Apr. 7th, 2012

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Today I have a special celebratory treat for you. It's not for first day Passover. It's not for Easter. It's because I feel like giving everyone a treat, regardless. Also, because, having celebrated Helen's new book, it's time to celebrate Kate's. Watch this space. I'll put it up when I'm awake which is...not yet.

Later today I might also be intelligent. That also is not yet. Awakeness is essential for this, too. Also, dragging my mind away from the folk festival, where bunches of my friends are dancing and some singing or playing. A close friend is in two morris sides this year. "What happens if they are on at the same time?" I asked her and she reassured me "They already have been."

And my Pesach presents may be few, but they are very special. My total hands-down winner is a turquoise pendant. It has special meaning (for it came from special people) and, like the Eleanor ring and the rocks, helps heal. I am extraordinarily lucky in my friends, for without them I would be facing much bigger emotional shortfalls whenever I look round my unit or try to do something. Where some of the holes were, I have brand-new stories..

Life for me is still about stories. Each time a story ends, a bit of me is gone. Each time there are new stories, I grow.

One of the side effects of being in Passover is that I miss family and friends who are gone. This was the time I spent with my two fathers, for instance. I miss Dad and Les and it seems wrong to miss them together, for they were my fathers sequentially. They were comfortable with each other, though, and so I shall think of a happy moment with each of them and I shall take a deep breath. I've lost five friends and relatives so far this year, and another is going. I miss the five each and every one of them and I shall send a hope into the world for a dignified and pain free end for the sixth.

If this weekend also entails you missing someone, feel free to share a story about them with me. For as long as their stories live, a small part of them is still with us.

There ought to be a fourth neshama* just to carry our best stories.




*soul, but not as television defines it. Also, the names of two of the others aren't neshama, but I can never remember what they are - I just know their functions and that none of them is specifically for story. My popular theology is lacking today. I must remind my nephew that when Dad died he went into Dad's bedroom to play with Dad's neshama and was found under the bed, hunting.
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special guest blogger, Kate Forsyth

The primary character in my new book, Bitter Greens, is the scandalous 17th century writer, Charlotte-Rose de la Force, who wrote the version of the Rapunzel fairytale that we know best.

She was one of those fascinating women that have been forgotten by history. She was related to the Sun King, Louis XIV, and became lady-in-waiting to the queen at the age of sixteen, living the next thirty years in the glittering royal courts of Paris, Versailles, Fontainebleau and Marly-le-Roi.

At the age of forty-seven, she was incarcerated by the king in a tumbledown old convent as punishment for her wild and wicked ways. She had had an affair with an impoverished actor, used black magic to try and ensnare herself a husband, disguised herself as a dancing bear to gain access to her much younger lover, and written a series of titillating novels about the king’s most notorious ancestors.

While locked away in the convent, Charlotte-Rose wrote the collection of fairytales that included ‘Persinette’ (later renamed ‘Rapunzel’ by a German author Friedrich Schultz).

Dramatic and fascinating as Charlotte-Rose de la Force’s life was, it was very difficult to research. Usually she is given nothing more than a biographical paragraph in encyclopaedias and fairytale scholarship.

After long months of detective work, I found a biography of her life, Mademoiselle de la Force: un auteur mèconnu du XVIIͨ siècle, by the French academic Michel Souloumiac. However, it was only published in French and despite my expensive and prolonged education, my French is very poor.

So I enlisted the help of a translator, Sylvie Poupard-Gould, who not only translated Michel Souloumiac’s biography, but also translated an autobiographical sketch written by Charlotte-Rose and a number of her fairytales, which had never before been translated into English. This took a great deal of time, because the biography was written in dense academic terminology, and the second was written in Old French, complete with the letter ‘f’ looking like the letter ‘s’.

Michel Souloumiac’s book Mademoiselle de la Force gave me the basic framework for my story, though there were many times when I had to use my imagination to fill in the gaps. For example, he says that Charlotte-Rose “came to the attention of the king” during the infamous Affair of the Poisons, a scandal about witchcraft, satanism, and murder that led to the execution of hundreds of people.

From those seven small words – “came to the attention of the king” - I wrote three whole chapters, in which Charlotte-Rose is interrogated by the terrifying Chambre Ardente and locked in the Bastille.

In April 2011, I packed up my three young children and we travelled to France on the trail of Charlotte-Rose de la Force. We went to the Louvre, where she came as a frightened sixteen year old country girl to work in service of the terrifying king who had locked up her mother against her will. It was easy to imagine the women in their wide silken gowns and tall lace headdresses, strolling along on the arms of men in heavy wigs and full-skirted satin coats, their high heels clacking on the stone floor, their shrill voices trying to fill the vast echoing space of the galleries of that old palace.

The children and I visited the Place des Vosges, where Charlotte-Rose’s cousin Henriette-Julie de Murat, another fairy tale teller, had lived with her elderly and aristocratic husband. I sat with my notebook and pen, writing away, while my children played tip in the garden and clambered over the modern climbing equipment.

We went to the Église Saint-Sulpice, the grand and gloomy church in Paris where Charlotte-Rose finally married her young lover, Charles de Briou, a few weeks after he reached his majority at the age of twenty-five. It was no use. They had ten days of happiness before the marriage was annulled, and her husband locked away in a madhouse by his parents.

Of course a trip to Versailles was de rigeur. My children suffered the stuffy, crowded tour of the gilded palace, having been promised bike riding around the lake. By the time we turned back to the train station, our feet were so bruised and swollen from the tiny cobblestones that we could barely walk. What must it have been like to have been a lady-in-waiting to the queen, never permitted to sit in the royal presence, all while wearing ridiculously high-heeled shoes that showed her noble lineage and enormous heavy skirts. Charlotte-Rose’s feet must have hurt all the time, I thought.

Finally, we travelled down to Gascony for a week, staying near where Charlotte-Rose spent her childhood. With a French translator accompanying us, we were given a private tour of the Chateau de Cazeneuve by its owner, the Comte de Sabran-Pontevès. One of the oldest privately owned castles in France, the Chateau de Cazeneuve was once the hunting lodge of Henri of Navarre, who became Henri IV of France. When he moved to Paris, he gave his castle to his cousin, Charlotte-Rose’s great-grandfather. It is an extraordinary place, built for strength on a bluff overlooking the wild Ciron River. I saw Charlotte-Rose’s baptismal records, her pram, and the room in which she had been born. I was able to see where the secret passage where Queen Margot, Henri IV’s wife, used to sneak through to rendezvous with her lovers. It was the most amazing and beautiful place, steeped in history and old tales, and the children and I were incredibly privileged to see it.

Writing the story of Charlotte-Rose de la Force was the most extraordinary adventure, both imaginatively and in actuality. I hope that Bitter Greens will ignite new interest in her life and her work, so that her name becomes as well known as the far less interesting Charles Perrault, who published his fairytales only a year earlier than she did.
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I just had an unexpected evening with family. My adopted sister (and oldest friend) and her family are in town for the folk festival and they dropped round and I played with Lucy for ages. Two children, two nights running. Friends two nights running. Cuddles and hugs and games. My miniature shopping trolley (full of toys) has been very much played with. And I have been given a very culinary birthday present, which I shall play with straight after Pesach. There's a bubble of contentment all around me.

Donna dropped around this afternoon with a cake for me and that cake has now had significant inroads made.

My bleak weekend wasn't at all bleak after all!

This leads to me doing something of grand wickedness. I shall leave the rest of today's work and do it tomorrow.

May 2013

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