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MADAME PICASSO by Anne Girard.

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“Although this book is a novel, and thus a work of fiction, I have taken the greatest care to recount events as they are known to have occurred. Various subplots, and the motivations of some of the characters, however, can only be fictionally drawn, since Eva left so little of herself behind for the world to discover. Because much of her life remains a mystery, as well as do some elements of her death, it became incredibly important to me to honor her memory by being as accurate as possible with the parts of the story that are known. Through those, I have respectfully woven plausible details and events in order to create the world of Madame Picasso.


One fact that touched me deeply while doing my research was discovering that the half-finished painting of Eva, which is mentioned toward the end of the novel, had gone missing and was found fifty years later, only after Picasso's death. It had been hidden among his private things, perhaps too dear to him to share with the rest of the world, or to part with. To support my supposition in that regard, the acclaimed historian, and personal friend of Picasso, Pierre Daix, revealed in his work, Picasso Life and Art, about Eva that "when we spoke of her two thirds of a century later, tears came to his eyes. They had truly lived together, and Pablo, when success came, needed her."



Filling in the blank spaces around the facts in a compelling and likely way, in order to join them with fiction, came in part, not just by studying Picasso's work for hints of their life together, but also by absolutely pouring over every word and nuance of Eva's correspondence with their good friends, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The letters, accented with little scribbles by Picasso himself, and his own added sentiments, read like a treasure trove of gossip, news, and poignant revelations about the part of her world Eva and Picasso tried desperately to keep private. They were a young couple happy, clearly in love, and with a sense of humor. In writing this novel, I was in search of the essence of the elusive Eva, and I think that was best found through Eva's own words.


Woven throughout her beautiful, sloping penmanship, the spirited underscoring of her signature, is a sense of humor, a tender heart, determination, and, most of all, a great enduring love for Picasso. I was profoundly moved by the love they shared, the struggles they endured, and the bittersweet end that I believed marked Picasso, and changed him forever.


MY MEMORABLE MEETING


One of the best things about writing novels based on the lives of real historical figures is going to places where they lived, and worked, getting a true sense of their lives to try and breathe life into their stories for readers. Last summer, while I was researching the story behind MADAME PICASSO, I was given the opportunity of a lifetime to interview a man who, for 30 years, was a close friend of Pablo Picasso. To sit and speak at length with a person who had actually known the great icon was probably the most unique, and daunting, prospect I had yet faced as a writer. Meeting the famed French photographer at his Provenceatelier initially seemed like a dream come true.


The actual event, however, became more than that, it was an adventure.


An international celebrity in his own right, Lucien Clergue certainly cuts a daunting figure, even across the internet. I had done my homework prior to our interview and found a distinguished looking, almost regal, white-haired gentleman whose intensely pointed gaze leapt off the page at me. But that seemed strangely fitting, considering the legend of Picasso's own powerful stare. Slightly unnerved by the prospect of meeting, I went on to view the iconic, sensual black and white photographs that first brought Clergue fame in the 1950's. Their abstract nature, the essence of them, reminded me of Picasso's later work, and so further tied the two men together in my mind, even before we met.


The plan seemed simple enough: I was to be met at my hotel by a liaison who would walk me through the cobbled back streets of the French village to the unmarked studio where Monsieur Clergue has lived and worked for decades. There was no time limit set for our meeting, and I was told nothing other than that he was tired after a delayed flight back from Italy. Still, my heart began racing the moment we set off into the Provencal summer heat, and the guide deftly maneuvered, with me trailing behind, the narrow, shadowy alleyways that looked like a setting for a sequence from Romeo and Juliet. Brightly painted doors, weathered by time. window boxes spilling fat geraniums, some of the window ledges above them holding discerning cats. Other windows were tightly shuttered from the midday sun. Already to me it was other-worldly, and on we walked to a massive arched door that looked like it could once have hidden a stable, at least something very large and imposing. She rang the buzzer. French pleasantries were exchanged with a secretary, before the buzzer rang again, the door clicked and we were let inside, the vaulted, shadowy foyer, and the door was slammed shut. You're a pro, I told myself. You've been at this a long time, how daunting can it be?


My question was answered, as my guide and I were ushered up a flight of ancient stone steps and into the commanding presence of Monsieur Clergue. Seated behind a massive carved oak desk, surrounded by soaring walls ornamented with photos of himself with Picasso, plus several priceless works of art, Clergue sank against the back of his massive leather chair, steepled his hands, raised his eyebrows and said very simply, "So then, what can I do for you?"


It was clear to me then that he was wary of writers who wanted to tread on the memory of his friend. That was something to respect and a point on which we could agree. In my novel I sought only to humanize Picasso, and thus, to honor him. So as our liaison excused herself and left the office, I decided to buck up and make the moments count. After a short exchange in which he told me of several "hit pieces" on Picasso he had witnessed recently, he admitted that he was, indeed, cautious of the motives of writers. I told him of my project, my background and my commitment to the story.


Suddenly, as if clouds had cleared away from the sun, he gave me a reserved little grin and said, "Ask away. What would you like to know about Picasso?" I had, in that moment, been given a modicum of his trust. I opened my notebook then, and went to work.


Over the next hour and a half, I heard story after story about the private Picasso, some tender-hearted things, some acts of kindness and generosity, that don't often figure into stories about the brash, womanizing artist. Even knowing what they were getting into, some of the women, Clergue explained, were happy to attach themselves to Picasso's fame and money anyway. But, he said, when it was over, there was more benefit in tell-all biographies and accusations, than in silence. Whether Clergue had a point or not, the world will never know. What I do know is that Lucien Clergue was a man staunchly defending his friend, one who was no longer here to defend himself, and I respected that.


As a novelist, it is not for me to judge Picasso's actions, or his choices. Rather, I believe it was my task -- and my incredible opportunity -- to learn some amazing private details about someone who was, first and foremost, a man, one with strengths and weaknesses, like any other man, but who, along the way, became the most famous artist of the 20th Century.


Picasso was an icon, one who loved, and who erred, who triumphed and failed. What I hope to do in MADAME PICASSO is share a bit of that man and his great love for his Eva.”


Anne Girard was born with writing in her blood. The daughter of a hard-driving Chicago newsman, she has always had the same passion for storytelling that fueled his lifelong career. She hand-wrote her first novel (admittedly, not a very good one) at the age of fourteen, and never stopped imagining characters and their stories. Writing only ever took a backseat to her love of reading.


After earning a bachelor's degree in English literature from UCLA and a Master's degree in psychology from PepperdineUniversity, a chance meeting with the acclaimed author, Irving Stone, sharply focused her ambition onto telling great stories from history with detailed research. "Live where your characters lived, see the things they saw," he said, "only then can you truly bring them to life for your readers." Anne took that advice to heart. After Stone's encouragement twenty years ago, she sold her first novel. When she is not traveling the world researching her stories, Anne and her family make their home in Southern California. When she is not traveling or writing, she is reading fiction




Pablo Picasso's love affair with women

'Picasso: Challenging the Past' opens at the National Gallery next week. Mark Hudson looks at how the artist saw the women in his life - as either goddesses or doormats.


'Women are machines for suffering," Picasso told his mistress Françoise Gilot in 1943. Indeed, as they embarked on their nine-year affair, the 61-year-old artist warned the 21-year-old student: "For me there are only two kinds of women, goddesses and doormats".

From Rembrandt and Goya to Bonnard and Stanley Spencer, male artists have drawn obsessively and immensely productively on the faces and bodies of their wives and lovers. But no one used and abused his women quite like the greatest artist of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso.

Looking at the extraordinary images in a new Picasso exhibition that opens later this month at the National Gallery in London, you feel that Picasso eviscerates his women in the service of his art. Here, alongside images of exquisite tenderness, are women pulled and gouged into tortured shapes, women cut in bits and reconfigured on the canvas. Yet harrowing as these images are, they are nothing beside the real life dramas that led to their creation.

Of the seven most important women in Picasso's life, two killed themselves and two went mad. Another died of natural causes only four years into their relationship. Yet while Picasso had affairs with dozens, perhaps hundreds of women, and was true to none of them – except possibly the last – each of these seven women shines out as a crucial catalyst in his development as an artist. Each stands for a different period in his career, representing a complementary or opposing ideal that inspired the evolution of a new visual language. Just as they became obsessively involved with him, so he was dependent on them.

Loyal, generous and affectionate when it suited him, Picasso could be astoundingly brutal, to friends, lovers, even complete strangers. Yet he felt real, often anguished passion for each of these women – a passion he explored in tens of thousands of paintings, drawings and prints, in which he attempted to capture not just the way these women looked, but the totality of his feelings towards them.
Fernande Olivier, the first great love of the Spanish artist's life whom he met in 1904, was far from a pushover. Incorrigibly lazy and promiscuous, but with a lively and independent mind, this statuesque redhead was a popular artist's model, a kind of "it" girl of the Parisian avant-garde. To the young Picasso, who had arrived in Paris from Barcelonaonly two years before – and whose experience of women was limited largely to prostitutes and the pious Catholic women who raised him – Olivier must have seemed an intoxicating challenge.

Physically obsessed with her languid, bemused presence, Picasso moved from the poetic romanticism of his Rose Period to a new way of working inspired both by the dynamism of modern Paris and by the enduring values of Mediterranean culture on which he was to draw all his life. In 1906, Olivier accompanied him to the village of Gosol in the Spanish Pyrenees, where the cubistic traditional architecture and her strong, sensual features were endlessly analysed in a vast body of drawings that led to the most influential painting of the 20th century – Demoiselles d'Avignon.

As Picasso worked on this definitive canvas in the suffocating heat of his Montmartrestudio, he was consumed with jealousy and anger towards Olivier who had temporarily walked out on him – this emotional violence feeding into a work that blasted the Renaissance idea of fixed perspective out of the window and changed the course of Western art.

When Olivier took up with a minor Italian artist in 1912 inan attempt to pique his jealousy, Picasso began seeing her close friend, Eva Gouel, the most elusive of the seven women. Frail and slender, she appears in only two photographs and her personality remains an enigma. Picasso's time with her coincided with the moment of synthetic cubism, in which observational elements were synthesised into semi-abstract compositions, often including collage or text. While Picasso never painted Gouel, he paid homage to her in several of these paintings, by including the words Ma Jolie – my pretty one – which is perhaps the most overtly affectionate artistic gesture he made to any of his women. While he was apparently devastated by her death from tuberculosis in 1916, this didn't stop him carrying on a simultaneous affair with one Gaby Depeyre.

Picasso's marriage to the Russian dancer Olga Khokhlova in 1915 coincided with a complete reversal in his artistic direction – from world-changing abstraction to relatively conservative neoclassicism. His portraits of Khokhlova have a restraint and serenity inspired by the 19th-century master Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.

Yet just as Picasso's artistic restlessness couldn't be contained for more than a few hours, so the desire of the socially ambitious Khokhlova to tame the now wealthy artist soon began to suffocate him. As their relationship disintegrated and she became increasingly delusional, his depictions of her and women in general grew ever more hateful – tortured masses of teeth, limbs and vaginas.

While Picasso's sense that he could do what he liked with absolutely anyone increased as his fame and wealth grew, he stayed with Khokhlova out of a residual desire for bourgeois respectability and the deeply ingrained Spanish idea that however unfaithful, a man doesn't leave his wife.

Picasso kept his relationship with the youthful Marie-Thérèse Walter – just 17 when he met her – secret from Khokhlova for eight years. Blonde, of equable temperament and athletic physique – but completely ignorant of art – Walter was immortalised in images of melting, idyllic eroticism in which we feel her guiltless enjoyment of her own sensuality and the artist's complete satisfaction in regarding it.

If Walter offered Picasso little on an intellectual level, his next great muse was the one who came closest to challenging him on his own terms – an artist and photographer closely involved with the Surrealists. He first encountered the mesmerising, raven-haired Dora Maar across the tables of the Café aux Deux Magots, stabbing a knife between her fingers till she drew blood. Picasso asked to keep her bloodstained gloves. When Maar and Walter later met in his studio, the ensuing argument degenerated into an all-out catfight between the two women, an incident Picasso later described as one of his "choicest memories".

Maar was Picasso's partner during the period of his greatest political engagement, her inner turmoil standing in for Spain's agony during the Civil War in Tate's iconic Crying Woman. She made a photographic record of Picasso's work on the monumental masterpiece Guernica, and her unmistakable features appear in the banshee-like head swooping into the painting. But in Picasso's most telling images of Maar, her features are disturbingly reconfigured – growing out of each other in all the wrong places – as though she is literally breaking down in front of us.

When Picasso threw her over for the much younger Françoise Gilot in 1943, Maar suffered a complete mental collapse, followed by nun-like seclusion.

"After Picasso," she famously declared, "only God." Lest it should be thought that Picasso had things entirely his own way, the case of Gilot is instructive. This young aspiring artist – just 21 when they met – seems to have handled Picasso's cruelties and perversities with amazing deftness, and was the only woman to leave him entirely voluntarily, with her dignity more or less intact. She bore him two children, with whom they lived a relatively normal family life for nine years. But was this domestic stability good for Picasso's art? While he captured Gilot's features in a series of radiant drawings and etchings, this was the period of his greatest fame, when his millionaire life on the Cote d'Azur was cut off from external reality, and it was all too easy for the artist to "play Picasso" in art and life.

The last of Picasso's great loves was, on the face of it, the one most in control. Picasso created more than 400 portraits of the demure Jacqueline Roque, who he married in 1961. The most memorable imbue her sharp features with a watchful, almost classical stillness that harks back to his Blue period paintings of nearly 70 years before. Roque, you feel, was the one who finally got Picasso to behave, and created a tranquil base for his last years.

Yet even her story ended in tragedy. In 1986 she killed herself, 13 years after Picasso's death. Like the other six women, she had collaborated in what is arguably the greatest artistic oeuvre of all time. Whether it was worth the pain, only she would be able to say.

Picasso: a lifetime in muses:

Fernande Olivier

(1881-1966; with Picasso 1904-1911)


After an abusive childhood and a violent teenage marriage, Olivier escaped into Paris's bohemia, and took up with Picasso during his most revolutionary phase – though she never saw the point of cubism. Picasso failed to suppress her lively memoir Picasso et ses Amis, but paid her a small pension provided the second volume didn't appear till after his death.


Eva Gouel

(1885-1915; with Picasso 1911-1915)


Born as Marcelle Humbert, she was the girlfriend of fellow artist Louis Marcoussis when Picasso became involved with her in 1911. Little is known of the frail Eva. While Picasso later claimed he knew greater contentment with her than anyone else, he carried on an affair as Eva lay dying of tuberculosis in 1915.


Olga Khokhlova

(1891-1954; with Picasso 1917-1935)


Picasso's Ukrainian first wife, and the mother of his eldest child Paulo, was a dancer with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and one of the few people of either sex to stand up to the artist. After their separation in 1935, she bombarded him with hate mail. But since Picasso refused to divide his assets with her, as required by French law, they never divorced.


Marie-Thérèse Walter

(1909-1977; with Picasso 1927-1936)


Picasso met the blonde 17 year-old outside the Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris in 1927, but kept their affair secret for eight years. She gave him a daughter, Maia, in 1935, at about the time she was supplanted in Picasso's affections by Dora Maar. She hanged herself in 1977.


Dora Maar

(1907-1997; with Picasso 1936-1944)


Born Henriette Theodora Markovitch, of Croatian and French descent. A talented artist and photographer, this Surrealist icon – powerfully portrayed by Man Ray – had a tragic air, caused, Picasso believed, by her inability to have children. She ended her days surrounded by dust-encrusted relics of her time with Picasso.


Françoise Gilot

(b.1921; with Picasso 1944-1953)


This level-headed law student abandoned her studies in favour of art and began an affair with Picasso at 21. She gave him two children, Claude and Paloma, and recalled their nine-year relationship in the best-selling Life with Picasso. Later married to American vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk, she still paints.


Jacqueline Roque

(1927-1986; with Picasso 1954-1993)


A sales assistant in the Madoura Pottery Studio in Vallauris, where Picasso created his ceramics, Jacqueline met Picasso in 1954, when she was 27, and became his second wife in 1961. While she quarrelled with his children over the division of his estate, they collaborated in the creation of the Musée Picasso. She shot herself in 1986.


Paisley, Cashmere, Pashmina ...

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The History of the Paisley Symbol and Paisley Pattern


Origins of the Paisley:

It is generally agreed that the paisley symbol originated in Persia200-650 AD during the rule of the Sassanians who created an empire who's armies kept the Romans at bay for centuries. This empire included what we know roughly as the middle east , the Caucasus and central Asia. Their culture continues to influence Persian identity right up to the present day (see Image 1 - a paisley ornament from Afghanistan C12th-14th). The symbol began to appear on Persian fabrics in the early C16th. Hence an early nickname for paisley shapes, especially by American quilt makers, was “Persian pickles”.

The symbol can be best described as a similar shape to a curving teardrop or a kidney. The symbol was called boteh (the Persian word for shrub or cluster of leaves) which is visually a combination of a spray of floral elements and a cypress tree. Centuries later the shape was called Buta almond or bud - the national symbol of Azerbaijan to this day. It could also be an adaptation of the yin-yang symbol used in ancient Chinese medicine and philosophy.

