The Land of Desire: French History and Culture

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71. Marie Bonaparte, Part I Oct 28, 2021

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“I liked murderers. I thought them interesting. Had not my grandfather been one when he killed the journalist? And my great-granduncle Napoleon, what a monumental murderer he was!” – Marie Bonaparte Welcome back! After a long break to buy new soundproofing equipment – which may or may not have been successful – we’re back with a new miniseries. I’m excited, as I think we’re covering one of the most interesting subjects this show has ever covered: the heiress, philanthropist and pioneering psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte. Naturally, if we’re going to discuss a pioneering child psychologist we have to go back to the beginning and tell the story of her family – and oh, what a family! Episode 71: “Marie, The Last Bonaparte” Transcript Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire. I’m your host, Diana, and each month I provide a glimpse into French history and culture. As I’ve settled into my new apartment, it took a little longer than I’d hoped to set up a new recording studio, and I had to order some new equipment. It was a blessing in disguise, as this delay gave me time to really luxuriate in the research of this month’s subject, someone who might be one of my favorite characters ever featured on this show. Marie Bonaparte is what I like to call a fascinating woman, the kind of woman who spends her life being unconventional, pioneering, wildly interesting and getting away with it all by being very rich. Her life story is outrageous, shocking, and almost too on the nose metaphorically: she’s the descendant of the man who swept away the Ancien Regime, and used her inheritance to drag Europe into the modern age. Marie Bonaparte was blessed and cursed with a larger-than-life family, and this obsession with family brought her into contact with the ultimate expert on the subject: Sigmund Freud. From a line of tyrants, murderers and emperors, Marie’s own enduring legacy is that of an advocate for the refugee, the child, and the visionary. While her ancestors traded on their power, their money and their name to acquire more of the same, Marie Bonaparte used her influence to push for newer worlds, broader minds and safer harbors. She experimented with her sexuality, she launched an illustrious career, and she saved the life of one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. Marie Bonaparte’s life is far too interesting to fit into a single episode. To begin – and with Freud, where else could you begin? – we’ll focus on Marie Bonaparte’s family. Perhaps you’ve heard of them. Along the way, we’ll encounter royal refugees, lions, murderers, Hitler, a seriously weird uncle, Edgar Allen Poe, Queen Elizabeth, Leonardo da Vinci, and more. This month, settle in for the fascinating story of Her Royal Highness, Princess Marie of Greece and Denmark, the last Bonaparte. “I do not believe that any man in the world is more unfortunate in his family than I am.” So wrote Napoleon Bonaparte in 1810, after facing another disappointment from his sprawling, fractious family. To give a little credit to the family in question, Bonaparte was as tyrannical over the dinner table as he was over the continent. In the first year of his empire, Napoleon wrote to one of his lieutenants that he expected absolute loyalty, subservience and obedience from his family if they wanted to share in his glory and power. “I recognize only those who serve me as relations. My fortune is not attached to the name of Bonaparte, but to that of Napoleon…those who do not rise with me shall no longer form part of my family.” Ruling over an enormous band of jumped-up Corsicans was like herding cats, and even General Bonaparte himself could barely manage the task. The easiest cat in the bag was Napoleon’s older brother, Joseph, with whom he had always been close. Joseph was the perfect family ally: smart, obedience, and less ambitious than Napoleon. Sometimes he was too unambitious. On the rare occasion that the brothers clashed, it was almost always because Napoleon was asking Joseph to do something besides sit around in the backyard watering tomato plants. In 1806, Napoleon ordered Joseph to go be king of Spain, which was absolutely the last thing Joseph wanted to do, and Napoleon fired back with that warning: cross me and I’ll scratch your name off the family tree. While Joseph eventually gave in, Napoleon faced stiffer resistance from his younger brother, Lucien. Only sixteen during the French Revolution, in many ways Lucien was the “true believer” of the Bonaparte family. From the beginning, Lucien Bonaparte represented the radical branch of the family, an ominous position which would echo over multiple generations. A self-declared Jacobin, the dramatic teenager vowed to “die with a dagger in his hand” and as long as his older brother represented a threat to the Ancien Regime, Lucien would do anything to support his cause. In 1799, Lucien was elected president of the Council of Five Hundred, and his flair for drama played a pivotal role in securing Napoleon’s rise. On the infamous 18th Brumaire, when Napoleon attempted a coup d’etat, Lucien slipped out of the council room and told the guards that the Council of Five Hundred were being harassed by a bunch of terrorists. Then, in a supremely goth 20-something move, Lucien pointed his sword at Napoleon’s heart, and swore to plunge it through his brother’s chest if he ever betrayed the country. At that moment, Lucien ordered the guards to expel anyone who resisted Napoleon’s coup d’etat. The guards marched in, the opposition marched out, Napoleon became the First Consul, and the French Revolution came to an end. Without Lucien, Napoleon might never have come to power – but the moment he did, Lucien began to wonder whether he had not created a tyrant. Napoleon and Lucien clashed over Napoleon’s iron-fisted rule over Europe – but they exploded when Napoleon extended his rule over Lucien’s private life. Before the French Revolution, the teenaged Lucien disobeyed his parents and married the illiterate daughter of an innkeeper. After bearing him two children, Lucien’s first wife died, and the Bonapartes couldn’t wait to marry their third son off to someone more suitable. Unfortunately for Napoleon and his parents, Lucien already had a new wife in mind: a scandalous young widow named Alexandrine Jouberthon. She was completely unsuitable. Despite the objections of his family, Lucien married Alexandrine, and launched another tradition which would continue down his branch of the Bonaparte family for generations to come: marrying below one’s station. Only Mama Bonaparte recognized her son’s marriage – nobody else was willing to risk Napoleon’s anger. Despite a civil ceremony, Napoleon refused to recognize Lucien’s second marriage, or the child it produced, and in 1803 Napoleon made good on his threat and sent Lucien, his wife, and their children into exile. But the enemy of my enemy is my friend – and Napoleon had a lot of enemies, so it didn’t take long for Lucien to make wealthy, powerful friends, including the Pope. In 1804, Napoleon rose once more from First Consul to Emperor. Napoleon issued a reminder to any members of the Bourbon family who still had heads on their shoulders: don’t even think about trying to reclaim your throne, and he issued a proclamation outlining the Bonaparte line of succession. Lucien Bonaparte, without whom Napoleon might never have risen to power, disappeared from the official Bonaparte family tree. A few years later, Napoleon offered Lucien another chance: divorce your wife, and I will welcome you back into the line of succession, and recognize your children as my family. You can even keep Madame Jouberthon as your mistress, so long as you bend the knee and apologize for what you did. Lucien rejected the offer, and tried to escape the continent altogether. Sailing for the United States, Lucien and his family were captured by the British, who allowed him to live the life of an English country gentleman. Napoleon was convinced Lucien was conspiring against him, when in truth the former Jacobin spent most of his time geeking out about telescopes and writing terrible poetry about Charlemagne. After Napoleon’s fall from power, Lucien moved back to Italy, where his friend the Pope granted him the title Prince of Canino. With oodles of money and a dozen children to occupy his time, Lucien spent his days scribbling more mediocre writing and excavating his backyard for Roman ruins. To the last, Napoleon couldn’t stop telling his little brother what to do, and even from his exile on the remote island of St Helena, Napoleon wanted Lucien to “cease writing poetry and to busy himself with writing a history of the Revolution and the Emperor’s reign.” Napoleon died before reconciling Lucien to the official family tree, and the Bonaparte line of succession soon became a headache which would rattle Europe for the next century. Napoleon’s legacy was supposed to be a child of destiny. In 1810, desperate for an heir, he’d married the great-niece of Marie Antoinette, a neat little way to tie up loose ends and bad feelings. The couple could barely stand one another, but they did their duty well enough to produce Napoleon Junior. In 1814, he reigned as Napoleon II for two weeks – and before you scoff, what did you accomplish as a three year old? Not for the last time, the Bonaparte family made a home in Vienna, where Napoleon spent his time twiddling his thumbs, doing nothing of importance and then dying of tuberculosis at the age of 21, without an heir. Napoleon’s older brother Joseph had died without having any sons, so the line of succession should have passed to Lucien, old but still kicking around the Italian countryside. But since Napoleon had erased Lucien and all of his children from the Bonaparte family tree, the line of succession skipped down to the next Bonaparte brother, Louis. Unlike Lucien, Louis was determined to do whatever it took to stay in Napoleon’s good graces. By hook or by crook, he was going to write his family into the Bonaparte line of succession in permanent marker. Louis sucked up to his older brother in the most predictable fashion: his first son was named Napoleon Charles Bonaparte. His second son was named Napoleon-Louis Bonaparte. Then, just for good measure, he figured why not hedge my bets, here’s my third son, Charles-Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Hedging bets was a good idea, since the first two Napoleon Bonapartes died young. So for those following along at home, Napoleon Bonaparte died on St Helena, his son Napoleon Bonaparte died of tuberculosis at 21, and the claim passed to his 24 year old nephew, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Meanwhile, back in Italy, Lucien’s children were growing up, and one son in particular seemed to have inherited his father’s legacy, for good and bad. Despite being scratched out of his brother’s line of succession, Lucien also enjoyed naming all of his kids after the emperor. His fourth son, Pierre Napoleon Bonaparte, was a real chip off the old block: just like his father, he spent his teens and twenties desperate to “die with a dagger in my hand”. Known as “the wild boar of Corsica” Pierre enjoyed nothing more than a good old-fashioned street fight, to the exasperation and embarrassment of his parents, who on at least one occasion begged the Pope to arrest their son for his own good. They weren’t wrong, and right after Pierre was released he went off and stabbed someone to death. Pierre was sentenced to death, but come on, nobody’s gonna be the one to execute a Bonaparte, so Lucien sent his idiot son off to America until things cooled off. Pierre fell in love with New York City, probably because it offered so many more alluring opportunities for a street fight, and at some point he ran into his cousin, Louis Napoleon, the new heir. Louis was trying to gather supporters for his cause, but Pierre was more interested in gathering mistresses for his bedroom. Then, in 1852, history repeats itself, this time as farce. Louis-Napoleon makes his move, and names himself Napoleon III. That same year, Pierre Napoleon falls in love – with a woman completely below his station. The new Emperor Napoleon tells his cousin to knock it off, but like father, like son, Pierre tells the Emperor to stuff it, and marries Nina, the illiterate daughter of a foundry worker. Then, you guessed it, Emperor Napoleon got mad, and refused to recognize Pierre and Nina’s marriage. Nevertheless, the couple have a bunch of children and putter around the countryside, where Pierre raises a pet lion and manages to keep himself out of street fights – for a while, at least. In 1867, Pierre and Nina got married again, in the hopes that Pierre’s cousin would recognize her and their children, but Napoleon III still refuses. In fact, he tells Pierre to stop using his middle name in public: there can only be ONE Firstname Napoleon Bonaparte, buddy, and I’ve got dibs. Pierre, Nina and their children are social outcasts, and in a surprising turn of events, this did not turn Pierre’s mood around. In 1870, Pierre took time to troll some anti-Bonapartists with an outrageous letter to the editor. The anti-Bonapartists took offense and a pair of gentlemen marched over to Pierre’s house the next day. After ringing the doorbell, they challenged Pierre to a duel. We can never be sure what happened next, but the next five minutes changed the family’s fate forever: Pierre Napoleon Bonaparte, cousin of the emperor, shot an unarmed man to death in his front parlor. Pierre Bonaparte’s case was the trial of a generation. 100,000 Parisians attended the victim’s funeral, and European intellectuals saw the trial as the end of an era. In a letter to Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels observed, “This Pierre Bonaparte scandal…is a splendid initiation to the new era in Paris. Louis is decidedly done for. For the bourgeois a most unpleasant awakening from their illusions, as if the whole foundation of corruption and vileness, built up so slowly and carefully for eighteen years, were about to collapse.” Once again, however, the Wild Boar of Corsica escaped the gallows. His triumph didn’t last long, however – within a few months, the Communards looted Paris, and they took extra pains to loot the despised Pierre Bonaparte’s home before they burned it to the ground, erasing the last of the family’s fortunes in a single blow. Pierre and his cousin both hit the road for Belgium. No longer under his cousin’s tyranny, Pierre and Nina had one last wedding ceremony, legitimizing their union – and their children – once and for all. Having accomplished this, Nina left the Wild Boar of Corsica for good. Pierre spent his final days in drunken debauchery and poverty, while Nina set her sights on her family’s future. Illiterate, despised, and impoverished, Nina had only one asset left: at long last, she and her children were officially Bonapartes. If Napoleon Bonaparte may be history’s most ambitious social climber, his nephew’s wife could probably give him a run for his money. Despite her own illiterate background, Nina’s son, Roland, soon proved to be a brilliant scholar – who shared his mother’s ambition and love of money. Roland didn’t have any money, but by god, he was a Bonaparte, and they might not be on the throne at the moment but the Bonaparte family had a habit of turning up like a bad penny. Nobody was ready to count the Bonapartes out of world history just yet. It was the Gilded Age, the belle epoque, when the Industrial Revolution produced its first generation of children ready to marry their new money to old names. Nina only had one son, one opportunity to marry him off to the right match. She only had one card to play, and in 1880, where else could you place your one big bet but the great gambling hall of Europe: Monaco. In 1806, while newly crowned Emperor Napoleon fought to secure his territory, a set of twin boys, Francois and Louis Blanc, were born in southern France. Their father died just before the twins were bor…

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69. The Boy Who Solved Vanilla Jun 24, 2021

