Amber pages
Given that, in today's academic world, she is described as "a prodigy of the Renaissance" (here and here for the book that does so, and likewise tells her story in detail), why am I finding it so hard to track down her actual writings. She has a listing and papers on jstor (here), but you need permission to access it; and the Cambridge Press links, above, likewise expect you to pay to read. And that's just the life. As to the poems - deep searching the Internet has proven virtually fruitless - just one "Tumulus" that she wrote for her father, which you could once read about, with a brief biography, here, though no sign of the text; but going back a year later, you can't anyway, because the link is dead!
The full story of the family and its intellectual life is told in a PhD thesis by Susan Broomhall (click here to read it; and defiinitely worthwhile if you are following my Woman-Blindness theme, because she discusses many of the women who I have also included); but again, no poems.
Camille
Morel writes moving poetry honoring her dead parents and sister - in Greek,
Latin, and French! Her parents, Jean Morel and Antoinette de Loynes, had run a
salon and their three daughters grew up in the heady intellectual and artistic
community fostered there. Only Camille published poetry throughout her life;
this is her last major work, printed in 1583 - a “tomb” for her father.
Below is what is on that picture, and the same again for the
transcription here, but my
impression is that she wrote it in Greek first, and the Latin below is a translation,
probably her own - why else would this link have
it in both languages?
IN TYPOGRAPHIAM
MVSARVM MATREM CAMILLA
Morella I. Morelli Ebredunaei
filia ex Graeco I. Aurati.
Carmine Musarumque Patrem, Musasque puellas
Cantemus, matrem Chalcotypenque Deam.
Chalcotypen omnis pulchrique bonique parente,
Dicamus nostro carmine Chalcotypen.
Namque omnes solus genuit Pater ipse Camoenas,
Non tamen ex una, matribus imo tribus
Mnemosynae primum commistus fronte serena,
Edidit antiquam progeniem Aonidum.
Progenies sed enim brevis haec erat atque caduca,
Ipsa quidem pulchrae matris, at aevibrevis.
Concepit sobolemque aliarum deinde sororum
Ex Chirographia, Daedaleis-digitis.
His quoque vita fuit brevior, genitrice creatis,
Quae pariat longa pignora pauca mora.
Iamque fere occiderat reliquarum turba sororum,
Nullum unquam in terris, fors, habitura locum.
Ab Iove mortales miserato, ni meliorum
Tertia Musarum stirps reparata foret.
Quam sata Vulcano divaque Tritonide quodam
Nigra superciliis Chalcotype genuit.
Quod genus Aonidum longos volvetur in annos,
Nempe ut ahena qui sit genitrice satus.
Salvete o multum vates, & ametis ahenas
Quas fecit Musas Dia Typographia.
Her father was the I (really J for Jean) Morelli Ebredunei named here - Ebredunei being the
Latinisation of his hometown; "filia ex Graeco I. Auratia"
I take to be a way of rendering her mother's name, which was Antoinette de
Loynes, herself also a poet of some distinction and one of the earliest of the
Paris salonistes (click here).
I am also intrigued
to see a line of Hebrew at the bottom of the text, which is from Proverbs
15:14, "לב נבון יבקש־דעת ופני ופי כסילים ירעה אולת"; "The discerning heart seeks
knowledge, but the mouth of fools feeds on folly." The Morels were
definitely not Jewish.
One day I shall take on the challenge of reviving my very
limited Latin O level knowledge, and try to make a translation into English. Or
maybe it would be even more amusing to make the translation into Hebrew!
Samuel Johnson, the lexicographer who wrote the first (known) English dictionary, born today in 1709; and you can still visit the house he spent most of his adult life in, in Gough Square, behind Fleet Street - a very nice place to live, then, and today too, if you're the curator who gets the attached cottage as part of salary!
Adrienne de Noailles, Marquise de Lafayette officially, Citoyenne Lafayatte in the Panthéon de la Renommée, released from prison, for the second time, today in 1797 - her full story is ... now below...