Many different cultures have used the paisley symbol and consider it to represent many objects including a cashew fruit, a mango or a sprouting date palm, an Indian symbol of fertility. The symbol’s shape varies dramatically in different countries from an Indian pinecone to a Russian cucumber.

Paisleys also have their place in Celtic tradition. Before the Roman empire’s influence prevailed in Britain, Celtic patterns were used on many highly-decorated metal objects. The Desborough Mirror, discovered at an archaeological excavation in Northamptonshire in 1908, was made in the Iron Age period in Britain around 50BC to AD50.  This bronze mirror’s complex swirling engraved symbols, very similar to paisley forms, can be seen at The British Museum, London.

The paisley pattern evolved mainly in The Kingdom of Kashmir. During Mughal Emperor Akbar's reign (1556–1605), shawl weaving production increased dramatically. It’s weavers absorbing influences coming across the borders from nearby China, Middle East and India. Woven paisley shawls were mainly worn by men for ceremonies. These early shawls did not display the paisley shape as we know it today but a curving flower with leaves and a stem, the roots of which have striking similarities to Chinese calligraphy. The way in which symbols from different cultures appear in the development of the paisley pattern show how weavers translated artistic influences from imported ceramics, documents, fabrics into their own designs.


The East India Company imported paisley shawls (adapted from the Persian word shal) from Kashmir and Persia to Europein large quantities from around 1800. The designs were specifically tailored to cater for each regions particular tastes. In Europethe shawls were worn mainly by women not men. The designs might depict exotic scenes of people on elephants riding past palm trees. For the Middle Eastern customers, the curved geometric paisley shape as we know it today was widely used. This was partly due to the Islamic preference not to depict recognisable natural objects.


The French Connection:

Joseph Marie Jacquard introduced the punch card system to looms in Lyon in 1804, resulting in the first programmable loom. This and other advances in technlogy during the C19th slowly reduced the high levels of child labour in the textile industries because machinery became larger and more complicated so was unsuitable for childen to operate. Prior to the jaquard loom, a child would sit on top of each loom raising and lowering the heddles. His invention made weaving 25 times faster with obviously dramatic increases in paisley shawl output.

In 1805, Napoleon and Empress Josephine, his frist wife, visited Lyon and viewed Jacquard’s new loom and granted the patent resulting in Jacquard receiving a royalty for each loom bought.

Joséphine, the first wife of Napoleon I, reputedly owned hundreds of cahsmere shawls. These Indian and Pakistani shawls were brought back from Napolean's campaigns in countries such as Egypt at the beginning of the c.19th. There are many portraits of Josephine wearing shawls similar in style and colour to pic.6 which were the height of fashion and luxury. The creamy ecru colour is the natural colour of the goat's fleece. Pic 7 is an example of a beautifully designed and coloured shawl woven in Lyon between 1850-1870.


British shawl production:

Due to their huge popularity in Europe, British production of woven shawls began in 1790 inNorwich, England but to a greater extent in 1805 inthe small town of Paisley, Scotland, hence the name Paisley pattern originated. However this is not an international name for the pattern, it is called Palme in France, Bota in Netherlands, Bootar in India and Peizuli in Japan.

Roughly equal quantities of imported Kashmiri and home-produced British shawls were bought in Britain in the mid C19th. The former retained their popularity despite their much higher prices. The main reason being that cashmere is actually hair from a goat and these fine hairs are soft and provide excellent insulation. Cashmerewas therefore prefered to sheep's wool which was regarded as much less luxurious.  Also the superior Kashmiri looms produced fully reversible fabric with many more colours. Initially the British shawls were only 2-colour, usually indigo and madder. At it’s peak from c.1850 -1860 the town of Paisleyemployed 6,000 weavers.


Popularity:

In Britain in the C19th the paisley shawl was the ‘must-have’ accessory of its day, a status symbol worn for important occasions and recorded in numerous portrait paintings. Until photography had become more available in the late 19th centurry, paintings recorded fashion trends. These paintings are now a valuable resource for mapping stages in the development of paisley patterns and variations in shawl shapes and sizes. Ford Maddox Borwn's painting (pic.8) from 1860 shows that even a poor girl on the street selling flowers is wearing the fashion of the day, possibly a gift from a sympathetic passer-by on a cold day. William Holman Hunt's painting The Awakening Conscience (1853 - The Tate Britain, London) shows the woman wearing a red paisley shawl draped around her middle and tied at the front, probably brought back by the man from an overseas trip.


Paisley patterns, intricate dynamic interlocking shapes in exciting colour combinations appealed to a wide market. Wool and silk blended yarns were used in Britain, as Tibetan goat hair down was not readily available. A rather unsuccessful attempt was made to rear cashmere goats in Essex, England in 1818. A small herd bred from two imported goats from Kazakhstanonly produced very small amounts of the underfleece as the British weather wasn't cold enough. The rearing was then abandoned.





The CashmereShawls of Empress Josephine            April 7, 2007

Ugly and Very Expensive

The CashmereShawls of Empress Josephine


“Ugly and very expensive, but light and warm.” That’s how a disappointed Empress Josephine of France(1763-1814) described the shipment of cashmere shawl she had just received to her son, Eugene de Beauharnais (1781-1824). They had arrived from Egypt, a gift from you her husband, Napoleon I (1769-1821), whose forces were stationed there from July 1798 until September 1801. From the remote mountains of India’s Kashmir region through Iran, the shawls had traveled to Egypt, where Napoleon, along with many of his officers, had bought them.

Know in France as a preeminent fashion setter, Josephine continued her letter, “I have serious doubts that this fashion will last.” Only a few years later, however, her tastes had so changed that she would spend as much as 20,000 gold francs for a single shawl, which by that point in time also were known as paisley shawls, the name taken from the distinct motif of the same name.

In 1664, Francois Bernier (1625-1688), the first European to visit Kashmir, had praised the shawls’ decorations but observed that the shawls were “often infested with worms.” The shawls were woven from the soft undercoat of wild mountain goats deposited in spring on bushes where the animals scratched themselves while shedding their winter coats (other travelers, witnessing the locals gathering the wool from the bushes, thought that it must be a vegetable fiber akin to cotton).

Women in France quickly found that cashmere shawls offered not only warmth but also a whimsical splash of color over the plain white neoclassic gowns then in style.

Shortly after the arrival of the first shawls in France, cashmere mania had crossed every European border.

In Europe and America, many paintings of the period showed women posed in their prized shawls.

Josephine herself amassed more than four hundred shawls, and, as her lady-in-waiting Claire Elisabeth Jeanne de Remusat (1780-1824) recalls, Josephine did not limit herself to draping them over her shoulders or to wearing them as turbans, as in India. She had them made into clothes, coverlets, and pillows.

The passion for the shawls inflamed to the extent that some women went so far as to steal them during court events. Laure Junot, duchess d’Abrantes (1784-1838), an insider at the court, told of a cashmere shawl decorated with a parrot motif that, stolen during a ball, turned up weeks later on the shoulders of a woman who had not taken steps to eliminate the rightful owner’s monogram embroidered on the border.

Deemed an exclusive privilege of married women, the cashmere shawl became an important element of wedding trousseaux. Some desperate women tried to persuade their husbands that only the gift of a cashmere shawl could prove their love.

Responding to the European mania for cashmeres, Indian weavers invented new techniques for making shawls more rapidly. It became standard practice to weave a shawl in two pieces, to be sewn together later by an expert rafugar (darner); the Indians also began to embroider the decorations instead of weaving them in, especially the motifs on the four corners.

In France, Guillaume Ternaux (1763-1833) began to offer imitations of Kashmirshawls using similar techniques as well as imported materials and decorations. In 1811, Napoleon commissioned twelve shawls from him for his new wife, Empress Marie Louise (1791-1847); the imperial court painter Eugene Isabey (1803-1886) provided the decorative patterns. Two years later, the French newspaper Moniteur Universel would proudly write, “Ternaux shawls are perfectly manufactured. The fabric has the right strength . . . , the patterns are created by our best artists and are different from the bizarre and confused motifs or foreign shawls.

In England, cashmere shawls were produced in Norwich while the textile industry in Paisley, Scotland, could count on agents in Kashmir to send new designs weekly for the printed (and very economical) copies of the shawls woven in Paisley that were to be found in London stores a week later. Also widely available were Austrian or German printed copies in cheap cotton or wool. Manufacturers began to create smaller shawls for the mass market. One innovation was a patented rectangular shawl decorated with a three-side border on one half and large palm-shaped motifs on the other: two different looks in one shawl, depending on which half was exposed.

In 1823, French merchants regularly traveled to Kashmir and Punjab regions to direct the work of the weavers toward European preferences. A few years later, the fad was over. No longer coveted status symbols, worn even by the lower classes, the light and soft stoles of the turn of the century had evolved into rug-like cloaks, described in a least one women’s magazine as “rather ordinary.”

Although seen only rarely in the wardrobe of today’s women, the paisley motif is popular in men’s accessories, china, and ready to-wear, highlighting a significant and lasting example of the exchange between Easter and Western costumes, economy, and culture.


From Piecework magazine issue July/August 2006

By Isabella Campagnol Fabretti



Le Café Militaire, par Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806)

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Decoration of the Café Militaire (Military Café)

Founded in 1762, the Café Militaire (Military Café), which was reserved for officers as was customary in all garrison towns, was located on the ground floor of a block built in 1761 on Rue Saint-Honoré and decorated in the Grecian style. The building was destroyed in 1855 during work on Rue de Rivoli carried out under Napoleon III and Haussmann. The decorations were brought to the Carnavalet Museum. Basking in praise from the press, Ledoux successfully signed off his first work: “In this Capital there is a café with noble new decorative details that are causing quite a stir. This is the Café Militaire (Military Café), Rue Saint-Honoré. (…) Everything there is rich, grand and simple, and exudes beautiful, wholesome antiquity. Mr Ledoux, who designed and executed this decoration, is displaying the rarest of talents…” Elie Fréron, L’année littéraire (The Literary Year) (1762).



The decoration of the Café Militaire (Military Café) combines the classic vocabulary of ordered architecture with decorative forms that “speak” on the theme of the warrior’s rest. The inner space of the café is made up of twelve columns with pike and laurel patterns topped with winged helmets, alternating with wainscoting adorned with trophies of arms and mirrors.



Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806).



Musée Carnavalet - Histoire de Paris
1762
BO 121 / 1 à 4

La mode des cafés se répand avec celle de la boisson du même nom à la fin du XVIIe siècle. Le premier établissement du genre, le Procope, ouvre rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, en 1675. Ces " maisons de café " se multiplient au XVIIIe siècle. On y goûte - pour les hommes du moins - une liberté toute nouvelle : celle de se réunir, hors d'un cadre familial ou social bien défini, pour le seul plaisir de discuter, de refaire le monde.
Élevé en 1762, au rez-de-chaussée d'un immeuble de la rue Saint-Honoré (à l'emplacement actuel du Louvre des Antiquaires), le café militaire était réservé aux officiers. Son décor est l'une des premières commandes parisiennes de Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806). Ledoux qui commença sa carrière comme décorateur, se fit connaître comme architecte en travaillant pour la Du Barry, Louis XV, et les fermiers généraux.
La sobriété et la rigueur de cet espace évoquent, selon les mots même de Ledoux, " un campement militaire bien ordonné pour le repos des militaires après un combat victorieux ". Tout autour de la salle, les faisceaux de lances, liés par les feuilles du laurier de la victoire, forment douze colonnes triomphales qui rythment l'alternance des miroirs et des panneaux sculptés. Comme les casques et les chimères qui couronnent les faisceaux, le décor sculpté des lambris de hauteur est d'inspiration antique et guerrière : trophées d'armes, étendards, boucliers où grimacent des têtes de Méduse, couronnes de lauriers.
A l'opposé du foisonnement sinueux et délicat du rocaille, Ledoux compose un décor viril. Verticalité des faisceaux et des moulures, symétrie et simplicité des ornements témoignent de la nouvelle orientation du goût.
A partir des années 1750-1760, des théoriciens, des artistes refusent les formes contournées, " capricieuses ", au nom du retour à la beauté et à la grandeur antiques. Ce nouvel idéal esthétique que l'on appelle néo-classicisme triomphe sous Louis XVI. Des formes plus dépouillées et plus rigides s'imposent aussi bien en architecture, qu'en peinture ou dans les arts décoratifs.






The Return of La Mariniére / Pull Breton / Pull Marin.

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The striped breton shirt as we know it today came into being shortly following the 27th March, 1858 Act of France which introduced the navy and white striped knitted shirt as the uniform for all French navy seaman in Brittany. The shirt was originally known as marinière or matelot. The original design featured 21 stripes, one for each of Napolean's victories.

Since 1889, the garment was manufactured by Bretagne, Tricots Saint James in wool and cotton for sailors. It then become popular with breton workers, for its ease of wear and practicality.

The official striped navy and white shirt became more generally a working mariner garment as it was picked up by men of the sea; seafairers and sailors across the region of Northern France. The distinctive block pattern of stripes on the French striped shirt made them easier to spot in the waves. The garment usually had a boat neckline.

The Saint James Binic II sweater was released by Saint James in 1889 in lower Normandy.

In the 1950s and 60s the shirt was again popularized by the Beatnik community and alternative culture.


Inspired by sailors, after a visit to the French coast, Coco Chanel introduced the design to the fashion world through her nautical collection in 1917. The Breton top became a symbol of haute-bourgeois loveliness during the pre-war Riviera years.

The introduction of this garment from the traditional working class to female fashion, was a breakaway from the heavily corseted belle epoque fashion of the time. The introduction of more casual wear to women's fashion was required at the time due to the increase in popularity of seaside destinations, like Saint Tropez. Coco Chanel designed the piece to be paired the shirt with long flared trousers. As the style adapted during the 1930s, the upper class would pair the top with a cravat, blazer and shorts.

The shirt was then made popular by Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso, Brigitte Bardot, Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Audrey Hepburn, James Dean and Jean Seberg.

The design is now synonymous with chic Parisian style. The shirt has been recreated in collections by fashion houses like, Balmain, Gucci, Givenchy and Jean Paul Gaultier, who has become an ambassador of sorts. He requires his press team to wear a version during his runway shows. The designer featured the style heavily in his work, most notably his male perfume bottle, Le Male which launched in 1993, is clad in a breton T-shirt.

The top is now worn by the likes of Kate Moss, Olivia Palermo and Alexa Chung.
The Breton top was first worn in Hollywood in the film, The Wild One (1953) starring Marlon Brando's. His co-star Lee Marvin wore a breton striped style t-shirt. His character was seen as the darker more dangerous of the pair.

The film famously inspired the biker, Frank Sadilek, who drove to Hollywood to purchase his own striped T-shirt. Frank later become the president of the Hell's Angels San Francisco chapter from 1955-1962. His typical uniform of gold earring, clip-on nose ring and worn out Breton striped top influenced the biker fashion at the time.

James Dean wore the Breton striped top in the movie Rebel Without a Cause (1955).

During the 1950s Hollywood costume designer, Edith Head, paid homage to the Breton in the film To Catch a Thief , the character played by Cary Grant wore a breton-style T-shirt with a white polka-dot cravat.

In the 1956 film Funny Face, Audrey Hepburn was seen wearing a black turtleneck sweater, ski pants and a breton top. The scene was a recreation of the typical Paris cellar clubs from the 1950s.

In 1965, Andy Warhol filmed Kitchen starring Edie Sedgwick, who is dressed in the trademark breton top and black tights. The outfit is synymous with Warhol's style throughout the 60s.


La marinière, aussi appelée tricot rayé, est un maillot de corps à manches longues en jersey de coton à rayures horizontales étroites bicolores bleues et blanches, caractéristique de la tenue des quartiers-maîtres et des matelots de la Marine nationale.
Un décret officiel du 27 mars 1858 introduit dans la liste officielle des tenues de matelot de la Marine nationale le tricot rayé bleu indigo et blanc décrivant ainsi ses caractéristiques techniques : « Le corps de la chemise devra compter 21 rayures blanches, chacune deux fois plus large que les 20 à 21 rayures bleu indigo. »

Une authentique marinière comporte donc sur le torse et le dos vingt rayures bleu indigo larges de dix millimètres, espacées de vingt millimètres et sur les manches, quatorze rayures bleues espacées de vingt millimètres.

Ses manches longues de trois-quarts ne doivent pas dépasser de la vareuse, et son encolure évasée monte au ras du cou.

Le « Tricot bleu de service courant Marine nationale » fait partie des tenues de service courant no 22 bis et 23 des équipage du personnel de la Marine nationale.

Les marins avaient coutume de dire que les rayures permettaient de repérer plus facilement un homme tombé à la mer.

Jadis fabriquée dans différents ateliers, puis dans les ateliers propres de la Marine nationale lorsque l'armée devint une armée de métier (autrefois de conscrit), la marinière est encore largement produite en France, par les entreprises Saint James, Armor Lux et Orcival.

