Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  But the whole thing itself, this immense imaginary construction, has stood the tests of time and taste, and has never been out of print – probably never will be. Half a century after its completion those florid vulgarities, those modernist pretensions, seem no more than incidental to its unique flavour, which lingers in the mind long after its labyrinthine plots (for they are myriad, and muddling) have been forgotten. The Alexandria Quartet is one of a kind, and as I see it, on the whole a masterpiece. NOTE The characters in this story, the first of a group, are all inventions together with the personality of the narrator, and bear no resemblance to living persons. Only the city is real. I am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act as a process in which four persons are involved. We shall have a lot to discuss about that. S. FREUD: Letters There are two positions available to us – either crime which renders us happy, or the noose, which prevents us from being unhappy. I ask whether there can be any hesitation, lovely Thérèse, and where will your little mind find an argument able to combat that one? D. A. F. DE SADE: Justine To EVE these memorials of her native city PART I The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes.… I have escaped to this island with a few books and the child — Melissa’s child. I do not know why I use the word ‘escape’. The villagers say jokingly that only a sick man would choose such a remote place to rebuild. Well, then, I have come here to heal myself, if you like to put it that way.… At night when the wind roars and the child sleeps quietly in its wooden cot by the echoing chimney-piece I light a lamp and walk about, thinking of my friends — of Justine and Nessim, of Melissa and Balthazar. I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together: the city which used us as its flora — precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria! I have had to come so far away from it in order to understand it all! Living on this bare promontory, snatched every night from darkness by Arcturus, far from the lime-laden dust of those summer afternoons, I see at last that none of us is properly to be judged for what happened in the past. It is the city which should be judged though we, its children, must pay the price. * * * * *

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  Taking the example of her predecessor, Madame du Barry made herself the king’s entertainment committee. She decorated her apartments to please Louis and stuffed them with his favorite flowers. Her mother had been a cook in many noble kitchens, and while haughty courtiers ridiculed this, Madame du Barry tempted the jaded royal palate with countless tasty dishes recommended by her mother. In addition, she brought in jugglers and clowns and had operettas and farces performed for the king’s amusement. While it was challenging enough to amuse the king in a palace, in the 1590s beautiful Gabrielle d’Estrées had the task of making Henri IV’s surroundings comfortable on the field of battle. For several years at the outset of their relationship, Henri was campaigning with his army against rebel forces throughout France. Golden Gabrielle, even when heavily pregnant, insisted on staying by his side, living in cold, drafty tents. She saw to it that he had a good dinner after a day’s battle, and she herself kept his clothes as clean as possible—often pounding them with rocks when she ran out of soap. While Henri was fighting on the field, Gabrielle remained in their tent writing his political and diplomatic dispatches. In the evening, they would discuss the events of the day. Gabrielle was tall with a delicious figure and graceful walk. Blessed with exquisite coloring—pale blonde hair and large blue eyes—she had a broad forehead, high cheekbones, and a nose just a bit too long for perfection. Her contemporaries—even enemies who hated Gabrielle for her Catholicism, her involvement in politics, and her warming the king’s bed—waxed poetic when describing her beauty. In addition to providing her royal lover with shining beauty and comfortable surroundings, Gabrielle offered him fierce political loyalty. During a ball in Paris, a messenger arrived informing the king that the Spanish had launched a surprise attack and captured the town of Amiens. Henri decided to march immediately. Gabrielle calmly went to her strong boxes in the Louvre, emptied them of fifty thousand pieces of gold, and gave Henri every penny to pay the initial costs of troops and provisions. While Henri mustered his troops, Gabrielle got in her carriage and visited the homes of the nobility to ask for donations, collecting an additional 250,000 ecus. Still not satisfied, Gabrielle took her extraordinary jewels to the richest banker in Paris and pawned them. Still in her ball gown and dancing slippers, Gabrielle set out for the front, where she insisted on taking care of her royal lover despite real danger. Henri wrote, “Last evening I found three bullet holes burned into the fabric of my mistress’ tent, and begged her to go to her house in Paris, where her life would not be endangered, but she laughed and was deaf to my pleas…. She replied that only in my presence is she pleased. I entertain no fears for myself, but daily tremble for her.”11

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “Then you act your feelings, instead of understanding them,” I say. “You relive your trauma instead of processing it. I don’t know that there is such a thing as a ‘real man,’” I add, “but I believe the main evidence for strength is the ability to look reality in the eye. When you are able to do that, you save yourself and the next generation from carrying your unprocessed trauma.” “I know exactly what you mean,” Ben says. “My father was a tank driver in the Six-Day War.” In June 1967, when Ben’s father was twenty years old, the Six-Day War broke out. Ben doesn’t know much about his father’s experience as a tank driver in that war. “My dad never talked about it. I only knew from my mom, who met him right after the war, that he was fighting in Jerusalem and that his best friend died there right before his eyes.” The Six-Day War was the third big war for Israel since 1948. It was that war that changed the old stereotype of the Jewish male. Israelis were proud of the young men who had won the war in only six days, and a new image of a Jewish man arose. Not only was that man seen as more masculine; he was like King David, able to defeat a greater enemy with his strength. Yitzhak Rabin, then Chief of the General Staff, announced after the war that it was the men who had won the war—not technology, not weapons, but the men who overcame enemies everywhere, despite their enemies’ superior numbers and fortifications. He declared that “only their personal stand against the greatest dangers would achieve victory for their country and for their families, and that if victory was not theirs the alternative was annihilation.” The young men’s job, then, was to prevent annihilation. This gave them a way to work through the trauma of the Holocaust and the Jews’ constant threat of persecution. The men carried the weight of history by adopting a hypermasculine role. At eighteen years of age they had to start presenting themselves as confident and fearless. “When I was a child I remember my father waking up in the middle of the night, screaming,” Ben says. “He was traumatized. Who knows what he had seen. I was born only a few years after the Six-Day War.” In Hebrew, the name Ben means “a boy.” When Ben gave me permission to write his story he also helped me choose this pseudonym, a name to disguise his real identity, one that would represent his father’s wish to have a first-born son.