Immigrant Tales: From Prussia to Australia

The Charles Dickens

It is mid-July 1877. Henriette Krause is at least seven months pregnant when the Charles Dickens, the three-masted steamer that left Hamburg on April 5 arrives near Brisbane. The ship's 510 passengers have now been traveling for three and a half months. They should be rejoicing upon nearing Australia's shores were it not that many are ill, plagued by typhus and measles. The stench is unbearable.

Henriette is near tears. The stoic endurance that has carried her through the last months is almost exhausted. She longs for space and fresh air, away from the cramped conditions of the ship. She is tired of having to sleep in a 1,8m by 45 cm space alongside hundreds. Her husband, Gustav, is as ignorant as she is about why they cannot disembark. Surely they have not come all the way from their homeland in East Prussia to be barred from setting foot on Australian soil? 

What is taking so long?

Soon the rumours circulate. The captain addresses them. They will be sheltered on nearby Peel Island. The health officer has inspected the ship. He has ordered them to be quarantined.

It will be seven more weeks until Henriette disembarks in Brisbane. Finally. She is now almost due to give birth.  Her bones strain under the weight of her swollen belly. Everything is surreal, here, at the Ipswich Depot where her husband enlists for work. The last five and a half months suddenly overwhelm Henriette and she reaches for her belly, gripping onto Gustav. It all comes back to her. What they have just lived. The unrelenting nausea. The monotony mingled with anxiety. She recalls those long stormy days and nights when the ship moaned dreadfully, while her and her companions were cramped in the damp darkness below deck. Their unwashed clothing, long imbued with sweat, dirt and salt, clung to their bodies giving off an inescapable odor that she would always remember; an odor that invited vermin and illness.  Some of their clothes had to be burned at Peel Island because they posed a contamination risk.

But then, a ray of light, a dash of hope. Gustav is smiling at her.  She hasn't seen him smile for months. He tells her that he has found an employment already. How efficient it all is now that they are finally arrived, here, in Brisbane. He is to go west of Toowoomba with his family where he will work as a labourer. The pay is low but he will be given some land to start anew. Their own land.

Their own land. It is a dream.

Henriette is relieved. It is just as well, she sighs.
Only a week later, she will give birth to the child that has journeyed with her all the way from Hamburg to Australia. It is a healthy boy.

Why would anyone go through this? Why? 

It is the question I asked myself. I am both relieved and horrified at this amazing feat. The human capacity to endure astounds me.

Krause family tree

Henriette had several children. The Krause seemed to have kept in touch with the German and Polish immigrant community in Queensland. One of Henriette's sons, Hermann Edward Krause, married Maria Martha Tewes who was herself born of German immigrants.

In turn their son, Allan Krause - my husband's grandfather - would marry a Polish immigrant.  When he died at 65, Allan was a true Aussie. He had enlisted to fight for Australia in WWII and was made a prisoner of the Japanese toward the end of the war. He would be marked by that experience.

My husband's father, Peter Krause, is effectively a mix of German and Polish. Like his ancestors, he is not averse to hard labor, honoring land and its produce, much like generations before him have done. His Australian wife is a tough cookie with an amazing open spirit and an endless curiosity. As a child, daughter of a long-distance drover, she rode to school on her large horse every day. Decades later, she has since travelled to China.

In Tara, in the year my husband was born, the townsfolk are not afraid to confront the tyrannical cops. Even if that means a fighting match. On the night of 19 August 1969,  Peter's wife feels the first pangs of labour. But Peter is not home. He has gone off to fight a cop. They send for him urgently; they come running to the ring and tell him to bloody hurry and that his son is being born. He has to get a friend to replace him in the boxing ring. And that's the climate into which Shane Krause makes his first appearance, some time before midnight.

Peter doesn't know it yet, but that little boy who interrupted his fighting match will grow up to be a screenwriter. 

In the early years of our relationship, Shane Krause would tell me that his last name was Prussian. By Prussian, he meant 'from the German-Prussian Empire' because Krause is a German name after all and one needs to distinguish the German-ruled Prussian Empire from authentic Old Prussia.

Old Prussia and its tribal regions

The region of Pomesania (left) is where the Krause family lived.