La marinière, bien que d’origine militaire, est également un élément important de la mode. Pendant la Grande guerre, Coco Chanel, habituée des stations balnéaires et inspirée par les marins locaux, lance dans sa seconde boutique, à Deauville, le « style marin », avec des marinières courtes. Elle perpétue ainsi la libération du corps de la femme et le coté « pratique » de ses créations, tout en utilisant un tissu simple lors de cette période de pénurie, le jersey de chez Rodier. La rayure devient luxueuse et se répand sur tout le territoire. Bien des années plus tard, Karl Lagerfeld, respectant l’héritage de la Maison Chanel, revisitera régulièrement la marinière dans ses défilés, particulièrement pour les collections annuelles de prêt-à-porter estival intitulées « Croisière».

Dans les années 1960, après que Jean Seberg soit apparue à l’écran dans À bout de souffle vêtue d’une marinière, c’est Yves Saint Laurent dès ses premières collections qui introduit la marinière, de façon détournée, dans la Haute couture.

John Wayne au cinéma dans les années 1940, puis Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Brigitte Bardot, le Mime Marceau, ou Sting plus tard, posent en marinière pour les photographes.

Mais c'est Jean Paul Gaultier qui reste le plus fidèle à la marinière, durant plusieurs décennies depuis les années 1980, et sous des formes, styles et matières les plus diverses : en 1983, c'est même l’élément majeur de sa collection Boy Toy, le créateur venant saluer le public à la fin du défilé habillé d'une classique marinièreN 2. En 2006, la marinière est détournée en robe du soir. Il habille Yvette Horner d’une marinière, il pose pour Pierre et Gilles avec ce vêtement, il l’utilise pour le design des flacons8 de sa ligne de parfums pour hommes « Le Mâle ». Pour lui et jusqu’à sa ligne « enfants » ou ses collaborations avec d’autres marques, la marinière fait partie intégrante de l'univers du Couturier.

Dans les années 2000, Kenzo commercialise des marinières …avec des pois, Sonia Rykiel jusqu’alors abonnée aux rayures multicolores le plus souvent sur fond noir, revient vers le basique de la marinière aux couleurs blanche et bleue.

En 2010, la marinière marque la mode : l’agence Elite fait poser les finalistes de son concours annuel en marinière échancrée, Prada élargi les rayures pour sa collection de septembre, Kitsuné, marque dont Gildas Loaëc, l’un des fondateur est breton, exploite l’idée de la marinière, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors…

L’année suivante, pour son nouveau contrat avec l’équipementier Nike, l’Équipe de France de football se voit dotée comme maillot officiel pour les matchs à l'extérieur d’un maillot blanc à rayures bleu foncé, inspiré de la marinière. Il l'utilisera peu. Très commenté, critiqué même, ce maillot rayé est abandonné onze mois plus tard au profit d'un maillot tout blanc, bien plus sobre.

En avril 2011, la boutique Colette consacre un thème à la marinière avec la présence de plusieurs marques de prêt-à-porter : Chanel, Comme des Garçons, Hermès, les macarons Ladurée, Longchamp et son sac pliable, Montblanc, le maquillage YSL, Swatch… La même année, Jean Paul Gaultier toujours, mais également Salvatore Ferragamo, Oscar de la Renta, The Row5, ou Alex Mabille, l'incorporent dans leurs collections. Un an après, c'est Thom Browne pour Moncler qui détourne le motif jusque sur les pantalons, suivi par A.P.C. ou Marc by Marc Jacobs

Outre les traditionnelles entreprises françaises Armor Lux, Saint James, ou l'historique Orcival produisant toujours en France depuis sa création qui fournit la Marine nationale, la marque Petit Bateau exploite la marinière, l’utilisant depuis des années sous de nombreuses formes et déclinaisons











Le Sabretache.

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A sabretache is a flat bag or pouch, which was worn suspended from the belt of a hussar cavalry soldier together with the sabre.
The sabretache is derived from a traditional Hungarian horseman's flat leather bag called a tarsoly.Early examples have been found the tombs of Magyar warriors from the 10th century Conquest of Pannonia. They were often strengthened and decorated with silver plates and would have contained fire-making tools and other essentials.
In the early 18th century, hussar cavalry became popular amongst the European powers, and a tarsoly was often a part of the accoutrements. The German name sabretache was adopted, tache meaning "pocket". It fulfilled the function of a pocket, which were absent from the tight fitting uniform of the hussar style. Part of the wartime function of the light cavalry was to deliver orders and dispatches; the sabertache was well suited to hold these. The large front flap was usually heavily embroidered with a royal cypher or regimental crest, and could be used as a firm surface for writing. By the 19th century, other types of cavalry, such as lancers, also wore them.
In the British Army, sabretaches were first adopted at the end of the 18th century by light dragoon regiments, four of which acquired "hussar" status in 1805. They were still being worn in combat by British cavalry during the Crimean War; "undress" versions in plain black patent leather were used on active duty.The Prussian Guard Hussars wore theirs in the Franco-Prussian War. In most European armies, sabretaches were gradually abandoned for use in the field before the turn of the 20th century, but were retained by some regiments for ceremonial occasions.
Sabretaches are now much sought after by collectors of militaria.












La pelisse.

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The style of uniform incorporating the pelisse originated with the Hussar mercenaries of Hungary in the 17th Century. As this type of light cavalry unit became popular in Western Europe, so too did their dress. In the 19th century pelisses were in use throughout most armies in Europe, and even some in North and South America.

In appearance the pelisse was characteristically a very short and extremely tight fitting (when worn) jacket, the cuffs and collar of which were trimmed with fur. The jacket was further decorated with patterns sewn in bullion lace. The front of the jacket was distinctive and featured several rows of parallel frogging and loops, and either three or 5 lines of buttons. For officers of British Hussars this frogging, regimentally differentiated, was generally of gold or silver bullion lace, to match either gold (gilt) or silver buttons. Other ranks had either yellow lace with brass buttons or white lace with 'white-metal' buttons. Lacing varied from unit to unit and country to country. The pelisse was usually worn slung over the left shoulder, in the manner of a short cloak, over a jacket of similar style - but without the fur lining or trim - called a dolman jacket. It was held in place by a lanyard. In cold weather the pelisse could be worn over the dolman.

The prevalence of this style began to wane towards the end of the 19th Century, but it was still in use by some cavalry regiments in the Imperial German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian armies up until World War I. The two hussar regiments of the Spanish Army retained pelisses until 1931. The Danish Guard Hussars Regiment (Garderhusar-regimentet) are believed to be the only modern military unit to retain this distinctive item of dress, as part of their mounted full-dress uniform.









Nancy Cunard

Nancy Cunard

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Nancy Clara Cunard (10 March 1896 – 17 March 1965) was a writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class and devoted much of her life to fighting racism and fascism. She became a muse to some of the 20th century's most distinguished writers and artists, including Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Tristan Tzara, Ezra Pound and Louis Aragon, who were among her lovers, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Constantin Brâncuși, Langston Hughes, Man Ray, and William Carlos Williams. MI5 documents reveal that she was involved with Indian socialist leader VK Krishna Menon. In later years, she suffered from mental illness, and her physical health deteriorated. She died at age 69, weighing only 26 kilos (57 pounds), in the Hôpital Cochin, Paris.


Cunard's style informed by her devotion to the artifacts of African culture was startlingly unconventional. The large-scale jewelry she favored, crafted of wood, bone and ivory, the natural materials used by native crafts people, was provocative and controversial. The bangles she wore on both arms snaking from wrist to elbow were considered outré adornments, which provoked media attention, visually compelling subject matter for photographers of the day. She was often photographed wearing her collection, those of African inspiration and neckpieces of wooden cubes, which paid homage to the concepts of Cubism. At first considered the bohemian affectation of an eccentric heiress, the fashion world came to legitimize this style as avant-garde, dubbing it the "barbaric look." Prestigious jewelry houses such as Boucheron created their own African-inspired cuff of gold beads. Boucheron, eschewing costly gemstones, incorporated into the finished creation green malachite and a striking purple mineral, purpurite, instead. It exhibited this high-end piece at the Exposition Coloniale in 1931.
 


The Rebel Heiress
By CAROLINE WEBER


In his 1928 novel “Nadja,” André Breton cites an old French adage: “Tell me whom you haunt” — whom you befriend —“and I’ll tell you who you are.” Judged by this criterion, the English heiress Nancy Cunard, who “haunted” Breton’s Surrealists and countless other artists besides, is one of the biggest stars you’ve never heard of. T. S. Eliot put her in an early version of “The Waste Land”; Pablo Neruda celebrated her “lovely sky-blue eyes”; and Samuel Beckett praised “her spunk and verve.” All three future Nobel laureates had fraught romances with her. Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Tristan Tzara, Ezra Pound and Louis Aragon were among her lovers. She played tennis with Ernest Hemingway, received house calls from James Joyce and modeled for Constantin Brancusi. Langston Hughes called her “one of my favorite folks in the world.” William Carlos Williams, who kept a picture of her in his study, deemed her “one of the major phenomena of history.”
This pedigree surely qualifies Cunard (1896-1965) as one of the 20th century’s most celebrated muses. But in her fine work, “Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist,” Lois Gordon, a professor of English at Fairleigh Dickinson University, shows that Cunard refused to be defined by her glamour or, for that matter, by the riches she enjoyed as heir to the Cunard shipping fortune. This unconventional child of privilege worked as a poet, a publisher, a journalist and, above all, a tireless supporter of the disenfranchised. “I’ve always had the feeling,” she explained, “that everyone alive can [do] something that is worthwhile.” Indeed, her whole life illustrated this principle, as Gordon’s biography — the first substantial study to be published in almost 30 years — reveals.

The only child of a British baronet and an American socialite, Cunard grew up in an English castle where “the living area alone covered more ground space than, say, the New York Public Library.” But she was unhappy there. Her father, Bache, cared chiefly about hunting, fishing and horseback riding, while his wife, Maud, whose “appetite for cultural and social advancement was voracious,” focused on cultivating the era’s leading writers. Maud’s socializing bred extramarital dalliances that, to Nancy’s astonishment, Bache passively tolerated. Appalled by their “ambiguous moral values,” Cunard “grew up to despise everything her parents and their class represented.”

History favored her rebellion, as her 1914 debut in London society coincided with the start of World War I, which for Cunard ushered in “a period of overt defiance of parental and social demands” and “artistic and sexual experimentation.” Taking her cue from Maud, Cunard assembled a “Corrupt Coterie” of artists, most of whom “sooner or later” became her paramours. In this milieu, she met Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, who were then spearheading a “literary revolution” in England. According to Cunard, this movement “changed my life,” imbuing her with a belief “in the sacred mission of art to change history.”

In 1916, Cunard impulsively married a wounded veteran, only to separate from him 20 months later. In 1921, she began a five-year affair with Pound; she soon seduced Eliot too. “Dazzled” by both men’s achievements (and even though Eliot mocked her in his verse: “But women intellectual grow dull”), she wrote three books of poetry in the 1920s. Gordon maintains that “Parallax” (1925) was “favorably compared with” “The Waste Land,” although the claim is based on a single remark by one of Cunard’s friends. In truth, her verse in no way rivals Eliot’s: “— But if I were free / I would go on, see all the northern continents / Stretch out before me under winter sunsets; / Look into the psychology / Of Iceland, and plumb the imaginations / of strange people in faraway lands.” These unimpressive lines make it hard to agree with Gordon that “Nancy anticipated the metaphysical-ontological relativism that marked much of the 20th century’s turn from traditional values to a plural secularism.”

STILL, Cunard’s stabs at poetry furthered her ties to “strange people in faraway lands” — like the avant-garde community in Paris, where she moved in 1920. Here she encountered not only Hemingway and Williams, but also the Dadaists and Surrealists, who shared her belief “in the sacred mission of art” and her “commitment to exposing the false dreams and hollow values” of the ruling class. But Cunard had her reservations. A self-described anarchist, she never embraced the Communist worldview. She also chafed at her own image as a mere siren, and “yearned for a more meaningful identity.”

In 1928, this impulse led her to found the Hours Press. Located in the Norman countryside, this small publishing house issued books by prominent authors like Aragon and Pound and by lesser-known writers like Samuel Beckett, who won an Hours contract in a contest at 23. But she was distracted when she fell in love with Henry Crowder, an African-American jazz pianist who “introduced Nancy to the complex and agonizing situation of blacks in the United States.” Her eyes now opened to racial injustice, she discovered “the sense of purpose that would define the rest of her life.”


 She edited and published “Negro” (1934), an almost 900-page anthology of black history and culture and a call to “condemn racial discrimination and appreciate the ... accomplishments of a long-suffering people.” Its 150 contributors included Theodore Dreiser, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes. Cunard herself wrote the preface, denouncing the “oppression” of “14 million Negroes in America.” Despite its urgent message and extensive scope (Gordon supplies generous excerpts), the press greeted the book’s publication with indifference and condescension.

The world proved even more judgmental about Cunard’s romantic ties to a black man. When she traveled to America in 1932, “she was maliciously attacked in the media” and in a barrage of hate mail. In England, her mother, now a widow, had “embarked upon a ruthless campaign” to separate her from Crowder. When Cunard failed to cooperate, Maud all but disinherited her.

Unbowed, Cunard continued her crusade, which by the mid-1930s took aim at fascism as well. She wrote dispatches for The Manchester Guardian, The Associated Negro Press, Crisis and other publications about Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and Franco’s coup in Spain. In August 1936, she moved to Spain to cover the civil war there. Presciently, she warned that “events in Spain were a prelude to another world war.” Exasperated by the international community’s failure to intervene, she used her reporting to denounce Franco’s brutality and demand help for his victims.

Cunard was especially concerned about those Spaniards who, in fleeing the fascists, landed in concentration camps across the French border. Although 80 percent of these “hundreds of thousands of refugees” were “women and babies and children and old people and cripples and wounded civilians,” rightist French officials, viewing the newcomers as Communist “scum,” offered them only “squalid, often mortal detention.” Camp inmates “had to wait five days for food and were then allotted two ounces of bread and one of rice — for a 48-hour period.” Many starved to death.

In addition to exposing this situation in the international press, Cunard established a shelter where “hot meals were prepared daily for as many as 3,000 to 4,000 people.” She also walked as many as 40 miles to visit the camps. By 1939, these efforts took a toll on her already fragile health and she returned to Paris to convalesce, though not before giving refugees the clothes off her back, “having felt I must leave everything possible to the bombed-out people of Barcelona.” Not long afterward, still unwell, “she stood on the streets of Paris with a sheet spread at her feet, asking for contributions ‘for the starving children in Spain.’ ”

The heiress turned beggar: the image is striking, and Gordon, who avoids sentimentality throughout, judiciously allows it to stand on its own. Similarly, when recounting Cunard’s involvement with an English pro-Resistance group during World War II, Gordon quotes without comment Cunard’s avowed preference for working “six night shifts in a row,” past the point “when ears and eyes give out” and “the spine turns to rubber.” “ ‘Sleep? Warmth? Food? No!,’ ” friends characterized her as saying. “ ‘Somewhere someone was suffering.’ ” Even after the war, she continued her self - abnegating regimen, concluding “that I should own absolutely NOTHING,” and devoting her meager resources to “many crusades.”

Admirable though it was, Cunard’s selflessness contained, according to her intimates, a manic undercurrent that became worse with age. Yet even as she relates Cunard’s decline into severe mental illness (exacerbated by excessive drinking), Gordon does not editorialize. “One night in Frascati, Italy,” she writes, Cunard “emerged drunk and bull-like from a cafe with a cigarette inserted in each nostril and began pelting dogs with tomatoes.” While the unruffled tone of such pronouncements may reflect the author’s refusal to judge (or romanticize) her subject, they also suggest a hesitancy to acknowledge the full extent of Cunard’s appetite for self-destruction.

And self-destruct she did. In 1960, after some drunken scuffles with London authorities, she was declared insane and placed in a mental hospital. In her paranoia, she blamed Spain, the C.I.A. and the British Foreign Office for her confinement. After her release, a destitute Cunard spent five years drinking heavily, eating almost nothing and ranting against bigots (“How I should like to machine-gun the evil whites” ) and fascists (“Damn Spain and all its doings”). In March 1965, just after her 69th birthday, she went on an extended alcoholic binge in Paris. Friends saw with alarm that she “had lost her reason” and looked “thinner than a Buchenwald corpse,” but she eluded them, only to resurface when the police found her unconscious in the streets. She could not remember her own name, and died two days later. Restrained to the end, Gordon quotes Neruda’s plainspoken eulogy: “Her body had wasted away in a long battle against injustice in the world. Her reward was a life that had become progressively lonelier, and a god forsaken death.” But perhaps an even more suitable epitaph comes from Cunard herself: “All that remains is a furious sense of indignation.” Indignation that, however harrowing, the reader cannot help but share.

Caroline Weber, whose most recent book is “Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution,” is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.




L'Atlantique Noir est à l'honneur du Musée du Quai Branly du 4 Mars au 18 Mai 2014, à travers une exposition mettant en avant le pamphlet Negro Anthology, publié par Nancy Cunard en 1934. Cette exposition propose de revenir sur l'icône anticonformiste de ce mouvement philosophique, Nancy Cunard, autour de photographies de Man Ray, Louis Aragon et des documents de cette femme poète.

