Blueinkedfrost

The Three-wattled Bellbird (Procnias tricarunculatus), native to C. America.

This is Manjeet. He is the Sailing Master onboard The Menagerie. He doesn’t know which way north is. Unimportant. They aren’t going north. They are going home. And everyone knows migratory birds are masters of finding their way home.

If you would like to know more about Manjeet and how he is Definitely Not a migratory bird, do check out my Kickstarter for Sail of the Menagerie!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jaimiewhitbread/sail-of-the-menagerie

art nouveau patterned end paper 

The 1881 portrait of two little girls rendered in pink and blue silk by Pierre-Auguste Renoir is, at face value, a society portrait of the daughters of French aristocracy. But the story behind the painting – and what became of the Jewish girls it depicts – is much darker.

Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers, the subjects of the Impressionist painter’s famous portrait Pink and Blue and the younger daughters of a French banking dynasty, were immortalised as youthful members of the “haute Juiverie”: glamorous, upper-class Jews of Europe at the height of the Belle Époque. Their older sister Irène was also the subject of a famous Renoir painting several years earlier, depicted with a ribbon in her flowing red hair against a lush green backdrop.

Nothing in the portraits of the young sisters gives any indication that, 60 years later, Alice would be hiding from German bombers in a ditch in Normandy and Elisabeth, the blonde child with a blue sash in Pink and Blue, would be boarding a one-way train to Auschwitz.

The Renoir Girls traces the path of the three Cahen d’Anvers sisters from their shimmering days in Belle Époque  Paris – yachting on the Côte d’Azur, trips to the opera, salons, summer retreats, and dancing the night away at opulent balls – to their little-known struggle to survive in Nazi-occupied France.

Ostler, former editor of Tatler magazine, first heard of the three Jewish sisters from Edmund de Waal’s memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes, which explores the once gilded lives of de Waal’s own Parisian Jewish banking family during the 19th and 20th centuries. His relative Charles Ephrussi, a Jewish art patron who had an affair with matriarch Louise Cahen d’Anvers - and who was rumoured to be the actual father of Alice – persuaded Louise to have her daughters painted by Renoir.

“Impressionism rises up after the Franco-Prussian War, and there's a whole new way of looking at art. There’s a lot of stuff to buy and a lot of stuff to commission and a market for it and the result is an incredibly creative period,” says Ostler, adding that Louise was an “extraordinary” art collector herself with “a hold over all the French writers and artists of the day.”

One line in de Waal’s book came as a punch to the stomach: Elisabeth was murdered at Auschwitz.

Despite the Cahen d’Anvers family’s abiding love for France, their generous artistic patronage and sacrifices during the First World War – the sons fought for France, the women were nurses, with Alice winning the Croix de guerre for bravery at the front – they were of course not spared the growing antisemitism of France that culminated in the Vichy regime. As their family friend Marcel Proust wrote at the time, the “social kaleidoscope was in the act of turning… the Dreyfus case was shortly to relegate the Jews to the lowest rung of the social ladder.”

Elisabeth, in what may have been a bid for self-preservation, converted to Catholicism in 1895 and remained a practising Catholic for the rest of her life.  In 1944 at the age of 70, just months from the Allied liberation of Paris, she was betrayed by a local mayor and Vichy collaborator “who insisted on reminding everybody that she was actually Jewish, even though she converted to Catholicism before she was 20 and had been married twice, both times to Catholic men,” Ostler says.

France's attitude to its Jews in this the era is illustrated by the Nazis’ seizure of the Cahen d’Anvers’ Paris townhouse which they used as a place to hold and torture Jews awaiting deportation.

“Antisemitism is one of those things that I've always been aware of, but it is a shapeshifter,” said Ostler, who is not Jewish herself. “It's this monstrosity, and I partly feel there is an enormous amount of ignorance about it. It overlaps with so many conspiracy theories and the darkest urges of human nature.”

She hopes The Renoir Girls will be received by British Jews as a book of support, a reminder of the immense contributions Jews have made to their societies over the past centuries.

"The Jewish community is incredibly important to this country,” Ostler said. “It's written out of respect to their strengths and creativity and generosity and the whole beauty of the culture that Jewish community can create and encourage.”

He was a peasant (probably a freeman, specifically) who had chosen to fight an invading professional army. He and the men he fought with probably knew that they would be outnumbered, outclassed, and (for lack of a better term) outgunned.

When the Danish army got to the city of Visby, on the island of Gotland, the residents were ready. Just 4 days before, the Danes had fought and slaughtered a group of about 1,000 farmers that had massed against them. The men at Visby numbered about 2,000.

When the smoke cleared, the Visby army had taken about 1,700 casualties, a staggering g 85% of their force. The Danes, who had numbered between 2,000 and 2,500, had only taken about 300 casualties, though the actual count is unknown.

not as bad at it sounds. i (25M) recently got engaged to this awesome girl (23F) who is probably like the sweetest lady that ever i looked on. my friend (31M) set us up and we just immediately hit it off and pretty soon we were talking about getting married. her dad (55M) and cousin (26F) liked me a lot, i got along with them well, everything was going great until a few days before the wedding. my friend’s brother (29M) came to me privately and basically told me that my fiancée was cheating on me. i could not believe this but we went outside her window THE NIGHT BEFORE OUR WEDDING and i saw her making out with some other guy. obviously i was devastated. i didn’t confront her then because i decided to do it at the wedding. i decided everyone needed to know exactly why i wasn’t marrying her. so when the priest asked if i came to marry this girl I said “no” and explained in front of everyone that she had been cheating on me with absolutely zero shame. obviously i was really upset about this and yelling and kind of pushed her to the ground. she was freaking out and said she had no idea what i was talking about but i literally saw her with my own eyes. she kept telling me she did not know what was going on and she was crying and then she passed out. i left. a few days later i run into another friend (28M) and he tells me that my fiancée fucking DIED after i left the church. how was i supposed to know that would happen???? i thought she just passed out!!! he is FURIOUS about this i guess because now he’s dating my fiancée’s cousin (??) and now my fiancée’s dad wants me to marry his niece (??) to make up for what I’ve done??? tbh guys im really lost but i saw what happened!!! she was literally with another guy!! i feel like i wasnt at fault here.