La Maupin

It's been a while since we've looked at history here on Eccentric Spheres, so today we'll be looking back at an amazing person that history has almost forgotten.

Traditionally the realm of sword fighting has been a male dominated area. Men fight duels, men go to war, while women stay home, take care of the children and generally stay feminine.

But the other day I learned of the existence of one remarkable exception, a woman called Julie d'Aubigny also known as Mademoiselle Maupin or la Maupin, 1673-1707.

La Maupin was the daughter of Gaston d'Aubigny the secretary of Louis de Lorraine-Guise, comte d'Armagnac. It was her father job, amongst other things to train courtly pages, and he took the opportunity to train his daughter at the same time. This included lessons in dancing, drawing, reading and fencing. Yup, that's right, she learned to fence despite being a girl very early on, and this while dressed as a boy no less.

When she was fourteen, she had an affair with her fathers employer, the Count, and he in turn married her off to Sieur de Maupin of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Shortly there after her new husband moved to the south of France for his job, but she elected to stay in Paris. It seems that even this early in her life no one told her what to do.

Sometime in 1687, La Maupin started a relationship with an assistant fencing master called Sérannes. He quickly became a wanted wanted man for killing a man in an illegal duel, and the adventurous couple ran away to Marseille. The lovers made their way by giving fencing exhibitions and singing. It was also La Maupin's habit to dress as a man during all this, though she didn't hide the fact that she was a woman. Perhaps it was to uncomfortable to fence in a dress. I don't know, I have never tried.

Once in Marseille she joined an opera company run by Pierre Gaultier, and shortly thereafter she dumped Sérannes for being boring.

Her next great adventure happened when she started a love affair with a young woman. After three months the girls parents locked her away in a convent in Avignon. Not that something as small as that could ever stop La Maupin. She entered the convent as a postulant, i.e. a person who wants to try out convent life before taking holy orders.

Once in the convent, La Maupin stole the body of a dead nun, put the corpse in her girlfriends bed, and set the whole thing on fire. Then they fled.

Their affair lasted three months after that, which is a shame since La Maupin was tried as a man in absentia and convicted of kidnapping, body snatching, arson and failure to appear in court. The sentence was death by fire. Ah, the flames of passion...

At this time, La Maupin traveled and sang. She hooked up with an older singer who tutored her until he pretty much drank himself to death, whereupon she returned to Paris.

Once there, she (dressed as a man) fought a duel over an insult with Louis-Joseph d'Albert Luynes, son of the Duke of Luynes. Despite the duel, which she won when she skewered his shoulder, they became lovers and life long friends.

When her new lover had to return to his regiment, she took up with a singer again, but her previous sentence hung over her. She wanted to join the Paris Opera, but she wasn't too keen on being burned alive. So she contacted her old friend and lover, the comte d'Armagnac, who got the king to grant her a full pardon.

In 1690, after her current lover had gained admittance to the coveted Paris Opera, she finally got her wish and performed with great success, first as a soprano but later as contralto. She became very popular, and the Marquis de Dangeau called her “the most beautiful voice in the world”.

It was at this time she became know as Mademoiselle de Maupin, as opera singers were styled thus whether they were married or not.

This part of her life was quite stormy. She beat up a rude and abusive singer and attempted suicide when she was rejected by a prospective lover, but the high point came when she while dressed as a man kissed a young girl at a society ball. This led her to be challenged to no less than three duels, all of which she won. But this led to trouble with the law again, as the King had forbidden duels in Paris.

Once again she fled, this time to Brussels, where she for a time became the mistress of Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria. She truly had a knack for making friends in high places.

After singing at the Brussels Opera, she returned to Paris, to again become a star. But trouble followed her when she beat up her landlord.

Despite this, she starred in several highly praised operas until she fell in love and started a torrid romance with Madame la Marquise de Florensac.

With the untimely death of the Marquise, La Maupin's heart finally broke. She retired from the opera and joined a convent (for real this time). She ultimately died in 1707, only 33 years old.