Le Musée du Quai Branly revient sur le combat de Nancy Cunard avec l'exposition Atlantique Noir visible du 4 Mars au 18 Mai 2014 : autour de cette femme engagée contre le colonialisme et le racisme, de nombreux surréalistes tant européens qu'américains vont s'allier dans un mouvement artistique et littéraire, et réaliser l'un des plus grands pamphlets contre le racisme, Negro Anthology.

L'exposition visible dans la Mezzanine Est du musée présente des documents d'époque, mais aussi des extraits de Negro Anthology, cette publication de 855 pages éditée en 1934 par maison d’édition The
Hours Press, créée par Nancy Cunard : on découvre alors un pamphlet semblable à une grande enquête documentaire, qui rend compte des analyses de militants, journalistes, artistes, universitaires, africains-américains, antillais, africains, de photographies et même de partitions musicales.

Ainsi, le Musée du Quai Branly salue le combat de Nancy Cunard, qui créa la maison d'édition The Hours Press en 1928 pour donner la parole à des militants tels Pablo Neruda ou Georges Padmore, en exposant des photographies de cette icône prises par les plus grands, Man Ray, Barbara Ker-Seymer, Curtis Moffat...

L'Atlantique Noir de Nancy Cunard, l'exposition au Musée du Quai Branly
Du 4 Mars au 18 Mai 2014,



La Redingote.

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Women's redingote

The first form of the redingote was in the eighteenth century, when it was used for travel on horseback. This coat was a bulky, utilitarian garment. It would begin to evolve into a fashionable accessory in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, when women began wearing a perfectly tailored style of the redingote, which was inspired by men's fashion of the time. Italian fashion also picked it up (the redingotte), adapting it for more formal occasions.


The redingote à la Hussar was trimmed with parallel rows of horizontal braid in the fashion of Hussars' uniforms.


The style continued to evolve through the late nineteenth century, until it took a form similar to today's redingote. The newer form is marked by a close fit at the chest and waist, a belt, and a flare toward the hem.

Men's redingote

The men's redingote was an eighteenth century or early nineteenth century long coat or greatcoat, derived from the country garment with a wide, flat collar called a frock In French, redingote is the usual term for a fitted frock coat. The form a men's redingote took could be of the tightly fitting frock coat style, or the more voluminous, loose "great coat" style, replete with overlapping capes or collars, such as a "garrick" redingote.





Scandalous women of the 19th century

VÍDEO/ Kate Summerscale: How she discovered the story of Isabella Robinson. Mrs Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale .

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Mrs Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale: review

A fascinating personal diary opens up the world of the middle classes in 1850, says Philippa Gregory, reviewing Mrs Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale.


Isabella Robinson was a Victorian wife who married for convention; a mother of three boys; a romantic; a diarist; a highly sexed woman who described herself as “an independent and constant thinker”.

“Aha,” says the blue-stocking reader (for this is she), “one of our own. This is a woman who is going to think and imagine and write herself into trouble.”

And so she does. She buys one of the new stationery products, a personal diary, and she follows the advice of the manufacturer, Letts: “Use your diary with the utmost familiarity and confidence, conceal nothing from its pages nor suffer any other eye than your own to scan them.”

In this diary, Mrs Robinson narrates the progress of her crush on a young married man; her erotic dreams of him; and the high point of their affair, in a closed carriage – “I leaned back at last in silent joy in those arms I had so often dreamed of and kissed the curls and smooth face so radiant with beauty that had dazzled my outward and inward vision.”

She wrote in the language and literary conventions of a romantic novel, with herself as a narrator-heroine. This diary created a record of her inner, secret life which could be read in so many ways: by her enraged husband as a court document to prove her adultery; by the newspaper readers for scandalised titillation; and now by Kate Summerscale as a chronicle on which to base a new book analysing reality, literary versions, and history.

Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace describes the affair between this lonely, passionate, intelligent woman and a younger man, from their first meeting in Edinburgh when she was a regular and welcome visitor in the house where he lived with his wife and mother-in-law to the time when, at a hydrotherapy spa run by him as the resident doctor, they walked together alone, lay on dry fern, and – as she wrote in her diary – “I shall not state what followed.”

This highly wrought account of their encounters was stolen by Mrs Robinson’s husband, a vindictive and bad-tempered man whose own moral position, as father to two illegitimate daughters, did not prevent him taking the high ground with his wife, and suing for divorce on the grounds of her adultery. He offered her own writing as the only material evidence.

Mrs Robinson’s defence was to claim that the diary was a fiction – a hallucinatory account of dreams and fantasies. Her lawyer explained that she suffered from nymphomania or erotomania, that a uterine condition had driven her mad with lust. Her private writing had to be offered up by herself as proof of her own madness. Faced with the choice of describing herself either as a sexually active woman or as insane, Mrs Robinson chose to save her reputation for chastity by sacrificing her reputation for sanity. In so doing, she cleared the reputation of the man she loved, and saved his marriage and his business.

Summerscale has rescued this extraordinary story from the archives, and set it into the context of a time when the debate about women, sexuality and marriage reached a new level of anxiety. She takes us into the heart of the sexual double standards of Victorian England, where a woman would lose her husband, children, property and reputation if adultery was proved. Meanwhile, a husband’s adultery was condoned: he could only be divorced if he was guilty of sexual or physical abuse of his wife. A conduct book of the time advised of the “inalienable right of all men to be treated with deference, and made much of in their own houses”.

Summerscale gives us a considered and complex view of Mrs Robinson’s world – Madame Bovary and Charles Darwin walk through these pages; her lover’s brother-in-law fakes his own death because of his horror of masturbation; gynaecologists avoid using a speculum for fear of their patients’ pleasure; and the divorce courts have to clear women from the public gallery because the material is so disturbing.

As one would expect from the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008), Summerscale’s prize-winning analysis of a Victorian murder and its detective, the material here is handled with confident subtlety. The history goes from the individual to the individual’s world with seductive ease. Mrs Robinson is no cardboard feminist heroine in this account: Summerscale is unsparing about her heroine’s silliness, flirtatiousness and emotional neediness. The judges at the divorce court, ostensibly the very bastions of patriarchy, are thoughtful and considerate, and their even-handed ruling is described in detail.

As in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, readers are allowed to form their own opinion as to guilt and motive. This is a highly considered social history teased out from a fascinating personal document, and Summerscale takes the reader through layer upon layer of understanding as this extraordinary divorce case opens up the world of 1850 middle-class England and the women who fitted themselves into its strictures.


Mrs Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale – review

This fine cultural history uncovers an engrossing landmark divorce case

Alexandra Harris



The chief exhibits from Kate Summerscale's deservedly bestselling and prizewinning last book, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, are still hanging about rather grotesquely in my mind. The mutilated body of a boy in the water closet, a sash window slightly open, a bloodstained nightdress stuffed into the boiler. Summerscale's reconstruction of the infamous murder investigation at Road Hill House was also a cross-examination of Victorian domestic life and its most disturbing secrets. Now, in Mrs Robinson's Disgrace, she uses the same techniques of historical sleuthing to reconstruct the events that brought one couple to the divorce courts in 1858. As before, she follows the clues outwards from this one case to the larger anxieties, prejudices and cover-ups that shaped it. Summerscale puts Victorian middle-class society back in the dock, and again it is both horrifying and salutary to follow the questioning from the gallery.

The chief exhibit this time is a diary. No blood, no corpse in the privy, just an ordinary Letts diary of the sort that is currently half price in Smith's. But this too is a relic of passions that could not be contained and which are exposed in the end to the scrutiny of a nation. The unfortunate diarist, Isabella Robinson, fell in love with a man who was not her husband and wrote her feelings down. That was her crime, that was her ruin, and that was all it took to cause a scandal of major proportions. Her husband, the industrialist Henry Robinson, had a range of mistresses and two illegitimate children, but no matter. For a woman the standards were different. After all, she didn't even own her diary.


The man she loved was the married doctor
Edward Lane
, pioneer homeopath and proprietor of an advanced hydropathy establishment in Surrey where patients were prescribed a bewildering number of different kinds of bath. Isabella spent time at Edward's spa, and in his study, but did they embark on an affair? Nothing in Edward's letters proved it – he was too careful a correspondent. Isabella, on the other hand, wrote in her diary a day-by-day narrative of her erotic longing and the dreamed-of reciprocation that began one afternoon in the Surreycountryside when Edward turned to her on the plaid picnic rug and kissed her.


In her diary Isabella was the heroine of her own romantic novel. She described the misery of her marriage to the insensitive Henry, her ennui and entrapment, the great redeeming joy of evenings spent reading poetry with Edward. She wrote out her fantasies and expressed the full force of her desire. She stopped just short of recording everything ("I rested among the dry fern. I shall not state what followed"), but she included in her diary much more than was licensed in any contemporary fiction. In France, Gustave Flaubert was at work on his great novel of adultery, Madame Bovary, but it would be banned from publication in England, deemed too repulsive and corrupting for English eyes.


Henry Robinson was one of the first to sue for divorce under the new Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, a landmark act that for the first time made divorce a possibility for middle-class couples. If Mr Whicher's investigation at Road Hill was the original whodunnit, Robinson v Robinson & Lane was the "original" divorce, the ancestor of more than 100,000 divorces that took place in the UK in 2010 alone.


And what an agonising mess it was. Isabella's diary was proof of her lustfulness but it did not prove anything conclusively against Edward. Could it be used against her and not against him? The only way to save Edward's reputation (as everyone was eager to do, at Isabella's expense) was to discredit the diary as the raving of a sex-obsessed lunatic. By a skewed logic more perverse than anything Isabella could dream up, a sane woman was now reinvented as an erotomaniac driven mad by a conveniently identified uterine disease.


At every stage this "real-life" story is a skein of fictions. Coleridge and Shelley taught Isabella what a love affair might be, and how she might construct herself as its heroine. The lawyers, too, learned their lines from literature. In court they fantasised a gothic tale in which Isabella's madness poisoned a whole respectable milieu. Summerscale is a subtle interpreter of the interplay between action and literary imagination, as was clear in Mr Whicher. A large part of her fascination with the Road Hill case lay in its influence on subsequent detective fiction. If the literary connections in Mrs Robinson are less compelling (and it should be said that Isabella is not going to vie with Emma Bovary for literary immortality), they are crucial to the vivid anatomy of an 1850s mind.


Summerscale might have been more upfront about her own methods of narration in a book so concerned with reading, writing and the interpretation of documents. There are potentially significant gaps and doubts in a story she strives hard to render as a polished whole. It comes as a surprise, for example, late in the day that Summerscale has not read Isabella's diary, the fateful book having been lost or, more likely, destroyed. She has had to piece together her account from extracts published in legal reports. She has made careful use of correspondence, but how representative are the letters that survive? Foraging in the footnotes in an effort to find out, I couldn't help feeling that discussion of these matters would have left us better equipped to read Isabella and her times.


As a guide to mid-Victorian cultural life, however, Summerscale is simply superb, and she sets a fine example of what cultural history can do. Isabella has her head examined by a phrenologist, so we get a miniature history of phrenology and its implications. (A large cerebellum meant excess "amativeness"; Isabella's cerebellum was very large indeed.) To understand Edward and his MoorPark spa we need to know about hydropathy, so we go on a course in alternative medicine and curative bathing (chair baths, hot air baths, wet towel baths, secretly sensuous baths).


In other hands, admittedly, this might become tiresome. But Summerscale has a knack of judging just how much we want to know. So she keeps adding strands to the web: divorce law, diary-writing, Victorian dream theory, gentlemen's advice on the advantages of erotic encounters in bumpy carriages. She knows that the settings, too, are eloquent: Henry's big white villa in Caversham where nobody is happy, the sandy soil of the Surrey hills, the precise qualities of Edward's study with its many doors, and the foul smells from the Thames that filter into a hot Westminster courtroom at the stinking centre of the British empire.


Sensing a silence or slight misunderstanding between two characters, Summerscale prods a bit, and the door flies open to a whole new set of stories. It's like watching someone going straight to the secret compartment in a many-drawered cabinet. Edward's friend and brother-in-law, George Drysdale, needn't have figured at all in Isabella's story, except that he turns out to cast a shadow across the whole affair. He faked his own death out of shame for his sexual fixations, resurrected himself, failed to cauterise his penis, and went on to write the first guide to contraception. That's the kind of obscure but astonishing life story we keep glimpsing in the background.


And we glimpse too, at a distance, famous people going about their business, like Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. When not decoding Isabella, the phrenologist is feeling George Eliot's cerebellum; Charles Dickens is leaving Boulogne just as Isabella gets there; and who should be strolling at Moor Park but Charles Darwin, so relaxed by his bath treatments that he said he "did not care one penny how any of the birds and beasts had been formed". He didn't stop caring for long, of course: he was at work that year on The Origin of Species, refining his theory of evolution even as Isabella reconciled herself to atheism and wondered what the absence of God might mean for the future of sexual relations.


At every turn Isabella's experience is contiguous with that of the people who were deciphering and shaping her world. But ultimately it is Isabella herself who stands as exhibit A in this engrossing investigation of a society casting judgment on itself and trying, with much confusion, to make up the rules.



• Alexandra Harris's Virginia Woolf is published by Thames & Hudson.

June 22, 2012 /

The Scarlet Diary / The New York Times


MRS. ROBINSON’S DISGRACE

The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady

By Kate Summerscale

303 pp. Bloomsbury. $26.


On Nov. 15, 1850, 37-year-old Isabella Robinson went to a party in Edinburgh where she was introduced to
Edward Lane
. Later she noted in her diary that he was “handsome” and “fascinating,” the first of many entries describing her feelings for Lane, a married medical student 10 years her junior.


Isabella was herself unhappily married to Henry Robinson, a curmudgeonly businessman and civil engineer who also had a mistress and two illegitimate children. In fact, Isabella despised this “uneducated,” “selfish” and “harsh-tempered” man, who, in turn, treated her with contempt. Robinson was, she told herself, only interested in money, while she yearned for the intellectual stimulation that could be found at the home the Lanes shared with
Mrs. Lane
’s mother, Lady Drysdale, among their circle of literary and scientific friends.


Upon finishing his studies, Lane opened a fashionable spa for hydropathy at MoorPark in Surrey, where his patients — including Charles Darwin — underwent a fanciful range of water cures to calm their irritable nerves. Isabella visited regularly, sometimes to be treated, sometimes just as a family friend — but always, as her diary revealed, to be nearer to Lane. In those years, her journal’s pages were infused with unrequited longing for the young doctor, whose every word and gesture was weighed and judged. Isabella was downhearted when he “hardly looked at me,” ecstatic when she sat next to him at a lecture. They talked about Byron, God, hot-air balloons and Coleridge’s poems, and went on walks that left her “too much roused to sleep.”


There was much sadness in Isabella’s diary, moments when “all is dark to me,” but also descriptions of dreams “of romantic situations, and
Mr. Lane
.” Kate Summerscale argues, convincingly, that these pages, like a novel, could “conjure up a wished-for world, in which memories were colored with desire.” Then, in October 1854, during a visit to MoorPark, Isabella suddenly wrote of passionate kisses in the nearby woods and in Lane’s study. “Oh, God,” she declared, “I had never hoped to see this hour.” From here on, the diary was filled with even more romance and desire, though Isabella refrained from describing a sexual act — if, that is, there ever was one. On their walks, she and Lane kissed, caressed and rested on a bed of dry ferns. But, she wrote, “I shall not state what followed.”


A little more than a year later, in the spring of 1856, those words were enough to shatter her world. When Isabella fell ill and, delirious with fever, mumbled the names of other men, her suspicious husband read the diary. He promptly took it and their children and left her, then filed for divorce.


In her hugely enjoyable account of a sensational 1860 English murder case, “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher,” Summerscale demonstrated her talent for forensic investigation. Once again, in “Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace,” she prods, scrutinizes and examines, employing a real-life historical episode to shed light on Victorian morality and sensibilities. This time, however, the chief evidence she presents to tell her fascinating story isn’t a corpse but a diary. Just as she used the killing of a child in her previous book to provide insight into mid-19th-century domestic life and the rise of detective novels, Summerscale now uses Isabella and Henry Robinson’s scandalous divorce case to explore such diverse subjects as the era’s romantic novels, peculiar health fads and views of marriage.


Until 1858, the union between a husband and wife could be dissolved only by an individual act of Parliament, which was extremely expensive and therefore unobtainable for all but the very rich. Yet in that year, the new Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes made the severing of such bonds affordable, thus bringing it to the middle class. The Robinson case was one of the first to arrive at the court.


Summerscale is graciously evenhanded in her depiction of Isabella, who, despite being vilely neglected in her marriage and treated appallingly during the trial, was also a flawed character. It’s difficult to warm to her when, for example, she fumbles around with Lane inside a carriage while her son is perched up top with the driver or when she writes about “dear little innocent Mrs. L,” sitting with her baby just after Isabella has amused herself with Mrs. Lane’s husband in the shrubbery.


The court proceedings make for disturbing but engrossing reading. The contents of Isabella’s diary were divulged to the lawyers and judges and reprinted in the newspapers. Her innermost feelings, wishes and dreams were revealed at breakfast tables across the country. And, as if her situation weren’t awful enough, her lawyers argued that she was a sex maniac who had created an imaginary erotic life. Since the diary was Henry Robinson’s only proof of his wife’s adultery, her lawyers insisted that parts of it were fictional — the product of her “uterine disease,” evidence merely of temporary insanity. Medical witnesses explained that her condition could cause sexual delusions and nymphomania. The newspapers gorged on every detail.


