Blueinkedfrost

Necklace

Henry Wilson

gold, ruby, pearl, moonstone, enamel, emerald, 1910

I was curious what the crew's files said so I took pictures. Taken from my tablet so they're not the best. Some of this is stuff that's already revealed or contextualized in this magazine (shoutout to @atlantis-archive for his super cool work) but there's interesting stuff in there nonetheless, like Vinny's explosion incident happening when he was fairly young and what's shown of Mole's past being more tame than Sweet made it out to be (though maybe the sewer exploration just grosses him out, I can see that being something Sweet would be disgusted by as a cleanly doctor and Audrey wouldn't care as much about.)

Unfortunately Vinny and Packard have a lot of their information blocked out and there's barely anything for Rourke at all, I wonder if it's intentional since it makes Rourke more ominous, Packard has a more minor comedic role, and being forced to wonder how many times Vinny got sent to jail is pretty funny.

Transcription under cut. Brackets means I'm interpereting a word that's cut off, question marks means that I'm not sure if I got it right or what it means, and parethesis are for adding context or my own personal commentary or analysis of their backstories. If anyone has any context for some things mentioned that they think they could explain (like place names or historical context), that would be appreciated!

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.”