Joan of Arc; Saint, Sainte or political gadget?

 France has recently celebrated the 600th birthday of St Joan of Arc.  Unfortunately for poor Joan, her reputation is becoming more and more tarnished.

Recently a scolar has decided that Joan was in fact a man. The French soldiers would never have followed a mere peasant girl into battle.  The reason why the French wanted her to be known as a woman was that the English would have been terrified of a woman sent by God to fight for the French.  Was God not supposed to be on the English side? I don't think this theory holds water as the French handed Joan over to the English for execution.  I think that would have blown her cover, if there was one. 

We're having an election for a new President later in the year.  There is a lot of fighting, name calling and so on, as usuall.  St Joan has cropped up in the midst of this as she has been venerated by the far right  for many years for booting out the English and leaving France for the French.  Last week president Sarkozy laid flowers in rememberence of Joan and visited where she was born in  Domremy. This has caused feathers to fly as some seem to think that they have exclusive right over the Saint.  

Well read - not

My retired lady who comes for an English lesson arrived last week with a newspaper cutting from a local paper which was about English people. More English people believe Sherlock Holmes existed that think that Sir Winston Churchill was a real person. They also think that King Richard the Lion Heart was a fictional character. I know there was a TV series when I was a child, but….

I added to the discussion with the news that I had heard. Woolworths was withdrawing its range of bedroom furniture for little girls after complaints from parents. They had called the furniture range “Lolita”. Apparently no one involved in the choice of name had heard of the book – or the films.

A bit of culture

We had breakfast on the port this morning, followed by the surprise. As the monuments are free today, lots of other visits are organised all over the town. Rob decided that a visit to the railway station would be a good idea. We learnt about the old station and that this month is the 150th anniversary of the railway system coming to La Rochelle. Unfortunately, Rob and I already knew quite a bit about the old station because of our interest in postcards. We could only visit the outside of the ‘new’ (opened in 1922) station because the French railways are very strict about having the public going all over the place. The visit was a bit of a disappointment.

This week has been the week of the television festival, which used to be held at Saint Tropez. While we were learning about the station some of the festival cars arrived to deliver the stars to the Paris Train. I didn’t recognise anyone, except for our favourite ex TV news reader Bruno Masure. Rob had seen him during the week when he visited the towers, but hadn’t got round to asking for an autograph. In fact we got his autograph about 20 years ago and he wrote us a little note with it. I presume he was covering the festival for one of the French newspapers. Checking his biography on Wikipedia I see that he is on the radio now and that he used to present the news wearing slippers which is why he always seemed so relaxed, I suppose.

Culture and history
As our post office is closed for refurbishment I have to go to the next village to collect our post (we have a box) at the moment and post any postcards we’ve sold. I always park the car across the village and walk through the lovely park. The horse Chestnuts are in flower at the moment and it smelt wonderful this morning as the grass was being cut. In the newspaper this morning was an article about an exhibition of painting by a local artist, so as the town hall is by the park, I went to have a look. There were only two paintings which I liked and the rest were a little bit messy for my taste. That’s my dose of culture for the day.

I discovered why the poster I wrote about fetched so much. The lady in the poster is Sarah Bernhardt but the advertisers hadn’t asked her permission. She was really cross about it and took them to court so the posters were taken down and probably a lot of them destroyed. Now you know why it was so expensive.

Absinthe was banned and I have tasted it. It’s reputed to rot the brain. That could explain a lot…