“Isabella’s defense,” Summerscale writes, “was far more degrading than a confession of adultery would have been.” By agreeing to her lawyers’ strategy, she sacrificed herself for Lane, whose career was at stake. If Isabella wasn’t lying, how many female patients would be willing to seek treatment at his spa? Desperate and decidedly ungallant, Lane described his reputed paramour as “a vile and crazy woman” who was “goaded on by wild hallucinations.”


The question was and is — did Isabella really have an affair with
Edward Lane
or was it all wishful thinking? The end of the court case is surprising, and to give it away would be an insult to Summerscale’s cleverly constructed narrative. But she stresses that one thing is clear: the diary “may not tell us, for certain, what happened in Isabella’s life, but it tells us what she wanted.”


Andrea Wulf’s latest book, ­“Chasing ­Venus: The Race to Measure the ­Heavens,” has just been published.

Kate Summerscale (born 1965) is an award-winning English writer and journalist.


Summerscale was brought up in Japan, England and Chile. After attending BedalesSchool(1978–1983), she took a double-first at OxfordUniversity and an MA in journalism from StanfordUniversity. She lives in London with her son.


She is the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House,based on a real-life crime committed by Constance Kent and investigated by Jack Whicher, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction 2008, and the bestselling The Queen of Whale Cay, about Joe Carstairs, 'fastest woman on water', which won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1998 and was shortlisted for the 1997 Whitbread Awards for biography.


She formerly worked for The Independent and from 1995 to 1996 she wrote and edited obituaries for The Daily Telegraph. She is the former literary editor of The Daily Telegraph Her articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph.


She has also judged various literary competitions including the Booker Prize in 2001.


The petit Théâtre of Marie-Antoinette

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The Petit Théâtre de la Reine (English: The Queen's Theatre) is a small theatre at Versaillesnear the Petit Trianon. It was designed and built in 1780 on the orders of Marie Antoinette. Her favorite architect Richard Mique did the work. The theatre seats only 100. It was intended for performances by the Queen and her family and friends. At the period, many aristocrats had such small theatres on their country estates to pass the time performing plays and operas.

Mique's exterior is plain, simple, and even severe. The interior is rich with gold, blue, and white decoration. The interior is a wooden room painted to resemble marble. The stage machinery still exists.


In 1780, the Queen and her friends played Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny's Le Roi et le fermier (The King and the Farmer, 1762) in the little theatre. The original forest set and rustic cottage set have survived. They were restored in the 19th century. They were in use in February 2012 for performances of Le Roi at the Versailles Opera.










Les Petits Appartements à Versailles, by Richard Mique. VÍDEO Marie-Antoinette intime 5-9

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The fame of the petit appartement de la reine rests squarely in the hands of the last queen of France during the Ancien Régime. The restored state of the rooms that one sees today at Versailles closely replicate the petit appartement de la reine as it appeared during Marie-Antoinette’s day (Verlet, 1937). Modifications of the petit appartement de la reine for Marie-Antoinette began in 1779 (Verlet 1985, p. 585).

In this year, Marie-Antoinette ordered her favorite architect, Richard Mique to cover all wall of the petit appartement de la reine with white satin embroidered with floral arabesques, ostensibly to give a decorative cohesion to the rooms. The cost of the fabric was 100,000 livres; the hangings were entirely replaced with wood paneling in 1783 (Verlet 1985, p. 586).

In 1781, to commemorate the birth of the first dauphin, Louis XVI commissioned Richard Mique to redecorate the cabinet de la Méridienne (1789 plan #6) (Verlet 1985, p. 586). It was in this room that Marie-Antoinette would choose the clothing she would wear that day.

In this same year, the bibliothèque – occupying the site of the petite galerie of Marie Leszczyńska – (1789 plan #7) and the supplément de la bibliothèque – occupying the pièce des bains of Maria Leszczyńska – (1789 plan #8), and, additionally, a room for the toilette à l’anglaise[6] a pièce des bains and a salle des bains were arranged, opening on the cour de Monsieur (Verlet 1985, p. 403).

The last major modification to the petit appartement de la reine occurred in 1783, when Marie-Antoinette ordered a complete redecoration of the grand cabinet intérieur. The costly embroidered hangings were replaced with caved gilt paneling by Richard Mique. The new décor caused the room to be renamed the cabinet doré (Verlet 1985, p. 586).

Of all the features of the petit appartement de la reine, the so-called secret passage that links the grand appartement de la reine with the appartement du roi is one that has become a legend in the history of Palace of Versailles. The passage actually dates from the time of Marie-Thérèse, and had always been a suite of service rooms that also served as a private means by which the king and queen could communicate with each other (1740 plan #1-4; 1789 plan #1-4). It is true, however, that Marie-Antoinette, who was sleeping in the chambre de la reine in the grand appartement de la reine, escaped from the Paris mob on the night of 5/6 October 1789 by using this route. The entrance to the so-called secret passage is through a door located on the west side of the north wall of the chambre de la reine.










Richard Mique was born at Nancy, the son of Simon Mique, an architect and entrepreneur of Lunéville and grandson of Pierre Mique also an architect. Following their example, he became an architect in the service of duke Stanislas Leszczyński, ex-king of Poland and father of Maria Leszczyńska, the consort of King Louis XV of France. Following the death of Héré de Corny, Mique participated as premier architecte in Stanislas' grand plans for reordering and embellishing Nancy, his capital as Duke of Lorraine. Stanislas made him a chevalier of the Order of Saint-Michel and maneuvered unsuccessfully to have Mique placed on the payroll of the Bâtiments du Roi.
Following his patron's death in February 1766, Mique was called to France the following October, at the suggestion of Maria Leszczyńska's Polish confessor. His official career in France was initially stymied by the influence of Ange-Jacques Gabriel, premier architecte. His main clients were a series of royal ladies. For Maria Leszczyńska, he built a convent, prominently sited in the town of Versailles, on lands at the edge of the park belonging formerly to Madame de Montespan's Château de Clagny, of which eleven hectares were consigned to the queen by her husband, Louis XV. At the queen's death, her daughter Madame Adélaïde completed the project.

Mique must have gained the confidence of the dauphin and the dauphine for, upon the accession of the dauphin as Louis XVI in 1774, he was appointed intendant et contrôleur général des bâtiments du Roi; he succeeded Gabriel as premier architecte to Louis XVI the following year, thus overseeing the last works carried out at Versailles before the French Revolution. He purchased a seigneurie in Lorraine, which completed his transformation to courtier-architect.

He laid out the queen's garden at the Petit Trianon from 1774 to 1785 in collaboration, it is believed (though without documentary evidence) with the painter Hubert Robert. The design — "one of the first instances... of pre-Victorian kitsch" (Higonnet 2002) — was based on sketches by the comte de Caraman, an inspired amateur of gardening. Mique was also responsible for the Hameau de la Reine, a mock farming village built around an artificial lake at the northeastern corner of the estate.

During the Revolution, he was arrested along with his son as participants in a conspiracy to save the life of Marie Antoinette, whose favorite architect he had been. He was brought before a revolutionary tribunal and, after a summary trial on 7 July 1794, both father and son were condemned to death and executed the following day. This was just three weeks before the fall of Robespierre and the end of the Reign of Terror.

Pierre de Nolhac, the historian of the Château de Versailles, in Le Trianon de Marie-Antoinette (1914), found Mique to have been "un artiste savant, habile, et digne de plus de gloire". A street in the city of Versailles commemorates his name.
 


The Riot Club Trailer

The Riot Club .

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The Universal Pictures film The Riot Club set for release in September 2014 is a film adaptation of Laura Wade's play Posh 


Laura Wade: ‘It’s the last time they can let their hair down’

Laura Wade’s play Posh ushered in the Tory government in 2010. Is the film version, The Riot Club, here to bury the Bullingdon boys’ era of inequality? She explains why she feels sorry for Cameron and co

Emine Saner



Laura Wade certainly has lucky timing. Her play Posh opened in 2010, less than a month before the general election, and the film version, renamed The Riot Club, has just come out in the runup to another one. Centering on the despicable activities of the 10 members of an Oxford university drinking club in the upstairs room of a country pub, it’s probably a reminder that David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson, all members of the infamous Bullingdon club, could do without.


Wade began adapting the play for the screen between the sell-out first run at the
Royal Court
and its transfer to the West End two years later (with impeccable timing again, a month after the MP Nadine Dorries complained about the “arrogant posh boys” running the country). “The 2010 production had the boys living under a Labour government and feeling like their backs were up against the wall because of that,” says Wade. “By 2012, that had to change – we had moved into a Tory government by then, so it was more about the boys feeling that, despite the fact their people were in power, they were still feeling disempowered or they lived in a world that didn’t really understand them.”


When Posh opened, it was described as a leftist call to arms, but Wade says she always felt that wasn’t quite accurate – besides, she’s far too careful and nuanced to declare outright class war. “I think that makes it sound rather soapboxy and I didn’t think it was,” she says. “It was certainly something that aimed to ask questions about the behaviour of wealthy and privileged people. I feel quite happy to be asking whether there are certain ways of behaving with the privilege that your life has given you that might be less helpful to the rest of society.” Also inescapable, and uncomfortable, was the fact that, for all their revolting views - and ultimately heinous acts that play out in that room of the country pub, the boys were actually rather fun – their jokes were funny, they were clever and charming. “I’ve had these boys living in my head for seven years now,” she says with a laugh. “But it’s quite entertaining. There are lots of knob gags. It helps that I have the sense of humour of an eight-year-old boy.”


Wade, whose name is always mentioned in pieces on talented young female playwrights, started writing Posh in 2007, the year that famous photograph of Bullingdon club members came out, showing Cameron, Johnson and privileged others, all floppy hair and supreme confidence. She was interested in the drinking societies, “because of the idea of a group of young men who would know that they were likely, after college, to end up in quite powerful positions. It was interesting to me that they had a real sense of their own history, their family history and where they stood in terms of that continuum. They are existing at a time when, in a sense, they and their families are the least powerful they’ve ever been, so what was it like for the boys of that generation? And it being a long way from my own experience [Wade is state-school, non-Oxbridge educated], it was anthropologically interesting. What makes people behave like that?”


What did she come up with? A sense of entitlement, and the knowledge that the damage (in life, as in the play, venues are trashed) could be magicked away with a big cheque? “It’s partly youth, and that’s often the excuse given for it. But also the idea that’s expressed in the film that college is the last time when they can really let their hair down because they know that later on in life there will be people looking at them. It felt that there was quite a lot of pressure on the boys, both academically and from family and history. That’s not intended to excuse their behaviour, but to explain it.”


The 2012 production came out after the youth riots the previous summer. “What struck me during the last year was the ton of bricks that came down on all the people who were involved,” Wade said at the time. “It’s said that we all do silly things when we’re young, but some of us get slapped in prison, and some of us don’t.”


When one character rants “I’m sick to fucking death of poor people”, it seemed suitably dramatic back in 2010, but now those in government have been accused, more with weary resignation, of exactly that. “There seems to be a lot of political action over the past few years that’s been about vilifying people who are unfortunate enough to need benefits and things that are intended to stir up bad feeling among people. Poverty ought to be considered a misfortune rather than a moral failing.”

The other striking thing is the misogyny – the young men hire an escort and expect her to perform oral sex on them; when she refuses they consider raping the pub landlord’s daughter. Again, back in 2010, it seemed shocking; now, in the midst of a so-called rape culture, it seems horrifyingly prescient. “It seemed, when writing the characters, that they had so little experience of women. That scene in the play, which continues to exist in the film, where they’ve hired an escort, and she turns up and she’s a real person, they don’t know how to handle it because they haven’t spent enough formative time with women to really treat them as rounded human beings. There’s that kind of casual misogyny that underpins quite a lot of what they do.” In a broader sense she can see that politically: “Recent policy has disadvantaged women disproportionately.”


With this film, and Downton Abbey having just begun its fifth series, what does she think the enduring appeal of the upper classes is? “I think we’re fascinated by the idea of aristocracy, particularly now when the structure of society has changed. I feel like Downton is working up to the point where they all have to move out of the house, and it goes over to the National Trust. I think it seems to appeal on a number of different levels. It’s about a world that doesn’t exist any more but we imagine ourselves into, whether we imagine ourselves as a below-stairs maid or one of the daughters of the family.”


Against this class nostalgia, the wealth gap widens, inequality seems ever more entrenched, and there doesn’t seem to be a huge swell of anger about it. “No, it’s surprising, isn’t it?” says Wade. “It’s surprising that people aren’t more up in arms about inequality. Maybe it’s because everybody is so busy trying to keep their own head above water.”


Still, she seems at pains to find sympathy for her characters. Isn’t that hard when, in the real world, the power networks she writes about having worked so well, those young men of the dining clubs are now presiding over public-sector reform, benefit cuts, the bedroom tax? “It always, for me, comes down to empathy and how much you are able to understand how other people with less privileged backgrounds get on,” she says. “If you don’t have that experience yourself, what are you doing to find out about it? I think the piece suggests that the boys in the club don’t understand, or take the time to try to find out. It’s important for me not to blame anyone – we don’t choose what background we come from, what school we go to – but it’s how you choose to behave and use the lucky cards you’ve been dealt at birth


Posh Britain: will they always lord it over us?

In new film The Riot Club, based loosely on the antics of the notorious Bullingdon boys, a gaggle of toffs trash restaurants for larks. Who are these people, how did they turn out like this – and what does it tell us about privilege today?

Stuart Jeffries




The posh, like the poor only more noisily, are always with us. Consider the new film The Riot Club. It is, you’d think, a devastating critique of Britain’s ruling classes, an adaptation of state-school-educated dramatist Laura Wade’s 2010 play Posh, which, by dramatising the wretched roistering of a restaurant-ruining university dining society closely resembling the real-life Bullingdon Club to which so many of our current rulers belonged, skewered the sense of entitlement to power of a privileged, wealthy, public school and Oxbridge elite. The play, at least, was timely: it was staged just as that elite was about to become the government and put its collective foot more firmly on the throat of the poor than previous administrations.


When Michael Billington reviewed Posh in 2010, he complained it was too implacable. “[Wade’s] argument would be even stronger if it admitted that, even within the ranks of the bluebloods, there were occasional spasms of doubt and decency.” But what made Posh bad drama for Billington made it good politics (certainly if you’re of a socialist persuasion): why dramatise the decency of the posh when we, if only figuratively, should be strangling George Osborne with Boris Johnson’s entrails?


But in that shift from stage to screen the implacableness of that rage got lost. Instead of evisceration, celebration. Guardian film editor Catherine Shoard reporting from the Torontofilm festival, wrote: “[I]t scores an own goal; it comes on dressed as a cheerleader for the left, then can’t help but defect.” The headline? “The PM should love it.”


What happened? The drama got co-opted by posh. It wasn’t just because the film is produced by David Cameron’s one-time roommate and fellow Etonian Peter Czernin, though you’d think that didn’t help. Czernin, incidentally, is a member of the Howard de Walden family. His mother, Hazel, Baroness de Walden, is holder of the 400-year-old baronetcy created by Elizabeth I in 1597 for Thomas Howard for his role in defeating the Spanish armada. In 2012, the family’s worth was estimated to be £2.2bn, and family members, including Czernin, benefited from multimillion dividends on the De Walden Estates properties in central London. Is Peter Czernin posh? Certainly factors such as going to Eton, being able trace your illustrious ancestors back to Tudor times, fattening your bank balance with the proceeds of rents from your family’s central London property portfolio and having David Cameron for a chum, don’t disqualify him.


Nor is The Riot Club’s dismal political switcheroo explained by the fact that its stars come from posh acting dynasties, though that probably doesn’t help either. One of the leads in the film is Max Irons, son of Sinead Cusack and Jeremy Irons (still celebrated for playing Oxbridge arse-kisser Charles Ryder in the 1981 TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited). Max attended the Dragon School in Oxford (boarding fees per term: £8,980; day fees per term: £6,230), as did so many other thespians – Tom Hiddlestone, Emma Watson, Hugh Laurie – whom one wouldn’t balk at calling posh. Another lead is Freddie Fox, son of Edward Fox and Joanna David, who attended and was expelled from Bryanston (boarding fees per term: £11,162). Freddie, 25, incidentally, told the Radio Times that he has taken to speaking with a Mancunian accent while working on the Manchester-based TV series Cucumber: “I decided I was going to stay in the accent until the job’s done. Of course, my parents hate it.”


But what the preponderance of posh in The Riot Club throws into relief is the complaint, now made almost weekly, that aspiring actors from disadvantaged backgrounds can’t get a break. Dame Judi Dench has disclosed that she receives begging letters from kids who can’t afford the cost of drama school training. David Morrissey makes a similar complaint, arguing that creative industries have an “intern culture” that is failing people from disadvantaged backgrounds.


In this sense, acting is a microcosm of Britain, one of the world’s most sclerotic, class-bound societies. Only 7% of Britain’s school-age population attend private schools, but half the cabinet – including Cameron (Eton), Clegg (Wesminster) and Osborne (St Paul’s) – went to private schools. Politics and acting are just two professions fast becoming what they weren’t – exclusive fiefs of daddy-bankrolled spawn.