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“Here Albius fertilized vanilla.” – Tribute to Edmond Albius, Saint Suzanne, Réunion. We’re back! After a big move, which required the dismantling and relocation of the trusty recording studio (a.k.a. Diana’s closet), I’m excited to record in my new space! Next month is the show’s sixth anniversary – I know, right?!! – and I’m asking YOU to submit questions for a special listener Q&A episode. You can contact me right here. Otherwise, send me a question on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter! After my last episode about potatoes, I figured I’d follow up with a little dessert. Today, let’s learn about one of the most valuable and mysterious plants on earth, the dizzying journey it made from its native homeland to its most famous outpost, and the unlikely character who unlocked its secrets. This plant’s intoxicating flavor is so widely enjoyed, and so universally incorporated into dishes around the world, that its name has become a byword for the everyday and boring. This is extremely unfair, since we’re talking about one of the world’s most labor-intensive and delicate plants, the only edible orchid on earth. That’s right: this week, we’ll learn about the sultry secrets of vanilla. Episode 69: “The Boy Who Solved Vanilla” Edmond Albius, the boy who unlocked vanilla Watch “Edmond’s gesture” in action in this video of vanilla hand-pollination, still used for the production of essentially all commercial vanilla in the world. See the humble melipona bee, which naturally fertilizes vanilla plants in Mexico. Transcript Bienvenue and welcome back to the Land of Desire. I’m your host, Diana, and this is the show’s first episode ever recorded outside of a closet! Just in time for the podcast’s fifth anniversary next month, I’m finally settled into my new apartment, and I’m working out the kinks of recording in a new space. I’ll be ordering some more recording equipment to really set up the space, so I beg your patience if this month’s sound quality is below average. It sounded nicer when I was essentially recording an episode underneath a pile of coats, but it’s a little easier on your host to sit in a chair, you know? Before I jump into today’s episode, a quick announcement: next month is the fifth anniversary of this podcast! I know, right? I’m going to celebrate with a big of a mixup – it’s been a few years since I did a Q and A episode, and there are a LOT more listeners nowadays. Between now and the end of the month, please send me your questions – these can be questions about subjects discussed in previous episodes, questions about the podcast’s production, or even just questions about me. You can send me questions through Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, or use the contact form on the show’s website, thelandofdesire.com. I look forward to answering my favorites in next month’s episode! Okay. On with the show. Perhaps I love a theme, perhaps I’m just hungry, but this month I’m continuing the theme of curious French food history, but we’re moving as far away from the damp, gloomy soil of l’Hexagone and traveling all the way to the balmy shores of the Indian Ocean. We’ll learn about one of the most valuable and mysterious plants on earth, the dizzying journey it made from its native homeland to its most famous outpost, and the unlikely character who unlocked its secrets. This plant’s intoxicating flavor is so widely enjoyed, and so universally incorporated into dishes around the world, that its name has become a byword for boring. This is extremely unfair, since we’re talking about one of the world’s most labor-intensive and delicate plants, the only edible orchid on earth. That’s right: this week, we’ll learn about the sultry secrets of vanilla. In 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes reached the shores of Mexico. After an arduous journey into the interior, that November, Cortes and his straggling band of 250 Spanish soldiers reached the splendor of Tenochtitlan, (Ti-NOSHE-titlan) the glorious capital of the Aztec Empire. A city of gardens, floating out of a great lake, it must have appeared like something out of a dream. The emperor Montezuma allowed these pathetic strays inside his paradise, and walled them in near his zoos and gardens. For nine months, the Spanish fleet were simply another curiosity in the emperor’s collection. Invited to court, one of the Spanish soldiers observed another one of those curiosities: “a drink made from the cocoa plant, in cups of pure gold” which was “frothed up…and served with great reverence.” The xocoatl or “bitter water” was an extraordinary colonial triumph, a testament to the extent of Montezuma’s rule. Throughout the Aztec empire, territories paid tribute in the form of local produce. Xocoatl (SHO-coe-ah-ttle) was a mixture of these tributes: maize, honey, chili peppers, the cacao beans of course, and one ingredient which brought the whole dish together, a tribute from the Totonac people which they called xa’nat (CHA-nat) an orchid which grew wild in their forest-covered mountains. The Aztecs accepted the mysterious orchids and their beans, and used them in great quantities for their special xocoatl, but they had no idea how the Totonac people grew or harvested the plant. Once the Aztec empire fell, and Spain began its long age of colonial exploitation, they continued Montezuma’s practice of simply demanding vanilla beans, without ever acquiring the knowledge of their cultivation. Before long, vanilla made its way to Europe as part of the so-called Columbian exchange and became a favorite of the continental aristocracy. One early fan was the aging Queen Elizabeth I, who learned about the exotic bean from her apothecary. That same apothecary sent a few beans to a French botanist he knew, Charles de l’Ecluse, whose written description of the plant in his book is the first chapter of France’s history with vanilla. While the Totonac continued to refer to their local plant as xa’nat, the Spanish referred to the orchid’s dark fruits as “little pods” or “vainilla” – a word derived from the Latin vagina, and if you’ve ever seen a Georgia O’Keefe painting of an orchid, you’ll understand why. Despite the spicy etymology, “vanilla” didn’t really catch on until the 1650s, and by the end of the century “vanilla” made its debut in French law, as part of an edict saying that all vanilla not grown in France must be sold by specific merchants paying specific fees and bringing their cargo through specific ports. Well, unfortunately for French gourmands on a budget, there was no other kind of vanilla – simply all of the vanilla in the world came from Mexico. Scarcity and competition launched a centuries long quest to break Spain’s monopoly on the mysterious orchid – but she wasn’t giving up her secrets anytime soon. If you’re ever lucky enough you encounter a vanilla orchid in the wild, you probably won’t even realize it. Unlike its showier cousins, the vanilla plant is a rather unassuming vine which likes to drape itself over tree branches in humid mountain valleys. Its flowers are rather small, with whitish yellow petals, and the most identifiable thing about vanilla is utterly absent: a vanilla flower doesn’t smell like vanilla! It’s a nice floral scent, but nothing you’d associate with root beer floats or birthday cake. For the first two hundred years or so, all vanilla plants which made a live crossing of the Atlantic were basically just duds. Europeans were going greenhouse-crazy, and every horticulturist worth his stuff had a steamy shed on his estate where, at least theoretically, conditions ought to produce some beans. But it never worked! Even as the demand for vanilla grew and grew, Europeans simply couldn’t get the plant to do anything. It wasn’t until 1806 that an Englishman announced that his vanilla plant was, in fact, blossoming! The event attracted crowds, and that lucky plant would lay the groundwork for widespread vanilla cultivation. But in 1806, everyone squeezing into that sweltering greenhouse to look at these long-awaited blossoms had only one question on their mind: how do you turn the blossoms into beans? Though the Europeans didn’t realize it for many years, they’d failed to notice the Mexican vanilla plant’s best friend: the extra-tiny orchid bee. These humble heroes of Central America do the delicate work of pollinating vanilla plants in the wild. Bees rootle around inside the delicate orchid, covering their furry bodies with pollen which then shuffles off into the plant’s ovaries. The ovaries swell up into a familiar bean shaped fruit, each one containing thousands and thousands of tiny seeds. Without bees, Europeans were stuck with some pretty white petals and not much else to show for all their gardening. It would take another half century and a journey of 6,000 miles before the mystery was solved once and for all – by a very unlikely person. THE SPICE HUNTERS For three hundred years, spices ruled the world. An insatiable appetite for exotic flavors drove Europeans to every corner of the earth, where they’d go to any lengths to secure a reliable supply of some spice or another. It was high-risk, high reward stuff: spice hunting meant perilous sea journeys, pirates, and indigenous populations who didn’t feel like handing over the goods at the end of a gun. But the most dangerous part of being a spice hunter? Other spice hunters, of course. Competition was fierce, and nations were focused on the long view: if you sailed into port with a hull full of cinnamon, you were a rich man; but if you sailed into port with a hull full of cinnamon tree saplings? You were a national hero. For fifty years, the most exciting spice hunter in the world was a French man with a superbly perfect name for the job: Pierre Poivre, a.k.a. Peter Pepper. If you wanted a life of adventure, you either joined the navy and sailed around the world or you became a missionary and sailed around the world. Pierre Poivre started out as a Jesuit missionary, and spent his twenties sailing around modern day Vietnam, China, and Macau. Poivre fell in love with China, particularly Chinese agriculture, and he spent time that may have been intended for studying the Bible studying terraced farms and spice markets. By 1745, Pierre turned 25 and gave up any pretense of godliness – to the relief of the other Jesuits, who kept kicking him out of assignments and strongly hinting that he ought to return home. But Pierre had tasted adventure and had no intention of a quiet life. He volunteered to join the French East India Company, where he assured everyone that he’d be able to obtain the spices – and the spice plants – France so desperately desired. The Company agreed to take him on, but they insisted on sending him back to the motherland for his official assignment. On the way back, traveling with two other French ships off the coast of Sumatra, the French fleet was canceled by a bunch of English ships. If Pierre wanted adventure, here it was: a fantastic battle played out on the seas, and midway through the fight, Pierre was hit by a cannonball. Pierre’s right arm was amputated, and he was forced to recover in prison, held in the Dutch port of Batavia, or as we know it, Jakarta. Eventually the French sailors were released and hitched a ride back to Europe by way of India. All along the way, Pierre learned everything he could about the spice trade from Dutch, French, and English merchants, not to mention the locals. Pierre learned everything there was to know about everything there was to acquire: cotton, sugar, coffee, batik printed cloths, coconuts, and of course spices. By the time he made it back to to meet his new bosses in person for the first time, Pierre’s proposition was simple: if you want to break the Dutch monopoly on nutmegs, I’m your man. I know everything there is to know, and I’ll stop at nothing until France can grow nutmeg trees of her own. This was exactly what France wanted to hear. France was in the middle of a million costly wars, and soon she’d embark on the stupidest one yet – the so-called French and Indian War, which would cost the crown its best territory in Canada, Louisiana and India. France needed money, and what better way to make money than to grow your own versions of the most lucrative substances on earth? So, in 1748, France sent Pierre on a mission to acquire spice plants for its newest territories in the Indian Ocean: the ile de France, now known as Mauritius, and the ile de Bourbon, now known as Réunion. The Dutch had a monopoly on nutmeg and cloves, and they did not come to play: over and over again, they didn’t hesitate to kill anyone who tried to smuggle out precious cargo. With the Dutch guarding their own supplies carefully, Pierre relied on his own networks. Sailing around to the Philippines, Pierre ran into some guys he knew, who knew other guys, who knew other guys, who eventually knew a guy from China who would sell fresh whole nutmegs to anyone brave enough to carry them out. Pierre bought 300 of the precious nutmegs, and managed to get nearly 50 of them to sprout. Nevertheless, bureaucratic red tape, missed connections and poor gardening by his colleagues meant that in 1753, Pierre Poivre finally sailed into Mauritius with five nutmeg saplings. But by god, they were five nutmeg saplings! By 1766, the broke French government dissolved the French East India Company and began managing the national spice industry directly. Pierre Poivre was a man who knew his stuff, so they assigned him to oversee the islands of France and Bourbon. During his management of the islands, he sent endless expeditions around the world in search of rare plants, which he planted in a spectacular garden which is still thriving today. During his term, Poivre cultivated cloves, peppers, cinnamon, allspice, almonds and of course, his precious nutmegs. He trained young men on the islands to care for all kinds of rare and exotic plants, even those which weren’t well understood. Unfortunately, almonds and cloves weren’t the only expensive imports Poivre oversaw. When France acquired the islands of France and Bourbon, the two landmasses had no indigenous populations. This made administration fairly easy at first – but the island lacked enough of a labor force to do any serious growing, so 17th century France used its favorite shortcut: slavery. It was only a short distance from the African mainland to the tiny islands, and thousands of men, women and children made the journey over the next 200 years. While Poivre was relatively enlightened for his time, personally arguing against the slave trade and introducing legislation to improve living conditions for the enslaved people under his jurisdiction, let’s not kid ourselves: Poivre’s goal as governor was to grow the enslaved population on the island. Poivre viewed enslaved people the way France viewed spices: it would be better and more affordable to produce your own supply than import them from somewhere else. He promoted programs to encourage enslaved men and women to form families and bear lots of children. The plan worked, and the population of Bourbon ballooned. Enslaved men, women and children on Bourbon performed a wide variety of jobs, from simple cleaning to highly specialized farming. They were considered especially skilled at taking care of the island’s precious plants. When a ship pulled into port in 1822 carrying a large number of vanilla plants, the samples had a prestigious geneology. Tracing their way back to Paris, and then across the Channel, these plants were cut from the same extraordinary vanilla orchid which had bloomed in a British greenhouse. For two decades, the most educated, privileged minds of Europe had been tending to this vanilla plant – and for two decades, they had failed to make it yield diddly squat. For the next two decades, the white planters of Bourbon kept up this tradition, yielding diddly squat, but colonially. So it was no small surprise when a young enslaved boy named Edmund took his…

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68. Antoine Parmentier & The History of the Potato Apr 29, 2021

