Headed home on the late morning train – pretty crowded but I can still manage a pair of seats to myself. (Hmm, that may be a fairly selfish choice; but I’m feeling tired/wonky enough (gastro again) that I think I deserve some space to myself (especially after the shared bathroom at the hotel – which is sometimes less pleasant than others – for this trip it was definitely a hardship)).
Reading Lady Montagu’s letters from the early 18th century – and how wonderful they are: spiky, funny, observant, with a slight edge that combines grandeur and satire. She is a sort of like a confident, wealthy, aristocratic version of Jane Austen a century later: a woman who blithely and calmly breaks all the rules of women’s behavior for her time, and uses politeness like a small dagger….
It’s also fascinating to see how different the various cities and towns of baroque-era Europe are: probably the most bizarre so far is Vienna – as she tells it, their clothes, habits and even their approaches to love affairs are so startlingly different than those of contemporary London that they could be on the other side of the world, or in another century. And, rather bizarrely, the Viennese court balls sound like a nightclub: men pay a gold ducat, women get in free.
Most of her best writing is too leisurely to quote bits of it; but at Ratisbon she discovered a place where every family argued with every other one, and during her brief visit she was expected to join one side or another of every quarrel – something she politely refused to do. Her explanation of this bizarre village ended wonderfully:
“I know that my peaceable disposition already gives me a very ill figure, and that 'tis publicly whispered as a piece of impertinent pride in me, that I have hitherto been saucily civil to every body, as if I thought nobody good enough to quarrel with.”
In a letter to her sister, she satirizes the problem of describing travels, and the features you’re supposed to pay attention to, when you secretly think they’re boring:
“This is also a fortified town, but I avoid ever mentioning fortifications, being sensible that I know not how to speak of them. I am the more easy under my ignorance, when I reflect that I am sure you'll willingly forgive the omission; for if I made you the most exact description of all the ravelins and bastions I see in my travels, I dare swear you would ask me, What is a ravelin? and, What is a bastion?”
Pretty good, eh... I think, after all these years, and despite being an American, that I’m beginning to understand the theory and structure of wit….
•••
As Lady Montagu passes beyond the borders of central Europe, into Hungary, various Balkans and finally Ottoman Turkey, satire fades as her fascination with true difference rises: and she discovers a need to be honest, and even cautious, in describing Europe’s old and dangerous enemy. Quite a woman: as exact as any noble warrior....
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