Posting from Paris, and remembering how much I love it in January – yes it might be a bit chilly, and some of the restaurants closed, but it is the best time of year – minimum tourists, just locals wandering along atmospherically misty streets.

I’ve spent the day strolling my favourite haunts – I’m staying in Montmartre, walked down to the Pompidou Centre (my 24-year-old self thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen and I’ve retained that affection), across the Seine to my favourite Cafe Glamis, wonderful view of Notre Dame but surprisingly unspoilt – lots of Parisiens resolutely ignoring the view, and then through the Marais to the Place des Vosges.

But I have also been following around the women of Paris from Alistair Horne’s excellent Seven Ages of Paris: Portrait of a City.

First up was Genevieve (sorry for lack of accents in this – struggling enough with French keyboard as it is), who might be called the “first Joan of Arc”. When the city was threatened by 451 by Attila the Hun, the residents of the city were preparing to flee. He had already taken Cologne, where he was reputed to have massacred 11,000 virgins.

But Genevieve had a vision, extorting the residents: “Get down on your knees and pray! I know it. I see it. The Huns will not come.”

She was right, although the wits of the time suggested it was because of an inadequate number of virgins in the city. Actually, Attila was off to deal with the Visigoths at Orleans.

She later, less successfully, led the fight against the Franks, and helped to convert Clovis, the pagan Frankish king. Dying at age 90 (an argument for a low calorie intake to prolong life – she had nearly starved herself to death in her youth) she was buried in the Parthenon, until her remains (and there can’t have been much) were scattered in the Revolution.

Now she is remembered, although the site doesn’t look very busy and I couldn’t find a sign even explaining her 1920s statue, on the Pont de La Tournelle, east of Notre Dame.

Ce chapeau peut-il etre regarni? My 19th-century French phrasebook contains this and similarly useful phrases.

I’m taking it with me to Paris today. It’s too long since I’ve been – but I’m not sure I’ll manage to work that hat into my conversations ….

Blogging probably won’t stop – I fear I’m now officially addicted.

Trouvez moi un chauffe-pieds! (Get me a foot-warmer!)

I was up at the British Museum today, for a talk on the Greek and Roman gods, focusing on the Townley collection of classical sculpture. It reminded me of lots of tales that I used to know in my early teens – when I was very into the subject – but have now largely forgotten. I was posting on them earlier in the week, which pushed me to get out of bed in time for the talk.

What did take me most about the talk, however, was the comments on how in the early(ish) Roman empire there were four religions, all monotheistic or quasi-monotheistic, jostling for supremacy. Of course we know which won, but it is fascinating to ponder whether women would have been better off with one of the others.

It is easy to dismiss Mithraism; a religion very clearly aimed at, and popular with, soldiers, it held woman to be less than human.

The others were the cults of Dionysus/Bacchus, and of Isis.

What would a 20th-century Isisian world look like, I wonder?

* The Road from Coorain, Jill Ker Conway, Vintage 1990 (first 1989), billed as ” a woman’s exquisitely clear-sighted memoir of growing up Australian” (out in the bush).

On a flick through I was very taken with the paragraph (as she is leaving her mother and her home for good: “I dreaded the parting but after some rough moments I learned that time manages the most painful partings for us. One has only to set the date, buy the ticket, and let the earth, sin and moon make their passages through the sky, until inexorable time carries us with it to the moment of parting.” (p. 235)

* Dangerous By Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists, Susan J. Leonardi, 1989. (They include Dorothy L Sayers, who, as I’ve written elsewhere, is one of my favourite authors – I’m hoping for some more background on Gaudy Night.

* The Frailty Myth: Women Approaching physical Equality, Colette Dowling, Random House, 2000 – hoping for some good facts and figures; I think I’ve already got the arguments.

* The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, Marguerite Yourcenar, (Trans. Richard Howard, 1980)

* Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut, Emily White, 2002.

