1775
and a letter bearing today's date was sent home by a Mrs Thrale, née Salusbury, but more colourfully known by her second married name, as Hester Lynch Piozzi. She and her Italian husband Jacob hosted a London salon, whose regulars included Samuel Johnson and therefore James Boswell, Dr Charles and especially his wife Frances Burney, Elizabeth Montagu, Joshua Reynolds, Anna Seward, Sarah Siddons, many others less well remembered today. The letter is now archived at the Rylands Library in the University of Manchester; it comments, somewhat snobbishly, about a visit suggested by her friend Elizabeth Montagu (click here for more on her, or go to Oct 2), an opportunity not to be missed while holidaying in Paris. Clearly Mrs Thrale was disappointed. The letter reads as follows:
"The Morning was spent in adjusting our Ornaments in order to dine with Madame de Bocage at 2 o'clock. There was a showy Dinner with a Frame in the middle, and she gave us an English Pudding made after the Receipt of the Dutchess of Queensbury. We saw nothing particularly pleasing at this Visit but the beauty of Madame de Bocages niece, the Countess of Blanchetre, whose husband was so handsome too that being a Frenchman - I wonder'd. In the course of conversation, however, he turned out an Italian, and there was another Italian Noble - man who hailed Baretti and made himself agreable to us all. Nothing would serve him but attend us at night to the Colissee which, after leaving our Names with the Sardinian Ambassadress, we were willing enough to permit. In Madame de Bocage's Drawing room stood the Busts of Shakespear, Milton, Pope and Dryden, the lady sat on a Sopha with a fine Red Velvet Cushion fringed with gold under her Feet and just over her Head a Cobweb of uncommon size & I am sure great Antiquity. A Pot to spit in, either of Pewter or Silver quite as black & ill-coloured, was on her Table, & when the Servant carried Coffee about he put in Sugar with his Fingers. The House these people live in is a fine one but so contrived that we were to pass through a sort of Hall where the Footmen were playing at Cards before we arrived at Madame's Chamber."
Bocage should have been spelt (I do mean spelt, given the spleen behind this onslaught) du Boccage, though her full name at her birth in 1710 was Anne-Marie Fiquet Le Page. Born in Rouen on October 22 1710, and educated at the Convent de l'Assumption in Paris, she married a tax-collector with a penchant for the literary life named Pierre-Joseph Fiquet du Boccage in 1727, moved permanently to Paris in 1733, and started attending salons as her way-in to the literary world.
She arrived, en force, as they say in Joan of Arc country, in July 1746, when she won first prize at the Rouen Académie, the first woman ever, though I am unable to discern which of her poems it was for. She sent a copy of it to Voltaire, who responded by addressing her as "chère Sappho de Normandie", which made reading the rest of the letter rather irrelevant; but with his name behind her she could now establish a salon of her own - on much the same scale actually as Mrs Thrale's in London - and was almost certainly one of the main models in Proust's mind when he created Mme Verdurin.
And all that from just a single poem! In 1748 she thanked the Rouen Académie by dedicating to it her translation of John Milton's "Paradise Lost" - a literary endeavour on the epic scale, a literary equivalent of Emilie du Châtelet translating Newton; it confirmed her fame and reputation, and led to lots of lesser poets dedicating poems back to her, mostly in the journal "Mercure de France".
Then, even more riskily, she put her own, a woman's, name on a play, "Les Amazones", to be performed at the Comédie-Française no less - and stop and think of the radicalities of this: one, women weren't allowed to act in plays at that epoch, let alone write them; two, "Les Amazones", the warrior-women of ancient Greece, not fit subject-matter for a patriarchal world, surely. She fell ill the night of the première, from terror probably, or perhaps just a ruse to avoid the abundance of rotten tomatoes, or worse, that might be thrown at her - rumours of a hostile reception to this woman's first disobedience were falling like fruits from a forbiden tree all over Paris in the days before opening night. The play got eleven performances - in Shakespearian London, at the height of the Golden Age, three was considered a blockbuster; populations were very much smaller then, travel even within the cities limited.
Now wealthy and famous, she set out on her version of the grand tour, visiting Italy and the Netherlands before coming to London, and publishing her memoires of those travels in 1770. She even dedicated her next (her last as it happens) major work of poetry - her own, not a translation - "La colombiade, ou la foi portée au Nouveau Monde", to the Pope, in gratitude for the audience to which he had invited her when she was in his city (click here). Probably Mrs Thrale was just expressing jealousy. Was "La Colombiade" well received? If eleven performances of a play counts as success, how do you evaluate three editions of an epic poem, plus translations into English, Spanish, German and Italian?