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“The vegetable of the shack and the château.” – Le marquis de Cussy April showers bring May flowers – unless they bring floods, famine, and fear. This month, I’m looking at the moment in French history when farmers turned their nose up at the foods of the New World – until they realized what the potato had to offer. Antoine Parmentier, one of the great hype men of food history, features in this month’s episode all about the tastiest of tubers! Episode 68: “Antoine Parmentier & The History of the Potato” Antoine Parmentier, “the apostle of the potato” Portrait of Antoine Parmentier holding wheat and potato blossoms that moment when u run into the king and it’s potato blossom season Transcript “Le légume de la cabane et du château.” – Le marquis de Cussy Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire! I’m your host, Diana, and most of this script was written over the course of a gloomy, rainy weekend here in San Francisco. As always, the arrival of rain in the Bay Area has only one appropriate response: “Ah, but we need the rain” – and it’s true, California is always in a fluctuating state of drought, and this year is particularly bad. I say this to explain that I have climate shifts on the brain right now, and my recent reading all focuses on the relationships between humans, cities, and weather. This month, as we wait to see whether April showers really do turn into May flowers, I’d like to do a prequel episode, if you will. If you’ve been a listener from the start – or if you’ve taken a dig through the archives – you’ll remember that the debut episode of this podcast centers around the volcanic explosion which kicked off a series of bread riots in France, acting as kindling for the French Revolution. Today, let’s ask this question: why didn’t that volcano trigger riots in Britain, or other countries in Europe? Or to put it another way, we associate the French Revolution with an uprising of millions of French peasants. It was the 1780s, why on earth did France still have so many peasants? Today, we’re taking a closer look at a dreadful century when France was – horror of horrors – out of date, behind the times, and out of fashion. As the rest of the West underwent an agricultural revolution, the French kept her ancient farming practices – no matter what the cost. One of the greatest revolutions in French history didn’t take place in Paris, or even Versailles, but out in the sticks, where wheat – the so-called staff of life – gave way to new crops, and a whole new way of life. In this episode, let us appreciate one of the great changemakers of French history: the potato. Subsistence farming/the old ways “And six years thou shalt sow thy land, and shalt gather in the fruits thereof: but the seventh year thou shalt let it rest and lie still; that the poor of thy people may eat: and what they leave the beasts of the field shall eat.” This passage from the book of Exodus perfectly captures the shmita, or the Sabbath year of the ancient world, in which farmers would spend an entire year letting their fields sit, fallow, as the soil rested and recovered. Though they wouldn’t have known why at the time, the chemistry checks out. Cereal grains, like wheat and rye, are “scavenger” plants – their roots dig down, down, down into the soil, gobbling up nutrients and incorporating them into the the stems and leaves, thus producing a nutritious crop with enough vitamins and minerals to sustain, oh, the human race. But scavenging the soil comes at a cost: planting cereal grains like wheat and barley in the same dirt year after year eventually leeches those nutrients, especially nitrogen, out of the soil. Things stop growing. Giving the farm a break – a sabbatical, if you will, eh eh – let those biblical farms recover and kept the soil from eroding. There was just one problem: what do you do during, you know, the year without a harvest? The impracticality of going a year without any harvest led to the development of the “two-field system” in which the farm was split in half – one field would be planted with crops while the other sat empty, and the next year they’d swap places. This system worked okay, which is why it persisted for thousands of years, but like a Gillette executive innovating razor blades, you’ve always got to ask yourself, what if we added another one? Around the year 800, French farmers gave it a shot – and it took feudal Europe by storm. Under the new system, you needed – you guessed it – three fields. In the spring, you’d plant beans or oats in your first field. In the fall, you’d plant wheat in your second field. The third field would lay fallow, just chillin’ out. Beans are nitrogen-fixers, they speed up the process of introducing nutrients back into the soil, so the land doesn’t just recover, it’s positively bursting with fertility. Meanwhile, the third field sits around fallow, with cattle grazing on the weeds and contributing free manure into the process. The three-field system was a huge improvement: most obviously, you only had one third of your land sitting around doing nothing at a given moment instead of one half. You now had two harvests each year instead of one. Better yet, one of those harvests was a cash crop, which could help you buy food to live on during winter. Finally, the more successful farmers were able to raise livestock. It was definitely an improvement over the Sabbath year, but over the two thousand years that this system was in place, things started to get…complicated. The need for food often took second place after the need for power, and the three-field system in its most common form, the “open field system” was a byzantine arrangement which had less to do with keeping everyone fed than with keeping everyone compliant. The system was juuuust productive enough to keep Europeans from starving…until, of course, it wasn’t. Feudalism is just a big daisy chain of power: at the top you’ve got God, and God bestows the crown on the king. The king bestows land onto his favorite lords. The lords then divided their vast tracts of land into tiny strips, which they rented out to local tenants. Here, this is your strip in the first field, this is your strip in the second field, this is your strip in the third field. It’s a bit like renting a parking space at your apartment building, and renting another parking space by your house – you probably won’t be using both of them at the same time, but you definitely want access to each of them when its turn comes up. Tenant farmers spent a loooot of time walking back and forth between their little strips. The tenants had the right to farm their little strips, and as long as they had rent money for the lord, the lord didn’t care about how you farmed it. The system prized stability over everything else: a lord couldn’t evict you or replace you, and you weren’t allowed to go somewhere else to work or try something besides farming. This was the system practiced by most of the European continent for centuries on end, from Charlemagne through the Renaissance. Whether you were farming in Normandy, East Anglia, or the banks of the Elbe, you were farming your little strips on somebody else’s land until you died. Unfortunately, that happened sooner rather than later for millions of Europeans. Life in the three field system was, to put it simply, precarious. Crop yields weren’t very high, which meant you didn’t have much of a buffer. If you planted 10 wheat seeds, you’d get 40 wheat seeds at harvest, which was just enough for you to save half for next fall and eat the other half to stay alive through winter. If you had a bad wheat harvest, you could use the cash from your bean crop. But if you had a year of bad beans and bad wheat? God help you. No food for winter, and no cash to buy more – farmers frequently found themselves making an agonizing choice about whether to eat the wheat grains they were trying to save for next year’s crop. Yeah, you’d need those grains to plant – but what was the point of saving them if you weren’t going to be alive to plant them? Everybody lived on the subsistence line, and one run of bad luck was enough to doom entire villages. In 1315, everyone’s luck ran out. Seven weeks after Easter, the rains began. “It rained most marvellously and for so long,” one witness observed. But the shine wore off as the rains continued. Day after day, and then week after week, those precious spring cash crops drowned under the weight of all that water. Anxious, the tenant farmers of feudal Europe turned to their precious fall crops, which would have to be gangbusters if they were all going to make it through the year. But it was just more bad news: September 1315 was freezing cold and rainy, and that harvest got trampled into the mud like the one before. A whole year of farming wasted. Most people assumed they’d been cursed by God, and no wonder. Even the French king, Louis X, on the eve of battle outside Flanders, found himself turning around before all the horses got stuck in the mud. Usually, when a village suffered a bad harvest, well-connected families compensated by networking with friends and family in other villages. What happens when everyone’s harvests fail at the same time? Worse yet, what if it happens again the next year? 1316 was just as wet as the 1315, and two bad harvests in a row was enough to kill a continent. From Normandy to Norway, villages filled with starving peasants, who ate diseased cattle and died on the side of the road. Unable to find nutritious food, humans ate questionable substances and died of malnutrition and disease. As desperate workers migrated in search of food, entire villages sat abandoned. In 1316, the entire grape harvest of France failed, and wouldn’t recover for nearly a decade. Livestock, just as hungry as their humans, succumbed to pests and disease, taking with them the last source of nutrition. Across the nation, French churches led special services and parades praying for good weather and food, but to no avail. Europe’s bad weather continued for seven years, and even after the famine ended, those who were lucky enough to survive it were forever weakened by the experience. When a mysterious plague arrived from Asia a few decades later, it found a frail, malnourished population, especially susceptible to disease, and it wiped out nearly one third of Europe. Life in France While farmers in the Low Countries were innovating their way out of famine, the vast peasantry of France was too busy surviving crisis after crisis. After the great famine years of the 14th century, followed by the Black Death which wiped out as much as 42% of the French population, the 15th century proved to be another endless series of disasters. Between 1420 and 1450, peasants faced massive food shortages at least 7 times in Paris alone. Roughly every ten years, the crops failed, and bad winters and worse wars kept people hungry until the middle of the century, when the French population finally recovered enough to repopulate the villages devastated by the Black Plague a hundred years earlier. The good times lasted for a few decades, before the return of cold winters spurred panic across the country, reaching its climax in a series of witchcraft trials. For most of the 16th century, England and France both followed the same patterns of traditional farming, which left the peasants existing at subsistence level at best, constantly vulnerable to the luck of the weather. Then, in the 1600s, something changed in Britain. Within one hundred years, Britain would undergo the first of a series of agricultural revolutions, and a stubborn, starving France found itself stuck in the past. Ironically, this thousand year cycle of feast, famine and fallow fields came to an end in France itself, though the rest of the country didn’t know it. In the same fields of Flanders where Louis X had to turn his horses around to escape the deadly rains of 1315, farmers were determined to figure out how to break the endless grind of subsistence farming. Long before the Enlightenment, Flemish farmers began conducting experiments to see which crops fared better in their local soil, and their discoveries changed the way humans farm for the first time in two thousand years. How to improve on a three-field system? That’s right. Give the Gillette executive another raise because that’s right, we’re going to add another field. Say hello to the four-field system. It changed what Europeans grew, and when they grew it. First, the people of Flanders ate their vegetables. Unlike the British and French, who stuck to a diet of beer and bread with perhaps the occasional onion for centuries after the discovery of the New World, Flemish farmers were open minded about new varieties of vegetables and crops making their way across the Atlantic. Not only could the Flemish eat these crops, so could their livestock – how handy! Different countries had their fodder crop of choice, but the Flemish particularly loved the humble turnip, whose leafy greens fed the cattle, and whose starchy bases fed the farmers. Second, Flemish farmers soon realized that certain kinds of grazing crops did just as good a job at restoring the soil as a season of doing nothing. Clover was particularly miraculous: cows loved it, but so did soil. Clover is very nitrogen rich, and a field of wheat or rye planted where clover used to be will be gangbusters. By the 1600s, the Flemish had perfected their system: four fields, each staggered but following the same sequence – wheat, then animal fodder, then barley, then a grazing crop. No more fallow fields, no more wasted land, and enough year round crops to keep livestock happy and well-fed around the clock. For two thousand years, autumn meant it was time to slaughter most of your livestock, because you couldn’t afford to feed them your precious wheat during the winter. Every harvest festival, every Christmas feast, is a legacy of this ancient tradition. For the first time, farmers could sustain all of their livestock over the course of the winter, feeding them clover and hay during the warm months and turnips during the winter. Farmers had diversified their portfolio, so to speak, and were no longer doomed by a single bad harvest or a year of cheap wheat prices. As anyone who’s ever played Stardew Valley knows, keeping livestock unlocks the real moneymakers – leather, cheese, milk, and more. Suddenly, Flemish farmers were squeezing incredible amounts of nutrition out of their land. Suddenly, Flemish farmers were living longer, healthier lives, and making enough money to lift themselves out of subsistence. Suddenly, starvation was no longer waiting just outside the gates. It was a milestone in human agriculture. The landowners of Britain caught on relatively quickly. The landowners of France did not – and they’d come to regret it. Change comes to Britain During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Londoners started seeing a new sight at the marketplace: vegetables. A wave of Dutch and Flemish immigrants brought with them the techniques – and the turnips – they’d perfected over the past century. As one witness recorded, they were the “first gardiners that came into these parts to plant cabbages and cauliflower and to sow Turnips, and Carrots, and Parsnips, to sow Raith, Pease, all of which at that time were great rarities, we having few or none in England but what came from Holland and Flanders…so ignorant were we of Gardening in those days.” Queen Elizabeth herself was a big fan of the newfangled treat called carrots. Nevertheless, it took many years for the farming techniques these newcomers used to get adopted by their neighbors. Here’s the thing about British lords of the 18th century: they really, genuinely loved farming. Read through any literature of the era and the lords are always having long discussions in front of the fireplace about how to drain such and such marsh, and how to improve the harvest, and would you like to see the new chick…

Full show notes at the publisher

67. Marcel & Celeste, Part II Mar 25, 2021

Show notes

“Proust n’a aime que deux personnes, sa mere et Celeste.” – Prince Antoine Bibesco

What better way to “celebrate” a year of sheltering in place than a closer look at France’s most famous social distancer? This week, I’m looking at the curious relationship between the eccentric, reclusive writer, Marcel Proust, and his beloved housekeeper-confidant, Céleste Albaret. Together, the two hunkered down into a mostly nocturnal life of writing, collaborating, and remembering while the world outside became incomprehensible. It’s the ultimate experiment in working from home – if your Uber Eats came from the Hotel Ritz, that is! Here’s the conclusion of our two part history of Marcel & Céleste. (Listen to part one here: 66. Marcel & Celeste, Part I.)

