New Weekly Quest: The Sept 3 Birth Of Great Ladies This week we present the Sept 3rd Birth Of Great Ladies. On this day, three great ladies were born:
- 1499 – Diane de Poitiers, French noblewoman and mistress of King Henry II of
- 1849 – Sarah Orne Jewett, American writer
- 1851 – Olga Konstantinovna of Russia, Queen of Greece
Great things happened on this same day!
1499 – Diane de Poitiers, French noblewoman and mistress of King Henry II of
Diane de Poitiers (3 September 1499 – 25 April 1566) was a French noblewoman and a prominent courtier at the courts of kings Francis I and his son, Henry II of France. She became notorious as the latter’s favourite mistress. It was in this capacity that she wielded much influence and power at the French Court, which continued until Henry was mortally wounded in a tournament accident, during which his lance wore her favour (ribbon) rather than his wife’s. She was immortalized in art as the subject of paintings by François Clouet as well as other anonymous painters. After the capture of Francis I by Charles V’s troops during the battle of Pavia (1525), the two eldest princes, François and Henri, were retained as hostages in Spain in exchange for their father. Because the ransom was not paid in time, the two boys (eight and seven at the time) had to spend nearly four years isolated in a bleak castle, facing an uncertain future. Henri found solace by reading the knight-errantry tale Amadis de Gaula. The experience may account for the strong impression that Diane made on him, as the very embodiment of the ideal gentlewomen he read about in Amadis. As his mother was already dead, Diane gave him the farewell kiss when he was sent to Spain. When he was returned to France at the age of 12, she was ordered by Francis I to act as a mentor to him and teach him courtly manners. At the tournament held for the coronation of Francis’s new wife Eleanor in 1531, while the dauphin François saluted the new queen as expected, Henri addressed his salute to Diane.
In 1533 the future Henri II married Catherine de’ Medici. There had been strong opposition to this alliance, the Medicis being no more than upstarts in the eyes of many in the French court. Diane, however, approved of this choice of bride. Diane and Catherine were actually related to one another, being both descendants of the La Tour d’Auvergne family. Indeed, to Catherine, Diane was an intrusive elder cousin as well as a rival. As the future royal couple remained childless, concerned by rumours of a possible repudiation of a queen she had in control, Diane made sure that Henri’s visits to his wife’s bedroom would be frequent. In another act of preservation of the royal family, Diane helped nurse Catherine back to health when she contracted scarlet fever. Diane was in charge of the education of her and Henri’s children until 1551; her daughter Françoise managed the queen’s servants. While Henri and Catherine would eventually produce 10 children together, and despite the occasional affair, Diane de Poitiers would remain Henri’s lifelong companion, and for the next 25 years she would be the most powerful influence in his life. Based on allusions in their correspondence, it is generally believed that she became his mistress in 1538. A famous painting of Diane de Poitiers in the nude by François Clouet. Remembered as a beautiful woman, she maintained her good looks well into her 50s, and her appearance was immortalized in art. Only two signed paintings by François Clouet are known to exist, one being a painting of Diane. The subject of that painting shows her seated nude in her bath. She sat for other paintings of the time, often topless or nude, other times in traditional poses. When Francis I was still alive, Diane had to compete at the court with Anne de Pisseleu, the king’s favourite. She had the latter exiled on her lands upon Francis I’s death in 1547.
Diane possessed a sharp intellect and was so politically astute that King Henri II trusted her to write many of his official letters, and even to sign them jointly with the one name HenriDiane. Her confident maturity and loyalty to Henri II made her his most dependable ally in the court. Her position in the Court of the King was such that when Pope Paul III sent the new Queen Catherine the “Golden Rose”, he did not forget to present the royal mistress Diane with a pearl necklace. Within a very short stretch of time she wielded considerable power within the realm. In 1548 she received the prestigious title of Duchess of Valentinois, then in 1553 was made Duchesse d’Étampes. The king’s adoration for Diane caused a great deal of jealousy on the part of Queen Catherine, particularly when Henri entrusted Diane with the Crown Jewels of France, had the Château d’Anet built for her, and gave her the Château de Chenonceau, a piece of royal property that Catherine had wanted for herself. However, as long as the king lived, the Queen was powerless to change this. Despite wielding such power over the king, Diane’s status depended on the king’s welfare, and his remaining in power. In 1559, when Henri was critically wounded in a jousting tournament, Queen Catherine de’ Medici assumed control, restricting access to him. Although the king was alleged to have called out repeatedly for Diane, she was never summoned or admitted, and on his death, she was also not invited to the funeral. Immediately thereafter, Catherine de’ Medici banished Diane from Chenonceau to the Château de Chaumont. She stayed there only a short time, and lived out her remaining years in her chateau in Anet, Eure-et-Loir, where she lived in comfortable obscurity. She died at the age of sixty-six. In accordance with her wishes, and to provide a resting place for her, her daughter completed the funeral chapel built near the castle. During the French Revolution, her tomb was opened and her remains thrown into a mass grave. In 1866 Georges Guiffrey published her correspondence. When French experts dug up the remains of Diane de Poitiers in 2009, they found high levels of gold in her hair. It is suggested that the “drinkable gold” she regularly took — believed to preserve youth — may have ultimately killed her.
1849 – Sarah Orne Jewett, American writer
Sarah Orne Jewett (September 3, 1849 – June 24, 1909) was an American novelist and short story writer, best known for her local color works set in or near South Berwick, Maine, on the border of New Hampshire, which in her day was a declining New England seaport. Jewett’s family had been residents of New England for many generations. Her father was a doctor, and Jewett often accompanied him on his rounds, becoming acquainted with the sights and sounds of her native land and its people. As treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, a condition that developed in early childhood, Jewett was sent on frequent walks and through them also developed a love of nature. In later life, Jewett often visited Boston, where she was acquainted with many of the most influential literary figures of her day; but she always returned to South Berwick, the inspiration for the towns of “Deephaven” and “Dunnet Landing” in her stories.
