Oeil-de-Boeuf and poem of poet, 李啇隱

What’s Oeil-de-Boeuf got to do with poem of poet, 李啇隱 (813-858)?  Let me tell the story.

登樂游原   
向晩意不適，驅車登古原，
夕陽無限好，只是近黃昏。

Going up to the Lo You Height                 
(translated by our friend, Charles)

I felt sorrow toward the evening,
I drove up to the ancient highland,
The evening sun is so beautiful ,
But it is approaching the night fall.

A good friend of ours emailed us talking about how he was excited and stirred while visiting Xi’an (西安), during which he saw a poem (see above) of poet, 李啇隱  (of 1,300 years ago), engraved in the stone.  He wrote,

“當我登上樂游原時，想起一千三百年前名詩人李啇隱，帶著「向晚意不適」的心情，在這裡兩手背後躊𨀉而行，我心中覺得我們是那麼接近，心情的喜悅與感觸不可言喻”

No need to translate as it is the same as what Lin Yu-Tang said in his “Art of reading” essay in The Importance of Living, (Charles read all books in English and Chinese by Lin Yu-Tang; I only read his English books.)

“Scholars seemed to have lived in different ages, separated by centuries, and yet their modes of thinking and feeling were so akin that their coming together across the pages of a book was like a person finding his own image.”

My friend wrote, “説不定我們會碰頭呢！” (We may meet one day!), I wrote, “but, you have met.”

It was the same stir in me when I saw “Oeil-de-Boeuf” in Versailles Palace September of 2014.  After marveling at the splendor and majesty of Grande Galerie (or called Galerie des Glaces because of its grand mirrors), we turned around the corner; Oeil-de-Boeuf immediately came into view.

The room is actually a short hallway connecting the King’s (Louis XVI) and Queen’s (Marie Antoinette) bed chambers.  It is best known as Oeil-de-Boeuf (bull-eye) as there are windows looking like “bull-eye” in it.

One will come across “Oeil-de-Boeuf” hundreds of times reading Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution.  Oeil-de-Boeuf is no longer just the name of a room, it is a symbol.

The fateful day was October 5 of 1789. Women in the market place were protesting the high price and shortage of bread; they quickly became a rioting mob, tens of thousands, gathering all the weapons they could lay their hands, marching to Versailles; as one historian said “the female insurrectionary force resembles the English Naval one.”

They broke through the guards, killing two of them, chasing Queen Marie Antoinette through Oeil de Boeuf to King’s bed chamber.  The photo (above) shows the small back door, through which she ran to the Oeil de Boeuf.  Next day they were forced to move to Paris, never returned.

The chasing at Oeil de Boeuf is as important an event as the storming of Bastille (7/14/1789) although less well known.  These events marked the turning points for violence in the unpredictable and uncontrollable revolution process.

While in Oeil de Boeuf, seeing the “bull eye” window, Janice and I quickly realized where we were; we thus fired up our imagination, seeing how the queen ran for her life; hearing the clamorous shouting of the mob; the scene was just like evening TV news to us.  Marie Antoinette (the most unfairly vilified woman in history) was not just the portrait hanging in her bed chamber; she was real; history came alive.

You may be interested in reading what Thomas Carlyle wrote about the chasing in Oeil de Boeuf in his The French Revolution, written in 1837, forty some years after the event.

Trembling maids of Honour, . . . hastily wrap the Queen; not in robes of state.  She flies for her life, across the Oeil de Boeuf; against the main door of which too Insurrection batters.  She is in the King’s Apartment, in the King’s arms; she clasps her children amid a faithful few.  The Imperial-hearted bursts into mother’s tears. “O my friends, save me and my children!”  The battering of Insurrectionary axes clangs audible across the Oeil-de-Boeuf.  What an hour!

The following paragraph is three years after the revolution began,

Three short years ago there was still Versailles and an Oeil-de-Boeuf: now there is that watched Circuit of the Temple, girt with drag-on-eyed Municipals, where, as in its final limbo, Royalty lies extinct.  In the year 1789, Constituent Deputy Barrere ‘wept’ in his Break-of-Day Newspaper, at sign of a reconciled King Louis; and now in 1792, Convention Deputy Barrere, perfectly tearless, may be considering whether the reconciled King Louis shall be guillotined or not.

This paragraph described the mood in Versailles in 1787 in the early days of the revolution.

What a France, through these winter months of the year 1787! The very Oeil-de-Boeuf is doleful, uncertain; with a general feeling, among the Suppressed, that it were better to be in Turkey . . . in the Trianon little-heaven, her majesty, one evening, takes Besenval’s [The last Commander of the Swiss Guards of France] arms; asks his candid opinion.  The intrepid Besenval’s—having, as he hopes, nothing of the syncophant in him, plainly signifies that, with a Parlement in rebellion, and an Oeil-de-Boeuf in suppression, the King’s Crown is in danger; whereupon, singular to say, her Majesty, as if hurt, changed the subject.