Episode 67: “Marcel & Celeste, Part II”

Transcript

In 1916, Marcel received a surprising letter: a sixteen year old soldier who had snuck his way to the front line wrote him from the trenches to admire his work. Entering into a discussion of friendship, Proust confessed, “I am myself only when alone, and I profit from others only to the extent that they enable me to make discoveries within myself, either by making me suffer…or by their absurdities, which..help me to understand human character.” While Proust continued making sorties outside his apartment, it’s unclear whether they were out of genuine loneliness or a colder, more ambitious sort of reconnaissance. In his all-encompassing dedication to In Search of Lost Time, Marcel’s own life seemed less and less important – in many ways, it seemed, his life was already over. His real life – that of dazzling society soirees and elegant salons, was an anachronism, murdered by the war. He now existed for reconnaissance work: categorizing the beauty and elegance he had known, trying to capture its essence in full. One night, he knocked on the door of a quartet leader, asking to hear a particular work of music as soon as possible. The two of them shared a cab around Paris, picking up the other musicians, and ferrying them back to 102 boulevard Haussman at one in the morning. Another time, he interviewed his housekeeper Celeste’s young niece to accurately capture the writing of a high school girl. He spent his money recklessly – what use was money if not in service of his work, and what use was money if he was going to die young? Of this he was convinced, the only question was whether he would finish his great work first. “I am a very old man, Celeste,” he once told his beloved housekeeper and friend. “I shan’t live long…and that is why I am so anxious to finish.” In 1917, as World War One ground up a generation of Europeans, Marcel Proust began attending regular dinners at the Hotel Ritz. There, he dined with other refugees of the old world: princesses on the run from empires which no longer existed, sophisticated artists and intellectuals, aging dandies and more. Relying on his personal charm and the gossip of the Ritz staff, Proust learned everything he’d ever wanted to know about the ruling classes of the aristocracy. Spending the dwindling reserves of his fortune on lobster and champagne while the war approached its climax, Proust was an eyewitness to the changing of the guard. On July 27th, 1917, attending a dinner party in the Ritz hotel room of a Greek princess, Proust heard the air raid siren go off. Standing on the balcony, Proust replayed that fateful night from three years earlier, “watching this wonderful Apocalypse in which the airplanes climbing and swooping seemed to complement and eclipse the constellations.” A few months later, Proust stepped out onto the sidewalk and encountered two soldiers: Americans. It was the end of the war, and the end of Proust’s world. In the years to come, Paris would fill up with this new, young, “Lost Generation”, and the world of Bizet, Zola, and Anatole France was giving way to Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald. On November 11th, Germany signed the armistice. “What a marvelous allegro presto is this finale,” he wrote, “after the infinite slow movements of the beginning and all that followed.” Marcel’s brother, Robert, returned home unharmed, but 1,384,000 men did not. Even then, Marcel knew, it was the beginning of the end. Just as the second volume of In Search of Lost Time appeared in stores, Marcel received a blow: he was being evicted from his apartment. For a moment, he allowed himself to dream: would he live in Venice? Would he finish his life’s work in Florence? But reality intruded – he was broke, and, his doctor reminded him, he would not survive the trip. “For an asthmatic,” he wrote, “moving to new quarters is usually fatal” but he was determined to finish his work. For months, Céleste ran ragged, making arrangements for Marcel, packing up his belongings, selling his possessions, and to the eternal chagrin of Proust scholars everywhere, burning Proust’s old notebooks in the stove. After taking one last look around his beloved home, Marcel exited 102 boulevard Haussman and with it, his connection with the outside world. As Céleste recalled, “Death began for him with our leaving Boulevard Haussman.” At once, Marcel set to work recreating his beloved isolation chamber. In went the carpets, the servants’ bell, his electric lamp, his electric kettle, the thick blue satin curtains. The apartment was freezing cold, and Marcel was hardly attached to his physical surroundings. According to Céleste, “he spent those last two years…in an atmosphere that already resembled the grave.” When she asked if he was comfortable in his new home, he would simply reply that they were “only passing through. When I have finished we will be more comfortable.” As he had murmured during their seaside strolls in Cabourg, Marcel assured Céleste that someday, when he was finished, they would travel, and he would show her the marvels of the world. Inside his cloistered apartment, Proust gasped “like a half-drowned person pulled out of the water, unable to say a word or make the slightest movement.” Outside, the second volume of In Search of Lost Time was a bestseller. On December 10th, Within A Budding Grove received the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honor. Within a day, the first edition was entirely sold out. Suddenly, the outside world spilled into Proust’s sanctuary. Within three days, Marcel received 886 letters of congratulations. Just before the publication of the third installment, Marcel received word that he had been awarded the Legion of Honor, just like his father. Marcel was world famous – but his grasp on life was more tenuous than ever. Whether out of stress, illness, or just plain addiction, Marcel depended on heavy doses of drugs to sleep. Life was now a race against time. He’d finished the all of his manuscripts, and now he had to correct the proofs, send them to publishers, and see them published before he died. By May 1921, the third and fourth volumes appeared in bookstores, and Proust could not stand out of bed without falling down. One week later, Marcel made it all the way out of his apartment to the Jeu de Paume museum, to attend an exhibit on Dutch masters, including a work by Vermeer. Standing outside the terrace of the museum, a passerby recognized the world-famous author and took a snapshot. Pale and sickly, with bags under his eyes but impeccably dressed, he looks into the distance, perhaps unaware that he is being photographed. He would never be photographed again in his lifetime. He spent the next six months in bed. He dragged himself out of bed to attend a lavish party on New Year’s Eve. He would not see the next one.

Sources:

The two biggies:

Marcel Proust: A Life, William Carter, 2013.
Monsieur Proust, Celeste Albaret, 2003. (Screw those reviewers, reading this book was a joy, I loved it.)

The rest:

“Marcel Proust and the medicine of the Belle Epoque” pamphlet, the Royal Society of Medicine: https://www.rsm.ac.uk/media/2060/marcel-proust-exhibition-booklet.pdf
Lamont, Rosette, and Céleste Albaret. “Interview Avec Céleste Albaret.” The French Review, vol. 44, no. 1, 1970, pp. 15–33. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/385924. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.
“In the Footsteps of Marcel Proust” William Friedkin, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/t-magazine/william-friedkin-marcel-proust.html
Boym, Svetlana. “Nostalgia and its discontents.” The Hedgehog Review, vol. 9, no. 2, 2007, p. 7+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A168775861/AONE?u=sfpl_main&sid=AONE&xid=9c209110. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.
Manley, Janet. “Longing for a Distant Home Amid a Pandemic.” New York Times, 14 Sept. 2020, p. B6(L). Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A635356510/AONE?u=sfpl_main&sid=AONE&xid=115d21c9. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.
“these were the days; OPINION.” Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 11 July 2020, p. O1,O6,O7. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A629146415/AONE?u=sfpl_main&sid=AONE&xid=6f8acd35. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.

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66. Marcel & Celeste, Part I Mar 25, 2021

Show notes

“Proust n’a aime que deux personnes, sa mere et Celeste.” – Prince Antoine Bibesco What better way to “celebrate” a year of sheltering in place than a closer look at France’s most famous social distancer? This week, I’m looking at the curious relationship between the eccentric, reclusive writer, Marcel Proust, and his beloved housekeeper-confidant, Céleste Albaret. Together, the two hunkered down into a mostly nocturnal life of writing, collaborating, and remembering while the world outside became incomprehensible. It’s the ultimate experiment in working from home – if your Uber Eats came from the Hotel Ritz, that is! Episode 66: “Marcel & Celeste, Part I” Transcript Bienvenue and welcome back to the Land of Desire! I’m your host, Diana, and before I get started, I’d like to give a big welcome to new listeners! For those who don’t already know, this week I was able to live out one of my childhood dreams. Growing up, my favorite section of the newspaper was always the advice columns. What can I say -I love telling people what to do! My friend, Danny Lavery, is better known as Dear Prudence over on Slate, and this week they invited me to be their guest host! For my longtime listeners, if you’ve ever thought, “Hmm, I really love Diana’s weird anecdotes about French history, could she tell me how to raise my children?” then it’s a banner day for you. You can listen to the episode at slate.com/podcasts/dear-prudence, and I’ll put the link in this episode’s show notes. Meanwhile, if you’re a Dear Prudence listener tuning in for the first time, thank you and welcome! With that happy announcement out of the way, let’s turn to today’s episode. Listeners, we have come to the end of a very, very long year. I’m cranky, I’m bored, I’m really really really good at baking now and I miss my friends terribly. One of the only ways I’ve gotten through 2020 with my sanity arguably intact is by experiencing it side-by-side with my loving boyfriend, Daniel, or as he prefers to be known, the much-abused unpaid intern and occasional producer of this show. He has been the bright spot of my year, and I wanted to pay him back by giving him a little Christmas gift: an episode all about his favorite person in the world, and perhaps the person best suited to comment on this strange period of history, the great French writer, Marcel Proust. 2020 was a year of seclusion and confinement, and it was also a year of transition. We speak of the Before Times, and a world, a whole way of life, which feels like it’s slipping out of our reach. At the same time, we hunker down, sheltering ourselves against an invisible enemy, staying within the safe confines of home and wiping down the groceries. Who could better understand the story of this year than a man conceived during a siege, who spent the last third of his life as a recluse, terrified of infection, dreaming of a lost world and mourning the impossibility of return? But there is one aspect of Marcel Proust’s life which feels especially relevant to us today, a part of his story which is often skipped over. While Proust famously loved and adored his sainted mother, his later years are inextricably linked to Proust’s father: the world-famous epidemiologist, Adrien Proust, pioneer of the modern cordon sanitaire. Today, we will navigate between the inner world and the outer, between safety and exposure, between past and present, between reality and memory, between sickness and health, between the glittering world of fin-de-siècle Paris and the dark chamber in which our story is set. The chamber in question was a refuge, it was a nest, and in many ways, it was a cage. This is the story of Proust’s bedroom. I. Open with impending siege (so he thinks) of Paris in September 1914, culminating in the flight to Cabourg II. Flashback to 1870 and the Siege of Paris III. Proust’s childhood illnesses (what is dad doing during this time?) IV. November 1913 – Swann’s Way is published. IV. Says goodbye to the Paris that he knew and leaves for Cabourg. But the hotel is no escape (soldiers etc) and so he must return home. Coughing fit on the way home resigns him to the idea that he doesn’t have much longer – and so he must devote his remaining time to finishing his great work. Begins life as a recluse. One evening in September 1914, Marcel Proust woke in the middle of the night and took a last look at Paris. It was the opening salvo of World War One, and Paris, everyone assumed, was doomed. With Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops on the march, it would only be a matter of time before glittering fin-de-siècle Paris found herself ground under German boots. It should have been a joyous time for Proust. Six years previously, he’d begun working on what he believed would be his masterpiece: a sprawling multivolume meditation on time and memory. After a string of rejections, he published the first volume, Swann’s Way, in November 1913, to wild acclaim. But he had little time to savor the victory – only a few months later, France found herself preparing for war. On August 2nd, just before Germany issued a formal declaration of war, Proust wrote a letter to a friend. “My petty interests…seem wholly unimportant when I think that millions of men are going to be massacred.” Three million Frenchmen received mobilization orders that day, including Proust’s friends and family. Though he’d done routine military service as a young man, Proust was far too ill to fight now, and he found himself left behind in a city full of women, children and the elderly, all of whom were preparing to flee. On August 29, Proust witnessed the first breach: a German monoplane flew over Paris and dropped a few bombs. By September 6th, the German army was only 30 miles outside Paris, all the taxis in Paris were barreling to the front lines carrying reinforcements, the government was packing up for Bordeaux, and Marcel Proust stood in the moonlight, making his farewells. He was leaving for Cabourg, a fashionable resort town on the coast where he’d stayed every summer with his family. With his genteel wardrobe folded gently into trunks, his manuscript gathered securely in his battered old suitcase, and his medications close at hand in his trusted housekeeper’s purse, Proust was one of a million Parisians saying goodbye. “In seeing this immense Paris that I did not know I loved so much, waiting, in its useless beauty, for the onslaught that could no longer be stopped, I could not keep myself from weeping.” Almost exactly forty-four years earlier, another man had faced almost identical circumstances: an invading army on the doorstep, Paris preparing herself for a siege, a city unsure whether to stay and fight or flee for safety. Like Marcel, this young man was at a turning point: after rising steadily through the ranks of his profession, he was on the cusp of a great breakthrough. Like Marcel, he would use the war to come as fodder for his career, and by the war’s conclusion, he would enjoy international fame. But as the Prussians advanced towards Paris on that sunny afternoon, the young man had only one thing on his mind: it was September 3rd, 1870, and Doctor Adrian Proust was getting married. At the age of 32, Adrian Proust embarked on the adventure of his life. For the past ten years, he’d been a rising star: graduating with honors from the Academie de médecin, before defending his doctoral thesis in 1866. After passing one final exam, Adrian was certified for a teaching post at the Academie de médecin – but a medical catastrophe that summer changed the course of his career. For the third time that century, a dreaded monster reared its head: cholera. Cholera was a disease of cities, found where too many people cluster together and contaminate the water supply. Originating out of India, the disease made its way to Europe by boat, and as trade between Asia and Europe grew, so did the threat of an outbreak. In 1832, cholera arrived in France and killed 100,000 people. In 1849, it returned and killed three times that many. In 1866, as Dr. Proust began weighing the option of a teaching position or a practice, cholera returned to Paris, deadlier than ever. That year’s outbreak had a fatality rate of 50%. All summer, Dr. Proust worked long hours, caring for patients while maintaining strict personal hygiene standards to keep himself from getting infected. As hard as he tried to save his patients, there was only so much Adrian could do – once infected, patients often died within 72 hours, by which point their family members would usually arrive with symptoms of their own. The only way to beat cholera, he knew, was to prevent it from happening in the first place. Adrian Proust belonged to a burgeoning discipline we would eventually come to know as epidemiology. Studying under his mentor, Adrian learned about the concept of a cordon sanitaire – a means of keeping infected persons isolated to prevent the spread of disease. While John Snow had famously shut off the Broad Street Pump in London during its 1854 cholera outbreak, the jury was still out about what exactly caused cholera, and it would be another 20 years before a German scientist discovered the guilty bacteria. In the meantime, Doctor Proust experimented in his own clinic, by isolating his cholera patients away from everyone else, to great success. After seeing the results on such a small scale, Proust wondered whether big results could only come from big measures: what if you could apply a cordon sanitaire to a whole country? What if a country with an outbreak could be hemmed in, to prevent outsiders from getting in to contract an infection, and to prevent infected people from getting out? In 1869, Doctor Proust represented France at the International Health Conference in Vienna to propose this audacious idea. “The question of international hygiene,” he proclaimed, “passes and surpasses political frontiers.” But before you could even begin to stop the transmission route of a disease, you’d have to know where, exactly, that transmission route was located. With the blessings of the conference, Doctor Proust set out on a grand international quest: starting in Russia, making his way to Persia, and then from Persia to Mecca, Turkey, Egypt and then finally back to Paris, he would map the voyage of the invisible enemy across the Western world. The voyage spanned thousands of miles, crossed on ever-changing modes of transport. Leaving Paris in a gleaming luxury train, after crossing into Russia he downgraded to the rudimentary wooden kibitka carriage. From there, he crossed the Caucausus Mountains on horseback, before descending into Persia on the back of a camel. In Tehran, Adrian found himself meeting the shah of Persia, desperate for relief from the cholera epidemics raging through his own empire. In Mecca, Proust watched millions of pilgrims sharing squalid conditions on the road to Hajj. Finally, in Egypt, Doctor Proust walked through the ports, inspecting ships bound for Europe. Retracing the path of every cholera outbreak of the 19th century so far, Doctor Proust had asked himself, “Where was cholera breaking out just before it reached Europe?” Every time, the answer was the same: “Egypt”. As the chokepoint between India and Europe, Egypt, Proust would one day write, “must be considered Europe’s barrier against cholera.” After completing his epic voyage, Doctor Proust returned home on November 28, 1869, accompanied by steamer trunks full of notes. He was the talk of Paris, and everyone wanted to meet this brave, pioneering young doctor to hear of his adventures – including a beautiful young woman from a good family, Jeanne Weil. (Jzhan Vey-uh) In the summer of 1870, Adrian made one last trip to inspect ports of entry around the French coast, but it was no time to be far from home. The Prussians were rattling their sabers, and Adrian had a girl waiting for his return. On September 2nd, 1870, the French army surrended to the Prussians. On September 3rd, Adrian Proust and Jeanne Weil were married. On September 19th, Paris was under siege. In a single terrible blow, after a year spent traveling thousands of miles across the world, Adrian’s world suddenly shrank to a single city. He found himself subject to an older, crueler form of isolation: the cordon militaire. Cut off from the outside world, Paris was a world apart. With all lines of communication cut except a few brave carrier pigeons and a daring hot air balloonist, Parisians knew they were on their own. Nothing could cross the barrier, not even food. Rationing kicked in at once. The cows disappeared, then the horses, then eventually dogs, cats, rats, and worse. Almost immediately, disease ravaged the capital. Two months into the siege, smallpox deaths tripled, and dysentery deaths quintupled. By the beginning of December 1870, Parisians were dying at triple the normal rate. Almost as terrible as the hunger and disease was the isolation: like Susan Sontag’s “kingdom of the ill” Parisians existed in a different time and space from the rest of the nation. They felt abandoned and forgotten. Paris was a world apart. At that moment, Jeanne came to Adrian with an announcement: she was pregnant. In the weeks ahead, Paris descended into a hellish winter: in subzero temperatures, Prussians cut the gas lines, firewood ran out, and food was a distant memory. By the end of the month, as discussed in the second episode of this podcast, desperate Parisians broke into the city zoo to eat the animals. Victor Hugo’s Christmas dinner was a slice of roasted elephant. Finally, on January 26th, just before the last of the food was set to run out, the French government in Versailles declared a truce. While starving Parisians fought over rations distributed by the Prussian army, the French government reassembled at Versailles to determine the outcome of the Prussian war. By that point, Parisians were estranged from their countrymen in every way: for four months, they’d held out against the Prussians, refusing to betray their country by giving in to the enemy, paying a terrible cost for their loyalty. But for what? Now, they’d been sold out by the same bungling government which had gotten them into this war, and if the peace treaty wasn’t insulting enough, it couldn’t have been more insensitive to the needs of starving, impoverished Parisians. In one outcry which feels particularly resonant today, the government announced that all landlords were entitled to full back payment on rent, which had been suspended during the siege, at the same time they suspended wages to the National Guard. Little surprise that in March, a violent uprising commenced in the poor districts of Paris, which we now know as the Commune. Fearing for the safety of his wife and unborn child, Adrian weighed his options. He’d just spent four months enduring the unthinkable in the city he loved. But he couldn’t bring himself to abandon his patients. When Jeanne begged him to stay home rather than travel through the barricades to treat wounded fighters, Adrian refused. In a prescient argument his son would one day echo, Adrian explained that he had a duty to fulfill, and a fear of death was not a good enough reason to abandon his duty. When Jeanne was six months pregnant, an insurgent took fire at Adrian, and the bullet just barely grazed his coat. Jeanne dissolved into fear, and became so overwhelmed with anxiety for Adrian’s safety that the doctor began fearing for her health, and that of their baby. More for their protection than his own, Adrian finally crossed the barrier, passing his family through the city gates to the estate of Jeanne’s uncle, Uncle Louis, in the suburb of Auteuil. In May, Paris burned. In June, the government broke through from the other side. After months of Parisians trying to get out of the capital, the French army was now getting in, killing 17,000 Communards and dumping their bodies in mass graves. A few weeks later, on July 10th, 1871, Jeanne went into labor. Once agai…

