February giveaway winners!
It is finally time to announce the winners of my February giveaway of paperback copies of Ann LeBlanc’s incredible novella, The Transitive Properties of Cheese! and they are: Hannah, Duranee, Jessica, Teresa, and Ceillie.
You may notice that I said there would be three winners, and yet I have listed five. Well, the world is very hard and I am very tired, so I have acquired two more paperbacks. It probably won’t happen again.
I will be emailing the winners shortly!
I am still plowing through The Invention of the Restaurant, by Rebecca Spang, and I’ve just started a history of Cajun food. I don’t feel like I’ve quite gotten to a place where what I’ve learned has rearranged itself into anything terribly interesting yet.
Instead, I bring you some wild incidental facts from researching what one might do with a dead body in Paris.
First of all, the word morgue entered the English language from French at the turn of the 18th century into the 19th, seemingly from the specific building (actually a series of specific buildings) in Paris built on the Ile de la Cité to house unknown bodies fished out of the river or picked up off the streets. These bodies were displayed on black marble slabs in front of a large glass window, theoretically so concerned citizens could identify them. But the whole facility very quickly became a significant draw for morbid tourists in the city, with some famous bodies drawing 40,000 people through the building in a single day. Until 1882, when the building was refrigerated, the bodies were kept cool by means of running water, but they still had to be removed after three days due to decomposition.
The beginning of the 19th century was a chaotic time for dead bodies even when they were claimed by someone. The Revolution had disrupted the old understandings of who was allowed to make money off funerary procedures and equipment, and not until 1804 was a set of laws issued to establish new norms around which parts of the funeral industry were under the direction of the clergy, the municipality, and the private industry (which sprang up to provide hearses, draperies, flowers, etc.) The architects of the Revolution had sought to remove all pomp, ceremony, and religion from French funeral procedures, but they were stymied by the widespread adherence to a “cult of death” (which was certainly Catholic but also deeply embedded in the vernacular of French life.)
There are obvious parallels there to the patriotic but ultimately very doomed attempt of revolutionaries to reform restaurants, discussed by Spang.
I shall collect more thoughts and bring them to you all in a couple weeks, along with the next queer giveaway book.
Keep on keeping on,
Sharon