Dench and Morrissey have a good point. One way of addressing it would be if we stopped making films about posh people starring posh people and produced by posh people. Aspirant actors from disadvantaged backgrounds might get a toe-hold.


What was most loathsome about The Riot Club is different from the foregoing. It’s the betrayal of the rage that made the play worth seeing in the first place. In the New Statesman recently, Cambridgestudent Conrad Landin recalled taking part in a focus group as the film’s makers tried to get a student perspective on the subject. He recalled the film’s director Lone Scherfig asking them: “But aren’t these the people you’d secretly quite like to be?” “‘No,’ I replied, aghast. ‘No,’ said several of the other Cambridgestudents in the room.” But that’s the narrative lie of posh: we hate them because we want to be them, not because we want to eliminate them as a precondition to becoming ourselves. Filled with Nietzschean ressentiment, teeming with self-loathing, we project on to the Other (the Posh) what we aren’t and never will be. Or, as Wade put it in an Observer interview: “We love watching rich people behave badly. It has a sort of grisly fascination.” If that’s true, and I doubt it, we have to kill that love: otherwise, if we watch stuff like The Riot Club we bend the knee to a lucrative global industry that has a dual function. Internationally, selling posh abroad (think: Downton Abbey, The Kings Speech, The Queen) has helped reduce the balance of payments deficit that resulted when the industries in which the working classes toiled were eliminated by the Conservative governments of the 1980s. And domestically? Selling posh helps reduces us to voyeurs of a pimped-up grotesquerie of toffs behaving badly. Think: Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, Made in Chelsea and now The Riot Club.


The Riot Club, then, recreates Brideshead’s deferential culture of fondness for posh at the moment when we least need it. Why? Because the fledgling meritocracy of postwar Britainis getting slaughtered as the posh reassert control. Like many other rotten things in this United Kingdom, it started with Tony Blair. When Blair, educated at Fettes – Scotland’s poshest private school – was elected at the 1997 general election, he broke the run of state-educated prime ministers. His predecessors – Major (Rutlish grammar), Thatcher (Kesteven and Grantham girls), Callaghan (Portsmouth Northern secondary), Wilson (Royds Hall grammar), Heath (Chatham House grammar) – were state-school kids. In The Time Machine, HG Wells divided society into the Uppers and Downers. For a while, between 1964 and 1997, the Downers started to get the upper hand. Things can only get better, sang D: Ream as Blair was elected in 1997. Arguably things have got worse – unless you’re posh.


Now the Uppers are back in power – a cabinet teeming with Etonians, the standing disgrace that is a posh clown as London’s mayor. But this posh return to office is unsustainable: if the government, like the police, fails to look like the society that it is supposed to serve, then alienation from it and its claims to authority follows. This is a specifically British problem, and one that, the safe money says, drove the movement for Scottish independence.


One laughable attempt to circumvent this problem is for our rulers to pretend to be what they are not. It’s what Slavoj Zizek calls fetishistic disavowal. What does that mean? It means Cameron presenting himself as blokey Dave in his polo shirt, doing the dishes; it means George Osborne telling us we’re all in this together (quite so: when you’ve been evicted because of the bedroom tax, or come back from being ritually humiliated at the jobcentre, don’t you head off to Corfu to cheer yourself up, chilling on the yacht of a Russian billionaire chum?).


But what Cameron, Clegg and Osborne disavow so vehemently (and their vehemence merely confirms what they disavow) is that they are posh. That’s why, quite possibly, the photograph of Cameron posing with his Bullingdon Club mates when he was an Oxford undergraduate was airbrushed from media databases. The photographers, Oxford-based company Gillman and Soame, made the “policy decision”, after the picture appeared in national newspapers, not to allow any school photographs they own to be published. They denied then that they had been pressurised to withdraw the picture by the Conservative party, but some were sceptical. Columnist Peter Hitchens, for instance, told Newsnight: “I think it tells us something about David Cameron that he doesn’t much want us to know, that he is not the ordinary bloke that he claims to be. That he is actually much grander and much more aristocratic than he has made out.”

So what is posh? I know, I know – I can’t believe I got this far through the article without defining my terms either. But posh is hard to define, especially when we’re in a hall of mirrors in which the posh disavow what they are and the goalposts of posh move so fast. Consider the Queen. She’s posh, right? Well, yes, but less posh than she was. In her 1950 Christmas broadcast, for instance, when she said “had” it rhymed with “bed”. Thirty years later, according to researchers at Australia’s MacquarieUniversity, her vowels had moved downmarket (or as the Mirror put it: “Er Madge don’t talk so posh any more”).


Posh is also more difficult to define once you realise that the term is relative. “Oh golly, oh gosh, come and lie on the couch with a nice bit of posh from Burnham-on-Crouch,” sang Ian Dury on Billericay Dickie. Really? Can you be posh and from Burnham-on-Crouch??


But real posh is something else. The Guardian’s Etonian film critic Derek Malcolm got close to it once when told me that his old school had conferred on him an “effortless sense of superiority”. That, I suspect, is part of what it is to be posh: certainly my lifelong sense of inferiority marks me out as Downer not Upper, non-U notU.


And then there is another definitional problem. The posh don’t like the word posh. “Posh?” exclaims Templer reprovingly to his wife in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, his 12-volume anatomising of 20th-century English posh. “Sweetie, what an awful word. Please never use it in my presence again.”


And then there is the grubby industry of wannabe-posh style fascists who make their pennies from unconvincingly stipulating what posh is and how to become it. Apparently, you should never, ever, say toilet. “In high society, the T word is worse than the F word,” explained self-styled adjudicator of posh William Hanson. “Avoid using it at all costs or prepare for social relegation. Lavatory is the smartest word.”


But this sort of elitist cobblers doesn’t get to the heart of posh.


One founding text of postwar posh is a paper called U and Non-U by professor of linguistics Alan Ross, published in Encounter in 1955. Ross argued that the upper classes were no longer better educated, richer, or cleaner than those not of their class. What distinguished the upper classes from the rest was the way they spoke.


U-speakers said sorry, not pardon, argued Ross, listened to the wireless not radio, and deployed table napkins not serviettes. Rubbish, retorted Evelyn Waugh in Noblesse Oblige: “There is practically no human activity or form of expression which at one time or another in one place or another I have not heard confidently condemned as plebeian, for generations of the English have used the epithets as general pejoratives to describe anything which gets on their nerves.” In his 2004 book, Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain, Ferdinand Mount took issue with Waugh: “It is not simply the fluidity of language which has washed away this whole disgraceful topic. What has gone is the will to erect, maintain and police such distinctions … the upper class no longer dares enforce its code.”


It doesn’t need to. It can rule effectively by affecting to be what it is not. Indeed so much of what it is to be posh has been erased as the old elite has reasserted its hold on the British throat. The posh may not smell better, think better, be richer, speak differently from the rest of us. They have erased their apparent distinctions while reinforcing their real ones, a very British version of Leo Strauss’s noble lie.


Will the posh always be with us, degrading our lives and diminishing our opportunities? Yes, unless we abolish private schools. The postwar dream was otherwise: welfare state and education reforms were designed to create a humane, fairer Britain that would provide a safety net for the vulnerable and ladder to the aspirant. Now the safety net has been snipped and the rungs of that ladder are increasingly reserved for the posh, for the 7% who were given an unfair advantage, those whose education was paid for by their parents. It doesn’t have to be that way.

The seven rules of being posh

After 25 years of living in Britain, US-born Tim Dowling believes he has finally worked out the class system. Here’s what he has learned

Tim Dowling


Distant observers of the UK’s charming class system will have many questions, especially regarding its inaccessible upper reaches. What does posh mean? How does poshness work, exactly? Who does it include, and exclude?


I can’t pretend to be an expert on the subject, but after nearly a quarter of a century in Britain I’ve learned a few things. What follows is more or less all of them.


1 There is no one kind of poshness. There are actually seven distinct types: poshness of birth; poshness of wealth; of accent; of education; also, the poshness of excellent taste, as well as the poshness of eccentric and exuberant vulgarity; and, finally, the poshness of assumed superiority. Some of these are inextricably linked, and some quite naturally overlap, but almost no one is possessed of all seven.


2 As a term of description or abuse, “posh” has an incredibly elastic definition. At one end of the scale you can accuse someone of being posh for owning a dishwasher. At the other extreme you will hear people saying, “The thing is, the Queen isn’t actually posh at all.”


3 Posh people aren’t usually snobs. They just don’t have very much to resent.


4 The most virulent form of snobbery operates entirely within the middle classes. This makes sense, because none of them is properly posh, and yet virtually all of them have dishwashers. If you are truly middle class, all you can see around you are other middle-class people doing it wrong. When you satirise the middle class in literature or on screen, they are both your target and your audience.


5 A brief or occasional visitor to the upper reaches of Britain’s class system could be forgiven for assuming that all posh people know each other. In fact he could be wholly acquitted. They sort of all do.


6 Far and away the poshest thing you can do is wilfully mispronounce your surname, as if the basic rules of vowels, consonants and syllables simply didn’t apply to you, and then oblige strangers to follow your lead.


7 The next-poshest thing you can do is have a freezing bathroom.


The Bullingdon Club was founded over 200 years ago. Petre Mais claims it was founded in 1780 and was limited to 30 men, and by 1875 it was considered "an old Oxford institution, with many good traditions". Originally it was a hunting and cricket club, and Thomas Assheton Smith II is recorded as having batted for the Bullingdon against the Marylebone Cricket Club in 1796. In 1805 cricket at OxfordUniversity"was confined to the old Bullingdon Club, which was expensive and exclusive". This foundational sporting purpose is attested to in the Club's symbol.


The Wisden Cricketer reports that the Bullingdon is "ostensibly one of the two original OxfordUniversitycricket teams but it actually used cricket merely as a respectable front for the mischievous, destructive or self-indulgent tendencies of its members". By the late 19th century, the present emphasis on dining within the Club began to emerge. However, Walter Long attests that in 1875 "Bullingdon Club [cricket] matches were also of frequent occurrence, and many a good game was played there with visiting clubs. The Bullingdon Club dinners were the occasion of a great display of exuberant spirits, accompanied by a considerable consumption of the good things of life, which often made the drive back to Oxford an experience of exceptional nature". A report of 1876 relates that "cricket there was secondary to the dinners, and the men were chiefly of an expensive class". The New York Times told its readers in 1913 that "The Bullingdon represents the acme of exclusiveness at Oxford; it is the club of the sons of nobility, the sons of great wealth; its membership represents the 'young bloods' of the university".

Today, the Bullingdon is still primarily a dining club, although a vestige of the Club's sporting links survives in its support of an annual point to point race. The Club President, known as the General, presents the winner's cup, and the Club members meet at the race for a champagne breakfast. The Club also meets for an annual Club dinner. Guests may be invited to either of these events. There may also be smaller dinners during the year to mark the initiation of new members. The club often books private dining rooms under an assumed name, as most restaurateurs are wary of the Club's reputation for causing considerable drunken damage during the course of dinner.


A photograph of former Bullingdon Club members wearing their club uniforms, including Prime Minister David Cameron and Mayor of London Boris Johnson was revealed in 2007. The copyright owners have since refused permission to use the picture.
A number of episodes over many decades have become anecdotal evidence of the Club's behaviour. Infamously, on 12 May 1894 and again on 20 February 1927, after dinner, Bullingdon members smashed almost all the glass of the lights and 468 windows in Peckwater Quad of Christ Church, along with the blinds and doors of the building. As a result, the Club was banned from meeting within 15 miles of Oxford.


While still Prince of Wales, Edward VIII had a certain amount of difficulty in getting his parents' permission to join the Bullingdon on account of the Club's reputation. He eventually obtained it only on the understanding that he never join in what was then known as a "Bullingdon blind", a euphemistic phrase for an evening of drink and song. On hearing of his eventual attendance at one such evening, Queen Mary sent him a telegram requesting that he remove his name from the Club.


Andrew Gimson, biographer of Boris Johnson, reported about the club in the 1980s: "I don't think an evening would have ended without a restaurant being trashed and being paid for in full, very often in cash. [...] A night in the cells would be regarded as being par for a Buller man and so would debagging anyone who really attracted the irritation of the Buller men."


Dinners in recent years, being relatively low key, have not attracted press attention, though in 2005, following damage to a 15th-century pub in Oxfordshire during a dinner, four members of the party were arrested; the incident was widely reported. A further dinner was reported in 2010 after damage to a country house. In February 2013, the Daily Mirror reported that an initiation for a new member to the Club involved burning a £50 note in front of a beggar.


In the last few years, the Bullingdon has been mentioned in the debates of the House of Commons in order to draw attention to excessive behaviour across the British class spectrum, and to embarrass those increasingly prominent Conservative Party politicians who are former members of the Bullingdon. These most notably include David Cameron (UK Prime Minister), George Osborne (UK Chancellor of the Exchequer) and Boris Johnson (Mayor of London). Hansard records eight references to the Bullingdon between 2001 and 2008. Johnson has since tried to distance himself from the club, calling it "a truly shameful vignette of almost superhuman undergraduate arrogance, toffishness and twittishness."

The Bullingdon is not currently registered with the University of Oxford, but members are drawn from among the members of the University. On several occasions in the past, when the club was registered, the University proctors have suspended it on account of the rowdiness of members' activities, including suspensions in 1927 and 1956. John Betjeman wrote in 1938 that "quite often the Club is suspended for some years after each meeting". While under suspension, the club has been known to meet in relative secrecy.


The club was active in Oxford in 2008/9, although not currently registered with the University, and the retiring proctors' oration recited an incident which, not being on University premises, was outside their jurisdiction: "some students had taken habitually to the drunken braying of ‘We are the Bullingdon’ at 3 a.m. from a house not far from the Phoenix Cinema. But the transcript of what they called the wife of the neighbour who went to ask them to be quiet was written in language that is not usually printed". The members therefore received an Anti-Social Behaviour Contract from the Thames Valley Police, threatening the more common ASBO. The proctor concluded in March 2009: "So I am pleased to say that, except perhaps at the highest level of national politics, the Bullingdon Club this year has been quiescent."


The Bullingdon is satirised as the Bollinger Club (Bollinger being a notable brand of champagne) in Evelyn Waugh's novel Decline and Fall (1928), where it has a pivotal role in the plot: the mild-mannered hero is blamed for the Bollinger Club's destructive rampage through his college and is sent down. Tom Driberg claimed that the description of the Bollinger Club was a "mild account of the night of any Bullingdon Club dinner in ChristChurch. Such a profusion of glass I never saw until the height of the Blitz. On such nights, any undergraduate who was believed to have 'artistic' talents was an automatic target."


Waugh mentions the Bullingdon by name in Brideshead Revisited. In talking to Charles Ryder, Anthony Blanche relates that the Bullingdon attempted to "put him in Mercury" in Tom Quad one evening, Mercury being a large fountain in the centre of the Quad. Blanche describes the members in their tails as looking "like a lot of most disorderly footmen", and goes on to say: "Do you know, I went round to call on Sebastian next day? I thought the tale of my evening's adventures might amuse him." This could indicate that Sebastian was not a member of the Bullingdon, although in the 1981 TV adaptation, Lord Sebastian Flyte vomits through the window of Charles Ryder's college room while wearing the famous Bullingdon tails. The 2008 film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited likewise clothes Flyte in the Club tails during this scene, as his fellow revellers chant "Buller, Buller, Buller!" behind him.


A fictional Oxford dining society loosely inspired by clubs like the Bullingdon forms the basis of Posh, by Laura Wade, a play staged in April 2010 at the RoyalCourtTheatre, London. Membership of the club while a student is shown as giving admission to a secret and corrupt network of influence in British politics later in life.


The TV series Trinity, set in a "TrinityCollege" in a fictional English city, featured an elite "Dandelion Club" whose members wore yellow waistcoats like those of the Bullingdon Club, and behaved in a similar manner.


In February 2012 Colman's, the company whose mustard is used by the club for its initiation rites, launched a TV advert in the UK featuring a comic minotaur character who is dressed in the Bullingdon Club uniform of teal blue long-tailed frock coat and mustard yellow waistcoat; and whose voice, mannerisms and blonde haircut all parody those of former club member and London Mayor Boris Johnson.


The Universal Pictures film The Riot Club set for release in September 2014 is a film adaptation of Laura Wade's play Posh 



The Riot Club, review: 'hilarious but lacking political bite'

A parody of the Oxford Bullingdon Club from the director of An Education presents a lewdly behaved gathering of young British thesps, says Tim Robey


How do you parody something that already seems beyond parody? Twice, in 1894 and 1927, The Bullingdon Club - a hell-raising society of elite OxfordUniversity students whose past members have included David Cameron, Boris Johnson and George Osborne - smashed every window in Peckwater Quad of ChristChurchCollege. You may not imagine there's much antisocial toffery left for fiction.

Laura Wade's 2010 play, Posh, dealt with a still-reported Bullingdon habit of trashing their dining establishments beyond recognition, and tossing a cheque at the landlord on the way out. It now reaches the screen as The Riot Club, starring a braying, lewdly behaved gathering of silver-spoon-reared young British thesps.