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65. A Trip to the Spa Feb 25, 2021

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“The waters of Vichy…gave me back my strength.” – Madame de Sévigné The darkest days of winter are here, and I think it’s time we all indulged in a little self-care, non? My own quarantine hobby, skincare, set me down a particular path. Why was I spraying my face with thermal spa water from France? What is thermal spa water? Why do we drink thermal spa water? Does any of it really do anything? France loves her thermal spas, no matter what form they take: rustic watering hole, glamorous resort, or rigorous medical establishment. Episode 65: “A Trip to the Spa” The history of French thermal spas: 19th century postcard from Evian-les-bain, one of the premiere thermal spas of France Classic Belle Epoque poster for a thermal spa – note the scantily clad ladies in their alluring gowns, oh la la. The rudimentary mud pits of Versailles courtiers’ favorite thermal spas at Bourbon L’Archimbault. We need a baigneuse on duty – there’s some funny business.. Transcript Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire! I’m your host, Diana, and here’s a little quiz to see whether any of you have spent the last oh-my-god year of the pandemic with the same hobby I have. Can you guess what this list has in common? Vichy. La Roche-Posay. Uriage. Avène. Caudalie. I can already feel a lot of you nodding along because you’ve already guessed the answer. Yeah, I wear sweatpants all day every day and I haven’t worn makeup since March 2020, but my skin? My skincare is glaaaaamorous, darlings, I am absolutely babying it. I just listed off a bunch of the most well-respected – and widely distributed – skincare brands in France. But that’s not all. If you’re very clever, you may also notice that all of the names I listed have something else in common. Every single one of those brands traces its origins back to a natural water source – whether it’s a world-famous spa town frequented by royalty, or a very picturesque babbling brook on some mythical farmland. All of these brands boast about their very special eau thermales, all of which are supposed to have very special and distinct healing properties. A few nights ago, while I was halfway through my night routine, I found myself wondering about those spa towns. The French really go crazy for hot springs – I personally associate hot springs with, like, a bunch of outdoor hot tubs, maybe a weekend getaway with the girls. For thousands of years, natural springs have provided the French with relief from major and minor physical ailments, tons of society gossip, a respite from the bustle of city life, and maybe, just maybe, a miracle or two. So this week, maybe it’s time to fill up the tub and enjoy this episode during a nice, warm soak in some hot water, because we’re taking a trip through the history of the spa. Take a stroll down the Boulevard Saint-Germain today, and you’ll pass any number of high-end pharmacies and drugstores, advertising a dazzling assortment of creams, lotions and potions to cure what ails you, whether it’s eczema, acne, indigestion, athlete’s foot or simply the inexorable march of time. Starting at Les Deux Magots, you could walk past the Pharmacie de Saint-Germain de Pres, the Pharmacie Beauté, Pharmacie Saint-Sulpice, and the Pharmacie Odeon within the space of a few blocks. But continue on a few more feet and you’ll encounter a different sort of dispensary altogether: the most ancient source of medicine in the city of Paris. Here on the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Boulevard Saint-Michel is the famous Musée de Cluny, home of the city’s most ancient Roman baths. Built approximately 2200 years ago, the baths were enormous in their day, stretching over 6,000 square meters of valuable real estate. Back then, the ancient Roman outpost called Lutetia required constant guarding, and this part of town held a host of administrative buildings – and military outposts. In Ancient Rome, wherever troops traveled, public baths followed, for rather obvious reasons. While rich Romans might build private baths in their homes, the general public was welcome and encouraged to take part in a public dip, where they could scrub themselves clean, exchange gossip, maybe broker a few deals, and even get a little workout in. Men and women both enjoyed use of the public baths, and free admission meant there was a genuine cross-section of society present in the pools. The ruins at Cluny are pretty typical Roman bath architecture: the complex was divided into three sections, in which water was available at different temperatures. First, you’d enjoy the piping hot water straight outta the ground in the calderia, sweating out your impurities. Then, you’d move into the tepidarium, where the naturally hot water had been allowed to cool off a bit. Here, you might get a massage with some essential oils. Finally, you’d step into the frigidarium, which is exactly what you think – a nippy environment to close the pores and finish off your day before going into the locker rooms to pick up your clothes. Even today, visitors to Cluny can see the sophisticated pipes which carried water around to the different chambers, and step inside the enormous frigidarium which remains in great condition for a 2000 year old YMCA. The golden age of the Cluny bathhouse lasted for about 200 years, after which point a roving band of barbarians sacked the baths along with the rest of the city. After that, bathhouses which survived invading hordes acquired a seedier reputation, and most of them fell into disuse or disrepute for the next thousand years. The next thousand years are extremely dirty and smelly, so let’s time travel all the way up to the year 1571. All over Europe, philosophers, scientists, artists and politicians were rediscovering Ancient Greece and Rome, experiencing a rebirth – a renaissance, if you will, eh, eh – of classical culture and thought. Early scientists had developed a bunch of very early lab equipment, and they were always excited when they came up with new ideas about how to use it. At some point early on in the Renaissance, someone thought it might be a good idea to figure out just what, exactly, was in natural spring water. After all, some natural waters smelled like rotten eggs, some of them made you feel sick when you drank it, and some of it had a special color. For the next two hundred years, whenever anyone with a 16th century beaker had an afternoon to kill, he’d trudge up the hill to the nearest natural spring, distill the water, and try to figure out what what the sediment was made out of. After about 200 years of this tinkering, a man named Andrea Bacci decided somebody needed to write the book on natural springs, and look, he was just such a man! His work, De Thermis, was a culmination of nearly 200 years of European men trudging up the hills with a canteen, and it was a pretty monumental work. For 497 pages, Bacci’s encyclopedic work declared that no man could consider himself classically trained in medicine without understanding the healing properties of natural waters – if no less than the Ancient Romans were out there building baths everywhere they went, surely there was something of merit in them? All of a sudden, that weird little steaming watering hole up in that obscure little village was more than a local curiosity or a laundry site – suddenly, it was a direct link to a glorious past, and perhaps a key to optimal health. As he wrote in a sequel later in his career, “these waters were known to the ancients but overlooked for hundreds of years, and had now been brought back to light for the good of all.” Bacci’s book wasn’t just a press release for the magic of thermal baths – it was also a rallying cry. For one thousand years, the baths had gurgled along, right under their noses. Oh, it wasn’t that people had forgotten about the baths. Sitting in a hot tub on a cold night is a pretty instinctive endeavor, and the locals certainly enjoyed their local watering holds. But the people weren’t taking the baths seriously enough. These were very serious matters, and they ought to be overseen by doctors, not just the rough and tumble public. With that in mind, Bacci laid out a long discourse about the incredibly complex world of water therapy – and a guide to the most reputable baths in Europe. Here’s where the problem comes in: France, according to Andrea Bacci, lacked any hot springs worth a road trip. In the 16th century, the discerning hydrotherapy enthusiast would recommend hot springs in Italy, Greece, Germany, and one particularly famous Belgian hot spring in the town of Spa. But France? Why? All the once great Roman baths had crumbled into disrepute, and what was left was of questionable medical potency. All throughout the 1600s, the royal families of Europe traveled to the natural springs of their nation, and returned home with tales of wonder cures, and their pleasing odors alone must have seemed proof that miracles really do happen. Yet in France, with no respectable bath houses to speak of, the French court sat around, stewing and sweating, turning their noses up either out of snobbery or desperation to escape the smell of their neighbors. But then, in 1580, an old, familiar tune began playing at court: the king and queen had yet to produce an heir. What France may have lacked in deluxe spas, she made up for with her number of quack doctors. Royal doctors packed up Henri III and his wife and dispatched them to the the natural springs at Bourbon-Lancy. It was the first great spa day of the French nation. Kind of. The thing is, in 1580, Bourbon-Lancy was a noble, ancient…pile of rubble. The waters were definitely hot, but none of the water nerds of the previous century had ever bothered to study what was in the water, or what curative properties it might hold. But good news for Henry: he was the king, and if he and his lady wanted a luxury spa trip, by god they were going to get one. Henri’s crew sent no fewer than 150 men ahead to transform the big pile of ancient rubble into a resort fit for a king. They cleared the rubble, restored the flow of thermal water to a more robust current, and even built a lodge for guests to stay – good thing, too, since the king and queen arrived with a bunch of sick courtiers in tow. Unfortunately, the queen did not get pregnant on the trip. On the other hand, one of her courtiers, the Comtesse de Fiasque, did get pregnant on the trip. The Comtesse de Fiasque was 54 years old at the time. So maybe there was something in the water after all. The first French royal visit to a thermal bath kicked off a national frenzy to discover the waters, promote the waters, and then take the waters. Any waters. It was a boom time for French doctors, all of whom insisted that their little spring would cure warts and soothe athlete’s foot. By 1600, every puddle in France seemed to have at least one curative property, and one local champion. Like cupcake shops in New York City in 2005, most of them were doomed to fail after the craze passed, but those which had been lucky enough to secure the patronage of royals and the rich secured themselves a lasting legacy. Bourbon-l’Archambault was the favored spa of Madame de Montespan, the mistress of King Louis XIV, which meant Bourbon l’Archambault was the favored spa of every other fawning courtier at Versailles. Others in search of specific relief for specific maladies might read through a 17th century guidebook to find an appropriate treatment center. Those with bad nerves or infertility took the waters at Forges, while those with the shakes went to Vichy. The eminent Madame de Sevigne believed so strongly in the curative powers of Vichy waters that she made the difficult eight day journey multiple times, well into her old age, to treat the arthritis which left her unable to hold a pen – a fate worse than death to the famous writer. No matter which site they chose, the rich and ailing were in for a quite a ride. One can only imagine the field trip from hell, with all of Versailles struggling with their best resort wear only to spend two weeks on muddy roads, trudging through terrible weather, in the middle of nowhere. As Madame de Sevigne recalls about one journey, “we walked from daybreak until nightfall, without stopping, just two hours for dinner, a continual rain, devilish paths, always on foot, for fear of falling into terrible ruts.” Once they arrived, it wasn’t exactly rainbows and kittens. While things had improved since King Henry III’s time, most of the spa towns were just that – towns. Compared to the gilded splendor of Versailles, it was hardly luxurious to spend three weeks in a town of 2000 peasants, renting a room from a pig farmer. The spa facilities were no better: even the famous Bourbon l’Archambault, favorite of the king’s mistress, was little more than a mud pit in the ground. Whatever the spa towns may have become later, 17th century spa-going was about two things and two things only: sticking close to the king, and finding something – anything – to fix what ailed you. Even if the medicine was a hell of a pill to swallow. If Andrea Bacci was worried about one thing, it was people having too much fun at the spa. As Europe entered the Enlightenment, ‘a good soak’ became ‘a dose of hydrotherapy’ and ‘taking the waters’ meant a rigidly monitored 18 part regimen. No matter where you went, everyone’s spa trip began the same way: bleeding and purging. Yum. As soon as you’d thoroughly emptied out your body, it was time to refill at the closest drinking fountain, where you’d drink as much magical thermal water as you possibly could. You’d drink and walk around the room, and then refill your glass, and drink, and walk around the room, making polite conversation with your other hydro homies until nature called, at which point you’d duck discreetly into a back alley to, ah, well I’ll let Madame de Sevigne explain it: “At six o clock we go to the fountain. Everyone is there, and we drink while making a face, the water is boiling hot and tastes unpleasantly of saltpeter. We turn, we go, we come, we walk, we hear mass, we make water in the alley, we talk discreetly about how our water making went.” Fun! If you were there for a specific ailment, you’d proceed to all manner of hydrotherapies, most of which are pretty familiar today: sitting in a hot tub, sitting in a steam room, and so on, before you’d be swaddled in blankets and set in a dry sauna, maybe even a mud pack. Every day you’d repeat the process, or some variation, for at least two weeks, after which you waddled out resembling a California raisin. At every step of your journey, you would be supervised by a medically-qualified intendant, who reported to the king’s own physician. Working alongside the intendant was the baigneur, aka the fun police, who made sure everyone wore their modesty gowns, intervened whenever he saw horse play, and kicked out any riff-raff. When you weren’t soaking, steaming or sweating, you were eating a light, boring lunch and enjoying quiet card games and conversation, before having another light, boring dinner and going to bed by 10 PM. If you’re struggling to imagine the court of Versailles going to bed by 10 PM, I don’t blame you, but on the other hand, perhaps for the perpetually hungover and gouty courtier, it was a nice break. Whatever else may have happened, you emerged after two weeks feeling well-rested, well moisturized, with some fresh country air in your lungs. No wonder everyone sang the praises of the spa doctors upon their return. And praise wasn’t all they brought back as a souvenir: by the end of the 17th century, the nobles began bringing back the water itself – a prelude to the distribution networks to come, and the new wave of spa mania which would sweep the nation. If the cheerleaders of the 17th century spa towns were doctors, the 18th century cheerleaders were hotel owners. With every body of hot water in France getting marketed to the rich, each enterprising up-and-coming…

