Holy Time Travel, Batman!

 Yet more fun with research! Just hours after I put up my last post, I scored a Guide to Paris written DURING THE TIME BENJAMIN JANUARY WAS LIVING THERE - 1829, smack in the middle of the "Bourbon Restoration." Just glancing through it, it contains LOTS of useful, mundane details, like what rooms rented for, and how much you'd have to pay for a haircut, and what cafes were in operation in the Palais Royale (not to mention who were the good actors, and who were the lousy ones, in every theater in town). (And an exhaustive catalog of EVERY WORK OF ART IN THE LOUVRE). (This guy was thorough).


I love this kind of stuff! Most of my old Baedeker Guides date from the early 1900s, so this was a real find! (And it's a PoD reprint, so it was cheap). One of the things that delights me about this is that it gives a contemporary table of British and French money, which will make future Ben January books which involve Paris MUCH easier - I'm ALWAYS trying to track down how much things cost in 1820s francs. (Getting a conversion from US dollars to Victorian pounds is usually pretty simple, so this is an easy stepping-stone).

Combined with my huge map of pre-Haussmann Paris, this is really useful.

AND, it included something that's going to make it into my next lecture on Napoleon: the fact that when Napoleon was getting ready to invade Britain (using the money he got from Thomas Jefferson - completely unconstitutionally - for the Louisiana Territory), he spent part of that money having a monument designed AND BEGAN CONSTRUCTION ON IT in Boulogne, commemorating his conquest of England, before he even began the invasion. The foundations and scaffolding were still standing in 1829. (It was later re-purposed as a monument to Napoleon's ARMY, after the Emperor himself went to take his little vacation in the South Atlantic. For awhile it had a royal globe, royal crown, and fleur-de-lys put on it by the Bourbons, and when THEY were thrown out of power - for the second time - in 1830, the crown was discreetly removed and the fleur-des-lys replaced by stars.)

And, of course, Napoleon changed his mind and the invasion never took place.



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