1639, 1945
Two very different women, responding very differently to the pressures of their ideological surroundings
First, the positive:
1639, and Marie de l'Incarnation (born October 28 1599; died April 30 1672), accompanied by two sisters and the patroness of their Ursuline order in what was then called Nouvelle France, disembarked at Quebec City; and I find myself deeply torn as to whether to include her in this blog or not, precisely because she was an evangelical Catholic who went to Canada to convert the “ignorant heathens” to the greater stupidity of her religion; her abandonment of the venture as a failure when the indigenous girls from the native tribes around Quebec simply refused to be “assimilated” is her first redeeming virtue.
And then there are the two hundred and seventy-seven letters that have been preserved, most of them with her son Claude (an Ursuline nun with a son? now there’s another interesting side of her), and the autobiography that she wrote, “Relation de 1654”, which are of immense importance to anyone studying early Canadian history and wanting to understand why the “First Nations” in Canada are respected as themselves, and fully integrated, as themselves, into Canadian society, while “Red Indians” south of the border live on reservations and have no rights under the laws of the Land of Freedom – everwhere, that is, except in Louisiana, which of course is French-America, and where the only Ursuline Convent in America can still be visited, in Nouvelle Orléans, I mean New Orleans. The Ursuline Constitution (in pdf format here, all 300+ pages of it!), and the educational methodologies, introduced by Marie de l’Incarnation (inter alia, but she was almost certainly the first) for the benefit of the French settlers rather than the now-left-alone indigenes, are two of the many keys.
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Second... but it needs no comment
1945
Of
themselves
the
facts are banal
Eva
Braun
born
February 6th 1912
in
Munich
met
Adolf Hitler
in
1930
while
working as assistant
to
the court photographer
entered
his household
in
1936
and
became his mistress
married
him
on
April 29th 1945
committed
suicide with him
the
following day
Of
themselves the facts
are
utterly banal
But
what might
a
Shaksespeare
an
Aeschylus
have
made of them
More on this on May 2.
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