So there it was, a busy, interesting but not excessive week, then I went up to the British Museum today, and discovered they have a book sale on … So add

* Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century, Kim Sloan (ed) – well it was a half price paperback, it is a beautiful book, and useful for handling sessions.

* Antonia Augusta: Portrait of a Great Roman Lady, Nikos Kokkinos, 1992 – “the most powerful and influential Roman woman of her time. The daughter of Mark Antony, wife of Drusus, mother of Claudius, grandmother of Caligula and great-grandmother of Nero … well I should know more about her.

* Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art 100BC to AD250, John R. Clarke, Uni of California, 2001. Can’t think of an excuse for that one except it looked fascinating. …

I posted recently on the term Alsatia, for the lawless area of London that had been the White Friar’s monastery. It maintained the right of sanctuary for many years, first formally, then informally.

Then last night I put up a poem by Thomas Shadwell. It turns out that his most successful play was The Squire of Alsatia, about a young heir who falls into the hands of the villains there. One of the features that made it a success seems to have been its use of their “cant”, local dialect.

Peregrine Bertie, writing to the Countess of Rutland, says: “It has been acted nine days successively, and on the third day the poet got 16l more than any other poet ever did. When all this is granted, there is nothing in it extraordinary–except it is a Latin song -but the thin reason why it takes soe well is, because it brings severall of the cant words uppon the stage which some in towne have invented, and turns them into ridicule.” (From Thomas Shadwell: His Life and Comedies, Albert S. Borgman; New York University Press, 1928.)

This was the play that made the fame of the actress Anne Bracegirdle, in whom I have another interest.

It made me think, could you play the “Six degrees of separation” game with history? I rather think you could.

Since I first posted on the subject, I’ve been slowly working my way through a book of early modern bawdy verse; there’s only so much innuendo and slapstick I can take in one sitting.

What has struck me is how many poems are entirely accepting in their accounts of female desire, be the characters sexually experienced women or “maids” (at least theoretically virgins). This is seen as an entirely natural, normal, expected aspect of life.

Two examples:

A Lady’s Complaint
When I was young, unapt for use of man,
I wedded was unto a champion,
Youthful and full of vigour as of blood,
Who unto Hymen’s rites full stiffly stood.
But see the luck: this gallant youngster dies,
And in his place an aged father lies,
Weak, pithless, dry, who suffers me all night
To lie untouched, now full of years and might,
Whereas my former man, God rest his sprite,
Girl as I was, tired me with sweet delight.
For when he would, then was I coy and sold,
Yet what I then refused, now fain I would
But cannot have. O Hymen, if you can,
Give me those years again, or such a man!

This seems to be by that prolific character Anon. Was it a female anon, one has to wonder?

I’d never come across the heavenly Hymen before, but yep, there is one such, of entirely respectable Greek ancestry, offspring of Aphrodite and Dionysus – of course – but curiously enough a male god, that of marriage. Priapus, his sibling, is god of lust. I should, however, have known because Hymen does appear in As You Like It.)

As I walked in the woods
As I walked in the woods one evening of late
A lass was deploring her hapless estate.
In a languishing posture, poor maid, she appears,
All swelled with her signed and blubbed with her tears.
She sighed and she sobbed and I found it was all
For a little of that which Harry gave Doll.

At last she broke out, ‘Wretched!’ she said,
‘Will no youth come succour a languishing maid
With what he with ease and with pleasure may give?
Without which, alas! poor I cannot live.
Shall I never leave sighing and crying and all
For a little of that which Harry gave Doll?

At first when I saw a young man in the place
My colour would fade and then flush in my face.
My breath would grow short, and I shivered all o’er.
My breasts never popped up and down so before.
I scarce knew for what, but now find it was all
For a little of that which Harry gave Doll.

Thomas Shadwell, in Westminster Drollery, 1672
Another version appears in his play The Miser, of the same year, which is adapted from Moliere’s L’Avare.

Poems pages 47-48 and 77, Lovers, Rakes and Rogues: A New Garner of Love-songs and Merry Verses, 1580-1830, John Wardroper, Shelfmark, 1995.