Lots to do today

Tags

Acadia, Canada, Capitol, France, life, Maritimes, Revolution, USA

I had to get up early today at 07:30am which is somewhat like the middle of the night for me. Usually I am a Crack of Noon riser which is the civilized time for retired folks like me.

So at 9:30am I had to be at the Club for the Thursday morning Coffee and Conversation program, today we had an Acadian historian Georges Arsenault, O.C., O.P.E.I whose family has been living on PEI since 1700. He is also an author and has written much about Acadian life and history on the Island. He also has a voluminous collection of old photos of Acadian Life on the Island dating back to 1860. He showed us many old photos of Acadian families and explained traditions in the period 1860 to 1950. It was fascinating, he had wedding photos dating from prior to 1946. How the common people lived if compared to high society, there was a stark difference. Brides has no wedding dress, they simply wore their Sunday best and so did the groom. Only people with money did the fashionable weddings the way we think of them today. The food prepared and served at weddings was also very different from today. Essentially the wedding would take place in Church at 7:30am and then the family would return home for breakfast at 9:00am. Back then Roman Catholics, Acadians are all R.C. , were not allowed to have food before Mass. Everyone was in their Sunday best and all of it took place in the Kitchen including the square dancing. What Acadians call in French souper (Supper) took place at Noon and both meals were offered by the Bride and her parents in their home. The Dinner at night around 6pm moved to the Groom’s parents home for more square dancing and food and of course Whiskey and Island Gin at 50 proof. That’s the Gin I buy for my Island friends, they do not want the English stuff at 40 Proof. The most important element of a successful wedding meal during the day was the desserts and sweets, some families could offer over 30 different types of sweets not including the Wedding Cake which was white and baked usually in the village by a woman who was known for her cakes and hired for that day. Which reminded me of my great Aunt Marie-Ange in Charlesbourg near Quebec City who was known at Christmas for her desserts and sweets.

The family photos are also interesting, most taken outdoors for the light in an age when no flash existed. Women in Acadian fashion have their heads covered by a bonnet or large scarf, custom being that only unmarried maidens could show their hair. Families were also large on average 12 kids and many upwards of 19 kids, all living under one roof in small farm houses. One wonders how they did it. It is only again after 1946 that people start having small families of 2 or 3 children.

After the talk, I went to my barber Jared who is a very nice person and great to chat with, we talked about what had happened the previous day in Washington D.C. at the Capitol building. He was working so could not watch television and was being told by his customers what was happening, he was in disbelief like I was and many other people. Though he remarked and I agree, we could see all this coming and were bracing for it. How come the Capitol Police did not prepare, were they over confident? I watch it all and was sickened by it, how can the symbol of a democracy be attacked like that by a mob which looked like Duck Dynasty. Ignorance on parade, truly sad. I was wondering if the Ceausescu solution could not be applied to Trump and his family, worked in Romania in 1989. What I fear like a lot of people is a possible return of another Trump type in 4 years, populist but more intelligent and cunning. Is the USA sliding into authoritarianism, it could happen after all 75 million Americans voted for him, hopefully not and the world will move on.

Afterwards I went to the Service Canada Office which provides info and registration for all Federal Government Programs, one stop shopping. This was instituted some 8 years ago by the Canadian Government. I was having some problem online with an application and could not get anyone at their 1-800 number unless you are willing to wait an hour or more on hold. So I simply went down to the Office and saw an Officer in 5 minutes. She answered my questions and all appears all right, I am much relieved.

An interesting site

Tags

France, graves, kings, queens, Revolution, tombs

Well today was a stay at home day and eat your storm Chips day. Yes we got 30 cm of snow and blowing winds, so this morning around 7am it was announced that everything was shutting down for the day. There was no cars to be seen on the street and one or two people occasionally walking a dog. The City has not really cleaned anything yet so driving is difficult at best and the sidewalks have disappeared. So it is best to stay at home. Here is a photo of Queen street, a block from the water,  a veritable winter wonderland. 