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64. Louis Pasteur and The History of the Vaccine Jan 21, 2021

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“I think my hand will tremble,“ – Louis Pasteur Happy New Year! The Land of Desire is BACK with an exciting – and hopeful – story to set us off on the right track in 2021. Your happy host gets to indulge her love of epidemiology a little bit without leaving you depressed in the middle of a pandemic (she swears). This week, we’re taking a look at one of the greatest French inventions of all time. Along the way, we’ll encounter Catholic masses for dogs, the worst cruise you’ve ever heard of, and a man who came a bit too close to becoming a true mad scientist, Louis Pasteur. We’re at a turning point in medical science, so what better time to look back at how far we’ve come? This week, join me for a closer look at the history of the vaccine. Episode 64: “Louis Pasteur and the History of the Vaccine” Transcript Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire! I’m your host Diana, and I’d like to start by wishing all of you a very, very happy New Year! I know it’s been a tough winter, but there are better days ahead of us. As many of you know, I’ve always been a huge epidemiology nerd, and I’ve struggled to restrain myself in the past because I know that most of my audience really doesn’t want to hear about diseases even when we aren’t going through a major pandemic. Fair enough. So I’m excited for an excuse to turn back to my favorite subject, but I promise, in a happy, optimistic way. If 2020 was the story of a disease, 2021 is looking like the story of its cure. This week, we’re taking a look at one of the greatest French inventions of all time. Along the way, we’ll encounter Catholic masses for dogs, the worst cruise you’ve ever heard of, and a man who came a bit too close to becoming a true mad scientist, Louis Pasteur. We’re at a turning point in medical science, so what better time to look back at how far we’ve come? This week, join me for a closer look at the history of the vaccine. On July 4, 1885, a nine year old boy named Joseph Meister was attacked by a dog near his home in the city of Alsace. As he cowered and shielded his face with his tiny hands, the dog lunged at him again and again, biting him. A nearby bricklayer heard the screams and managed to beat the dog back with a pair of crowbars, but not until Joseph sustained fourteen bites on his thighs, legs and his hand. Joseph’s mother rushed him to the local doctor, who applied carbolic acid to the wounds, but the two adults looked at one another with a terrible fear. Joseph was at risk for one of humanity’s deadliest diseases, a disease scary enough to inspire not one but two terrifying mythical monsters, a disease with a nearly 100% fatality rate, a disease which guaranteed the worst of all 19th century fates: an ugly death. Joseph was at risk for rabies. Joseph’s mother, beside herself with worry, asked the doctor what else could be done. The doctor must have known Joseph was in dire straits, because he made a radical suggestion: take the boy to Paris, he said. There’s a scientist there, a famous scientist, who thinks he may have a solution. Joseph, still in unbearable pain, accompanied his mother to the train station at once, and within 48 hours of the attack, they found themselves in one of the strangest buildings they’d ever stepped inside: this was the laboratory of the great Louis Pasteur, and it was filled with rabid dogs. In the long, strange cultural history of humans and diseases, rabies has always held a unique space in our minds – more specifically, in our amygdala, which controls fear. We’ve had rabies for just about as long as we’ve had domesticated dogs, and just about every ancient set of laws we can find has some sort of rule about how to handle wild dogs, rabid dogs, dogs who bite, and people who are bitten by dogs. The first known victim of rabies appears in a cuneiform tablet from ancient Mesopotamia, written about four thousand years ago. The ancient Greeks referred to lyssa, or a wild violence, while the Romans spoke of rabere – or “rage” from which we may get the word “rabies”. Over the centuries, across civilizations, the same disease appears again and again, and one thing in particular stands out: humans have always, it seems, known exactly where rabies comes from. Take a moment to appreciate that. Even during periods of time when diseases were the whims of god, justice for your sins, or the mysterious and unknowable slights of fate, rabies alone had a clear cause and effect. We didn’t have germ theory, we didn’t have microscopes, but there was one infection pathway that humans have pretty much always understood: mad dog bites man. Man goes mad. Mad dog and mad man die. The end. As it turns out, that wasn’t the entire story – it looks like rabies first made its way into bats, and then the bats found their way to the dogs, but again, in a world where you got smallpox because Zeus was in a bad mood or you lusted after your neighbor’s wife, let’s give the ancients credit where it’s due. Over the centuries, the preventative measures and treatments for rabies grew accordingly sophisticated and complex. In ancient times, a bit of fur from the dog in question would be laid on top of the bite wound – remember that next time you fix yourself a mimosa because you need a little “hair of the dog” to cure what ails ya. By the middle ages, an apothecary would put together a salve of salt, vinegar, garlic, nettles, leeks, chives, and olive oil. It was utterly useless but I bet it tasted spectacular. But as always, when you want something to be done in an unnecessarily elaborate way, nobody can do a better job than the kings of France. Obsessed with la chasse, or ‘the hunt’, French kings and aristocrats spared no expense when it came to their game animals – and the dogs they used to track them. Each year, aristocrats would have their new hunting dogs shipped to the Church of St. Menier les moret, where the very confused canines would find themselves surrounded by monks chanting prayers, singing masses, and lighting candles in hopes that the dogs would be protected from “the madness of the blood.” If you think a candlelit mass for dogs sounds eerie and macabre, wait until you see what humans come up with next. Take a moment to consider the progression of rabies in a human victim. At first, there might not be any symptoms at all. Rabies is unlike most diseases in that it avoids the superhighway of the human bloodstream, which moves germs around efficiently – but is monitored by the highway patrol officers of the immune system. Instead, rabies takes a different approach, traveling through the human nervous system. This takes awhile, and in the days and even weeks after a victim is bitten, they may experience nothing worse than a bad flu. But once rabies reaches the brain stem, the terrible collapse begins: patients lose their minds. They’re delirious, they’re scared, they’re hallucinating. Above all, they’re furious, raging and pulling at their restraints. Patients don’t sleep. They don’t understand human speech. And most spectacular of all, they develop hydrophobia: an agonizing fear of water. Within days of the symptoms’ arrival, the patients die. They always die. It was and is a horrifying disease. Even today, fewer than 20 patients have ever recovered from rabies after the symptoms show up, and you don’t want to know how doctors have to treat them. But keeping those facts in hand, think about this: A human receives a bite from a bat, and soon he finds himself transformed. He doesn’t sleep at night. He becomes afraid of irrational things. The villagers call him a vampire, and the only way to kill him is to cut off his head. What about this: a human receives a bite from a wolf, and soon he finds himself transformed. It can take weeks for the changes to show. He doesn’t sleep at night. He is beset with fits of rage, and when he’s consumed with his madness, he’s no longer human but a wild animal. He must be hunted down and killed. If you thought the Twilight books were ubiquitous, that’s nothing on the vampire and werewolf culture of 16th, 17th and 18th century France. You may think of the period of time between the Renaissance and the Revolution as a golden age of discovery and knowledge, but it was also a golden age for mythological monsters. Between 1520 and 1630, as many as 30,000 French men and women were accused of being werewolves. In 1530, a group of young men were attacked by wolves, and one man managed to slice the ear off of one of the beasts. The next day, the local tavern wench showed up missing part of her ear – you can see where this is going. Nearly fifty years later, on the other side of the country, one town formally authorizes its residents to track down a werewolf using “pikes, halberts, arquebuses and sticks”. Meanwhile, the hysteria was fueled by actual rabies outbreaks, mostly concentrated within the remaining wolf populations of France. In 1749, a rabid wolf bit 70 people. Ten years later, another wolf bit 17 people. Ten years later, another wolf bit 40 people. No wonder the werewolf and vampire fads stayed fresh in everyone’s imaginations. At no point in the following century did this mania die down, continuing on into the 18th century when, as Voltaire wrote, “nothing was spoken of but vampires, from 1730 to 1735.” Time had done little to curb France’s fears of rabies – they’d only changed shape in the imagination. By the 19th century, vampires and werewolves were a thing of the past, but that didn’t mean social attitudes had entered the so-called “Age of Reason.” In an age where you could be killed by smallpox, polluted air, getting run over by streetcars, getting run over by carriages, getting run over by horses, duels, or childbirth, French people in the 1800s were completely obsessed with rabies. Rabies felled about 25 French people each year back then, which means you literally have a better chance of getting killed by lightning than rabies. But the civilized men and women of 19th century France couldn’t abide the thought of descending into an animal state – of losing control over your limbs, your hunger and thirst, your sexual urges, and finally, your mind. Rabies was filed away with other notorious conditions like nyphomania – terrifying and titillating in its base nature. As one historian phrases it, “It was a concern with the effects of bourgeois repression that went into the articulation of the illness, its symptoms as well as its etiology.” The line between man and nature seemed thin, and one trend of the age seemed to erase that line even further. In the 18th and 19th centuries, something shifted in European domestic life: dogs became pets. Oh, the aristocrats loved their hunting dogs, but they were dogs with jobs, the loyalty and affection was a bonus. But by the 1700s, even middle class families might keep lapdogs, which lived inside, ate inside, climbed up on furniture, climbed up on laps, even licked humans on their faces! Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that right at the same time we were getting closer to dogs than ever before, we became hyper-aware of the danger that could always be hiding right inside their adorable furry bodies. Oftentimes, owners were unwilling to admit that danger even when it stared them in the face. They’d bring their beloved laptogs to the vet, snarling and foaming at the mouth, all while the owners insisted that their beloved Fifi never left their third floor apartment. Soon, the French began forgetting the oldest known truth about rabies – that it spreads through bites. “Mais non,” the owners would sniffle. “It is not possible, she has never left the salon!” They began to insist on a phenomenon called “spontaneous rabies”. Recalled one veterinarian: “Madame owned a dog of an exceptionally small breed…He became rabid; she brought him to see me. The lady in question never took her cheri outside, except in her arms; his little paws had never tread the pavements of Paris.” Naturally, it soon turned out that Madame had been leaving her little dog in the courtyard on a regular basis to do his business, during which time he’d been attacked by a local terrier. Over and over again, Parisian pet owners found their tame little Pekineses and pugs transformed into snarling beasts. Rabies was no longer a disease of the huntsman or the peasant, doomed by their low class stature to live in the wilderness, close to animals. With the widespread adoption of pets, rabies was now a disease of the bourgeois – and it went from an ancient taboo to a modern hysteria. In the midst of national panic, the French turned to their greatest hope: the nation’s preeminent scientist, Louis Pasteur. By the 1880s, Louis Pasteur enjoyed national fame in multiple scientific disciplines. He had a wide range of interests, but the one common trait among them? Tiny things. Louis was one of the world’s first microbiologists, though the world hadn’t come up with that term just yet. He knew the world was full of organisms and molecules too small to see with the naked eye, and he wanted to know how deeply they shaped the world around us. His research into food spoilage was so groundbreaking, the milk and eggs in your fridge right now are probably labeled “Pasteurized”, meaning they’ve been heated enough to kill bacteria. He also figured out that bacteria was responsible for a silkworm disease which was hobbling the French silk industry. After his experiments in industrial sanitation, Pasteur wanted to take his career in a new direction, focusing on the most mysterious – and important – tiny things known to the world at that time: germs. Scientists and philosophers kicked around the idea of germs since the Middle Ages, but it wasn’t until Louis Pasteur came along that germ theory really got put to the test in a rigorous, repeatable way. As my fellow epidemiology nerds will know, a famous cholera outbreak in London in 1854 pit ‘germ theory’ scientists against those who believed in ‘miasma theory’ – that bad air was itself the cause of disease. According to miasma theorists, a bad smell didn’t just indicate that something dangerous might be nearby, the bad smell was the dangerous thing. In the 1850s, Louis Pasteur conducted a series of experiments to disprove miasma theory once and for all, showing how so-called “spontaneous” bacterial growth was impossible. Boiled broth would never grow bacteria, no matter how much air you passed in front of it. The germ theory showed that diseases were caused by things – as the veterinarian had discovered, dogs didn’t spontaneously become rabid. If tiny things could induce infection, could other, similar tiny things prevent infection? To learn more, Pasteur turned his attention to one of the more puzzling breakthroughs of the previous century: Edward Jenner’s smallpox preventative. Before the 18th century, there was only one way to protect yourself against smallpox: give yourself a smallpox infection, pray for the best, and survive it. Once you made it through, people knew, you wouldn’t get infected a second time. Throughout Asia and the Middle East, people practiced inoculation, in which you’d scratch someone’s skin a bit and rub it with some pus from a smallpox victim. By rubbing the pus onto a superficial wound, the infection was more likely to be mild, and you were more likely to survive it. But it was more or less the same idea: to survive smallpox, you had to get smallpox, and you had to live. It was by no means foolproof, and many people did not survive the treatment, including one of the heirs to the British throne. Still, it was a 2 percent fatality rate instead of a 30 percent fatality rate. But it was very expensive, and mostly off limits to anyone besides aristocrats. In the 1790s, a British scientist named Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids seemed naturally immune to smallpox, and wondered whether it had anything to do with the fact that cows suffered from a similar disease named (you guessed it) cowpox. Maids who survived cowpox didn’t contract smallpox…

