The Marchioness returns to Demopolis (Part One)

In Ross King’s ‘The Judgement of Paris’, there’s an entertaining comparison between the working methods of Manet and Meissonier. In his rush to wow the Salon of 1868, Manet repeatedly bungled his ambitious canvas of the execution of Mexico’s Emperor Maximilan. The event was fresh and shocking, but Manet was not one for research. He was competing with the likes of Goya and Gericault- timing was everything, details be damned. As a result, as technicalities about uniforms and an absenceRead more

The Exile

In the early summer of 1817, a group of French settlers arrived in the wilderness of what would become southwest Alabama. They were Bonapartist exiles- among them Napoloeon’s foremost generals and aristocrats, forced to leave France after his final defeat. Where the Black Warrior and Tombigbee rivers meet, they founded the town of Demopolis, but their efforts to cultivate a ‘vine and olive colony’ there were doomed from the start. I read this story (for it feels like a folktale)Read more