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Falling in Style
“Thou shalt not blow pot smoke into the face of thy pet!” was the thirteenth commandment according to William Burroughs. The effort to upgrade the moral standards according to the needs of society is...
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Style Empire in Painting
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Style Empire continued after the Bourbon restoration to the throne of France. The Style is well understood in furniture and other decorative arts, but in painting, apart from the...
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Le Gros’ Portrait of Napoleon’s Aid-de-Camp
By the time he was twenty-one, Antoine-Jean Gros had become a painter of the victorious French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. After meeting Josephine in Genes, he was received by her husband and...
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Napoleon II and the Cinco de Mayo
Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s painting The Sleeping King of Rome can be seen at Louvre-Lance. That is where I saw it six or seven years ago. The painting was originally presented at the Salon in 1811. As the...
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Indifferent (a text of Paul Claudel translated by Vadim Bystritski)
No, not indifferent, this mother-of-perle messenger, this precursor of Aurora should be described as someone who could either fly off or continue, and is not about to step into a dance, as one of his...
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Marie-Antoinette (a text of Jean Cocteau translated by Vadim Bystritski)
The expression to lose your head brings to mind that fringe and tragic meaning we happen to associate with Marie-Antoinette and how the haughty frivolousness of her good-weather days turned nobly...
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The Emperor’s Barge
It is well known that Louis XVI’s Naval victories were due to research and innovation. Often the king himself was behind them. The introduction of copper hull boats, for example, took years of study...
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A Cat Chasing a Butterfly
Had you met a royal page with red ears, there would have been only one fitting explanation — he must have been to see the King, for one had to trace his nobility to the 1300’s to be a royal page,...
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Lacremae Rerum
From one language to the other the most confusing subject to learn is prepositions: there are no correspondences between them. Is this why a quantity of ink was spilled over translating Virgil’s “tears...
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A Swede in the XVIII Century Paris.
Many of my American friends feel claustrophobic in Parisian hotels — it’s too tight, too hot. They completely miss the idea of boudoir! It has to be tight, it has to be hot, especially when outside it...
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