No one knows where she is buried.

I cannot say for sure if La Maupin's story has been embellished with time, but I find her story to be pretty extraordinary. She did what she felt she wanted, flaunted the rules of the day and led a life of romance and tragedy. An amazing woman by any standard.

Until next week, don't fight any illegal duels!

Hitler's Furies

Recently I finished Wendy Lower's book, Hitler's Furies: Women in the NaziKilling Fields (2014).

As the title suggests, this book examines the role of women in the Holocaust, and it does a pretty decent job of it. There is an important clue in the title though: killing fields. The book doesn't touch upon the role of women in the concentration camps, save for a passing mention.

Instead Lower shines a light on the massacres in the east, most notably in the Ukraine. Also, the book stays clear of the more famous monsters like Ilse Koch, which is fine. Much has already been written about them, and this is a more general look at the subject.

We get to follow the lives of a few select women, how they came to be in the Ukraine during WWII and what they did there. Being a book about the Holocaust it naturally focuses on the atrocities the Nazis committed in the east, and we are told the story of a few women who were willing participants in killing Jews. It's worth noting that these murderesses went east mostly with their husbands, most of whom were in the SS. A few of the women who worked in the administration system and became lovers to Nazi killers, also joined in. It seems no women went east expressly to kill. There were no women in the Einsatzgruppen.

We also follow a few women who, though brought up in Nazi Germany, traveled to the front as nurses and did not commit atrocities. I'm not sure why the author decided to include these stories, except perhaps to illustrate that not all German women who traveled east participated in the killings. In my opinion these anecdotes don't really contribute all that much to the book. Sure they witnessed some of the horrors, but we already know that they happened anyway. They are well written, but fairly uninteresting. If this had been a work of fiction, they might have been more valid. You decide.

Another aspect of Hitler's Furies analyses how being a part of the Nazi system affected women in general. On one hand Germany at the time was extremely conservative. Women were expected to go from dutiful daughters to respectable mothers and hausfraus. But with so many men in the army, SS and SA, the system had a desperate need of workers. And they were not shy about employing women. This created a mass of women who were independent both socially as well as economically. Perhaps more so than in the rest of Europe at the time.

To my great surprise, I found out that there were even high ranking female inspectors in the Gestapo. In all my time studying the Third Reich I have never come across this. Sadly the book leaves this part pretty much unexplored. I suppose this is due to the lack of solid evidence left behind, but it's a shame none the less.

Finally we follow the aftermath, and the ultimate fates of these killing women. Or rather lack of fates. Very few women were ever punished for their crimes. Naturally they downplayed their participation as much as possible, but interestingly enough, the allied investigators and prosecutors were unwilling to believe that women could do such things. Yes, a few were executed, mostly in East Germany, but the majority got away with it.

Final verdict? Definitely worth reading. I was a bit disappointed, mostly because I expected more. Perhaps it would be fair to say that Hitler's Furies could have been a bit more hard hitting. I get the feeling that the author didn't want to wallow in the horror and sheer vileness of the subject matter, but in pulling back lost something vital. The book becomes somewhat clinical, and being an objective observer which is what the author should be, the book lacks passion. Historical works shouldn't take sides and they mustn't preach, but the tone is a bit dull.

I don't know how to say it better. If the subject matter is of interest to you, by all means read it.

Until we see each other again, have a great week!

Outposts

Back in the day, I found a low budget film by the name of Outpost (2007) and decided to give it a go. It's awesome. A tense horror film with “undead” Nazis. What's not to love? Well I'll tell you, read on.

Yesterday I decided to watch the sequel, Outpost: Black Sun (2012) and today I saw Outpost: Rise of the Spetsnaz (2013), and although we still have “undead” Nazis, unlike the original, here we have very little to love.