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  They came, I suppose, as much for the sun as for the socialism. They spread blankets between the stalls and tents, and ate their lunches there, and lay with their sweethearts and babies, and threw sticks for their dogs. But I saw them listening, too, to the speakers at the stalls - sometimes nodding, sometimes arguing, sometimes frowning over a pamphlet, or placing their name upon a list, or fishing pennies from their pockets, to give to some cause. As I stood and looked, I saw a woman pass by with children at her skirts - it was Mrs Fryer, the poor needlewoman whom Florence and I had visited in the autumn. When I called to her, she came smiling up to me. ‘I got my place in the union, after all,’ she said. ‘Your pal persuaded me to it ...’ We stood chatting for a moment — her children had toffee-apples, and held one up for Cyril to lick. Then there came a blast of music, and people shuffled and murmured and craned their necks, and we stood together, lifting the children high, and watched the Workers’ Pageant - a procession of men and women dressed in all the costumes of all the trades, carrying union banners and flags and flowers. It took quite half-an-hour for the pageant to pass; and when it had done so the people put their fingers to their lips, and whistled and cheered and clapped. Mrs Fryer wept, because her neighbour’s eldest daughter was walking in the line, dressed as a match-girl. I wished that Florence were with me, and kept looking for her damson-coloured suit and her daisy, but - though I saw just about every other unionist who had ever passed through our parlour — I did not see her once. When I found her at last, she was in the speakers’ tent: she had spent all afternoon there, listening to the lectures. ‘Have you heard?’ she said when she saw me. ‘There’s a rumour that Eleanor Marx is coming: I daren’t leave the tent, for fear of missing her address!’ It turned out she had eaten nothing since breakfast: I went off to buy her a packet of whelks from a stall, and a cup of ginger ale. When I returned I found Ralph beside her, sweating, still pulling at his collar, and paler than ever. Every seat in the tent was taken, and there were people standing, besides. It was stiflingly hot, and the heat was making everyone restless and cross. One speaker had recently made an unpopular point, and been booed from the platform. ‘They won’t boo you, Ralph,’ I said; but when I saw that he was really miserable, I took his arm, left the baby with Florence, and led him from his seat into the cooler air outside. ‘Come on, come and have a fag with me.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  Memoirs became popular, though they must be read with care and compared with other documents of the period. Written with an aim of publication, many memoirs had the dual purpose of self-vindication and finger-pointing. Shortly before her death in 1615, Queen Marguerite of France wrote her memoirs to provide herself with a virtue as crisply white as parchment, throwing in numerous stories of her husband’s unseemly behavior with mistresses, though leaving out her own unseemly behavior with lovers. The vengeful duc de Saint-Simon, who left Versailles a disappointed courtier in 1722, stubbornly scratched his quill across forty volumes of memoirs, his ink mixed with hearty doses of venom. Contemporary biographies started popping up, but even they must be scrutinized. Count Karl von Pöllnitz traveled the courts of Europe starting in 1710 and in 1740 became Frederick the Great’s master of ceremonies. Fascinated by the amorous adventures of Augustus the Strong of Saxony (1670–1733), who reputedly fathered more than three hundred illegitimate children, Count von Pöllnitz published a biography in 1734, the year after the king’s death. While the basic facts of the king’s love affairs were true, we can imagine that the count polished up the conversations he reported, for comic effect. Along with literacy came a new appreciation of women’s valuable civilizing influence on society. The French court of the sixteenth century began accepting the idea that women were just as intelligent and capable as men, but infinitely more attractive. Almost overnight, royal mistresses became admired, imitated, and lauded. In the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the position of royal mistress was almost as official as that of prime minister. The mistress was expected to perform certain duties—sexual and otherwise—in return for titles, pensions, honors, and an influential place at court. She encouraged the arts—theater, literature, music, architecture, and philosophy. She wielded her charm as a weapon against foreign ambassadors. She calmed the king when he was angry, buoyed him up when he was despondent, encouraged him to greatness when he was weak. She attended religious services daily, gave alms to the poor, and turned in her jewels to the treasury in times of war. François I of France (1494–1547) was the first king to give the title maîtresse-en-titre—official royal mistress—to his favorite. He enjoyed several mistresses in succession with great aplomb. By the second half of the sixteenth century, French mistresses wielded more power than any others in Europe would for nearly two hundred years. Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henri II (1519–1559), became a member of the French council, an exclusive assembly convened for deliberating governmental matters. Diane made laws and imposed taxes, and she signed official decrees with the king in a joint signature, HenriDiane. Gabrielle d’Estrées, mistress of Henri IV (1553–1610), also joined the council, made laws, received ambassadors, and assisted greatly in ending the religious civil war.