Hearing the word "legend!" exclaimed anachronistically by men in wigs, as the eponymous club is founded in days of yore, supplies the first hint of the Hogarthian tableau of terrible behaviour that Danish director Lone Scherfig intends. She then plunges us into surely the most ridiculous account of Oxford freshers' week initiation rites ever put on screen. In one hilarious scene, a character pops the keys to his vomit-soiled sportscar through a charity shop's letterbox with the words "Ashtray was full anyway."

Talk about revisiting Brideshead: this is meant to be now, though only the use of mobile phones as a plot device separates us from a lavish and lamplit Edwardian debauch.

We soon get to the key location where most of the play was set: The Bull's Head, a village gastropub with fine-dining pretensions, far from Oxford because "we're banned from anywhere closer". Here fresher hopefuls Alistair (The Hunger Games’s Sam Claflin) and Miles (Max Irons, son of Jeremy) vie to impress the established membership with their binge-drinking stamina, while the landlord (Gordon Brown, no relation) bows and scrapes in their private room. The carousing, the gobbling and the breakages just get louder, and when Harry (Douglas Booth) summons a prostitute in the hope of a 10-man under-the-table servicing, a line gets crossed.

Whereas on stage the landlord's daughter (Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay, down-poshed) was the one eventually propositioned for a ludicrous amount of money, Wade here brings in another fresher, the "bootstrappy regional" sympathetically played by Holliday Grainger, to suffer this indignity. Her arrival comes as a shock to Miles, her nominal new boyfriend, whose phone has been wickedly hijacked to send a fake SOS text and beckon her along.

Wade's play was an enjoyably scathing broadside against the niche grotesqueries of a barely-existent social class. It lacked subtlety, really: you knew exactly what position it was bound to strike, and the uncomprehending servility of the pub minions felt a little easy and patronising. Still, there was a pungency to the writing which has been heavily diluted here, along with its political bite.

Some of the supporting performances are so hammily spiteful and giggly they let the side down, but the film is perfectly cast in its main roles. If director Scherfig proved anything with Carey Mulligan in An Education, it's how to make the cream of our acting talent come out looking even more promising than when they entered. Claflin has a hard, bitter edge to him - he's a lone wolf, seeing what he can get out of this bunch, seizing his chances to pounce.

Booth affects a raffish nonchalance that's perfect for a character whose corruption and predatory contempt for women are papered over by a veneer of charm. And Irons, given range for a lot more doubt and self-awareness than Miles had on stage, is hugely impressive, wobbling on a thin line throughout between being seduced and horrified. This whole business could have been an emotional vacuum - a sticky wicket, really. But they sock it about like opening batsmen who know exactly what they're doing.


Prince Charles urges action against climate change 'before it is too late'

Last Mitford sister, Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, dies at 94

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Last Mitford sister, Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, dies at 94

BBC NEWS / 24 September 2014


Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, and the last surviving Mitford sister, has died aged 94.


Her son, the Duke of Devonshire, announced the death in a statement from Chatsworth House, her stately home.


Prince Charles said he was "saddened" by the news, saying he "adored and admired" Deborah and would "miss her so very much".


The Mitford sisters fascinated - and sometimes scandalised - British society in the 1940s.


Unity was a friend of Hitler; Diana, the second wife of British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley; Jessica, a left-wing activist, and Nancy, a novelist and historian.


Deborah, like her elder sister Pamela, was more focused on home life.


Nonetheless, along with her siblings, during her lifetime she moved in the same circles as Sir Winston Churchill, John F Kennedy and Evelyn Waugh.


She also accompanied her sister Unity to tea with Hitler in 1937, was painted by Lucian Freud, and amassed a collection of Elvis Presley memorabilia.


Nicknamed the "housewife duchess", she made Chatsworth in Derbyshire one of the most successful and profitable stately homes in England after marrying Andrew Cavendish - who later became the 11th Duke of Devonshire - in 1941.


The statement from her son said: "It is with great sadness that I have to inform you that Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, has passed away peacefully this morning."


It added that an announcement about funeral arrangements would be made shortly.


Prince Charles said: "My wife and I were deeply saddened to learn of the death of the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, whom both of us adored and admired greatly.


"She was a unique personality with a wonderfully original approach to life, and a memorable turn of phrase to match that originality.


"The joy, pleasure and amusement she gave to so many, particularly through her books, as well as the contribution she made to Derbyshire throughout her time at Chatsworth, will not easily be forgotten and we shall miss her so very much."


Born Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford on 31 March 1920, the duchess was the sixth daughter of the 2nd Baron Redesdale.


The Mitfords' childhood at their family home in the Oxfordshire village of Swinbrookwas immortalised in Nancy's novels, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.


Her parents made a poor job of hiding their disappointment that Deborah had not been born a boy, leaving Thomas their only son.


The Mitfords' father disapproved of educating girls, famously insisting that hockey would make their ankles fat, and Deborah spent her formative years skating and hunting.


Her sister Unity's infatuation with Hitler saw the young Deborah invited to tea with the German dictator, although the visit made little impression on her.


"If you sat in a room with Churchill," she later recalled, "you were aware of this tremendous charisma. Kennedy had it too. But Hitler didn't - not to me anyway."


At Chatsworth, the Duchess took on a major role in running the house and its garden, which have been used in a number of film and TV productions, and she ran the estate's farm shop.


In July 2002, the duchess and her husband spoke out against the government's proposed ban on fox hunting.


Made a dame in 1999, she became the Dowager Duchess of Devonshirein 2004 after her husband died and their son inherited his title.


She penned a number of books including the autobiographical Wait for Me: Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister, which was published in 2010.



The Dowager Duchess of Devonshireobituary

Last of the famous Mitford sisters, she became a successful chatelaine of Chatsworth House

Veronica Horwell


Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, who has died aged 94, was for more than half a century the chatelaine of Chatsworth House, the great stately home and estate in Derbyshire. In that time she did much to promote it as a favourite public destination.


But she started out as the youngest of the Mitford sisters – the country chick of that sophisticated brood, the extraordinary offspring of Lord Redesdale and his wife, Sydney. Although sister Nancy's claim that Debo could imitate a hen expelling an egg might have been a joke, Debo did drive the cart delivering the Mitford henhouse eggs to the station. While Nancy, Diana, Unity and Decca pursued literature, fascism, Hitler and socialism, Debo's best friend in childhood was the family's old groom, Hooper, "the human end of the horses; the stables were my heaven".


She was born at Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire, but equine bliss ended at 16 when the Mitfords sold their next country house: at 17, Debo's closest sibling, Jessica – "Decca"– eloped without a word, a letdown slightly ameliorated by the £1,000 libel settlement the Daily Express paid Debo for wrongly naming her as the runaway, which she squandered on a fur coat. She came out as a debutante in 1938 at a ball given by her doting father at the Mitfords'London house, and enjoyed the last real season before the second world war. Unity, the Hitler groupie, wrote from Germany: "Swyne [a Debo nickname] seems to be having a wonderful time … who will the romance be with?"


The answer was Lord Andrew Cavendish, also 18, younger son of the Duke of Devonshire, encountered at the races. He joined the Coldstream Guards, while Debo and her mother went to Berne to collect Unity, who had put a bullet through her brain but survived, severely damaged; they coped with Unity's resultant moodiness and incontinence through the first year of war. But then, nothing organic fazed Debo – when travelling to Mull by train, she milked her beloved goat in the first-class waiting room at Stirling: "Which I should not have done since I only had a third-class ticket."


Debo wrote to Diana – in Holloway for supporting her fascist husband, Oswald Mosley – about her impending nuptials: "I do wish you weren't in prison. It will be vile not having you to go shopping with, only we're so poor I shan't have much of a trousseau." Debo married Cavendish in the bomb-damaged St Bartholomew the Great, in London: "Two houses had been totally destroyed in our street the night before, and all the glass was blown out of our house, so my mother put up wallpaper rolls as pretend curtains and went on with the wedding." She followed him around the country: "I do disgusting work now, do feel sorry for me, it's in the YMCA canteen and it's very embarrassing because they all copy my voice," both its extraordinary vowels and the racy Mitford lingo.


But Debo was never a serious snob, considering class an irritant: "The biggest pest that has ever been invented". Her husband became heir to the dukedom on the death of his brother in 1944 and succeeded unexpectedly early when his father died in 1950, 14 weeks before the date on which the estates would have escaped 80% death duties. The couple inherited a directory of property, principally Chatsworth House, with 175 rooms, 50 of them huge, and a £5m revenue bill incurring £1,000 interest a day. It took 17 years to clear the debt, with failed appeals to the high court and the sale of Rembrandts, a Poussin and superfluous ancestral accommodation, including Hardwick Hall, also in Derbyshire.


In 1959 they moved in "over the shop" at Chatsworth, made over to a trust, and they kept an Irish holiday castle, Lismore. Nancy, a connoisseur of aristocratic chilblains, wrote to Diana: "Debo has become the sort of English duchess who doesn't feel the cold." They transferred to Chatsworth to help repair it for the first round of stately-home-openings. Debo did the decor, the grandest of shabby chic – she continued the house tradition of gold-leafing the exterior window frames, but only because it lasted longer than paint and she liked the glow on gloomy November days.


Nancy teased Debo that invitations to writers and artists to stay had more to do with interiors than intellect: "They are terrible wreckers, worse than puppies and will give a mellow old look to the house in no time at all. I expect that's why you have them." Not quite fair, perhaps: the Duke commissioned Lucian Freud to paint Debo's portrait when she was 34 ("That's the dowager duchess; it was taken the year before she died," asserted a visitor); and, although Debo claimed to be no reader and only a letter-writer, there were corridors stacked with Mitford letters, she wrote a history of Chatsworth, an estate shop steady-seller, and a wicked collected journalism volume, Counting My Chickens ... and Other Home Thoughts (2001). She was an unlikely devotee of Elvis Presley, and King memorabilia decorated her Chatsworth office. Such a beauty when young, she said; she had visited his rival stately home, Graceland, and thought it very moving.
She was a competent businesswoman ("I am very good at spending money and she is very good at making it," conceded the Duke), managing her share portfolio and the Chatsworth enterprises; hers was the signature printed on the labels of Chatsworth Food Ltd's chutney and Cumberland sauce; she served in the farm shop "until they installed the mechanical till which I was too stupid to operate".


But the estate's 6,000 farmed acres, which Debo could name field by field – Mrs Vickers's Breeches, Big Backsides, Old Zac's Pingle – stimulated her more than the house's silver steward and the 2,000 lightbulbs, which were powered by an updated wonder of Victorian hydraulic engineering. As she aged, she took delight in the continuity of the details in the house, securing her closet every day with a rare late-17th-century lock.


Few other presidents of the Royal Agricultural Society or the Royal Smithfield Club could recite a flock's afflictions as she could – "Orf scrapie, swayback, blackleg, water mouth or rattlebelly, scab and footrot, scad or scald"– or work with a sheepdog, and she appreciated a whippet or two about her feet.


Debo's book Farm Animals (1991) featured rare breeds of fowl, Buff Cochins and Wesummers, which she raised; the Chatsworth farmyard was a teaching aid for cityfolk. She liked to cite the boy from a school in Sheffield who watched the milking demo. "He gave me such a look and said, 'I think it's the most disgooosting thing I've ever seen in me life, I'm never going to drink milk again."


The Devonshire marriage weathered revelations during an Old Bailey trial in 1985 that the Duke, for all the family motto "secure by caution", had been careless with his chequebooks while furnishing the London flats of young female acquaintances. He was generous to his Duchess, too, over the years commissioning a collection of bejewelled insect brooches, which she wore pinned to ribbons as they left quite dreadful holes in frocks. In 1999 she was made a DCVO, a dame in the Royal Victorian Order. At the 50th anniversary of the couple's accession to the ducal title, Debo swanned into the marquee in a costume created for a Victorian duchess at a 19th-century Chatsworth thrash: she found its whaleboning very supportive.


Following her husband's death in 2004 she remained active as a writer, producing a memoir, Wait for Me!, in 2010. Three of her children died at birth. Her son Peregrine succeeded to the dukedom, and she is also survived by her daughters Emma and Sophia.



• Deborah Vivien Cavendish, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, stately home owner and writer, born 31 March 1920; died 24 September 2014

Broadcast on Tuesday 14 December 2010.

Downton Abbey Series 5. ITV: Downton Abbey Series 5 Official trailer

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Downton Abbey review – Down There Abbey, more like: they are all sex-mad
The aristocratic Crawley clan are back – and it’s all going on upstairs, downstairs and in my lady’s chamber
    Sam Wollaston            
Rump of yellow labrador, wagging faithfully towards big cedar and Jacobean-style stately, accompanied by tinkly easy-listening piano and soaring strings. It’s back: Downton Abbey (ITV, Sunday), posh soap – more Howard’s Way than Howards End … I know, I did that one before, but I like it, OK? I’m plagiarising myself.

She (presumably) – the lab – is called Isis, unfortunately. Well, the Crawleys weren’t to know what that would come to mean, 90 years down the road (Downton has now reached 1924). Likewise when they named their (as yet unseen) cat Al Shabaab …

So what’s going on? Dark clouds are gathering. No, not the iClouds with the sex tapes, clouds of change. “I feel a shaking of the ground I stand on,” says poor Carson. Earthquake, is it? Suicide attack by Isis, the caliphate hound? No, just momentous social upheaval. The village wants Carson, not his Lordship, to chair their war memorial committee, and it has put Carson in a fearful tizzy.

On top of that, the country has elected a Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, son of a farm labourer and a housemaid, who is upsetting the old order, like Carson. The downstairs people are starting to look at those stairs with thoughts of ascending. Even Daisy is considering bettering herself. While above, the toffs are beginning the long slow slide towards irrelevance.

Not that they’re going quietly. “They’ve cast the net wide tonight,” says the Dowager Countess, clinging on with old-lady claws to the past and to every fibre of her own snobbishness, on noticing that a teacher has been invited to dinner. A teacher! Imagine! It gets worse – she, the teacher, Sarah, Tom’s new love interest – has an opinion too, and isn’t afraid to express it, over the soup. A woman, with a brain, and an opinion, who wants a conversation, whatever next? No wonder people are upset. “The nature of life is not permanence but flux,” laments Carson.

“Just so, even if it does sound faintly disgusting,” replies Mrs Hughes. Mrs Hughes! What the … are you suggesting what I think you are, flux without the l?

And that’s not the end of the filth. It seems everyone is having carnal thoughts; if not actually doing sex, then at least waking up to its existence. Even Bates, officially the most sexless man on television, wants in. “I can think of one thing,” he says, when Anna says there’s nothing they can do about not having children. “Mr Bates!” she says, which is presumable what he goes and does, sulkily.

There’s more; this is the sex episode, Down There Abbey. Lady Mary, who still hasn’t decided between her two suitors (zzzzzz), decides the best way to make up her mind about Lord Gillingham is to shag him. Not exactly how she puts it, but it’s certainly what she means. “Even now, we must decide whether we want to spend our lives with someone without spending any real time with them, let alone … you know,” she tells prudish Anna.

This new one too, aristo sex-pest Lady Anstruther (Anna Chancellor, joining briefly), entices James the servant toy boy upstairs. Upstairs, downstairs, in my lady’s chamber, for flux and everything else. Maybe that iCloud was overhead after all; now it’s burst and is raining down a deluge of smut. But then Lady Edith carelessly sets fire to the place, which puts a stop to things before the earth can move again.

“Save the dog,” shouts Lord Grantham. It’s reassuring that he’s thinking of the dog before the servants – the old way isn’t quite over yet. And by the time the fire brigade arrives, Isis has been taken out of the crisis, and is safe and wagging again, on the drive. I’m glad, she’s the only character I care about.


Picture preview: Episode two

A new guest joins the Crawley family for dinner, but will he be welcome by all?
Will Miss Bunting and Branson's friendship develop further?
Can Edith live the truth without telling the truth?

Will Daisy's unrest continue as she pursues further study?


Paraboot / "Michael" Model / Legendary "Chaussures".

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The audacity and entrepreneurial spirit of Rémy Richard


It all began in the late nineteenth century in Izeaux, a small village at the foot of the Alps. Rémy-Alexis Richard, born in 1878 into a humble farming family, became a semi-skilled cutter at Chevron, one of a score of shoe factories in this Isère village. These factories received orders from contractors "in the city", bought the leather, cut it and had the pieces assembled by farming families at home in the surrounding hills, before fixing them (by nailing or sewing them) onto wooden or leather soles, depending on the product in question.

Rémy Richard soon realised that these contractors from the cities earned more money than his own boss, and decided to try his luck; he went up to Paris with the designs for his own models to sell them as a "factory agent".

His plan worked! Rémy had "his" first shoes manufactured by the factories in Izeaux – including the one he had just left – and sold them to the "major" clients in Paris. In 1908, he began to hire his own staff.



Rubber becomes the DNA of the Paraboot brand


From Paristo London via Amsterdam, Rémy Richard loved travelling and tradeshows, where he collected plenty of medals.

In 1926, although he didn’t speak a word of English, he set sail for the United States. With an eye for innovation, he noticed the rubber boots worn by the Americans, and above all the assets of this brand new material, also known as latex or gum. This was an epiphany for him. He returned with this material and knowhow to Tullins Fures, a small town close to Izeaux, where he had just bought a new factory building.