Our two little ones Nicky and Nora did not want to go out at all. Though Nora loves to sample freshly fallen snow. I should ask her what it taste like.

There is a site on the Internet I have been following for some time, it is in French and comes from France, the author Marie-Christine Pénin does a lot of research on the sepulture of famous people and churches, cemeteries and catacombs which may contain the tomb of people who have made a mark in time. Her work takes her back often some 600 years or in some cases more recently in the last 90 years.

Reading her blog is fascinating, she researches all kinds of people, from Kings to actresses and even murderers. She gives background on the life of the person and how they died and were they are buried, in many cases the tombs may have disappeared because of urban renewal, demolition of churches or closing of cemeteries.

What I did not know was the amount of attacks on the dead perpetrated by the French Revolution or what Simon Schama like to call it, the French Civil War in his book Citizens.

Often Marie-Christine Pénin will write about a Paris neighbourhood and how it has changed in the last 400 years. The Paris of today has little to do with the Paris of pre-1870. She provides maps and the old former name of streets. Photos also of what the street or buildings look like today. It is fascinating to discover how the dead fared in the years after they were buried. Today she was writing about the famous church of La Madeleine in Paris, many thousand of tourist visit it each year. She started by telling us that the parish of Marie-Madeleine hence La Madeleine has existed since the year 800 AD. The current church we see is rather new and gave us a brief history of its construction and the people involved. But in that story she introduces the story of the Revolution and the guillotine and where the bodies of the victims of the summary revolutionary justice were buried.

There use to be 3 cemeteries in and around La Madeleine, during the revolution specifically 1792-1794 the years of La terreur (the terror) thousands of people from all walks of life were executed, simply being suspected of some kind of wrong doing and off with your head. The grave diggers could not keep up with the mass arrivals of dead bodies and heads to be buried, it was mayhem and the resident of the neighbourhood would complain of the terrible odour coming from the grave site, no coffins were used and bodies were quickly disposed of.

Each person who was guillotine was transported in a cart pele mele with other unfortunates. Once at the grave site, corpses would be unloaded, any personal object was taken and entered in a ledger to be given to a caretaker. Bodies were stripped naked and tossed into a common grave, heads and all. After the revolution, in 1815 at the Restoration of the Monarchy under Louis XVIII there was a search for missing members of the French Royal Family. Louis XVI and his wife Marie-Antoinette were found easily, they had been buried in a designated spot in one of the cemeteries and today you can see the Chapelle expiatoire built on the site of their original graves. However Madame Elizabeth, the sister of Louis XVI was executed in 1794 and buried in a common grave with hundreds of others, her body was never found.

Kings of France and Princes and Princesses and great Officers of the Kingdom were buried at Cathedrale of Saint-Denis. At the revolution mobs descended on the church and violated the tombs dragging the remains of the Kings and others and dumping the corpses into a common pit on the side of the Church. At the restoration in 1815 much work was done to recover the royal remains and place them back inside the church. A new mausoleum was erected for Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. They are now buried in St-Denis.  Another body that was never found was that of Philippe Duc d’Orléans known during the revolution as Philippe Egalité, he was the cousin of Louis XVI.

Philippe had a huge grudge against the King and voted at the trial for his execution, surprising Robespierre and others. However just to make sure 48 hours later a second vote was taken, the revolutionaries were not so sure they wanted to execute Louis who was not a bad fellow just a bumbler, again Philippe voted the death of his cousin. He himself was arrested later and executed buried in a common pit a few steps from his unfortunate cousin Louis and sister-in-law Marie-Antoinette.

If you are interested by French history here is the site link  http://www.tombes-sepultures.com/crbst_52.html    The site is in French.