• From Less (2017)

  A party was called for, of course, and the old gang all came back together—Leonard Ross, Otto Handler, Franklin Woodhouse, Stella Barry—piled into the shack on the Vulcan Steps, and patted Robert on the back; Less had never seen him so bashful with his pals, so obviously delighted and proud. Ross went right up to him, and Robert bowed his head, leaning into the tall Lincolnesque writer, and Ross rubbed his scalp as if for good luck or, more probably, as if they had done this when they were young. They laughed and talked about it ceaselessly—what they were like when they were young—which baffled Less, because they seemed just the same age as when he met them. A number had given up drink, including Robert by then, so what they drank was coffee, from a beat-up metal urn, and some of them passed around a joint. Less resumed his old role and stood to the side, admiring them. At some point, Stella saw him from across the room and went over with her stork walk; she was all bones and sharp edges, a too-tall, unpretty woman who celebrated her flaws with confidence and grace, so they became, to Less, beautiful. “I hear you’ve taken up writing too, Arthur,” she said in her scratchy voice. She took his glass of wine and sipped from it, then handed it back to him, her eyes full of devilry. “Here’s my only advice. Don’t win one of these prizes.” She herself had won several, of course; she was in the Wharton Anthology of Poetry, which meant she was immortal. Like Athena coming down to advise young Telemachus. “You win a prize, and it’s all over. You lecture for the rest of your life. But you never write again.” She tapped a nail on his chest. “Don’t win one.” Then she kissed him on his cheek. That was the last time they ever were together, the Russian River School.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  In 1895, the German ambassador Count Eulenberg described the forty-two-year-old actress as “ravishingly pretty with extraordinary youthful looks, marvelous coloring, shining golden hair and great blue eyes with the sweetest expression, a really good soul who never says an unkind word and is always pleasant and gay and ready to help whom she can. Apart from which she is delightful company and has a very original way of relating little anecdotes.”13 The emperor loved his beautiful wife, Empress Elizabeth, who was always balancing precariously on the brink of insanity. But the anguished empress was in no position to amuse and comfort her husband, and she spent most of her time trekking across Europe in a fruitless effort to cast out her inner demons. In fact it was she who had chosen Katharina to be her husband’s mistress to relieve her own guilt at deserting him. The empress kept throwing the two together—they were a bit slow to understand—until an affair began. It was a wise choice. Franz Josef wrote Katharina that his visits to her cheerful home were “the only rays of light in my otherwise dreary life.”14 With his children married and his wife away, the lonely emperor often roamed the endless corridors of the royal palace alone, with no one to see to his personal comfort. He had dozens of servants to snap to his commands, but not one would have dared to see what he was lacking and make suggestions. Katharina filled this role, giving him a painted screen to protect him from the draft, a thick wool smoking jacket, a cozy little rug. His favorite gift was a hand mirror with the words in French “portrait of him whom I love.”15 Untamed ShrewsWhile the vast majority of royal mistresses presented an unfailingly cheerful face to the king, there were some notable exceptions. Two of the worst harpies reigned in the 1660s and 1670s. Louis XIV’s Athénaïs de Montespan and his cousin Charles II’s Barbara, Lady Castlemaine, were both cunning, hotheaded, vengeful, and rapacious. When she first became Louis XIV’s mistress, Athénaïs de Montespan was the most beautiful woman at the French court. She had thick tawny hair, large, heavily lidded blue eyes, a straight nose, good teeth, and the cherubic lips so cherished at court. Her neck was long and shapely, her large bosom and white shoulders well suited to the daring off-the-shoulder gowns of the 1660s. As one courtier reported, “Her greatest charm was a grace, a spirit, a certain manner making a witticism.”16 Unlike her predecessor Louise de La Vallière, whose beauty had lasted just about as long as the violets she had been compared to, Madame de Montespan kept her looks almost until the age of forty, but with the utmost exertion. She marinated herself daily in creams, oils, and flower essences to keep her complexion fresh. She spent lavishly on cosmetics, dabbing on the ivories, roses, and peaches of her complexion as if nature had not fully complied with her exacting requirements.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I recognize Dr. Atlas as one who writes in full, knowing detail about what I call in my work ‘the generational wound.’” —Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés Reyés, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves “With elegance, Galit Atlas explains the troubling and nourishing aspects of our emotional inheritances. She deftly shows why the hurts and stuckness that can plague us can be faced and, yes, dissolved. Contemporary psychoanalysis at its best. And good storytelling too.” —Susie Orbach, author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue “Galit Atlas has given us a gift with her book Emotional Inheritance. With warmth and compassion, she is able to show the reader the ways our present challenges could be linked to our inherited past. Using patient stories and her own experiences, we are taken on a journey of discovery. By sharing these stories, she gives us a glimpse behind our own curtains and helps us understand that if we are open to the possibility of hope, now might be the right time to break the silence our ancestors have held for so long.” —Sharon Salzberg, author of Real Happiness “Galit Atlas’s Emotional Inheritance is insightful, perceptive, and provocative—but also tender, touching, and personal. Talented clinicians are not always talented writers, but Dr. Atlas is, and her stories will stay with you. The world of epigenetics is in its infancy for most of us, but Dr. Atlas uses ordinary language to explain how we are born with psychological legacies that we cannot escape but which