieces.

But on the day of her wedding, the new Empress, in her bridal finery beheld no such wonders. In order to install galleries for the spectators, all of the paintings had been moved out of the room for the ceremony, over the strenuous opposition of Monsieur Denon, the museum’s first director. The walls were covered with crimson draperies and Gobelins tapestries for the occasion, and an altar had been set up. The painting above, by Rouget, depicts the blessing of the rings and gold coins exchanged by the spouses.

After the celebration of a wedding Mass, Napoléon insisted that the etiquette of the Grand Couvert, the public dinner the late Marie-Antoinette hated so much, be revived for the wedding banquet. It is represented here by Alexandre Dufay, alias Casanova.

Napoleon and Marie-Louise: the wedding banquet

The banquet is held in the newly appointed State Room of the Palace of the Tuileries, part of the Louvre compound. Napoléon’s mother and siblings are seated in a semi-circle around the newlyweds. Courtiers stand in the galleries. The banquet lasts but twenty minutes (remember that Napoléon has no interest in food.) According to Captain Coignet, eyewitness to an imperial Grand Couvert, “nobody uttered a word. One was only allowed to speak when addressed by the sovereign master. Imposing it may be, but cheerful it ain’t.” The painting somehow manages to convey the stifling atmosphere of the wedding festivities.

In any case, I wish Miss Catherine Middleton and Prince William a much cheerier wedding, and much happiness in matrimony.