Singers and Palaces

Tags

Alexander Palace, Architecture, Europe, Italy, Nicholas II, Revolution, Romanov

We went to the Pour House / Old Triangle which is a pub on Great George street in Charlottetown for the first night of Winter Jazz. The band featured well known professional musicians and singer Dylan Menzie of Belle River, PEI. Dylan has a great voice and an easy way with the audience.  I did not know about Winter Jazz, year round we go to Island Jazz but this is different, the calibre of the artists seems better. We are going again on 15 November to hear another artist, Erin Costello from Halifax.

Both Menzie and Costello have won awards for their work and are successful. Again the music scene in PEI is great.

Now on a completely different topic, I have been interested all my life by history and archeology of sites around the world. I really enjoyed our time in Rome and travelling in Italy for all the ancient site one could explore and try to understand. Near Rome next to Fiumicino Airport is the original site of the ancient Port of Ostia with its great basins and warehouses, you can see how ships arriving from Egypt with their cargo where un-loaded and re-loaded on flat bottom barges to be floated down 35 Km on the Tiber river to the City of Rome. A site few people know because it is in a isolate and wild area once part of a Princely Estate, though it is next door literally from the Airport terminal. There are many other sites, in Jordan I visited many times the Graeco-Roman city of Gerasa or Jerash as it is know today. Built by the Romans it is fascinating to see, it is said to be one of the best preserved city of the Decapolis, it is mentioned in Mark 5.1  and Luke 8.26.

The Jordanian Government with the help of international archeological experts have preserved and enhanced Jerash. You can walk its streets and understand what a great city it was in its time.

In Poland which was devastated by the Second World War, cities like Warsaw were rebuilt to recreate the buildings lost thus reviving national history. Many other countries have done the same.

With the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union,  Russia has rediscovered its past, it is no longer taboo to talk about Imperial Russia or the Tsars. In the last 30 years much has been done to restore history to its rightful place. Vladimir Putin who is from St-Petersburg has invested enormous amounts of money to restore the former Imperial Capital. We visited the city a few years ago and I would love to go back to see more of it.

It is a city of Palaces and its suburb Tsarkoye Selo (Tsar’s Village) was the private residence of the Romanovs since Peter the Great built it. It is a collection of Palaces and great Orthodox churches more splendid one from the other. The Second World War saw St-Petersburg endure a brutal siege of 900 days and more than 1 million city residents died, mostly of starvation. Much of the Palaces and gardens of Tsarkoye Selo where savagely vandalise, looted and destroyed. What you see today when you visit is extensively re-built and restored. Historical photos show the extent of the damage and it is a miracle to see it all re-born.  Some of it was rebuilt in the 1950’s but most of it has been restored in the last 25 years and some is still on-going at great expense and it involves a great deal of expert artistry. Russia appears to have an army of incredible artists who toil at recreating the past.

 

Peterhof a baroque palace built for the wife of Peter the Great by Domenico Trezzini 1714-28. The top photo shows the palace in 1944 the bottom photo shows the palace today. A miracle of restoration. We visited it and it is impressive. 

Currently the Alexander Palace built in 1792 by Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi is being refurbished. This palace was built by Catherine the Great as a gift to her grandson Alexander who would become Tsar and fight Napoleon. He is the Tsar in the novel Tolstoy, War and Peace.

Later in 1905 this palace would become a residence for the last Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra and their 5 children. The family lived there and not at the Winter Palace in town for security reasons. The Winter Palace was used only for Official matters, the Alexander Palace was a private residence. After the Tsar abdicated in March 1917, they lived for a time in the Palace until their arrest and deportation to Siberia, they were murdered by the Bolcheviks in July 1918 on the orders of Lenin. It was President Boris Yeltsin who gave the late Imperial Family a State Funeral and invited the senior Romanovs and others to come to St-Petersburg for the funeral in 1998. The Russian Orthodox church declared them Holy Martyrs.