Rémy began manufacturing boots that were guaranteed to be waterproof, with "layers" of latex added by hand on wooden lasts and vulcanised in vats.

Rémy Richard was not the first to do this, however. In 1853 the Englishman Hiram Hutchinsonhad already set up a rubber boot factory in France, the forerunner of the Aigle group. Hutchinsonacquired the patents from Charles Junior Goodyear, the inventor of vulcanisation, as well as patents from his father, Charles Goodyear – who, a few years earlier, had developed a sewing machine that was to bear his name.

Rémy did however have eleven years’ start on Vitale Bramani, the founder of the "Vibram" brand: it was Rémy Richard who invented notched soles for mountain boots. Such were the interweaving paths of destiny.

Rémy then had the idea of using this rubber to replace wooden soles. These were inexpensive but uncomfortable and tended to wear out too quickly

Rémy just needed to find the right technique: at that time, the leather uppers of shoes were either nailed to wooden soles or sewn onto leather soles. Neither technique was possible with rubber soles.

Rémy Richard therefore developed a system using fine rubber soles which could be sewn to the upper and then glued with liquid latex to a thicker rubber sole.

The only remaining problem was vulcanisation; an old walnut oil press (another local speciality) made it possible to bake, and thus vulcanise, these shoes in steel moulds, using the humble principle of the waffle iron.

From then on, all the work boots had rubber soles. These became the distinguishing mark of footwear produced at the Richard Pontvert factory.



1983
Le plébiscite de « la » Michael sauve Paraboot de la disparition


Whilst negotiating with the Trade Tribunal, Michel Richard went to Italyin search of more efficient equipment. He sought to understand the methods of his most formidable Italian competitors. In the end, he met "WP lavori in corso", an Italian distributor of fashion garments, and negotiated a contract.

The Italian stylists had decreed that men needed to get themselves a new look: gone were the dark suit, shirt and tie and black thin-soled moccasins. Instead they were to wear tweed jackets, corduroy trousers and polo-neck jumpers. All that was missing was a thick-soled shoe made from decent materials. Although they had all they needed in Italy, they chose the Michael model by Paraboot.

The popular demand for “the” Michael saved Paraboot from going under.

The fashion quickly caught on, orders flooded in and the workload management schedule was assured. The historic suppliers who had been spared when bankruptcy loomed remained loyal! Paraboot had been working with the same tanneries for several generations – suppliers who were friends first and foremost, who shared the same passion for the job and enjoyed mutual trust. That made all the difference.

The French clients were still there and were right to have waited: two years later, the Italian fashion arrived in France, providing them with unexpected additional business.

The only thing left to be done was to reorganise everything: the staff trusted the young boss and accepted his new rules. Management control became sharper, with computers rolled out to all departments. Productivity improved - as did pay.


The bankers were relegated to counting income and expenditure.



The Mitford Sisters / VÍDEO bellow,The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire

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The Mitford family is a minor aristocratic English family whose main family line had seats at Mitford, Northumberland. Several heads of the family served as High Sheriff of Northumberland. A junior line, with seats at NewtonPark, Northumberland, and Exbury House, Hampshire, descends via the historian William Mitford (1744–1827) and were twice elevated to the British peerage, in 1802 and 1902, under the title Baron Redesdale. The Mitford sisters are William Mitford's great-great-great-granddaughters.


The sisters, six daughters of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and Sydney Bowles, became celebrated, and at times scandalous, figures that were caricatured, according to The Times journalist Ben Macintyre, as "Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur"

The family traces its origins in Northumberland back to the time of the Norman conquest. In the Middle Ages they had been Border Reivers based in Redesdale. The main family line had seats at MitfordCastle and Mitford Old Manor House prior to Mitford Hall in 1828.

The sisters achieved notoriety for their controversial but stylish lives as young people, then for their public political divisions between communism and fascism. Nancy and Jessica became well-known writers: Nancy the author of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate and Jessica 1963's The American Way of Death. Deborah managed one of the most successful stately homes in England, Chatsworth. Jessica and Deborah married nephews-by-marriage of prime ministers Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan, respectively. Deborah and Diana both married wealthy aristocrats. Unity and Diana were well-known during the 1930s for being close to Adolf Hitler. In the early 1980s, Deborah became politically active when she and her husband Andrew Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire joined the new Social Democratic Party.


The children of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, known to his children as "Farve" and various other nicknames, their mother was Sydney Freeman-Mitford, Baroness Redesdale, known as "Muv", the daughter of Thomas Bowles. David and Sydney married in 1904. The family homes changed from Batsford House to Asthall Manor beside the River Windrush in Oxfordshire, and then Swinbrook Cottage nearby, with a house at Rutland Gate in London. They also lived in a cottage in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire which they used as a summer residence.


The sisters and their brother Thomas grew up in an aristocratic country house with emotionally distant parents and a large household with numerous servants; this family dynamic was not unusual for upper-class families of the time. There was also a disregard for formal education of women of the family, and they were expected to marry at a young age to a financially well-off husband. The children had a private language called "Boudledidge" (pronounced 'bowdledidge'), and each had a different nickname for the others. Their parents were described as "nature's fascists". At least two of their daughters followed in their footsteps; one turned her back on her inherited privileges, ran away to become a communist, a result of the excitement of European politics in the 1930s. Jessica's memoir Hons and Rebels describes their upbringing, and Nancy obviously drew upon her family members for characters in her novels.


Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, their political views came into sharper relief. "Farve" remained a conservative, but "Muv" usually supported her fascist daughters, and they separated in the late 1940s. Nancy, a moderate socialist, worked in London during the Blitz. Pamela remained seemingly non-political, although reportedly a rabid anti-Semite.Tom, a fascist, refused to fight Germany but volunteered to fight against Imperial Japan. He was killed in action a short time after arriving in Asia. Diana, married to Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, was imprisoned in London for three years under Defence Regulation 18B. Unity, distraught over the war declaration against Germany, tried to commit suicide by shooting herself in the head. She suffered brain damage which eventually led to her early death. Jessica, a communist supporter, had moved to the US, but her husband Esmond Romilly volunteered for the RCAF and died when his bomber developed mechanical problems over the North Sea. In numerous letters Jessica stated that her daughter received a pension from the Canadian government from Esmond's death until she turned 18. The political rift between Jessica and Diana left them estranged until their deaths. The other sisters kept in frequent contact.


The sisters were prolific letter-writers, and a substantial body of correspondence still exists, principally letters between them.

The Mitford sisters - Unity, Diana and Nancy Unity Mitford; Diana Mitford (Mrs Bryan Guinness, later Lady Diana Mosley) and writer Nancy Mitford. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

There is more to the Mitfords than Hitler and the high life

Friends mock my fascination with the family as a ‘posh crush’, but Debo and her sisters showed women what was possible


 Hadley Freeman           


As I write this, my desk is stacked high with remnants of “the Mitford industry”, as Decca Mitford referred to it with scorn. I have been collecting them since I was a teenager, the way football fans collect programmes, and with news this week that Deborah (or Debo, as she was nicknamed by her nickname-loving family) Mitford, the youngest and last surviving member of the family had died, I’ve been rereading them all.

There are the biographies and collected letters, starting with my personal favourite, Mary S Lovell’s The Mitford Girls, as well as those written and edited by the family’s friends and relatives, some with predictably glamorous surnames (Waugh, Guinness); some with predictably ominous ones (Mosley). But most of all, there are the books by the women themselves: Decca Mitford’s autobiography, Hons and Rebels; Diana Mitford’s A Life of Contrasts; Deborah Mitford’s titled, charmingly, Wait for Me! Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister; and Nancy Mitford’s glittering novels, From Highland Fling to Don’t Tell Alfred, via The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.


So yes, I am one of those people who loves both to read about the Mitfords and to read the Mitfords. This is probably a hopelessly non-U habit of mine, but being a hopelessly middle-class American, everything about me is non-U. But I hadn’t realised until relatively late in my obsession how other fellow non-U-ers frowned on it too. “You’ve got a posh crush, I see,” one journalist sniffed at me, on spotting a Mitford book sticking out of my bag.


DJ Taylor summed up the Mitfords as “witty remarks and textbook flippancy [underpinned by] an absolute and obdurate self-belief”. In a review of a collection of letters between the sisters, Andrew O’Hagan, one of the best critics and writers living, described their style as mere “posh aesthetic”: “The posh aesthetic appeals to people who want life’s profundities to scatter on the wind like handfuls of confetti,” he wrote in the London Review of Books. Liking the Mitfords, I realised, was seen as something girlish, shallow and immature, like having an over-developed fondness for ponies, or wanting to be a ballerina. And this, in all honesty, amazed me, and still does.


The Mitfords were posh: of that there is no doubt. Their parents, David and Sydney Freeman-Mitford, were Lord and Lady Redesdale, rich in land but not in cash, and when it comes to English aristocracy, you can’t get more posh than that. To read the names that run like beads through the sisters’ biographies is like reciting a rosary of the early 20th-century British upper class: Curzon, Cooper, Churchill, Cunard, Strachey, Beaton. This is part of what Taylor describes as the “Mitford chic”, and it is how they’ve long been packaged and sold.


Their particular brand of upper class snobbery is now so anachronistic it’s simply amusing: in an obituary this week of Deborah, the writer pointed to a list of the late Duchess of Devonshire’s dislikes, which included but was not limited to “the bits of paper that fall out of magazines; female weather forecasters; the words ‘environment’, ‘conservation’ and ‘leisure’; supercilious assistants at makeup counters; dietary fads; skimmed milk; girls with slouching shoulders and Tony Blair.”


And then there are the Nazis. Of the seven Mitford children – Nancy, Pamela, Tom, Diana, Unity (“Bobo”), Decca and Debo – most had met Hitler and one, Unity, had an intensely close relationship with him and signed off her letters, in classic Mitford style, “Heil Hitler! Love, Bobo”. Unity is probably the ultimate example of nominative determinism, having been conceived in Swastika, Ontario, and given the middle name Valkyrie at birth. Diana fell passionately in love with Oswald Mosley and the two married in Goebbels’ drawing room, with Hitler as a guest. At the other end of the scale, Decca ran away as soon as she could and became a committed communist.


As a middle-class American – and Jewish, to boot – I should be repulsed by the Mitfords. That I’m not is because they collectively represent something much greater than their (fascinating) biographical details. For a while I thought it might be “posh-crushing”, and so read books about other aristocratic families. I couldn’t finish a single one, they were all utterly deadly.


It astounds me that anyone could dismiss the Mitford mentality as simply a “posh aesthetic”, because their writing is so much more layered than that. Yes, Nancy’s two most famous novels are witty, but they are underpinned by great hooks of self-awareness and sadness that snag on the lightness. “Keeping up a good shop-front” was the aim in the face of the enormous personal tragedies suffered by the whole family.


Even though Nancy wrote The Pursuit of Love at the height of her love affair with Gaston Palewski, even she couldn’t envisage a happy ending for them and killed her alter ego, Linda (but in classic Nancy fashion, she also killed Linda’s lover too.) And she was right: Palewski would eventually devastate her by marrying someone else, and she died soon after. One can only maintain the shop-front for so long.


But the Mitfords represent more than glamour and tragedy. To me, and I suspect to a lot of other women (for it is mainly women) whom they fascinate, they remain an exciting reminder of a woman’s ability to shape her own life, for better or worse, uncowed by familial and social expectations and restrictions.


Decca fell out with most of her family due to her political beliefs; David’s heart was broken by Diana’s marriage and Unity’s antics, and his and Sydney’s marriage was eventually destroyed by the strain of it all. But each of the girls pursued their own wildly different paths, whatever the personal cost.


Decca went from being a pampered, uneducated aristocratic child to a fierce civil rights campaigner in the US; Diana remained unapologetically devoted to Mosley to the day he died; Nancy lived a somewhat lonely life in Paris, writing novels. How many of us can say that we pursued such individualistic lives, utterly unshaped by our parents and unlike our siblings?


If they were all fascists, or novelists, or communists, there would be of no interest. The fascination comes from the unapologetic differences. So it might sound odd to say this about a family spiced with such bitter ingredients as Hitler and loss, but what the Mitford sisters represent is courage and freedom.



Wait for Me! Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister, by Deborah Devonshire

Debo Mitford's story, written aged 90, is a worthy addition to the family oeuvre

Rachel Cooke


The great thing about loving the Mitfords is that a fresh treat seems to be delivered almost every week. Already this year, we've been blessed with a new edition of Wigs on the Green , Nancy's long-lost skit on the dubious politics of her brother-in-law, Oswald Mosley. And now, hard on its heels comes Debo, the youngest sister, who, at the grand old age of 90, has written her memoirs.

Naturally Debo is somewhat at a disadvantage here, given how many have come before her. Nancy and Decca weren't the only writers in the family – Diana (Mosley) also published her memoirs – and I've long since lost track of all the letters and biographies. Can her book really contain anything new? Certainly, it's striking that its author's eccentric childhood, being so familiar, makes up one of the least interesting sections of Wait For Me! But this isn't really the point. You read her for her qualities, not for her revelations.


Of course, the Mitford parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale ("Muv and Farve"), still have the power to charm, even when depicted by one more willing to stick to the facts than Nancy, whose novels made Farve famous. Debo has the sharp beak of a magpie when it comes to wrenching from memory just the right anecdote. I like this one. Farve, she writes, would take his coffee to his study, where he would proceed to drink it cold at regular intervals throughout the morning: his "suckments", he called this. When a housemaid was rash enough to empty and wash his cup, he thereafter locked the vessel in his safe.


There are also warm portraits of her sisters. As a child, Decca (Jessica) was Debo's favourite, being closest to her in age, though her love for Unity, whose pathetic life caused the whole family so much pain, ran very deep. When, in the book, war breaks out, and Unity, a fascist with a pash for Hitler ("she would be arrested as a stalker today," observes Debo), shoots herself with a mother-of-pearl pistol in a Munich park, her sister's prose, previously lively, falls mechanically flat. You sense that behind the stiff lip, all this still hurts terribly (Unity was thereafter retarded, and liked to dress up as a clergyman). "We knew the bad side," she writes a little later. "We knew she had condoned Nazi cruelty … [but] there was something innocent about Unity, a guileless, childlike simplicity that made her vulnerable and in need of protection." Horrible to have to all but apologise for loving your own sister.


She met Andrew Cavendish, a second son and therefore not, at the time, the heir to a Dukedom and the Chatsworth estate, in 1938, the year she came out: "That was it for me … nothing and nobody else mattered." They married during the war, at the height of the bombing, a time both heady and terrible. Decca's husband, Esmond, had already been killed; Debo's brother, Tom, and Andrew's brother, Billy, died soon after. Diana, meanwhile, whose politics meant she was considered a threat to the nation, was in Holloway Prison. (Debo believes Nancytold the Foreign Office that Diana was "extremely dangerous" because she was jealous of her.)


Through it all, however, Debo is the best kind of stoic. It's not only that, like everyone in wartime Britain, she learned to cope (when petrol rationing came in, she used an old horse-drawn milk float to get around). She is in possession of what I can only describe as a uniquely Mitford-esque sensibility: loving but unsentimental; devoid of self-pity; unwilling to bore others with her own travails; able to find the ridiculous in almost anything. I realise, all you Mitford haters, that she was cushioned by her class, and her husband's wealth. But these qualities – dismayingly rare in Oprahworld – are, to me, indisputably admirable. No wonder she has so many friends.


In her memoir, you'll find everyone, from Hitler (he wasn't "like his photos", and his flat, being very brown, was horrible) to Ivor Novello ("What an enchanting bit of beige," he said, on meeting her whippet, Studley). Visitors to Chatsworth, and to the Duke's Irish home, Lismore Castle, include Evelyn Waugh, Hubert de Givenchy and Duncan Grant, though first up is Lucian Freud, enlisted to paint cyclamen on the wall of a Chatsworth bathroom, a task he never completes (he would greet Debo every morning with the words: "I've had a wonderful night taking out everything I did yesterday"). I can't share her enthusiasm for the moaning minnie Prince of Wales, but we all have our blind spots.


Admittedly, the Duchess's work at Chatsworth – its farm shop was her idea – hardly makes for thrilling reading. "My eight-year association with Tarmac came about by chance," is a sentence so crashingly dull, I half wondered if she was being satirical. But there is something cherishable about her enjoyment of her Derbyshire life. Her enthusiasm for the big house, and for all that it brings with it, is generous, and occasionally batty: when Oscar de la Renta comes to stay, she worries he will find mere flowers boring, and creates a table decoration featuring a cockerel (alive) in a glass box.


Above all, though, it is enduring. Since the Duke's death in 2004, she has lived in a nearby village, but her appetite – for friends, for fun, even for work – belongs to someone half her age. This is what stays with you. As she relates the deaths of her sisters – Diana was the last to go, in 2003 – you feel, by rights, that her world should narrow, that she should, by now, be marooned on the survivors' island that is extreme old age. Yet this is emphatically not the case. She misses them. How could she not? But her eyes – always a special shade of blue – seem to me to be as beady, and as full of mischief, as ever.
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