SPOILER ALERT

First off, I spell undead with quotation marks because they aren't really risen from the grave, (mostly, it get's confusing at times) but rather stuck in a strange electromagnetic field. See, the Nazis wanted to create invincible soldiers, and thus injected them with some kind of miracle goo and exposed them to a field generated by a super science device that created a unified field. This made them unkillable, but also uncontrollable and the project was shut down.

Now enter our “heroes” in Outpost. A scientist named Hunt has hired a team of mercenaries to find said machine although it's been 65+ years since the war ended. They arrive at this creepy bunker somewhere in eastern Europe. The exact location is cleverly unspecified but we know it's war-torn and bleak. Inside the bunker they find the machine and it still works! Just go with it, it's not the weirdest thing that's going to happen.

Unfortunately this allows the Ghost-Nazis to manifest (though it is possible they could do that anyway), and it's on!

I have to say the Ghost-Nazis are terrifying in this movie. They appear anywhere, shadowy and massive, they kill with bayonets and disappear just like they came. Very creepy indeed! To top it off, you can shoot them all you like, but they don't care. They just keep coming, and then you die.

I'm not spoiling the ending, you'll just have to watch it yourself.

In Outpost: Black Sun, we are introduced to a young woman, Lena, who's a Nazi Hunter. A bit late for all that these days, but why not? She travels to the area the Outpost is in to find and kill/arrest the creator of the machine, one Klausener. She has no idea about “undead” Nazis, she's just there to get this evil old man for being a Nazi.

Along the way, she meets an old acquaintance, Wallace, who's a scientist and he's there to find the machine (of course). They team up just as U.N. troops move in to the area, to contain some vague chemical weapon.

The duo encounters some “undead” Nazis but they are pretty different from the original version. Instead of being creepy Ghost-Nazis, they now charge around and roar a lot. And where their faces used to be shadowy, they now look like stereotypical zombies. This is such a shame! All the suspense is gone and all we have now are rage zombies in SS uniforms.

Along the way, they team up with a reluctant U.N. special forces team who's in the area to destroy the unified field machine, because the field is spreading and with it, the “undead” Nazis, and they are still killing pretty much everything in sight.

If this all sounds kind of crappy, it's because it kind of is. The movie itself is pretty well written. The characters mostly act logically, like when the soldiers bring Wallace along since their scientist got killed, but refuse to take Lena since she's a useless civilian. (She goes after them anyway). But this is in no way as good as the original.

Again I won't spoil the ending too much, it was OK, but the scene with the guy shooting lighting like Emperor Palpatine, I could have done without.

So over all, a totally watchable film if you liked the first Outpost. Sad about the “undead” Nazis, but I guess you can't have everything.

The third installment though, Outpost: Rise of the Spetsnaz, was terrible. Absolute garbage. Instead of continuing the story from the first two movies, they decided to do a prequel, (insert theatrical sigh of frustration here), even though the second movies ending practically begs for continuity.

Here we're introduced to a group of Soviet partisans who get tangled up in the whole “undead” Nazi business when they ambush a German convoy. Soon enough most of them are dead and the survivors, including their commander are taken to the Outpost to be experimented upon.

There are three major flaws in this film.

First off, the Nazi Commandant, Strasser, is so campy and cliched, that the only thing he's missing is a limp and a monocle. He even zpeaks in a riddikkulous zheatrical fashion, which is even lamer considering none of his men do. They talk perfectly normally.

Secondly, the “undead” Nazis are even dumber than in the second movie. They are all huge hulking men with bald heads and even worse zombie makeup than in Black Sun. To be fair, they were prototypes, since at that point the Nazi scientists hadn't perfected the formula yet. But it really does nothing for the film.

Thirdly, the partisan commander is ridiculously bad-ass. He even outfights the Rage-Nazi-Zombies hand to hand. And, of course, being the hero, he really cares about his men. In the end, he's as cliched as Commandant Strasser.

I don't want to nitpick this film, since I don't care enough about it, as this is simply a pointless action movie set in the Outpost universe. But it does the series a disservice by going against things already established by the earlier films. And that I can't forgive it for. I had low expectations going in to this, but I was still let down. Do yourself a favor and avoid it.