we can, with her help, understand.” —Juliet Rosenfeld, author of The State of Disbelief “This book is full of great wisdom, expertise, and humanity. An important, terrific, gripping read.” —Dr. Anne Alvarez, author of Live Company “ Emotional Inheritance offers extraordinary insight to readers who feel stuck in lifelong patterns and sense they are haunted by ghosts from their family’s past. Dr. Atlas deftly shares her own history and those of her patients while seamlessly weaving in the relevant psychological research. Dr. Atlas’s book reads like a propulsive page-turner while also offering deep psychological insights about inherited trauma and family secrets. This book will undoubtedly change lives and help readers unlock their unfulfilled potential.” —Christie Tate, author of Group “Galit Atlas takes up Tolstoy’s assertion—‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’—as she narrates the ways in which traumas are uniquely held within families. Atlas tells the layered stories of her patients as their traumas reverberate with her own history of trauma and loss. The intimacy of the storytelling captures the recognition and repair that Atlas undertakes with her patients. Together they exhume the secrets and the ghosts that carry and bury trauma, pulling the reader into the present through the past, in order to break into the potential that is the future. Such potential is not a simple, sunny vale.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  Some Catholics resented being lectured on the subject of religion by the king’s mistress. These were reminded that it was Gabrielle who had convinced the pope himself to accept Henri into the church. Henri was thrilled at Gabrielle’s success in convincing powerful Catholics, one by one, to accept his decree of religious toleration. He wrote, “My mistress has become an orator of unequaled excellence, so fiercely does she argue the cause of the new Edict.”6 Through a combination of warm charm and cold threats Gabrielle pushed her point home. In 1598 the Edict of Nantes was signed granting Huguenots certain rights while deferring to Catholics. The sure sign of the edict’s justice was the fact that both sides went away grumbling. But Henri was thrilled and knew he could not have issued the edict without Gabrielle’s diplomatic skill. “We must never yield our mind”Henri’s grandson Louis XIV did not permit his mistresses any great exercise of political power. Louis himself in his memoirs, which were intended to help his heir rule after him, wrote, “Time given up to love affairs must never be allowed to prejudice affairs of state…. And if we yield our heart, we must never yield our mind or will…. We must maintain a rigorous distinction between a lover’s tenderness and a sovereign’s resolution…and we must make sure that the beauty who is the source of our delight never takes the liberty of interfering in political affairs.”7 Louis’s Madame de Montespan had little interest in politics, but she demanded that her views be heard in the realms of art, architecture, literature, and music. Her protégés included Molière, Racine, Boileau-Despréaux, and La Fontaine. Her only success in the political domain was in getting her candidates appointed to high-level positions—and even then, she usually promised much and delivered little. One courtier, the marquis de Puyguilhem, tired of waiting for her to procure for him a coveted position at the king’s disposal, actually hid beneath her bed while she was out having lunch with Louis, knowing they would return to her room for sex afterward. Silent as the grave, the marquis listened to the royal lovemaking and their postcoital conversation. He was furious to hear Madame de Montespan argue against his appointment, despite her glittering promises. Later, as Madame de Montespan and her ladies started walking toward the palace theater, the marquis accosted her, calling her a dog’s whore and a liar and repeating word for word what she had said to the king. Shaking with fear—certain that the devil himself was in league with Puyguilhem against her—the royal mistress stumbled to the theater, where she promptly fainted and was revived only with great difficulty.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But Kitty could have worn anything - a string of bottle-tops about her neck - and still, I thought, look like a queen.Helping Kitty with her buttons made me slow with my own dressing; I said that she should go on down without me. When she had done so I pulled on the lovely gown that she had given me, then stepped to the glass to study myself - and to frown at what I saw. The dress was so transforming it was practically a disguise. In the half-light it was dark as midnight; my eyes appeared bluer above it than they really were, and my hair paler, and the long skirt, and the sash, made me seem taller and thinner than ever. I did not look at all like Kitty had, in her pink frock; I looked more like a boy who had donned his sister’s ball-gown for a lark. I loosened my plait of hair, then brushed it - then, because I had no time to tie and loop it, twisted it into a knot at the back of my head, and stuck a comb in it. The chignon, I thought, brought out the hard lines of my jaw and cheek-bones, made my wide shoulders wider still. I frowned again, and looked away. It would have to do - and would have the merit, I supposed, of making Kitty look all the daintier at my side.I went downstairs to join her. When I pushed at the parlour door I found her chatting with the others; they were all still at supper. Tootsie saw me first - and must have nudged Percy, beside her, for he glanced up from his plate and, catching sight of me, gave a whistle. Sims turned my way, then, and looked at me as if he had never seen me before, a forkful of food suspended on its journey to his open mouth.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I would like to have a picture of you, beside my bed ...’ The card I sent her was a favourite of mine, a picture of Kitty and me in Oxford bags and boaters, in which Kitty stood with her hands in her pockets and I leaned with my arm through hers, a cigarette between my fingers. I signed it ‘To Ada, from one “King” to another’; and it was very odd to think that it would be pinned to a wall, or put in a frame, so that unknown girl might gaze at it while she fastened her frock or lay dreaming. Then there were other requests, for odder things. Would I send a collar-stud, a button from my suit, a curl of hair? Would I, on Thursday night - or Friday night - wear a scarlet necktie - or a green neck-tie, or a yellow rose in my lapel; would I make a special sign, or dance a special step? - for then the writer would see, and know that I had received her note. ‘Throw them away,’ Kitty would say when I showed her these letters. ‘They’re cracked, those girls, and you mustn’t encourage them.’ But I knew that the girls were not cracked, as she said; they were only as I had been, a year before - but braver or more reckless. That, in itself, impressed me; what astonished and thrilled me now was the thought that girls might look at me at all - the thought that in every darkened hall there might be one or two female hearts that beat exclusively for me, one or two pairs of eyes that lingered, perhaps immodestly, over my face and figure and suit. Did they know why they looked? Did they know what they looked for? Above all, when they saw me stride across the stage in trousers, singing of girls whose eyes I had sent winking, whose hearts I had broken, what did they see? Did they see that - something - that I saw in them? ‘They had better not!’ said Kitty, when I put my idea to her; and though she laughed as she said it, the laughter was a little strained. She didn’t like to talk about such things. She didn’t like it, either, when one night in the change-room of a theatre we met a pair of women - a comic singer and her dresser - who, I thought, were rather like ourselves. The singer was flashy, and had a frock with spangles on it that must be fastened very tightly over her stays. Her maid was an older woman in a plain brown dress; I saw her tugging at the frock, and thought nothing of it.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I didn’t like him much. Janet, however, who called oftener, I took to at once. She was eighteen or nineteen, big-boned and handsome; a born barmaid I had thought her when studying her photograph - so I was rather tickled to learn that she worked as a tapstress in a City public-house, lodging with the family who ran it, in their rooms above the bar. Florence fretted over her like anything: their mother had died while the sisters were still quite young (their father had died many years before that), Florence had had all the raising of the girl to do herself and, like older sisters everywhere, was sure that Janet would be led astray by the first young man who got his hands on her. ‘She will marry without giving it a second’s thought,’ she said wearily to me, when Janet paid her first visit after I moved in. ‘She’ll be dragged down having babies all her life, and her good looks will be spoiled, and she’ll die worn out at forty-three, like our own mother did.’ When Janet came for supper, she stayed the night; then she would sleep up in Florence’s bed, and I’d hear their murmurs and their laughter as I lay in the parlour below - the sound made me terribly restless. But Janet herself seemed marvellously unsurprised to see me dishing up the herrings at the breakfast-table, or putting her brother’s linen, on a wash-day, through the mangle. ‘All right. Nancy,’ she would say - she called me ‘Nancy’ from the start. The first time we met I still had the bruise at my eye, and when she saw it, she whistled. She said, ‘I bet it was a girl done that - wasn’t it? A girl always goes for the eyes every time. A bloke goes for the teeth.’When the house wasn’t being shivered to its foundations by the thud of Janet’s footsteps on the stairs, it was trembling to the arguments and the laughter of Florence’s girl-friends, who came by regularly to bring books and pamphlets and bits of gossip, and to take tea. I thought them a very quaint breed, these girls.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  “You are turning the King yellow”More powerful even than Louise de Kéroualle, Madame de Pompadour wielded the greatest power of any royal mistress ever. Initially she was interested only in her romance with Louis XV. But once she found herself clawing for survival in the snake pit of Versailles, she was clever enough to know she needed friends in high places. The new mistress started—tentatively at first—sounding out which courtiers were her friends and which were her enemies. She used her influence with Louis to dismiss high-level officials who stood resolutely against her and replace them with her friends. One of her first steps was to replace the comptroller, who had remonstrated against her extravagance, with a friend of hers who immediately paid all her bills without question. Soon, Madame de Pompadour controlled the plum prizes of pensions, titles, honors, and positions at court. The king, relieved that he did not have to make all the decisions himself, gratefully relied on his mistress to take care of them. The great majority of courtiers, ministers, government officials, and even struggling artists decided to befriend her. In the morning, they were allowed to crowd into her rooms to watch in awestruck admiration as she applied her makeup. A young writer named Marmontel handed her a manuscript he was working on and asked for her comments. Several days later, he wrote, “I presented myself one morning at her toilette when the room was crowded by an assemblage of courtiers.” To his surprise, Madame de Pompadour took the young man into her private office to return his manuscript marked with corrections and suggestions. When they returned to the pool of humanity swimming in her drawing room, “All eyes were turned on me,” Marmontel relates, “on every side I was greeted by little nods and friendly smiles, and before I left the room I had received enough dinner invitations to last the whole week.”14 As the sexual relationship between Madame de Pompadour and the king waned, her political power increased. Messages designed for the king’s eyes alone first had to pass through the mistress’s hands, and it was she who decided if they were important enough to bother Louis. Ambassadors found they could see the king only in the company of the maîtresse-en-titre, who carefully observed to see if Louis was turning yellow, a clear indication that the conversation was upsetting him. When Monsieur de Maurepas, minister of Paris as well as secretary of state and secretary of the navy, involved the king in a long, boring discourse, Madame de Pompadour dismissed him smartly by saying, “Monsieur de Maurepas, you are turning the King yellow. Good day to you, Monsieur de Maurepas.”15 The minister waited in vain for the king to countermand his mistress’s order. When this did not come he withdrew, seething with anger that a middle-class female nobody should throw him out.