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63. Jeanne de Clisson and the Black Fleet Oct 29, 2020

Show notes

“If I don’t kill a man every now and then, they forget who I am.” – Blackbeard, 18th century English pirate BOO! It’s spooky season, so I’m bringing you a chilling tale of piracy, treachery, and blood-soaked revenge. This week, we’re digging into the very beginning of the Hundred Years’ War, when a bunch of scheming men had their plans ruined by scheming women. We’ll learn about the War of Breton Succession, a.k.a. a teensy conflict that managed to explode into an international proxy war. Despite the strictures of medieval society, Breton women were claiming thrones, leading armies into battle, and taking to the high seas. Jeanne de Clisson, furious widow, turned her rage into a lifelong search for vengeance, and we are definitely going to dig into the gory details. Episode 63: “Jeanne de Clisson and the Black Fleet” Jeanne de Clisson, lady pirate: Medieval portrait of Jeanne de Clisson See the organizational splendor of the Hundred Years War. Transcript Bienvenue and welcome back to the Land of Desire. I’m your host, Diana, and I have to make a confession: I am a scared little baby. Whenever Halloween comes back around, I remember how much I hate scary movies, scary stories, and generally anything that causes anxiety in any way. My most sacred October ritual is watching Practical Magic while giving myself an autumnal manicure. If you’re the kind of person watching movies like The Exorcist, Get Out, or Night of the Living Dead, I salute you, I respect you, but I do not understand you! But this year, I’m going outside my comfort zone to bring you some genuinely spooky content, starring one of the wildest ladies in the French history books. I don’t know about you, but I could do with a little angry vengeance right now, a little hellraising. So today, change out of your day pajamas and into a black veil, light a pillar candle and sharpen your swords. Piracy is our only option. In 1328, the French King Charles IV did a very inconsiderate thing: to the great inconvenience of everyone in Western Europe, he died without leaving a male heir. No sons, no brothers, not even any useful old uncles. It’s never a good idea for a king to die without a line of succession, but Charles really couldn’t have chosen a worse time. He’d spent his entire reign squabbling with his mortal enemies, the English, and now they’d be making a play for his throne. The fight for Charles’s crown would waste everyone’s time, money, and lives for the next five generations, with everyone picking sides, double-crossing one another, then picking the other side, and then double crossing one another again. The fight was so epic, so complicated, and ultimately so, so stupid that George R.R. Martin would use it as the inspiration for Game of Thrones. And just like Game of Thrones, it has a sad trombone sound of an ending. The Hundred Years’ War eventually became something like white noise: a constant clash going on in the background, all while Europe lurched its way through the Middle Ages, wrestling with big questions about God, death, and what it means to be human. One of the most important questions Europe tackled during this time had grave implications for the war itself: what to do about women? Can’t live with ‘em, can’t make heirs if you send ‘em all to a nunnery. Throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, rascally women kept scuppering the plans of powerful men. They were claiming thrones, leading armies into battle, sleeping with the enemy, dying in childbirth when men needed them to live, surviving the bubonic plague when men needed them to die, and in at least one extremely memorable occasion, taking to the high seas for a blood soaked reign of terror. This week, join me for an extra-spooky examination of the life of the lady pirate, Jeanne de Clisson, the Lioness of Brittany. In the year 1322, Charles IV inherited his older brother’s crown and his older brother’s nemesis. In the 14th century, the area we know as “France” was a motley assortment of territories, some of them more obedient to the crown than others. Ever since Guillaume, duc de Normandie, sailed across the Channel to conquer England in 1066, the kings of England had laid claim to various duchies and land holdings too close to Paris for comfort. For example, the beautiful, profitable duchy of Aquitaine used to belong to the French crown, until Eleanor of Aquitaine divorced the king of France and married the king of England. But the English kings were getting uppity. As the duke of Aquitaine, the King of England was supposed to bend the knee to the King of France, or so the King of France said, conveniently enough. In 1291, the English king, Edward I, stopped paying tribute to Charles’s father, Philip. Philip insisted on treating Edward like a duke, not a fellow king. If you can believe it, this caused offense. After a bunch of fighting, it was agreed: King Philip would allow Edward I to marry Philip’s sister, Margaret, in exchange for Edward returning the territory of Gascony to France for a little while, as a show of obedience. After a while, the king of France would return Gascony, and all would be well. But it was a trick! Edward handed Gascony over to Philip, and Philip refused to hand it back. As you can imagine, Edward I didn’t take it well, and England began sharpening her swords against the French. But Philip’s victory was short-lived: while he racked up victories against his overseas enemies, trouble was brewing back home. On paper, at least, Philip’s dynasty appeared secure: he had three adult sons, and one adult daughter. As good noble boys and girls, they were all four expected to marry for political advantage, and they all four did so. All three sons married girls from the houses of Burgundy, a rich and prosperous duchy which Philip was determined to bring under French control. Meanwhile, Philip attempted to patch things up with England by marrying his daughter Isabella off to Edward I’s son. So far, so good. But in 1314, Philip’s house was rocked by scandal. For poor Isabella, cast off across the English Channel, life was pretty miserable. Shunted off to the land of her enemies at the age of 12, Isabella found herself married to a young man who was definitely uninterested and probably homosexual. Whether she was bored or in the mood for a little family revenge, at the age of 19, Isabella decided to set her family’s reputation on fire. That year, Isabella, her husband, and her father-in-law, King Edward I, set sail for France. It was supposed to be a moment of reconciliation between the two rival countries, embodied by Isabella herself, the bridge between the families. As any good guests might, the English brought gifts. Isabella brought a number of beautiful embroidered purses, which she gave to her sisters-in-law, the lovely ladies of Burgundy. But later in the visit, Isabella noticed something curious: the purses which she had given to her sisters-in-law were now being carried around by a couple of handsome young knights. Isabella wasted no time informing her father, and before long, King Philip had his own daughters-in-law under surveillance. Eventually, to the astonishment of the nation, King Philip broke the news that at least two of his sons had been cuckholded – the heir to the throne, Louis, and the youngest son, Charles. Jury was still out on his other daughter-in-law, Joan. The two adulterous princesses were locked in the Tower of Nesle (NE-LLE). The handsome young knights were tortured and hanged. By the end of 1314, Philip himself was dead, possibly from embarrassment. The eldest son, Louis X, ascended to the throne, with his wife still locked in a castle. Before long, Louis’s wife died under mysterious circumstances – some say she was strangled, others say she was smothered by a mattress. Whatever the case, Louis didn’t celebrate his freedom for long – soon afterwards, he died playing tennis. His second wife gave birth to his only son a few months later – just in time, right? But Louis’s posthumous heir died five days later. Now the French throne passed to the late King Philip’s middle son, Philip V. But it didn’t pass to him without a fight: poor dead Louis had an elder daughter, Joan, who claimed the throne for herself. All across France, legal scholars grappled with the question: could a woman inherit the throne? After the scandal of the two princesses and their infidelity, legal scholars felt confident in their answer: no, the throne could never pass through the female line. If the heir to the French throne’s wife could cheat on him, the way Louis’s wife seemed to have done, there was no way of knowing whether her children were really his. It’s an interesting counterfactual: would the French have allowed the throne to pass through the female line if it weren’t for that specific scandal happening at that specific moment? Who knows. Philip V inherited the throne over his niece, but once again, his reign would not last for very long. Only six years later, Philip died from dysentery and the throne passed to the youngest son, Charles IV. Like Louis, Charles’s wife was locked up in a tower during his reign, and he made no moves to let her out. Instead, he annulled their marriage and sent her into a nunnery, after which point he remarried a woman who promptly died giving birth to a child. By the end of his reign, Charles had only one living child – but whoops! It was a daughter. The same legal decision which had given the throne to Charles’s older brother now prevented the throne from passing to Charles’s daughter. Which brings us back to the year 1328. In the span of only a few years, the French throne had gone from ‘totally secure and stable for generations’ to a game of capture the flag, and France’s old nemesis, England, was ready to play. — Back across the Channel, good old Isabella had been getting into mischief once again. Not content with ratting out her sisters-in-law, apparently, Isabella returned home intent on destroying her husband. Joining forces with her lover, Isabella encouraged her son, Edward, to take up arms against his father. The plan worked, and Edward III assumed the English throne in 1327, just in time to see his rival across the Channel kick the bucket. With Charles’s daughter unable to inherit the throne, the French crown would instead pass to Charles’s male cousin, Philip the Fortunate. Young Edward saw his chance: “Okay,” he told European nobility, “of course a woman can’t inherit a throne. Obviously. Duh. That would be ridiculous. But what if – go with me here – what if a man could inherit the throne through a woman? You know, come to think of it, I really think I should be the king of France.” And with that, the Hundred Years’ War was born. Without getting into the nitty gritty of the Hundred Years War, because even in quarantine, none of us really have that kind of time, here’s what matters most for our story today: the Hundred Years War is always portrayed as a war between the French and the English, but who, exactly, is that referring to? The English kings were descended from French nobility and held a bunch of territory across the Channel. The land we now call “France” was then composed of a bunch of different duchies, only some of whom considered themselves “French” in any sense of the word. The battle lines weren’t clearly drawn, and over the next hundred years they often shifted one way and then another. And there’s no better example of these shifting loyalties than the subject of this week’s story, Jeanne de Clisson. — Jeanne de Clisson was born Jeanne de Belleville, in a castle on the coast of Brittany. For centuries, England and France fought over who got to claim Brittany. As the name implies, the British had a heavy influence in the region. The Breton language, derived from Celtic tongues, has more in common with Gaelic than French. The lords of Brittany were the first to help William the Conqueror invade England, and were rewarded with territories there. But Brittany was across the Channel from England, she shared a border with France, and her people were divided in their loyalties. In truth, if you asked most residents of Brittany whether they felt they were English or French, most of them would tell you, “I’m Breton.” Young Jeanne was no different. Jeanne’s parents married her off to a local nobleman at the age of 12. She gave birth to two children by the age of 15 before her husband died. Suddenly, Jeanne was the hottest widow in town. Two years later, just as King Charles was kicking the bucket, Jeanne married Guy de Penthievre. It was a hell of a match – he was the second son of the duke of Brittany himself. Right from the start, Guy’s family complained that Jeanne was a gold digger, out to steal his titles and fortune. If you’re wondering “isn’t that the point of rich people marrying one another” the truth is, I don’t get it either, but Guy’s family carried the day. After a few years, Jeanne’s marriage was annulled. Guy’s family would really regret this move later on. Jeanne, meanwhile, was the hottest widow in town again. She was exceedingly eligible: a rich teenager, bestowed with valuable property from her late husband’s estate, demonstrably fertile with years of childbearing ahead of her, it’s a surprise she managed to squeeze in any more single living before she married again. This time, Jeanne married Olivier de Clisson, another very rich member of the local Breton nobility. Jeanne and Olivier seemed well-suited to one another. They were the same age, they’d both been married before, they both owned lots of property, and by all accounts they appear to have genuinely loved each other. Together, Jeanne and Olivier had five more children, and things seemed to be going pretty well – until 1341, when Jeanne and Olivier found themselves embroiled in the biggest battle to hit Brittany in centuries. The duke of Brittany, Jeanne’s ex-father-in-law, had three sons with his first wife, including Guy de Penthievre. Then, after his first wife died, the duke remarried and went on to have one more son with his new wife. The duke’s sons from his first wife hated their stepmother, and they hated their half-brother even more. But as the saying goes, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” By 1341, all three of the duke’s sons from his first marriage were dead, including Guy. As the French scholars had insisted only a few years earlier, French titles had to pass from man to man, right? That meant the dukedom of Brittany was set to pass into the hands of the dreaded fourth son, John de Monfort. This was a real problem. Not only did the local families hate John de Montfort, the French king, Philip the Fortunate, did too. John de Montfort was considered a sneaky, dubious fellow, and England supported his claim to the throne. Who wants to support the guy that England is rooting for? Then, just as John was getting ready to assume control of Brittany, a new challenger appeared: Guy de Penthievre’s daughter, Jeanne. (If you’re subscribed to my newsletter, you probably saw my recent issue about how everyone in France is named one of four names. Since this is going to be a confusing episode otherwise, I will now refer to Guy de Penthievre’s daughter as L’il Jeanne.) This is where things got wild. What should have been a regional dispute turned into an international proxy war, with England and France both wanting their guy in charge of Brittany, both because it was territorially useful and because it would make their enemy just so mad. In order to thwart England’s candidate for the dukedom of Brittany, L’il Jeanne used England’s own argument against them. “Following the same logic of your king, Edward III, the duchy should not go to John de Montfort,” L’il Jeanne said. “If a title can pass through a woman, the way Edward III says it can, then the rightful heir isn’t the duke’s weird fourth son that nobody likes, it’s me, the daughter of the duke’s second son, and my husband. Charles de Blo…

