by Robert Thier
[32] My head is a rotten potato.
[33] Welcome! Welcome, Sir and Madam, to Leclercq and Lacroix, the finest fashion designers in France.
[34] In spite of the name, these troops have nothing to do with any president, especially not an American one. They were the official troops of the East India Company, the British conglomerate which at this time controlled the Indian subcontinent, including some countries and regions that today are not part of India, such as Pakistan.
[35] A ‘tricolour’ is any insignia with the colours red, white and blue (in France, not the USA). It was the official emblem of the French Revolution and later became the flag of the French Republic, a rather ironic fact if you take into consideration that the white part of the flag stems from the white banner of the House of Bourbon, the very monarchs of France who were beheaded during the Revolution.
[36] A few years after this book, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs did in fact change premises from its old headquarters to number 37 Quai d’Orsay in Paris, where it still is located today.
[37] One of the major branches of British trade during the 19th century was the opium trade. Opium was planted in India, and then mostly sold to China, where addiction to the drug caused severe health problems and was the origin of two successive wars against the British Empire. It would be difficult to make comparisons to modern times because of the illegal nature of today’s drug trade, but it probably wouldn’t be unfair to say that the British Empire was the greatest drug cartel in the history of humankind.
[38] If you consider the possibility of a country going to war over a single death remote, think again. This is essentially how the First World War was started: the crown prince of Austro-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo by Serbian nationalist terrorist Gavrilo Princip, which began a war between Austro-Hungary and Serbia that was joined by so many allies on both sides that, eventually, it involved nearly all the major powers of the modern world.
[39] May ants infest your underwear!
[40] Jacques, let me in.
[41] My God! It’s you! Come in, come in!
[42] Death to the aristocrats.
[43] This should actually be historically correct. I took me quite a while to discover the real crest of an obscure personality from 19th-century England. I truly hope I’ve done my research correctly. If I’m correct, the motto to go along with the crest is ‘si sit prudentia’, Latin for ‘if there be prudence’.
[44] What in God’s name is this racket—?
[45] This is an outrage! Can’t honest citizens go about their daily business in peace in France nowadays? I’m going to complain to the mayor! I’m going to complain to the governor! I’m going to complain to the—
[46] Unless you wish to complain to His Majesty the King, you had better close your mouth right now!
[47] Wealthier households in Victorian England used to have a gong which was rung by the butler to call the family together, usually to meals.
[48] John Wood the Younger, son of (unsurprisingly) John Wood the Elder, was the architect of the Royal Crescent and many other buildings in the city of Bath. The Royal Crescent is an intriguing piece of architecture. Presenting an elegant, unified, crescent-shaped façade at the front, at its back one can see that it is actually composed out of many individual houses arranged in a crescent shape right next to one another. It is generally considered one of the most significant examples of Georgian Neo-Classical architecture in the United Kingdom.
[49] For anyone who might be interested: shining a light in your eyes is done by doctors to test your pupillary light reflex. If your pupil contracts when intense light shines in your eyes, the doctor knows that the most important nerves in your eye are working correctly.
[50] ‘Embarrassing shit’ sickness.
[51] ‘Finding-out-I’m-lying’ sickness.
[52] Humour, in this case, is not referring to anything comical, but to the medical theory of Humourism. Before doctors developed the germ theory and discovered that viruses and bacteria spread sicknesses, the most widespread theory was one stemming from Ancient Greece which proposed that there are four temperaments, each of which is linked to one of four bodily fluids, and sicknesses are caused by an excess of one or more of these bodily fluids. This is the theoretical reasoning behind leeches being used in medieval and ancient medicine: blood was considered to be associated with the sanguine humour, and if doctors diagnosed you as being excessively sanguine, they would bleed you.
[53] This was also part of pre-modern medical theory. The idea that bad-smelling air caused sickness is quite ancient, which was why, for example, in medieval Europe, people lit fires to cover the odor of plague victims, hoping it would hinder the spread of the disease.
[54] The phrase ‘hope springs eternal’ comes from the poem An Essay on Man by 18th-century poet Alexander Pope. The part of the poem around the quotation goes like this:
Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be blessed:
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
[55] Fussock—a victorian insult for well-padded ladies.
[56] A Victorian expression for an ugly person.