I dropped the name Emilie du Châtelet earlier, and quite deliberately. Anne-Marie du Boccage won more literary prizes than anyone before or since, but the two that really counted, membership of the Academies of Rome and Bologna, had only ever been achieved once before by any other Frenchwoman, and that was our Newtonian. Oh, and she was also admitted to the academies of Padua, Florence and Cortona, but that's like getting a Booker the same year you won the Nobel.
She died, still fighting, 91 years old, in Paris on August 8 1802.
You can access "La colombiade" here, her lifelong and highly literary letters here and here; the one thing I have been unable to locate is her translation of the other Pope to whom she was much dedicated, Alexander Pope's "The Temple of Fame", which in her version became "Le Temple de la Renommée" (no, not Hall of Fame, as in pop stars and sportspeople; this is Temple of Fame, as in Sappho of Normandie); his version can be found here.
You may also have noticed Mrs Thrale's comment about the busts; Madame du Boccage collected them, and they formed another, albeit minor, aspect of her fame: all are at museums around Europe today, but the one of her, by Jean-Baptiste Defernex, is at the top of this page, and also in the British Museum.
Amber pagesSome dates produce coincidence by happenstance... actually, all dates produce coincidence by happenstance, it just happens that some coincidences you notice, because you happen to be minded to see coincidence, and the items in question just happen to be within your sphere of knowledge and interest; so it isn't really coincidence at all, just, well, noticing the sorts of things you're on the look-out for...
Where was I? Yes, some dates produce coincidence by happenstance, and today is one of them.
The great philosopher of the Enlightenment, without whom there might never have been that explosion of liberal thought and worker-peasant awareness which led to the great rebellions of the 19th century, the great proletarian revolutions of the 20th, Denis Diderot, was born today in 1713
Could Václav Havel - dramatist, and former President of Chechosolvakia, born today in 1936 (see December 29) - or Lech Wałęsa - former shipyard-worker and President of Poland, named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize today in 1983 - have been anything more than an illiterate factory-serf or a press-ganged vassal-labourer, had it not been for Diderot (and others too, obviously, but he was one of the principals)?
And Bob Geldof too - born today in 1954, and easily forgettable even while you're still listening to him as "rock musician" (actually, I do rather like his Monday song), but memorable, indeed immortalised already, for Live Aid, one of the great occasions when the proletariat of the world took the initiative and told the power-executives what Democracy is supposed to be about.
The mind-set of the common people, altered fundamentally by events in history, people in history, of which and whom they might well have been completely unaware, each leading to the next, cause and effect, but mostly what I would rather call source and impact, a phrase not generally "out there" in the philosophical essays. So who and what were they?
When they reached Versailles, she was one of a small delegation who met with Louis XVI to deliver their petition about the dire state of the economy, particularly the scarcity of bread, which in truth was rather more concerning to common folk than the philosophical differences between a king, a president and a military dictator, or where precisely the royal family lived. Sadly that latter demand was the only one the king was willing or even able to carry out, and he did promise to rehouse the Royal Family at the Tuileries Palace in Paris.
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Less than a year later, on August 10 1792, the Tuilleries Palace was stormed by the National Guard of the second Paris Commune, backed by federal troops from Marseille and Brittany. The royal family fled. Leading the assault that day - Reine Audu, Queen of the markets of Les Halles (that was the reason for her nickname, long before the Revolution). Alongside her in being honoured with the award of a civil crown by the federal troops were two other women who can also be found on the page for Aug 10, the Girondiste Théroigne de Mericourt, and a twenty-seven-year-old actress who had only arrived in Paris five months earlier, Claire Lacombe.
What happened afterwards? History is unclear; some say she died in early 1793, but fail to provide documentary evidence. And contradicting them there are records of her being honoured that same year by the Paris Commune, "as an authentic testimony to her bravery and patriotism”, which could be posthumous, except that the Jacobin Club at the same time collected 357 francs and 5 sous, which they would not have done if she had not been alive and starving so much that she needed it. There is also a record of a woman named Louise Leduc, at the Sainte Pélagie Prison for an unidentified crime, in July 1794, and another at the nearby Hospital for Lunatics records the death of a woman with the same name at the end of that same year.
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