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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
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 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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