kim said

Quick Dispatch from The Big Easy

And this is the only thing that is quick, darlin'. Everyone really does say "good mornin'" and "how ya'all doin," the rum butter bread pudding at the Napoleon House is like heaven melting in your mouth, and Italianate is my new favorite architectural style. N'awlins is everything I thought it would be and more.

Queen of the Nile

"Shakespeare's Cleopatra may have been darkened by 'Phoebus's amorous pinches', but in Tiepolo's magnificent frescoes in the Palazzo Labia in Venice she is as pearly-pale as the earring she is about to drop into her gilded cup, with albino eyelashes and opalescent breasts. It wasn't until the very end of the 18th century, the period when Napoleon sent his troops and his scholars to Egypt, that Cleopatra's exoticism became once more (as it had been in her lifetime) the most important thing about her. Delacroix painted her as a kind of Gypsy fortune-teller, dark-eyed and tousle-haired." ("The Most Wicked Woman In History," The Guardian)

Image: Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra

Related from the Archives: Maggie the Cat and Lord Byron

Objects of Desire: Napoleonic

"Dashing passementerie and bold brass buttons come marching in." (Style.com)

Image: 3.1 Philip Lim two-toned leather band jacket

Related: "It's Napoleon and His Lovers"

"It's Napoleon and His Lovers"

"It's Napoleon and his lovers," Gabbana said. "It's about him and all of the women around him during his life--Marie Antoinette, Pauline, Josephine." The Napoleonic theme continued with British fashion house Burberry which celebrated its 150th anniversary with a celebrity-packed catwalk show at Palazzo Serbelloni, Napoleon's Milanese residence. (Zeenews.com)

Images: Dolce & Gabbana Fall Ready-to-Wear Collection on Style.com

 

 

Flaubert Fragments

"Bal donné au Czar", by contrast, is not just inédit but quite unsuspected. These are the notes Flaubert took, in June 1867, after attending a ball at the Tuileries given by Napoleon III for Alexander II of Russia and William I of Prussia. The mock self-importance with which Flaubert reported his invitation in a letter to Caroline – “Their Majesties wish to inspect me as one of France’s more splendid monuments” – indicates that he was well aware of the artist’s status on such occasions: as a minor piece of table-dressing. In any case, the high politics of the “Three Emperors Summit” pass him by; here he is the professional writer hoovering up usable detail at a grand society event. Thus he has an eye for the Tsar’s elastic-sided boots, of which he disapproves, the food offered to below-the-salters like himself (cold salmon and a glass of Saint-Péray), the jewellery, the flirting, and the goody-bags one of the Emperor’s equerries distributes. Some of Flaubert’s more extended jottings – a lyrical description of a night-time parade of bedizened women in the gaslit garden – already have an embryonic fictional feel to them. Their most plausible destination would have been the project known (in one of its many vestigial manifestations) as Sous Napoléon III. ("Lost Fragments from the Life of Flaubert," by Julian Barnes for the Times UK)