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  And there is no sign that his power is waning. His kingdom is more widely spread than ever before, and has the fairest prospect of final triumph in all the earth. Napoleon at St. Helena is reported to have been struck with the reflection that millions are now ready to die for the crucified Nazarene who founded a spiritual empire by love, while no one would die for Alexander, or Caesar, or himself, who founded temporal empires by force. He saw in this contrast a convincing argument for the divinity of Christ, saying: "I know men, and I tell you, Christ was not a man. Everything about Christ astonishes me. His spirit overwhelms and confounds me. There is no comparison between him and any other being. He stands single and alone.102 And Goethe, another commanding genius, of very different character, but equally above suspicion of partiality for religion, looking in the last years of his life over the vast field of history, was constrained to confess that "if ever the Divine appeared on earth, it was in the Person of Christ," and that "the human mind, no matter how far it may advance in every other department, will never transcend the height and moral culture of Christianity as it shines and glows in the Gospels." The rationalistic, mythical, and legendary attempts to explain the life of Christ on purely human and natural grounds, and to resolve the miraculous elements either into common events, or into innocent fictions, split on the rock of Christ’s character and testimony. The ablest of the infidel biographers of Jesus now profess the profoundest regard for his character, and laud him as the greatest sage and saint that ever appeared on earth. But, by rejecting his testimony concerning his divine origin and mission, they turn him into a liar; and, by rejecting the miracle of the resurrection, they make the great fact of Christianity a stream without a source, a house without a foundation, an effect without a cause. Denying the physical miracles, they expect us to believe even greater psychological miracles; yea, they substitute for the supernatural miracle of history an unnatural prodigy and incredible absurdity of their imagination. They moreover refute and supersede each other. The history of error in the nineteenth century is a history of self-destruction. A hypothesis was scarcely matured before another was invented and substituted, to meet the same fate in its turn; while the old truth and faith of Christendom remains unshaken, and marches on in its peaceful conquest against sin and error

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Finally, this brotherly love expanded to love even for enemies, which returned the heathens good for evil, and not rarely, in persecutions and public misfortunes, heaped coals of fire on their heads. During the persecution under Gallus (252), when the pestilence raged in Carthage, and the heathens threw out their dead and sick upon the streets, ran away from them for fear of the contagion, and cursed the Christians as the supposed authors of the plague, Cyprian assembled his congregation, and exhorted them to love their enemies; whereupon all went to work; the rich with their money, the poor with their hands, and rested not, till the dead were buried, the sick cared for, and the city saved from desolation. The same self-denial appeared in the Christians of Alexandria during a ravaging plague under the reign of Gallienus. These are only a few prominent manifestations of a spirit which may be traced through the whole history of martyrdom and the daily prayers of the Christians for their enemies and persecutors. For while the love of friends, says Tertullian, is common to all men, the love of enemies is a virtue peculiar to Christians.672 "You forget," he says to the heathens in his Apology, "that, notwithstanding your persecutions, far from conspiring against you, as our numbers would perhaps furnish us with the means of doing, we pray for you and do good to you; that, if we give nothing for your gods, we do give for your poor, and that our charity spreads more alms in your streets than the offerings presented by your religion in your temples." The organized congregational charity of the ante-Nicene age provided for all the immediate wants. When the state professed Christianity, there sprang up permanent charitable institutions for the poor, the sick, for strangers, widows, orphans, and helpless old men.673 The first clear proof of such institutions we find in the age of Julian the Apostate, who tried to check the progress of Christianity and to revive paganism by directing the high priest of Galatia, Arsacius, to establish in every town a Xenodochium to be supported by the state and also by private contributions; for, he said, it was a shame that the heathen should be left without support from their own, while "among the Jews no beggar can be found, and the godless Galilaeans" (i.e. the Christians) "nourish not only their own, but even our own poor." A few years afterwards (370) we hear of a celebrated hospital at Caesarea, founded by St. Basilius, and called after him "Basilias," and similar institutions all over the province of Cappadocia. We find one at Antioch at the time of Chrysostom, who took a practical interest in it. At Constantinople there were as many as thirty-five hospitals. In the West such institutions spread rapidly in Rome, Sicily, Sardinia, and Gaul.674 § 101. Prayer and Fasting.