At the time they emigrated, it was part of the German-Prussian Empire.

Today it lies in Poland.

The Old Prussians were an ancient Baltic people. Fierce pagan tribes, they were likely extinguished by the evangelising medieval Teutonic Knights and, in later centuries, their numbers would have waned under the wave of migration that swept from Germany into Old Prussian land.

So the last name, Krause, is German. Alas, my wild fantasy of Shane being a direct descendant of some ancient oceanside clan that worshipped pagan deities, and sang deep-throated spiritual melodies like the one in this video, had to be tossed aside.

But my imagination was running wild, fueled by medieval scenes of sword-wielding knights riding from the West into Old Prussia, intent on ridding the land of these detested pagans, with the blessing of the Polish neighbours.  I had a vision that perhaps Krause had been the last name of some Teutonic Knight.

Teutonic Knight

by Andre Mazzocchetti

Picture this. He was a brutal man with noble convictions and let nothing cross what he believed was an honorable crusade. He was there, for sure, when the Teutonic Order defeated the Old Prussian tribe of the Pomesanians, and  when the Monastic State constructed the fortified castle that gave birth to the city of Christburg.

Reconstituted Christburg castle, now in ruins

Oh, it was all so believable and delicious. After all, Gustav Krause who came to Australia in 1877 with his heavily pregnant wife was in fact born in Christburg, today's Dzierzgoń. Surely that was a sign that his family had always been there for centuries? Ever since the time of the knights...

I pleased myself in this titillating fantasy. The idea that my very own Shane Krause was directly related to a Teutonic Knight was a historical novelist's porn.

Chrisburg

Who knows the truth. What is certain, is that some German family, perhaps several families, with the last name, Krause, did migrate to the region at any time between the 13th to the 18th century. Over this period, Christburg would be part of Poland for an extended time, hence the Polish name, Dzierzgoń.

By the time Gustav Krause was born in 1847, as far as he knew, his city was part the Kingdom of Prussia.  In this context, Christburg was part of West Prussia. But by 1871, when the German emperor, Bismarck, ruled and the German Empire was formed with Prussia as its leading state, Christburg eventually became part of East Prussia.
[Note: This is the reason why I found genealogical sources contradictory - some sources assert he was from West Prussia while some say he was born in East Prussia. It's all a matter of politics.]

And that's where I dug a little deeper and found the reason why Henriette Krause put up with being pregnant for an excruciatingly long journey.

In his essay on The Prussian-Polish Situation: An Experiment in Assimilation, William I. Thomas delves into Bismarck's policies, and the relationship between the Prussian-Germans and the Prussian-Poles.

After many centuries of Germans living side by side with Poles, one would expect intermarriage. And that is observable in my husband's ancestors.  Gustav Krause is a fine example of this multi-cultural situation. While his father was a Krause, his own mother with a last name of Reikowski, was Polish. Gustav had also wed Henriette Pukallus, also Polish. It is arguable that while the family spoke German, they most likely spoke Polish and felt partly Polish.

Having established that the family was as Polish as it was German, it really helped to explain why they would wish to leave at this time.

According to Thomas,
"as long as the peasant felt that the [German] government was friendly to him, he paid little attention to agitators. But in 1873 he was attacked by the government. At this point, Bismarck took a hand and decided to force the process of Germanization. He said he was not afraid of the Polish man, but of the Polish woman. She produced so many children. He undertook the task with apparent confidence, but he was profoundly deceived in his judgment of the peasant. He said that the peasant who had shed his blood so generously for Germany was at heart a true German [alluding to the recent Franco-Polish war]. The fact is, the peasant had been gradually losing sight of the fact that he was a Pole and the policy of Bismarck restored to him that consciousness."

Otto von Bismarck

Despite being part of the most powerful empire in Europe, one that had demonstrated its superior military might by recently defeating the French, Gustav and Henriette Krause were not enthused about their new German ruler, and with reason.

During the process of Germanisation, the German language became a substitute of the Polish tongue in the schools. Teachers who had no knowledge of Polish were favoured for employment by the education system. According to Thomas, "at this point the peasant knew that the government was his enemy."