The following is the happier days in Oeil-de-Boeuf in 1783,

On the 3^rd of November 1783, the Oeil-de-Boeuf rejoices in its new Controller-General. . . . Great, in any case, is the felicity of the Oeil-de-Boeuf.  Stinginess has fled from these royal abides: suppression ceases; . . . .

Churchill cried often in public

Churchill was a man of letter and a man of action.  Graduating from Sandhurst, he was a military man by trade and training.  During the WWI when he was released from the five-man War Council, he immediately resigned from Government and went to the Western Front to become a battalion commander with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.

Though a macho guy he might be, he cried in public on numerous occasions in his “long and not entirely uneventful” life. Here is one example.

When Churchill visited Paris on 11/10/1944 (after the liberation of Paris and before the end of the war), de Gaulle treated him with a splendid parade along Ave Champs-Elysees from Place de la Concorde to Arc de Triomphe.  They laid a wreath at the Arcde Triomphe, at the Clemenceau Statue, and at Foch's tomb.  The crowd chanted “Chur-chill!” and according to Eden, “not for one minute did Winston stop crying . . . he could have filled buckets.”

Janice once asked me how this “Victory Walk” compared with the victory parade for President Woodrow Wilson in December 1918.

There is no comparison.  There were about two million people (war time Paris population was only one million) came out to welcome President Wilson─“the  most massive display of acclamation and affection ever heaped upon a single human being.” As it was Americans who came to the rescue when England and France locked in a bloody stalemate with Germany from 1914 to 1917.

Cambridge as I know (我所知道的康橋): We visited the Eagle Pub

It has been more than five months since we came back from the London-Paris trip, and yet I still haven’t finished the writing yet.  Today (February 28) in 1953 Francis Crick went to the Eagle Pub to announce that he and James Watson have discovered “the secret of life”.  The plaque seems to indicate that both Watson and Crick were there to make the announcement.  In his The Double Helix, Watson wrote, “. . . Thus I felt slightly queasy when at lunch Francis winged into the Eagle to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.”  (Watson was much more conservative than Crick was.)  The plaque was unveiled by Watson on April 25, 2003, though.

The Eagle Pub was close to The Cavendish Lab where Watson and Crick worked, and they hanged out here quite often; so the Pub can boast their contribution to the discovery of the DNA structure.  The history of Eagle Pub is traced back to Corpus Christie College (Miao-Chih’s college) in 1525; the college was founded in 1352 and is also nearby.

Today is the time to post some of the photos we took in front of the Eagle Pub on September 22, 2014.  This should be in the series of Cambridge as I know (我所知道的康橋).

800th anniversary of Magna Carta

Buckingham Palace had a reception celebrating the 800^th anniversary of Magna Carta yesterday (Feb. 23).  The photo shows the Queen was inspecting it.  We did it while in London last September.  The link is to the post in my blog.

http://doctorjytsai.blogspot.com/search?q=magna

The four original 1215 copies were displayed together at the British Library for one day, 3 February 2015, to mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta.

 

 

Poppies in Flanders Fields and in the Tower of London (and in our yard)

I am writing “Why read WWI?”, but I will post this first as I never finished writing about our London/Paris trip.  Before the trip Tuner alerted us the poppies we’ll see in the Tower of London.

2014 was the 100^th anniversary of the First World War.  There were 888,246 (British dead) ceramic poppies in a powerful display of “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” in the Tower of London.

“Remembrance poppies” came from a poem written by a Canadian surgeon, John McCrae in May 1915, during the second Battle of Ypres. Flanders Field is in the border between Belgium and France.

There were many versions of stories as to under what circumstance he wrote this poem.  According to Martin Gilbert’s The First World War, McGrae was a 42-year-old Canadian doctor, “an author of a book on pathology, he had volunteered as a gunner on the outbreak of war [August 1914], but then transferred to the Royal Canadian Medical Corps.  After two days surrounded by the human wreckage of the German attack, he wrote one of the most frequently quoted English-language poems of the war.”

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Reading this poem, I always listen to my favorite song of “Green Green Grass of Home” again.  Please go to a post in my blog (posted 6/1/2010) in which you can listen to this song sung by Joan Baez and Tom Jones.  The following link is “Listening to green green grass of home on Memorial Day”.

http://doctorjytsai.blogspot.com/2010/09/listening-to-green-green-grass-of-home.html

Anglophile and Francophile

After coming back from London and Paris trip last September I have been listening to BBC radio every day. And all my non-medical readings focus on WWI and French Revolution.  I am reading John Keegan’s and Martin Gilbert’s The First World War concurrently.  Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution is the iBook on my iPad.

They are all British or Scottish authors; no wonder my daughters call me Anglophile.  Janice even asked why I came to America, instead of England forty some years ago.  I said it was the same reason why Europeans went to Paris during Louis XIV’s reign.

The following is from Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization.

“Foreigners came to Paris as to a finishing school for all graces of body and mind.  Thousands of Italians, Germans, even Englishmen, preferred Paris to their native lands.”

By the way Churchill is a Francophile who saw that country “as being synonymous with civilization.”

