by Beth Arnold
An ongoing series about uprooting our lives in America and moving to France. For what's happened before, see previous Jours of Our Lives entries here.
THE WIND HOWLED, and rain steadily pounded the roofs and streets, land and sea throughout the night. The leak in our skylight, that streamed down Matisse's “Odalisque á la culotte grise” for the first time when we were away, was back and silent drops of water were glazing the floor. I stayed up and read. I was close to finishing Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser, and since I've become quite fascinated with "that Austrian woman" as the French would say as a slur during the lifetime of this much and wrongly maligned Queen of France (in Ms. Frazier's opinion and now mine as well), I couldn't put the heavy tome down.
I am on a course of reading French history to understand the roots of the country I'm in. I've gone from Middle Ages to Revolution, or, to put it another way, from murder, mayhem, and pillaging to murder, mayhem, and pillaging. Some things don't seem to change in time—with
the exception of who’s doing it to whom. Constant warfare together with inhumane atrocities weren't a daily routine in the France of the 18th century, as they had been in the 11th and 12th, when survival often depended upon the whims of one's ruler and/or conqueror, as well as on the Pope and Church, and on what terror was improvised and who owed what revenge to whom. That is, until the people rose up against the royal family and aristocracy and chopped off so many heads that streets ran thick with blood. As the heads, hearts, and various other entrails of whoever was the last to be tried and found guilty of some treason real or made up were paraded upon pikes around town, the rioters were literally covered in the sticky red fluid that courses through life or drains from the lack of it. The radicals were evidently delighted to mutilate bodies, which is a bit disappointing, but the blood of their victims reflected some sort of (twisted and anti) communion with their freedom. The point of changing the system in France was valid; these actions were dubious at best. But this is inevitably the question of revolution: Must it be murderous and violent?
Archduchess Marie Antoinette, Queen of France (1755-1793), Kunsthistorisches Museum, (Image via Wikipedia)