ENDS AND
ENDINGS
COMPILATION AND
COMMENTARY
BY LUCY WARNER
FEBRUARY 10,
2020
HERE IS A BOOK
WHICH I RAN ACROSS IN DOING RESEARCH ON ECONOMIC MATTERS FROM THE PROGRESSIVE
VIEW. IT LOOKS SO GOOD THAT I HAVE ORDERED IT TO READ. IT SHOWS THE HISTORY OF
MONEY IN A CERTAIN FAMILY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT ERA; AND IT DETAILS SOME OF THE
PERILS OF HAVING WEALTH, GETTING IT, AND KEEPING IT AWAY FROM THE MASSES ON ONE
HAND, OR FROM FAMILY ON THE OTHER. THE DESCRIPTION IS FASCINATING. THIS IS
NON-FICTION.
DeJean, Joan
(2018). "Chapter Twelve: The Invention of Money". The Queen's
Embroiderer: A True Story of Paris, Lovers, Swindlers, and the First Stock
Market Crisis. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. fn.15. ISBN 9781632864765. Retrieved
11 October 2019.
'The Queen's
Embroiderer' Stitches Up A Twisted Family Saga
May 6, 20187:00
AM ET
GENEVIEVE
VALENTINE
Sometimes it
can be such a comfort to forget current events for a little while and lose
oneself in a nice cozy slice of history, a moment when a family of greedy,
abusive, litigious frauds scrabbled for power using obsequious ingratiation,
shameless lies, mounting debt, and outright cruelty — against a national
backdrop of rapid economic shifts built on precarious foundations and exploited
by corrupt government officials, so the rich got richer and everyone else was
ruined. Plus, there's some embroidery!
The Queen's
Embroiderer is the latest by Joan DeJean, who's authored half a dozen books
about French history (How Paris Became Paris) and design (The Essence of Style:
How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style,
Sophistication, and Glamour). The brief introductory note to this book suggests
she ran into a needle-scratch moment in the middle of more conventional
research: Jean Magoulet's appointment as the Queen's Embroiderer, alongside a
1719 royal decree that his daughter Marie Louise be arrested and shipped to
Louisiana. That was undoubtedly a surprising fate for the daughter of a royal
appointee.
Then she found
out Jean Magoulet had made the request himself.
DeJean
describes the impetus behind this book as her desire to unravel the love story
between Marie Louise Magoulet and her husband (briefly), Louis Chevrot. But
inevitably, the young lovers take a backseat to the generations of in-laws
before them, who eventually reach such a cartoonish level of underhanded
dealings that by the time DeJean is suggesting Jean Magoulet impersonated his
own dead brother for years to facilitate a double life, she includes several
original documents, as if she knows things are beginning to beggar belief.
And that,
somehow, is not even the wildest data point in this story, which features guild-hopping,
inheritance fraud, domestic abuse, eloping to England, sending toddlers to
their deaths, locking the gates against the poor, and the occasional escape
from a chain gang. There's an impressive depth of research — this is, as much
as anything else, a mystery about the manipulation of record-keeping and
identity — and it reveals an equally impressive depth of both determination and
depravity in some of the family figures, but by the time she introduces John
Law and the 1720 stock market crisis to provide a wider historical context,
it's almost a footnote to the family disaster. That's quite a trick given the
scope of that particular economic panic, but with nearly 30 major players,
sheer generational entropy dwarfs everything else. (There is a detailed family
tree at the front of the book; you will need it.)
Still, some
aspects of the wider upheaval are striking, as DeJean builds a credible picture
of the mania of a nation becoming an empire: Monarchy as economy, war as
opportunity, slavery as profit margin. The legal system was so brutally
patriarchal that it's a surprise — to us and to the author alike — when a woman
gets any justice at all. Credit was trumpeted as a tool of social uplift by a
financial bureacracy more concerned with the royal coffers than long-term
stability; in the wake of the crash, a specialized police force was sent out to
gather impoverished and unprotected people for deportation to Louisiana — where
they would, presumably, be a boon to the royal coffers again. (Angry Paris mobs
attacked so many of those deportation forces that the idea was soon abandoned.)
Given the
nature of the family, the story is often so dour that sometimes only the
historical minutiae keep you going. (If you ever wanted to know more about the
fascinating probate-inventory process of 18th-century France, you're in luck.)
But DeJean is so strapped for good news that in an attempt to scrape together a
happy ending for anyone at all, she occasionally glosses over, say, the moral
implications of why going to Haiti was good for business. A few survivors of
the Chevrot and Magoulet debacles do manage to get out from their forefathers'
shadows — and that there are so few loose ends in this two-century saga is a
testament to DeJean's research (and a compelling argument for preserving
historical records on a local scale, for that matter). But The Queen's
Embroiderer lives largely in the place where petty men desperate to make
themselves palatable to those in power poison their own family relationships,
leverage a broken legal and government system, and leave a trail of trauma and
destruction in their wake; a long shadow indeed.
Genevieve
Valentine's latest novel is Icon.
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