Amber pages
Mike Oldfield, composer of "Tubular Bells", born today in 1953, providing an excuse for a piece on "whatever happened to?"... maybe, one day....
But there are people who I definitely intend to follow up:
Anne-Josèphe Terwagne, or Théroigne de Méricourt if you insist, attacked by a gang of Jacobins in the Jardin des Tuilleries, today in 1793; but read the story of Red Rose Claire Lacombe on Aug 10 first... and then (update 2025) see the green traffic light below
Anthony Shaffer, screenplay writer, and Peter Shaffer, playwright, born within seconds of each other, and completely identical, today in 1926, providing an excuse for a piece on famous twins:
Jacob and Esau (heels and birthrights)
Perets and Zerach (less well-known, but that scarlet thread!)
Romulus and Remus
Castor and Pollux (click here)
Apollo and Artemis (click here)
And speaking of pairs, the female half of that most famously tragic love story, Abélard and Héloïse...
Héloïse du Paraclet in full, born in either 1100 or 1101, died today in 1163, or it may have been 1164, the Juliet to Pierre Abélard's
Romeo, and it turns out that they weren't somebody's made-up love-story,
but two real people, he one of the leading theologians and philosophers of
their day (more on him among the reverend
writers), and she one of his students, or tutees might be more accurate
because he was hired by her parents in a world without non-convent schools, and
brought to their château, where what he initially fell in love with was her
diligence, her intellectual curiosity, the speed of her intellectual
development, and the gradual realisation that she was at least as clever as he
was, and probably more so. To put that in context, he would later be a primary
influence on both Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; as to her, when he
first came to tutor her in 1115, she was already fluent in Greek, Hebrew
and Latin, and would need all three, as well as her native Franchoise, when she
became abbess at d'Argenteuil, a convent being, in the end, the only place
where a woman with a brain had any chance of using it, back in those mediaeval
times. He, by the way, spent his latter years as a monk at St Denis Paris, where
he published his "Historia Calamitatum" (click here) and received some of the most deprecating
correspondence ever received by a man who thoroughly deserved it, from a woman
he had badly wronged.
And speaking of women who were badly wronged, but on this occasion by her fellow-women, and women with whom she had shared an extraordinary triumph at that. Anne-Josèphe Terwagne, also known as Théroigne de Méricourt: née le 13 août 1762 à Marcourt dans l'ancienne principauté de Liège et morte le 8 juin 1817 à l'hôpital de la Salpêtrière de Paris. If you can read French, start here; if not, here and ask your computer to translate it.
“Théroigne de Méricourt was an
unhappy courtesan when she fell in love with revolutionary ideals. Denied a
political role because of her sex, she nevertheless campaigned tirelessly until
a mob beating left her broken in both mind and body.”
The portrait of her is by the miniaturist François-Hippolyte Desbuissons
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