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62. Surya Bonaly Sep 24, 2020

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“Please, try to be fair.” – Surya Bonaly, 1994 World Championships At long last, I get to combine two of my great passions: French history and 1990s women’s figure skating! Let’s face it, France hasn’t produced that many great female skaters over the decades. Male skaters like Alain Calmat and Pierre Péra made their way to the champion’s podium, but as the end of the 20th century approached, French women had yet to clinch a single individual medal. At the beginning of the 1990s, however, a once-in-a-generation talent arrived, giving France its first shot at a women’s medal in 40 years. You’d think France would be thrilled, right? But Surya Bonaly was not the skating talent they’d expected: eccentric, defiant, athletic – and black. In the age of “ice princesses”, Surya was an anomaly, and the figure skating world feared the kind of future she represented. Frustrated at every turn, she faced disappointment after disappointment until at last, with the whole world watching, Surya decided to make figure skating history – on her own terms. Episode 62: “Surya Bonaly” Surya Bonaly at the Olympics: 1992 Albertville Olympics: 1994 Lillehammer Olympics: 1998 Nagano Olympics: Transcript Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire. I’m your host, Diana, and I’m really excited about this month’s episode, because I get to combine two of my biggest passions: French history, and women’s figure skating of the 1990s. Like so many other Millennial babies, I grew up watching the sport at what was maybe its peak: Kristi Yamaguchi, Oksana Baiul, Tara Lipinski, Michelle Kwan, Nancy Kerrigan, and more. It was a golden age and the whole world was watching – especially at the Winter Olympics. Every four years, everyone dropped what they were doing to watch the so-called “ice princesses” take to the rink with their axels, toe loops, and spins that seemed to go on forever. But there’s one skater whose talent was a bit harder to measure. Those who watched her skate at the time still remember what she accomplished, but she isn’t often included in the highlight reels, and the jury is still out on her career’s narrative arc. Was she a fierce innovator who focused on athleticism over grace? Or was she simply a poor skater with an attitude problem? Was she the victim of institutional racism, or just ahead of her time? This week, we’re reexamining the unusual and uncertain legacy of one of France’s greatest female figure skaters ever, Surya Bonaly. “She lacks artistic refinement. She’s a sore loser. History will forget her unless she wins the worlds or Olympics. She and her omnipresent mother flub the big things, and they evince godawful taste in hairstyling, costumes, music and choreography. Plus, they don’t play the game by kowtowing to judges and skating officials.” So wrote Sports Illustrated, and if you asked 100 people to identify the figure skater in question, I think 99 of them would give the same answer: Tonya Harding. But they would be wrong: the skater in question was Surya Bonaly, then a 22 year old skater and France’s greatest hope for an Olympic figure skating medal in over 40 years. Surya and Tonya had a lot in common, it’s true: they both came from lower income, eccentric families, they were famous for their powerful moves – and awkward landings, and they were definitely cultural outsiders in the rich, white world of women’s figure skating. Tonya Harding’s career has received a lot of attention in the last few years, leading other 90s figure skating fans asking, “Where’s the story of Surya?” But when Sports Illustrated wrote those words in 1995, nobody knew how Surya’s story would end. “Depending on the beholder,” the article went, “Surya Bonaly is the most gifted and athletic figure skater in the world today, or she is a unique but squandered talent whose career seems destined to stall at also-ran status if she fails.” Nobody knew if Surya was destined for greatness – or obscurity. In 1985, a small crowd gathered on the ice of the Jean-Bouin ice rink in Nice. Didier Gaihauguet surveyed the men and women in front of him as he began preparing drills and exercises for the day. While the skaters may have impressed and awed local spectators with their smooth warmup laps around the rink, Didier was frustrated. This was the French national team, gearing up for another year on the European championship circuit, and once again, it looked to be a disappointing bunch. While France boasted a number of champion ice dancers and pairs skaters, women’s figure skating was not exactly a source of national pride. Worldwide interest in women’s figure skating seemed to get bigger every year, but attention always focused on the biggest and best competitors: the United States, Japan, and of course, the Soviet Union. The team assembled in front of him had grace and talent, but they lacked spirit. He struggled to push them beyond their limits. While he might see a few medals from the European Championships, maybe a few competitors at Worlds, Didier had few hopes for the next Winter Olympics, three years in the future. While he put his skaters through their paces, a young girl carefully stepped onto the ice. This little girl was about ten years old, with dark black skin and lively eyes. As the girl made her way onto the ice, a woman from the stands motioned to Didier. Suzanne Bonaly, she introduced herself. My daughter wants to practice, but your group is taking up every space on the ice. Could she have an hour on the ice this afternoon? Amused, Didier watched the girl skate around the ice. Faster and faster, the young girl lapped the ice rink, while Suzanne told Didier her daughter’s story. In 1974, Suzanne and Georges Bonaly adopted an eight month old girl from an orphanage here in Nice. Suzanne, a PE teacher, and Georges, a draftsman, were eccentric, bohemian types who’d spent the past few years road tripping all the way from Europe to India. They named their daughter “Surya” – Sanskrit for “the sun”. The three moved into a ramshackle shepherd’s hut in the outskirts of Nice, without running water or electricity, where they raised Surya and 26 goats. “I lived in the countryside,” Surya recalled in an interview. “We did not have television. ..We made our own honey, and our own goat cheese. I loved this life so much.” Surya had responsibilities on the farm, but she also had freedom to pursue wide ranging interests, including the flute, diving lessons, and above all, gymnastics. Surya was uncommonly talented for her age, and by the time she and her mother drove up to the skating rink that day, she’d already participated in junior championship tumbling competitions. But her gymnastics training carried over onto the ice: she was strong, she was flexible, and she was fearless. While gymnasts practiced over padded mats, Surya had no hesitation about attempting the same moves over rock-solid ice. In 1984, Surya first became interested in figure skating after watching the great German skater Katarina Witt perform at the Sarajevo Winter Olympics. Inspired by Witt’s routine, Surya attempted a double Axel at the age of nine, and promptly broke her ankle. She’d spent the whole summer in a cast, Suzanne said, practicing her flute. Today would be one of Surya’s first days back on the ice. As Didier watched, the young girl gathered speed, spinning and leaping across the rink. Suddenly, to his astonishment, Surya leapt into the air and attempted another double Axel. While it was unsuccessful, Didier was stunned to see a little girl try a double Axel on a broken ankle caused by another double Axel! This was the kind of spirit his team needed, he knew. “France,” he recalled in a recent documentary, “had no hard fighters.” Didier leaned in towards Suzanne. The French national team would be here practicing for the next three weeks. Surya should come and practice with them. It was an absurd request to make of a young girl, but Surya and Suzanne showed up every single day, and by the time the national team left Nice, Surya landed a double Axel and a triple jump. Didier told the Bonalys in no uncertain terms: move to Paris. Train with me. You could be great. As Surya remembers, it wasn’t an easy decision. She was still training in gymnastics, still learning how to fence, still enjoying the bucolic splendor of her countryside home. But the next year, Surya made the decision: The Bonaly family was moving to Paris. By the age of 12, Surya was training with the national team. “The first two years were rough,” she remembers. “The reception in Paris was not nice, and the other girls envied me a bit because I knew how to do a lot of different sports. But when you’re stuck in one gear, you can’t shift out of it.” In 1987, a curious sight began popping up at European figure skating competitions. Making their way through the parking lot, figure skating fans saw a raggedy RV, covered in dirt. Sometimes the door would open, and out would a hippie man and woman with matching long grey hair, a young black pre-teen girl and five enormous, slobbering Great Danes. Surya, her parents and their traveling menagerie drove all over the continent, recalling her parents’ road trips around the world. But as Surya’s talent grew, there were more and more competitions to win. Under Didier training and Suzanne’s watchful eye, Surya ascended through the ranks of French figure skating until in 1989, she made her debut at the World Championships. The media took one look at Surya’s skin, her RV full of Great Danes and her bravery on the ice and knew they had a great story on their hands. But exactly what story did they have? Who was Surya Bonaly? According to TV and radio, this young phenom apparently traced her origins back to the tiny island of Reunion, near Madagascar. Far away from ice and snow, Surya had been born on a beach full of coconuts. After the Bonalys adopted her, Surya’s life became a bizarre bohemian experiment: she ate a macrobiotic diet, including bird seed. She never cut her hair. If you’re thinking these rumors sound suspiciously racist, like the exotic fantasies of some weird white person…you’re not wrong. These stories were fed to the press by none other that Surya’s coach, Didier Gauhauguet. “I made them up,” he told Sports Illustrated a few years later. “They wrote that Reunion thing like crazy. Because that’s what you want to hear, no? It’s a good story. We did that together, me and Suzanne. We said Surya came from Nice, but her biological parents came from Reunion. Really, we had no idea.” A white coach telling reporters that the only black woman in figure skating was born on a beach full of coconuts is some truly old school, Josephine Baker in a banana skirt racism, and if you think people have written whole theses on this media moment, you are correct. But whatever the rumors swirling about her ethnic heritage, Surya controlled the narrative that year by taking 10th place at Worlds. Her career was about to explode – and everything seemed to be within her reach. By the dawn of the 1990s, Surya Bonaly was the most exciting female figure skater in France. She was sensational in every way, her routines offered a spectacle for the eyes, with brightly colored costumes inspired by the sprinter Flo-Jo, and routines that offered more jumps and tricks than anyone else’s. In 1990, Surya moved into ninth place at Worlds, and the next year she made it to fifth. In 1991, Surya took home the gold medal at the European Championships, the first French woman in history to do so. She was only getting better with every major competition, and the biggest test of her career was around the corner. In 1992, France couldn’t believe its luck: the best female figure skater the nation had produced in decades arrived just in time to compete in the first Olympics hosted on French soil since 1968. It had been 40 years since a French woman had had a real shot at an Olympic figure skating medal. It seemed like destiny: Surya was the hometown hero. She was given the honor of taking the athlete’s oath on behalf of all the competitors during the Opening Ceremony. Spectators crowded the stands during her practice sessions, where she tested out tricks too risky to be allowed in regular competition. To the crowd’s shock and delight, during one of her warmup routines, Surya dug her toe into the ice and flipped backwards, her head only inches from the ice. She’d been performing the trick at exhibitions for years, a legacy from her days as a champion gymnast. It was easy to do the same backflip on the ice as she’d done on the mat, so long as she didn’t think about what might happen if it went terribly wrong. And from the judges podium, it almost did – Surya performed her backflip only a few feet away from the Japanese star, Midori Ito. A referee skated over to Surya and told her in no uncertain terms, she was not allowed to do a backflip during warmups ever again – and why should she, when backflips had been banned from competition since 1976? Why were backflips banned from competition? It depends on who you ask. Some say it’s just too damn dangerous. Others say it was too tacky, turning world-class figure skating into a Vegas act. Another reigning theory argues that all figure skating jumps must be landed on one foot, and all the backflips performed in competition before the ban had been landed, with a bit of a thud, on both feet. Regardless of the reasons, Surya’s backflip drew cheers from the crowds and glares from the judges. As the referee said to the New York Times that day, “Of course it was intimidation. Whether it was intentional or not, I don’t know. But these people have enough problems putting their mental state in order without this kind of bashing going on.” Even without a backflip, however, Surya’s program seemed like a knockout – eight triples, more than anybody else on the ice, and the ace up her sleeve: a quadruple toe loop. No woman had ever landed a quad in competition. But the same little girl willing to attempt a double Axel on a broken ankle was now an 18 year old determined to make figure skating history. But could she pull it off in competition? And more importantly – was it enough to please the judges? On February 22, 1992 Surya prepared to step out onto the rink. As she prepared her body and mind, Didier warned her: don’t do the quad. You’re not ready, it’s too risky.” But Surya was determined. Everyone favored the two American champions, Kristi Yamaguchi and Nancy Kerrigan, who combined technical precision with grace and elegance. When it came to Surya’s own routines, she knew she lacked a certain finesse, that special something, what the French might call a je ne sais quoi. Like Tonya Harding, warming up on the sidelines, Surya knew the judges looked down on her idiosyncratic background, her eccentric parents, her outsider status. The judges hated her Flo-Jo inspired costumes, so to please them, Surya wore a beautiful costume designed by none other than French designer Christian Lacroix. No one could fault her appearance – except, of course, there was the unspoken question of her skin. Though Surya has always denied she was treated unfairly because of her race, she was without doubt the only black figure skater in elite competition, in a sport famously predominated by white, rich girls from good families. Under the scoring system of the time, everyone was graded out of 6, regardless of the difficulty of their routine. There was nothing to say that doing eight pretty good toe loops instead of seven would earn her higher scores than someone else doing six toe loops to perfection. The only way she’d have a shot at the medal, Surya figured, was to knock the judges socks off. If she landed the quad in competition, she’d be too good to ignore. Rattled from her argument with Didier, Surya sought out her other most important mentor: Suzanne. But to her surprise, the officials said no. “I was very disturbed,” Surya told reporters that night, “that my mother was not allowed by th…

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