After the abolition of the monarchy the Palace is then turned into a museum, but little by little all the personal artifacts belonging to the Tsar’s family is either looted by the Bolcheviks, sold off in international art markets. Some will end up in other palaces like Pavlovsk where it remains to this day.

During the Second World War the Alexander Palace is destroyed by fire and looted by the German Army. It will remain largely a ruin until the 1990’s when efforts are made to renovate and rebuild. In the last 10 years, enormous efforts have been underway to bring the Palace back to its former glory, in 2020 eight rooms will be re-opened to the public and by 2022 it is hoped that the entire palace can be completed. It will be a permanent Memorial to the Family of Nicholas II since it was their family home.

The left side of the Palace were the apartments of the Tsarina and her 5 children, the right side of the building was reserved for the Tsar. The palace itself is surrounded by enormous gardens with all manner of features, like a play house for the children, bridges over ponds, a hunting lodge for the Tsar and fantastical constructions to amuse and decorate the gardens.

The Romanovs employed both Italian architects and French garden designers, Charles Cameron a Scot was hired by Catherine the Great as her personal architect. She loved Roman antiquities and the neo-classical style.

Needless to say the restoration of these palaces is a great asset in promoting tourism and the Russian State and the regional authorities in St-Petersburg have done a lot to ensure that the memory of the Romanov are kept alive.

Here are some photos of the work done so far. Remember that the Alexander Palace was in a very poor state.

The Maple room in 1945 used by the Tsarina as a living room.

The Mountain Hall in 1946 with Soviet Officials posing.

Another room in 1946, the tiles around the ruins of the fireplace are a deep greenish blue glaze.

Second floor rooms waiting restoration. Structural work has already been done.

The Maple room in 1920 some decorative elements have already disappeared, most of the large plants are gone. Much worse was to come. This room is under complete re-construction now since the war devastated the palace.

Some elements were saved by the Communist Curators of the Palace before the arrival of the German army in 1941.

Some pieces of furniture did survive, because they were taken away before the war. This lapis-lazuli console table has been returned to the Palace.

Original furniture and tiger skin rug which also survived, easier to move smaller objects in an evacuation. Now returned to the Palace.

The Turkish Bath of the Tsar just completed with a large pool. This room had to be totally re-built and the tiles recreated from fragments found on the premises. Many photos of the era also helped.

The study of the Tsar another room just completed in the renovations.

The Maple room undergoing a complete reconstruction, this included recreating the delicate plaster work of guirlandes of flowers in an art nouveau style.

The great library getting a new floor which will be an exact copy of the original.

Ornate ceiling recreated.

This work at the Alexander Palace has been on-going for 8 years now. I cannot help thinking that once it is completed it will remain a very sad place knowing the fate of this inhabitants in 1917. Somewhat like the Miramar Palace in Trieste, once the home of Maximilian of Hapsburg and his wife Charlotte, before they accepted to move to Mexico at the invitation of Napoleon III to rule that country until Maximilian was executed by Mexican revolutionaries in 1867. His wife Empress Charlotte of Belgium returned to Europe but suffered a life of mental illness, living in seclusion and dying in 1927, quickly forgotten by her royal relatives in Austria, Belgium and Britain.

 

 

 

 

Bourreaux de l’Etat

Tags

Bourbon, Civil war, executioner, France, Louis XVI, profession, Revolution, Sanson

I follow a blog written in French by Marie-Christine Pénin called www.tombes-sepultures.com which specialize in locating the tombs of famous people in France. The period covered is usually 17th, 18th  and 19th centuries. I often wonder where is so and so buried, a famous name does not necessarily have a famous grave. Each entry gives you the story of the person and how it ended with often some strange family detail about the burial. One entry recently was about the French Revolution (Civil War) and how the Kings and Queens of France buried in the St-Denis Cathedral were dug up and their tombs smashed. Some with vivid description of the cadaver, like that of Louis XV whose body was black and gave out a powerful stench despite the fact that he had died some 17 years prior.