We visited the happiest place and the saddest place on earth

I came across a headline of the news of measles outbreak in Disneyland; it says “Measles hits ‘the Happiest Place on Earth’”.

We also visited “the saddest place on Earth” when we’re in the Tower of London last September.  Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Bishop Fisher, Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey and Catherine Howard (another Henry VIII’s wife) were buried, after their executions, at St. Peter Ad Vincula, next to the Waterloo Barracks, which houses the Royal Jewels, after their executions.  No wonder the 19^th century historian, Thomas Macaulay said that this chapel was the saddest place on Earth.

So within three months we visited the saddest place and the happiest place on Earth.

Feeling sad at the saddest place on Earth.

Our hearts are with Parisians

Sadly the bell tolled from Notre Dame sounded sadder than what we heard in late September and one cannot see the Eiffel Tower in her night gown tonight as the light was turned out.

“Make me a willow cabin at your gate” and the trip we didn’t make

More than three years ago when a two box sets of DVD of Jean Arthur was released, WSJ had an article of “The legend of Jean Arthur” who was less well known than the stars she starred opposite, the likes of Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Cary Grant.

She died at age of 90 in 1991.  Her last film was “Shane” in 1953.  I found it interesting in a short letter-to-the-editor to WSJ (see photo below).  “Exquisite” is the only way to describe when one hears a good actor/actress reciting the famous lines of Shakespeare plays.

Many years ago I was blown away hearing a soliloquy of King Claudius (Disney’s Lion King was modeled after him) played by, I recall, Kenneth Branagh.  Such a beautiful and powerful thing! I was then determined to read the Bard.

Bernard Shaw said of Laurence Olivier’s playing Shakespeare’s, “He picked words off the playscript page, flung them passionately into the dark and secured them in the minds of theatergoers.”

After attending Richard III in theater, Lincoln wrote to the actor discussing how the opening line should be uttered, “Now is the winter of our discontent.”

When we decided to take a side trip to Paris for 2 ½ days on our trip to London, we scrapped from the list many sites we initially intended to visit: Blenheim Palace, Windsor Castle, Oxford University and Stratford Upon Avon.

I even planned to sit inside the “Willow Cabin” locates in the gate for the Visitors of Stratford Upon Avon reciting “Make me a willow cabin at your gate”.  Of course, I won’t be lucky enough to have a duet with Jean Arthur.

Willow Cabin” in the gate for the Visitors of Stratford Upon Avon

Parliament, Banqueting House, Richard the Lionheart, Virginia Woolf and Ottoline

While waiting on the long line to enter the Palace of Westminster (House of Parliament) on September 21, I kept watching the statue of Richard I, Richard the Lionheart, in the old Palace Yard.  I wonder why, among so many kings over the ages, he was picked for this honor?

The statue (installed there in 1860) shows Richard I lifting his sword on horseback, an image consistent with this warrior king who is known as the Lionheart.  I didn’t watch the movie “Richard the Lionheart”, but then again I do not learn history by watching movie.

What is the irony to me is that Richard I only spent less than 6 months in his 10-year reign (1189-1199) residing in England; he was basically busy with the Crusade (the third one) and he probably didn’t even speak English.  He used England as the source of his taxing revenue to sponsor his crusade.  He reportedly said, “I would sell London if I could find a buyer.”

Yesterday news report the renovation of the Palace of Westminster may cost more than £3 billion.  The England kings had conducted the business of governing at this site since 11^th century, although the medieval parliament was destroyed by fire in 1834, only the Great Hall survived (we visited on September 21).  The current building that we saw was built 1840-1870.

Upon hearing the abdication of Edward VIII, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary on December 10, 1936,

“. . . I will go to Westminster.  A bus took me to the top of Whitehall. . . Whitehall was full of shuffling & trampling.  People going both ways. . . A very beautiful yellow brown light: dry pavements: still lamps lit.   Lines of light at Parliament Squr. & the houses of Parliament in silhouette.  The lamp burning in the watch tower. Opposite the House Guards there was Ottoline, black, white, red lipped coming toward me. . .That’s the window out of which Charles the First stepped when he had his head cut off said Ottoline, pointing to the great lit up windows in their frame of white stone.  So my mother always told me.  I felt I was walking in the 17^th century with one of the courtiers [Ottoline]; & she was lamenting not the abdication of Edward but the execution of Charles.  It’s dreadful, dreadful, she kept saying. . .”

If you read this post; my sentiment is the same as that of Ottoline.
http://doctorjytsai.blogspot.com/2014/11/lady-ottoline-morrell-literary-hostess.html

We spent our first day (September 21) in the area where Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary.  She went to “Westminster” (the Parliament, where the action was), not the Abbey (to pray).  Whitehall used to be the Palace, which was destroyed in the Great London Fire, only the Banqueting House survived, in front of which Charles I was executed.

On the margin Virginia Woolf wrote, “Under which king, Bezonian? speak, or die”, which is from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2.  With the kingship changing hand, she was thinking about the lines in the Bard’s play.