The method, incidentally, was based on Galileo's demonstrations at Pisa - he dropped objects of different weights from the top of the tower, which then smashed on the ground simultaneously, to demonstrate that Aristotle's understanding of the laws of gravity were, actually, just as wrong as his own. Having established that light travels slower in water than it does in air (it doesn't), and measured the speed of light (to within 1 percent of what is currently regarded as the "true" figure), Foucault swung a heavy iron ball from a strip of wire 220 feet (67 metres) long, and in this manner demonstrated - as far as I who am a writer, not a physicist, can understand the matter - that Umberto Eco was an extremely clever writer of completely pointless books.
Greta Garbo (Greta Lovisa Gustaffson), actress, born today in 1905
Jimi Hendrix, rock 'n' roll guitarist, died, today in 1970. Most of those amazing guitar solos turned out to have been partially pre-recorded, and him playing the rest on stage. I thought only athletes cheated.
Patty Hearst and two "comrades" captured, today in 1975; she had been "kidnapped" by the Symbionese Liberation Army on February 4th 1974, only to appear with a machine-gun in her hands just six weeks later, taking part in a bank robbery in San Francisco. Was she brain-washed? Was it Stockholm Syndrome? Was the kidnapping a fake? Do Americans love conspiracy theories? Is there a movie to be made from this? Could Umberto Eco be persuaded to write the book?
Long before the Revolution in France, the Lafayettes moved to America to test their liberal beliefs in an environment that was heading in the same direction, but also as a way of encouraging their French compatriots back home to move more quickly in that same direction: they purchased two slave plantations in Cayenne, in what today is French Guiana, with the intention of giving the slaves their liberty, and then distributing the land among them. She did the work, banning flogging and prohibiting the sale of slaves from day one, then beginning the long task of education that would be essential if they were to take charge of their own plantations - he was busy elsewhere, having volunteered to serve as a senior commander in George Washington's army-of-independence, where he cemented his reputation at the siege of Yorkville in 1781.
He also became friends with Thomas Jefferson, and when the couple returned to France in 1787, it was in partnership with Jefferson that he wrote one of the key documents of the French revolution, "the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" (read it in French and English here). Then came the revolution, and his rise to that senior position in the military... and then Robespierre and the Terror, which turned against all of France's noble families, even those like the Noailles who supported their cause. While Gilbert had fled to Austria, Adrienne was imprisoned and condemned to the guillotine; both her mother, her sister and her grandmother were beheaded, but she was saved at the last moment: Elizabeth Monroe, the wife of America's ambassador in Paris (and later President of the United States, James Monroe), turned up at the prison on the day before the execution was scheduled, and told everybody very loudly that she would be coming back to see her friend Adrienne the next day, and the one after that as well. Her death-sentence was immediately guillotined in her place, but she did not stay in France... her husband was in prison in Austria, and that was where loyalty demanded her presence; she spent the next two years in gaol, at his side, released today, September 18 1797.
But the double experience had ruined her health, and while she spent the next ten years using her financial, legal, and diplomatic skills to try to salvage her family's fortune, the efforts down the years had exhausted her. She died on December 25 1807, aged just forty-eight, and is remembered in France to this day, not as Marquise, but as Citoyenne Lafayette.
Just to complete the tale (and see Sept 6 as well), husband Gilbert became a Liberal member of the French Parliament after the Bourbon Restoration, returned to America as President Monroe's personal guest, and toured each one of what in those days was just twenty-four states, finding his name attached to numerous towns and even a university as a hero of the revolution (click here). In July 1830 he became a hero of another revolution, to the extent that he was invited to take the office of dictator; he refused, supporting Louis-Philippe as constitutional monarch, but then rejecting him when Louis turned autocratic. He died on May 20 1834 and was buried next to his wife at the Picpus cemetery in Paris.
Oh, and when you hear the name Lafayette, do not confuse Adrienne with Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, who was also a Comtesse de la Fayette, and
wrote what is regarded as the first French, indeed possibly the first European
novel, "La Princesse de Clèves" in 1678; her dates are 1634-1693 and
she gets a mention on Aug 25.
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