Category Archive:
Let them eat….
It’s now thought that if Marie Antoinette made her most famously un-p.c. statement at all, she said, “Let them eat brioche!” and not, as legend has it, ‘cake.’ (Rousseau offered the disambiguation.) Let me eat brioche! The eggy puffed cake…
Asperges à la Pompadour
Though the ancient Greeks ate asparagus, which grows wild in the Mediterranean, and the Romans did, too, in the East the vegetable picked up a sexy reputation as an aphrodisiac, one served in Tales of the Arabian Nights. (Asparagus’s success…
Fine and dandy
I can’t wait to put my hands on a copy of this reprint of Honoré de Balzac’s Treatise on Elegant Living , just out from Wakefield Press and translated into English for the first time. It’s a guide for the 19th…
A lofty beginning, thanks to Mme de Pompadour
Diderot worked for twenty-six years as the editor of the monumental French Encyclopédie, producing 17 volumes of text and 11 of illustrations published between 1751 and 1772. It summed up the world’s knowledge, but its writers also challenged the beliefs of…
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