Lotharingia

by Simon Winder

  1.  An attractive language consonance: Poeljemarkt; Marché des Poulets; Poultry Market.

  Chapter Four

  1.  The relationship between the French monarchy and the dukes wobbled about a fair bit. One nadir came when Charles VI besieged John the Fearless in Arras in August 1414 and sent him a letter addressed to ‘John, the so-called Duke of Burgundy, raving with the fury of envy and ambition’.

  2.  Actually, that is inhuman – it just can’t be left out. Luxembourg was taken by a specialist ‘escalader’ using a ladder made of silk and hooks to get over the walls. He found a little barred gate unwatched and returned with a hundred shoeless picked men on the darkest night of the year, armed only with daggers and breastplates and carrying a gigantic pair of pincers with handles twelve feet long. These snipped through the gate’s bars and locks and the town fell almost without loss of life. There.

  3.  This diamond was an early example of a revolution begun by the Jewish diamond-cutter Lodewyk van Berken in Antwerp, inventor of the scaif, a machine that transformed the beauty and complexity of diamonds, and of the ‘pendeloque’ cut. Antwerp remains central to the diamond industry.

  Chapter Six

  1.  My first published history essay was about this statue, published under the undemanding editorship of a magazine which I myself edited. Actually going to see it for the first time over thirty years later in Bar-le-Duc was almost too much in its deferred intensity. René is shown as a flayed corpse in a heroic pose, admiring himself in a little mirror with ligaments stretching across his rotting neck. It is just as startling, if smaller, than I had imagined from drawings. The tomb took a beating during the French Revolution, so it was reassembled in 1793 with an awkward box at René’s feet filled with tiny bits of other family members picked up off the floor, including Robert the Magnificent, his wife Marie de France, and their son Edward, Duke of Bar, killed at the Battle of Agincourt, having inherited the dukedom after both his brothers were killed at the Battle of Nicopolis.

  Chapter Seven

  1.  One of Barack Obama’s ancestors is the beautifully named but no doubt vinegar-faced kill-joy Thomas Blossom.

  Chapter Eight

  1.  Curiously Racine was present, watching Mons from the French lines through a telescope ‘which I struggled to keep hold of, as my heart was beating so, seeing all those good people in peril.’

  2.  I was planning to write a whole section on the Dutch cult of the dairy cow: breeding, cheese, prosperity, meadows and then hop on to the lovely world of Dutch horticulture. I regret not writing it, but it had meant perjuring myself by pretending enthusiasm for Aelbert Cuyp’s super-boring paintings of cows and the section was really only an elaborate excuse so I could use Browne’s otherwise rarely used invented adjective ‘retromingent’, an adjective applied to animals that urinate backwards, like cows. Browne also invented such words as ‘medical’, ‘coma’, ‘hallucination’, ‘incontrovertible’, ‘prairie’, ‘precarious’ and so on, but retromingent should be the queen of them all.

  Chapter Nine

  1.  Just to be clear – it was the tomb festooned in legitimist ribbons, not I.

  2.  This was a classic Lotharingian triumph as the Duke of Marlborough effectively did a ‘reverse Spanish road’ to race his troops down from the Netherlands to Cologne to Koblenz to Mainz to Heidelberg before heading east round the Black Forest and completely wrecking the French and Bavarian armies.

  3.  The Principality of Sedan, like the related micro-state of the Duchy of Bouillon, was absorbed by France in the seventeenth century. During the Allied discussions in 1815 it was decided that France should keep Sedan, which was then the headquarters town of the Prussian occupation forces, a decision which had a huge impact on subsequent French history. Bouillon was attached to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, and therefore, through twists and turns, became part of Belgium, allowing Godefroy of Bouillon to become a national Catholic hero.

  4.  The eye, not the captain.

  5.  French Revolutionaries would both burn the famous statue (only a partial hand survived) and eradicate the great church in the Upper Town in which she had lived, originally founded by Godefroy of Bouillon’s mother.

  Chapter Ten

  1.  Adam and Eve accessorized both ways can now be seen in the cathedral – but with the originals back in their rightful place.

  2.  Jemappes is a village outside Mons. It was such a key victory that in 1795 the French memorialized it by creating the department of Jemappe out of the old County of Hainaut, the former enclave of Tournai plus bits of Liège and Namur. The humiliation of living somewhere named after your own defeat lasted until 1814.

  3.  Commemorated by Thorvaldsen’s extraordinarily eloquent and sad Lion Monument in Lucerne, carved in the very different world of the 1820s.

  4.  The French returned to British male fashion at the time of the early twentieth-century Entente Cordiale, with one fashion journalist cooing about a devastating ensemble in loud checks: ‘un peu Edouard VII, un peu «cad»’.

  Chapter Eleven

  1.  For those readers who say: ‘Oh, he just stole that joke from David Blackbourn’s great book The Conquest of Nature – shameful I calls it,’ I can only urge them to borrow my copy, where it clearly has at the bottom of page 105 my scribbled ‘exactly in line with Wagner!’ but when you turn over the page, only then does Blackbourn make the same point, where I have written Oh rats! and drawn a sad-face.