Jewett was educated at Miss Olive Rayne’s school and then at Berwick Academy, graduating in 1865. She supplemented her education through an extensive family library. Jewett was “never overtly religious,” but after she joined the Episcopalian church in 1871, she explored less conventional religious ideas. For example, her friendship with Harvard law professor Theophilus Parsons stimulated an interest in the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, an eighteenth-century Swedish scientist and theologian, who believed that the Divine “was present in innumerable, joined forms — a concept underlying Jewett’s belief in individual responsibility.” She published her first important story in the Atlantic Monthly at age 19, and her reputation grew throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Her literary importance arises from her careful, if subdued, vignettes of country life that reflect a contemporary interest in local color rather than plot. Jewett possessed a keen descriptive gift that William Dean Howells called “an uncommon feeling for talk — I hear your people.” Jewett made her reputation with the novella The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). A Country Doctor (1884), a novel reflecting her father and her early ambitions for a medical career, and A White Heron (1886), a collection of short stories are among her finest work. Some of Jewett’s poetry was collected in Verses (1916), and she also wrote three children’s books. Willa Cather described Jewett as a significant influence on her development as a writer, and “feminist critics have since championed her writing for its rich account of women’s lives and voices.”
Jewett never married; but she established a close friendship with writer Annie Fields (1834–1915) and her husband, publisher James Thomas Fields, editor of the Atlantic Monthly. After the sudden death of James Fields in 1881, Jewett and Annie Fields lived together for the rest of Jewett’s life in what was then termed a “Boston marriage.” Some modern scholars have speculated that the two were lovers. In any case, “the two women found friendship, humor, and literary encouragement” in one another’s company, traveling to Europe together and hosting “American and European literati.” In France Jewett met Thérèse Blanc-Bentzon with whom she had long corresponded and who translated some of her stories for publication in France. On September 3, 1902, Jewett was injured in a carriage accident that all but ended her writing career. She was paralyzed by a stroke in March 1909, and she died on June 24 after suffering another. The Georgian home of the Jewett family, built in 1774 overlooking Central Square at South Berwick, is now a National Historic Landmark and Historic New England museum called the Sarah Orne Jewett House.
1851 – Olga Konstantinovna of Russia, Queen of Greece
Grand Duchess Olga Constantinovna of Russia, later Queen Olga of the Hellenes (3 September 1851 – 18 June 1926), was the queen consort of King George I of Greece and briefly in 1920, Queen Regent of Greece. She is the great-grandmother of Queen Sofia of Spain, the paternal grandmother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and the great-grandmother of Charles, Prince of Wales, heir apparent to the British throne. lga was a genuinely popular Queen and was extensively involved in charity work, endowing the Evangelismos (Annunciation) Hospital, Greece’s largest, in downtown Athens, as well as a Russian hospital in Piraeus. In 1898, she insisted on continuing her engagements without a military guard even though shots had been fired at her husband and daughter.Being an Orthodox Christian from birth, Queen Olga became aware, during visits to wounded servicemen in the Greco-Turkish War (1897), that many were unable to read the Bible. The version used by the Church of Greece included the Septuagint version of the Old Testament and the original Greek language version of the New Testament. Both were written in Koine Greek while her contemporaries used either Katharevousa or the so-called Demotic version of Modern Greek. Katharevousa was a formal language that contained archaicised forms of modern words, was purged of “non-Greek” vocabulary from other European languages and Turkish, and had a (simplified) archaic grammar. Modern or Demotic Greek was the version commonly spoken. Olga decided to have the Bible translated into a version which could be understood by most of her contemporary Greeks rather than those educated in Koine Greek. The translation was opposed by those who considered the translation “tantamount to a renunciation of Greece’s ‘sacred heritage’”.
In February 1901, the translation of the New Testament from Koine into Modern Greek that she had sponsored was published without the authorisation of the Greek Holy Synod. The price was set at one drachma, far below its actual cost, and the edition sold well. In order to mitigate opposition to the translation, both the old and new texts were included and the frontispiece specifically stated it was for “exclusive family use” rather than in church. At the same time, another translation was completed by Alexandros Pallis (1851–1935), a major supporter of a literary movement supporting the use of Demotic in written language. Publication of the translation started in serial form in the newspaper “Acropolis” on 9 September 1901. Almost immediately Purist theologians denounced this version as a “ridiculing of the nation’s most valuable relics” while a faction of the Greek press started accusing Pallis and his Demoticist supporters of blasphemy and treason. Ecumenical Patriarch Joachim III of Constantinople denounced this translation, adding further fuel to the opposition. Riots were started by students of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, who had been organized by conservative professors. They requested the excommunication of Pallis and anyone involved with the translations, including Olga and Procopios, the Archbishop of Athens who had been a favorite of Olga and had supervised the translation after her personal request.
The conflict between rioters and troops, who had been called in to maintain order, resulted in eight deaths and over sixty people wounded. By December the remaining copies of Olga’s translation had been confiscated and their circulation prohibited. Anyone selling or reading the translations was threated with excommunication. The controversy was called the “Evangelika”", i.e. “the Gospels question”, after the word “Evangelion”, Greek for “Gospel”, and ultimately led to the resignation of the Metropolitan bishop, Procopius, and the fall of the government of Georgios Theotokis.