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Jacopo Sadoleto (born at Modena, 1477, died at Rome, 1547) was one of the secretaries of Pope Leo X., bishop of Carpentras in Dauphiny since 1517, secretary of Clement VII. in 1523, a cardinal since 1536. He was frequently employed in diplomatic peace negotiations between the pope, the king of France, and the emperor of Germany. He had a high reputation as a scholar, a poet, and a gentleman of irreproachable character and devout piety. He best represents the Italian Renaissance in its leaning towards a moderate semi-evangelical reform within the Catholic Church. He was an admirer of Erasmus and Melanchthon, and one of the founders of the Oratory at Rome for purposes of mutual edification. He acted, like Contarini, as a mediator between the Roman and Protestant parties, but did not please either. In his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, he expressed opinions on divine grace and free-will which gave offence in Rome and in Spain. His colleague, Cardinal Bembo, warned him against the study of St. Paul, lest it might spoil his classical style. Sadolet prevented the spread of Calvinism in his diocese, but was opposed to violent persecution. He kindly received the fugitive Waldenses after the terrible massacre of Mérindol and Cabrières, in 1545, and besought the clemency of Francis I. in their behalf. He was grieved and disgusted with the nepotism of Pope Paul III., and declined the appointment to preside over the Council of Trent as papal delegate, on the score of extreme poverty. This highly respectable dignitary of the papal hierarchy made a very able and earnest effort to win back the orphan Church of Geneva to the sheepfold of Rome. He thereby came involuntarily into a literary conflict with Calvin, in which he was utterly defeated. Fresh from a visit to the pope, he addressed a letter of some twenty or more octavo pages "to his dearly beloved Brethren, the Magistrates, Senate, and Citizens of Geneva." It is written in elegant Latin, and with persuasive eloquence, of which he was a consummate master.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  3. Modern authorities. Mosheim: De reb. Christ. ante Const. M. etc., last section (p. 958 sqq. In Murdock’s Engl. transl., vol. ii. p. 454–481). Nath. Lardner, in the second part of his great work on the Credibility of the Gospel History, see Works ed. by Kippis, Lond. 1838, vol. iv. p. 3–55. Abbé de Voisin: Dissertation critique sur la vision de Constantin. Par. 1774. Gibbon: l.c. chs. xiv. and xvii.–xxi. Fr. Gusta: Vita di Constantino il Grande. Foligno, 1786. Manso: Das Leben Constantins des Gr. Bresl. 1817. Hug (R.C.): Denkschrift zur Ehrenrettung Constant. Frieb. 1829. Heinichen: Excurs. in Eus. Vitam Const. 1830. Arendt (R.C.): Const. u. sein Verb. zum Christenthum. Tüb. (Quartalschrift) 1834. Milman: Hist. of Christianity, etc., 1840, book iii. ch. 1–4. Jacob Burckhardt: Die Zeit Const. des Gr. Bas. 1853. Albert de Broglie: L’église et l’empire romain au IVme siècle. Par. 1856 (vols. i. and ii.). A. P. Stanley: Lectures on the Hist. of the Eastern Church, 1862, Lect. vi. p. 281 sqq. (Am. Ed.). Theod. Keim: Der Uebertritt Constantins des Gr. zum Christenthum. Zürich, 1862 (an apology for Constantine’s character against Burckhardt’s view). The last great imperial persecution of the Christians under Diocletian and Galerius, which was aimed at the entire uprooting of the new religion, ended with the edict of toleration of 311 and the tragical ruin of the persecutors.1 The edict of toleration was an involuntary and irresistible concession of the incurable impotence of heathenism and the indestructible power of Christianity. It left but a step to the downfall of the one and the supremacy of the other in the empire of the Caesars. This great epoch is marked by the reign of Constantine I.2 He understood the signs of the times and acted accordingly. He was the man for the times, as the times were prepared for him by that Providence which controls both and fits them for each other. He placed himself at the head of true progress, while his nephew, Julian the Apostate, opposed it and was left behind. He was the chief instrument for raising the church from the low estate of oppression and persecution to well deserved honor and power. For this service a thankful posterity has given him the surname of the Great, to which he was entitled, though not by his moral character, yet doubtless by his military and administrative ability, his judicious policy, his appreciation and protection of Christianity, and the far-reaching consequences of his reign. His greatness was not indeed of the first, but of the second order, and is to be measured more by what he did than by what he was. To the Greek church, which honors him even as a canonized saint, he has the same significance as Charlemagne to the Latin.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  Is it hopeless to hope for love on the battlefield of greed, ambition, and cruel adultery? Is the woman who lays her gift of lilies—or is it thorns?—at the base of an altar worshiping not love, but an idol, a graven image of fame and wealth and power? Is the real goal of the royal mistress, as one eighteenth-century French courtier put it, to “find glory in a whoredom that is part of History”?19 But in the patchwork of light and dark and good and evil that is human nature, our spotlight illuminates virtues as well. In it we see Agnes Sorel, sitting before a hearth doing needlework, gently persuading a cowardly Charles VII to drive the English from French soil; the courageous Gabrielle d’Estrées, who faced cannonballs on the battlefield to stay by the side of Henri IV, ably ending a bloody civil war with clever diplomatic persistence; Madame de Pompadour, mentor of artists and writers, eagerly turning in her silver, furniture, and priceless diamonds to build hospitals and pay the soldiers of Louis XV. We see Wilhelmine Rietz, willing to face imprisonment and possibly death rather than leave Frederick William II to die without her by his side. We behold loyalty in the face of betrayal in Maria Walewska, long ago dismissed by Napoleon while pregnant with his child, trudging up a steep hill on Elba to visit in exile a man whose princess bride and fawning courtiers have forgotten him. We see Katharina Schratt, stout and matronly, tiny glasses perched on the bridge of her nose, sitting on a concrete garden bench reading dispatches to eighty-year-old Emperor Franz Josef, whose eyes have failed. And Camilla Parker-Bowles, offering calm advice and loving support to a man torn between duty and inclination. Those who tread the earth wearing crowns—and we the crownless—all worship at altars of greed, ambition, and desire. But sometimes flowers sprout in the blood-soaked battlefield or the fire-ravaged forest, and a glorious tree grows from an unlikely crack in a crumbling wall. Afraid to see the truth of what we have been worshiping, we cast down our eyes. Yet if we look up, we might find that our altar has no idols, or that the idols we put there have fallen and we behold something else shining in their place. In searching the darkness, we have found light. NotesIntroduction1. D’Orliac, p. 171.2. Delpech, p. 23.3. Andrews, p. 161.4. Bray, pp. 467–468.5. Pöllnitz, pp. 251–252.6. Hume, p. 208.7. Trench, p. 182.8. Hervey, vol. 1, p. 42.9. Trench, p. 172.10. Memoirs, p. 183.11. Hardy, p. 42.