A last couple of points. Both the “undead” General who leads the “undead” Nazis in the first two films as well as Commandant Strasser wear black SS uniforms, even though it's supposed to be towards the end of the war. The uniforms should have been gray, since Himmler banned the black uniform from common use. Parades only and such.

Also at the end of Black Sun, a cackling “undead” hag-nurse appears. In the third film we learn a little bit more about her, but the way she's shuffling around in a tattered black cloak, wielding a syringe and goes: “hehehehihihihehehehiiiiii” is so stupid! They should have left her on the cutting room floor.

So to sum up, the first Outpost is pretty damn good, the second is watchable and the third is foul.

Until next week, I hope you don't have to deal with any Ghost-Nazis, because they are scary.

Have a great week!

Let's Twist again

Tornado. A word that to many people means terror, destruction and death.

To me it means fascination because I live in Finland and we don't get tornadoes here. We get long cold winters instead, but given the choice, I'll take a few months of snow and cold over having my house ripped to pieces any day.

I just finished watching a Nova documentary on these bad boys, an thought I'd share with you, since it's Monday, and I have nothing better to blab about. I'll link it at the bottom.

Tornadoes are usually rated on the Enhanced Fujita scale, or EF scale which used to be known as just the Fujita scale. It goes from EF0 meaning topical damage to EF5 which means towns are flattened.

Although tornadoes have been observed on every continent except Antarctica (It's too uniformly cold and dry for them to form there), they are most prevalent in what's known as Tornado Alley in the U.S.

Tornado Alley doesn't have any clear borders but it's core is usually considered to be northern Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. If you live there you will get to know tornadoes personally.

In the U.S. about 80% of tornadoes are EF0 to EF1, and it's rare for them to last longer than 10 minutes. It's hard to say how often they strike, due to vastly different seasons but also because small local tornadoes aren't always reported, though many are.

Now, since this is Eccentric Spheres we're going to take a look at some extreme ones.

The record holder for biggest tornado is the Tri-State Tornado that rampaged through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana in March 18, 1925. It's records are:

• Furthest path traveled: 352 km (219 miles)
• Longest duration: about 3.5 hours
• Fastest traveling speed: 117 km/h (73mph)

The record holder for most recorded deaths is the Daultipur-Salturia Tornado that ripped through Bangladesh on April 26, 1989. This monster killed about 1300 people, but it should be noted that population centers in Bangladesh are much denser than in Tornado Alley and that their houses aren't built nearly as well.

In fact, efforts are under way to build houses that are better able to withstand the gruesome forces that the large tornadoes produce. An EF5 is as powerful, if not stronger, than the Hiroshima nuclear bomb. But instead of one powerful pulse, an EF5 continuously puts out this unimaginable force as it travels along.

The biggest difficulty in designing houses that are capable of resisting these wind speeds aren't just the costs involved but the fact that as a tornado approaches, your house is first beset by a powerful pushing force, but when the tornado is close, it exerts a pulling force instead and this is no joke. On May 22, 2011 in Joplin, Missouri (featured heavily in the documentary I mentioned) the EF5 grabbed the local hospital, not a small clinic mind you, but a large hospital and twisted the entire building four inches off it's own foundation!

Luckily only about 1% of tornadoes are EF5's and it's unusual for them to hit towns or cities but, as communities grow and multiply it becomes increasingly likely that they get hit.

I have had a fascination with powerful natural disasters like tornadoes since I was a child, and I can sometimes sit for hours and watch storm chaser footage on Youtube. Indeed that's how I found this documentary. 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUj9OW_OXmU

If you're interested in the subject matter, do give it a shot. It's pretty good, with really nice CGI explaining how tornadoes are formed, but for all non U.S. readers, be advised that it is very American in style with long dramatic pauses “in order to ------ save lives!”

I hope you have a great week and don't get blown away. Until next week!