  2.  Britons and Americans abroad are one of the giant subjects I have no room for. Henry James treats the Channel as something like the River Styx, with the plots of many stories and novels stemming from that transition. The closing pages of What Maisie Knew become ever more crazily over-reliant on the timetable of the Boulogne ferry.

  3.  A frenzy which would in fact be achieved outside the framework of this book by the horrors further east involved in suppressing the Hungarian Revolution.

  4.  It inspired Washington, DC (through sheer bad luck Jefferson visited Karlsruhe), giving it the same mind-bending, baffled quality.

  5.  In the strangely confrontational style of this period there is a carving on the church of St Leodegar himself, a Burgundian priest, holding the drill with which his eyes were removed during one career low point. He is traditionally prayed to by people with eye problems, whereas, it might be argued, he should be the very last person you would want to contact on this issue.

  Chapter Thirteen

  1.  The Eiffel Tower was the final, winning riposte in one of the sillier elements of Franco-German rivalry. With Strasbourg Cathedral now in the Empire, the Germans owned the world’s tallest building. This was then trumped by the Church of St Nikolai in Hamburg. The French counter-attacked with the frankly ridiculous new giant metal spire to Rouen Cathedral. This only bought them four years of supremacy before Cologne Cathedral was completed. For a shocked interval, the endlessly delayed Washington Monument took over, but then five years later the Eiffel Tower nearly doubled the size of the world’s tallest building, but only in the almost incredibly babyish context of a building which only existed to be tall.

  2.  Very briefly the Germans got into Arras at the beginning of the war, but in the frantic manoeuvres of the ‘Race to the Sea’ they were forced to retreat. It was this complex, terrifying, mobile campaign that Foch directed from Cassel (chapter 7).

  3.  When I last was in Zürich I had an in-the-footsteps-of-Lenin espresso there – enjoyably it was festooned with posters for Baz Luhrmann’s bloated and corny film of The Great Gatsby, its Flapper Capitalism almost designed to make Lenin’s ghost eat its own beard with rage.

  4.  Extraordinarily, because of Namibia’s tortuous and strange subsequent political history, the full-scale version of the monument is still standing in Swakopmund – but surely for not much longer.

  Chapter Fourteen

  1.  He fretted too about designing the Gate to make it as hard as po
ssible for Belgians to turn it into a pissoir.

  2.  Werth says so many startling things: ‘Could what we call history be anything more than men’s vainest illusions? What we attribute to history in wartime and to the powerful in peacetime, isn’t it a sign of our own incapacity? We make history as the sick make sickness.’

  3.  It is a wonderful place, preserving perfectly the genteel, ticking-clock, bluebottle-dying-slowly-behind-lace-curtains atmosphere of pre-1914 French bourgeois life.

  4.  Much of France’s future spent time in this captivity, none a great military loss to the Allies: Messaien, Althusser, Sartre, Mitterrand. Braudel began writing his masterpiece The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II in a camp at Mainz, mostly from memory.

  5.  Degrelle, Bouillon’s most contemptible citizen, managed to get to Spain and live there unrepentantly and unpunished to a great age.

  Postscript

  1.  He ended up as Commander (capitaine de frégate!), with a devastating uniform.

  Acknowledgements

  As ever I must acknowledge the extraordinary patience and kindness of various receptionists, guides, guards, academics, waiters, librarians, taxi drivers, a ski instructor and a croupier for putting up with me in various ways. I am extremely grateful to Tim Blanning, Paul Baggaley, Christine Jones and Jonathan Galassi for sternly corrective readings of the text; and for many conversations, for help and for advice to: John Seaton, Pankaj Mishra, Ulinka Rublack, Barend Wallet, Maria Bedford, Christopher Clark, the ever missed Carol Janeway and David Miller, Mark Allinson, Tom Penn, Gillian Fitzgerald-Kelly, Richard Barber, Adam Phillips, Ellen Davies, Henrika Lähnemann, Patrick McGuinness, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, Richard Duguid and Brendan Simms. As ever, I am very much indebted to Stefan McGrath and Tom Weldon; to Andrew Wylie, Sarah Chalfant and Tracy Bohan; and to Nicholas Blake. I would like to acknowledge the critical role played in the writing of this book by the makers of the Belgian liqueur Mandarine Napoléon, a sickly chaos of macerated fruit, green tea, cinnamon, eau-de-vie and cloves (‘complexe, riche et généreuse, idéale pour les dames et les messieurs exigeants’). Glasses of Mandarine Napoléon drove along the writing of this book as much as printer ink and pencils. I would also like to thank Penny and David Edgar, James and Sandra Jones, Stephanie Poirier, Elizabeth Winder (for a great deal) and the various members of the Winder and Perrett clans.

  Above all I have to thank my own family, who slightly unfortunately have grown up while I have been staring at a computer screen or been ill in Lille. It is hard to imagine a more entertaining and cheerful bunch and I am endlessly in the debt of Barnaby, Felix and Martha for many years of affection and comedy. This book is dedicated to Christine Jones, to whom I am myself totally dedicated.

  Simon Winder

  Sequim, Wandsworth Town, 2014–18

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