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  TJae student who is interested may consult the works above referred to for the views of the writers themselves, and for criticism of their views: Zahn, ZkWkL* 1889, pp. 4St~466; Gloel, Die jUngsie Kritik afe* GolQforbri$fe&i Erlangen, 1890; Schmidt, Der Galaterbrief tm Feuer far Krilik, Leipzig, 180.2; Godet, Introduction to the Epistles of SL jPttuti 1894, pp. 230 jf.; Knowling, Witness of the J£pi$tl®$, Lon- don, 189*, chap. Ill; and T^titnony of St. Paul to Christ* New York, 1905, Preface and Lectures I and III; Schmlcdd, article, "Galatians," In Encyc* Bib, vol. II, cols. 1617-1623; Clemen, Paulns^ Giesseji, 1904, vol. I, pp. 6-42; Lake* Marlm* Ephtles of St. JP^wl, London, 1911, chap. ¥11; ef. literaturo referred to by Moff. Introd., p. $07, Knowl~ Ing, and Schmfedel, op. cit* Modern criticism as represented by scholars of all schools of thought, with the few exceptions noted, ratifies the tradition of centuries that the letter to the Galatians was written, as it claims to have been* by Paul, the Christian apostle of the first century. The internal evidence of the letter, with the vivid difttioAure of a commanding personality and a tense and in- tensely interesting situation, and the correspondence of that ait nation with that which is reflected In the other literature to from the author and period, supple- by the evidence, rather though it is, furnish no ground or occasion t Indeed, for other opinion* * J, Jfttf «f#i ««QI; Ks Aw Cf. aiHid I JNTRODUCXIOfl^T' ", ;\\ 'U 'v'''"' VII, ANALYSIS OF I* INTRODUCTION, i1-10. 1. Salutation, including assertion of the writer^ tolic authority i1*4. 2. Expression of indignant surprise at the threatened abandonment of his teaching by the GalatiasiH, in which is disclosed the occasion of the i*>10. II. PERSONAL PORTION OF THE LKTTKR. The general theme established by thr Independence (if all human authority relation to Christ: i^-a11, i« Proposition; Paul received his not but immediately from God i11 IS* a. Evidence subntanttattng the wf hia of various of hin life i1*-^1. a. Kvidenca Ills tile hN tw» !l# i* llit of hi* and Ms after i1*"1** c. a VH!I in hi* i |f| f *. A tho iif tii^ it if in aari C I*-** c hi* nit i la llf one i1 lft. / li^ In at *«•», f. tnd i»f Hi A| » §i to It fur thf abo ti of tit te INTRODUCTION III, REFUTATOR^ PORTION OF THE LETTER. The doctrine that men, both Jews and Gentiles, become acceptable to God through faith rather than by works of law, defended by refutation of the arguments of the judaisers, and chiefly by showing that the "heirs of Abraham" are such by faith, not by works of law. Chaps. 3, 4. i. Appeal to the early Christian experience of the Galatians 3t-6. 3* Argument from the faith of Abraham, refuting the contention of his opponents that only through conformity to law could men become "sons of Abraham "3^.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In general the hierarchy formed a powerful and wholesome check on the imperial papacy, and preserved the freedom and independence of the church toward the temporal power. That age had only the alternative of imperial or episcopal despotism; and of these the latter was the less hurtful and the more profitable, because it represented the higher intellectual and moral interests. Without the hierarchy, the church in the Roman empire and among the barbarians would have been the football of civil and military despots. It was, therefore, of the utmost importance, that the church, at the time of her marriage with the state, had already grown so large and strong as to withstand all material alteration by imperial caprice, and all effort to degrade her into a tool. The Apostolic Constitutions place the bishops even above all kings and magistrates.240 Chrysostom says that the first ministers of the state enjoyed no such honor as the ministers of the church. And in general the ministers of the church deserved their honor. Though there were prelates enough who abused their power to sordid ends, still there were men like Athanasius, Basil, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Augustine, Leo, the purest and most venerable characters, which meet us in the fourth and fifth centuries, far surpassing the contemporary emperors. It was the universal opinion that the doctrines and institutions of the church, resting on divine revelation, are above all human power and will. The people looked, in blind faith and superstition, to the clergy as their guides in all matters of conscience, and even the emperors had to pay the bishops, as the fathers of the churches, the greatest reverence, kiss their hands, beg their blessing, and submit to their admonition and discipline. In most cases the emperors were mere tools of parties in the church. Arbitrary laws which were imposed upon the church from without rarely survived their makers, and were condemned by history. For there is a divine authority above all thrones, and kings, and bishops, and a power of truth above all the machinations of falsehood and intrigue. The Western church, as a whole, preserved her independence far more than the Eastern; partly through the great firmness of the Roman character, partly through the favor of political circumstances, and of remoteness from the influence and the intrigues of the Byzantine court. Here the hierarchical principle developed itself from the time of Leo the Great even to the absolute papacy, which, however, after it fulfilled its mission for the world among the barbarian nations of the middle ages, degenerated into an insufferable tyranny over conscience, and thus exposed itself to destruction. In the Catholic system the freedom and independence of the church involve the supremacy of an exclusive priesthood and papacy; in the Protestant, they can be realized only on the broader basis of the universal priesthood, in the self-government of the Christian people; though this is, as yet, in all Protestant established churches more or less restricted by the power of the state.