This week it is about the family Sanson, who for 7 generations where the Official Executioner of France, from 1688 to 1847. A profession that no longer exist, but a profession nonetheless required for putting to death the great and the not so great of France who had been condemned by the State. Official Executioner was a title given by the King and then at the Revolution by the Committee in charge. It was  a paid job with honours and benefits. One benefit was on the death of the Executioner, he was entitled to a Funeral Mass with full Civilian Honours. So for 159 years the Sanson, from fathers to sons where in charge of executing by whatever means decreed, prisoners. They not only exercised their profession in Paris but also in several other cities of France. The head of the Family usually had Paris and his sons had other cities, some  sons were also helpers in the putting to death of a condemned person. They were responsible for maintaining the tools of their trade and setting up the scaffolds etc ensuring that all would go well.

A very grim business and not always a quick affair, sometimes in the 17th and 18th centuries executions which were a public spectacle required some showmanship. However amongst the duty of the Executioner, he had to meet with the condemned prior to the execution, they would have a surreal conversation about what was to take place and the condemned could make a request that he be dispatched quickly if possible, often giving the Executioner a sum of money. One of the Sanson was known for his consideration and kindness toward the condemned person, his job was to put them to death not to make them suffer unduly or turn a public execution into butchery.

It was Charles-Henri Sanson who had to execute King Louis XVI. Though he had been a revolutionary in 1789 by 1793 he had lost his appetite for the revolution and turned against it. In his opinion far too many innocent people had been condemned by comedy show trials, where the results were more important than the facts or the truth. When he was given the paper ordering the execution of the King, Charles-Henri Sanson said he felt faint and wanted to run. He knew the trial had been rigged against the Sovereign and Sanson was hoping for a last minute reprieve or a plot to free the king. This royal execution would haunt him for the rest of his days and in his will he left money so that a Mass could be said  monthly to ask God for forgiveness for this horrible business.

Sanson’s son would execute 9 months later Queen Marie-Antoinette, who was leaving behind two young children. The day of the execution the Parisian crowds were in an ugly mood and sullen, very much against putting the Queen to death. He also dispatched other revolutionaries like Danton and Robespierre. He like other members of his family are buried around Paris in churches or in cemeteries amongst other dignitaries.  We do not know much about the Sanson family except for the journals and correspondence they left behind, they had a job to do and it required a certain amount of discretion.

 

 

 

End of Season

Tags

France, NGC, Ottawa, Paris, Revolution, Vigée-Lebrun

The activities are winding down for Volunteers at the National Gallery of Canada or I should say we are now going on the Summer schedule. Volunteers are busy in other area with the end of the School year. The lectures Les Mercredis Culturels and Wednesday Mornings have ended, our 55th Season. I have just completed the arrangements for the new Season starting on 23 September, we will have 24 very diverse topics for our lectures in French and in English. This new Season will focus on the Museum its collections and experts with a special presentation on Louise Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun who was the Official Court Artist of Queen Marie-Antoinette. She will be the topic of our Summer Showcase in 2016.

Vigée-Lebrun painted beautiful portraits of the Queen and her children, her friends and other notables at Court. She will go on after the arrest of the Royal Family to work in Italy, Austria for the Mother of Marie-Antoinette, Empress Maria-Theresa and at the Russian Court in St-Petersburg before returning with the Restoration and Louis XVIII to Paris. She was such a great artist that during these long years of exile she will never be out of work or alone. She is invited to all the European Courts and paints the greats of this world.

Louise-Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755-1842)

In 2016 the NGC marks the year of women artists so Vigée-Lebrun is a fitting subject.

During the Summer we still have the daily Docent’s Choice and until end June we have in house school groups who come to visit. There are other activities to occupy the Docents, until September when the regular season starts again.

It has been a busy year and I am happy to be not so busy. Not to forget Chagall opens on 28 May and the NGC is open everyday from 10am to 6pm.