There would be other reforms too, like the systematic purchasing of Polish land by the German government with the intent of settling it with Germans. Construction was also prohibited without a permit, which effectively denied Poles the right to build on newly acquired land, nor build further on the land they already owned.

It is no coincidence that when in 1877, Gustav and Henriette boarded the Charles Dickens, Henriette's brother, his wife and children - all Prussian Poles - were also on board.

Henriette's niece, Ottilie Ward, née Pukallus.

Ottilie Pukallus came to Australia on the Charles Dickens. 

She was then 2 years old.

They were all Prussian Poles who faced oppression by the German government. As a mixed blood person, Gustav Krause had not one culture, but two. With his Polish background and through his Polish wife's eyes, he could see the Polish perspective and identify with it. He could see the writing on the wall. He would have been supportive of leaving.

As for Henriette, pregnant or not, she was getting on that ship. If Bismarck had said that the Polish woman produced too many children, then Prussia was no place for a Polish woman to be making babies.

It was just as well, for in 1907 the German government passed an expropriation act, allowing it to seize any land which the colonisation commission desired but could not purchase. If you were a Pole and refused to sell your land, you were in for a horrid time.

So there you have it. After much research, my Teutonic and pagan fantasies have now long vanished. In their stead, reality - the tyranny of an imperial government intent on Germanisation; the desperate plight of a German-Polish family dissatisfied with their poor treatment and dreaming of a better world. All these things brought me my husband.

After all that, Shane Krause has kept his German name and most people do not know how complex his family's story truly is. On the face of it, he is descended from a “German immigrant". And so in a sense, Bismarck has had his way.

The French Revolution: Brittany and the Vendée

Drownings of Nantes in 1793, Joseph Aubert (1882)

“We must exterminate all men who have taken arms against the Republic 

and strike down their fathers, their wives, their sisters and their children. 

The Vendée must become a national cemetery.” 

      – General Turreau

The French Revolution is generally accepted as covering the period 1789 to 1799, ending with Napoleon’s coup d’état and the dissolution of the Directory. Prior to the formation of the Directory government France was ruled by the National Convention headed by Robespierre. This period, aptly known as the Terror, lasted from September 1793 to July 1794. 

For Western France, in the region of the Vendée, the Terror was accompanied by bloody and religious civil war including a period of mass killings that some French historians have recently come to denounce as a genocide and which led to the decimation of a third of the inhabitants in the Vendée. 

In the Western town of Nantes the representative of the National Convention, Jean-Baptiste Carrier, was responsible for atrocities and massacres that defy imagination. 

In my latest novel, I was interested in portraying a female perspective for this turbulent period.

Origins of the Conflict

It is a misconception that aside from aristocrats and nobles all French people were in favor of the beheading of their king and queen. 

The inhabitants of Brittany and of the newly named region of Vendée (comprising parts of Brittany, Poitou and Anjou regions) were never in favor of the guillotining of their king, Louis XVI, on 21 January 1793. They were staunch royalists and deeply Catholic. The execution of King Louis was not well received. 

To compound the people’s outrage, the new Republic had not only nationalized church property, but it also outlawed all priests who refused to forsake their oath on the Holy Bible.  According to these new laws, priests now had to swear upon the Constitution. Those who resisted were labelled ‘refractory’ and banished from preaching. There were persecutions involving both priests and nuns. In worst cases such priests were hunted to death or murdered en masse, as happened in Nantes in December 1793 when hundreds of refractory priests were tied up, locked into a barge and drowned in the Loire River. 

Already unsettled, the Vendée peasants rose in arms against the Republic when in February 1793, the National Convention made a call for the conscription of 300000 unmarried men, from the age of 18 to 40 years. 

The people of the Vendée had already witnessed great injustices toward their beloved priests, whom they hid, but this new conscription law was the tipping point because it would have left thousands of peasants unable to fend for their families. Meanwhile they would be forced to enlist in support of a Republic they had come to see as tyrannical.

Determined to oppose the Republic, these men, often illiterate and attached to their land, elected nobles and landlords—local men whom they held in high esteem—to lead and train them in battle. The Great Vendéan Army was born. 

Initially this Great Army won many victories against the soldiers of the Republic, but from December 1793, its luck began to turn. From January to July 1794, Paris sent a giant army to sweep across the Vendée. Its orders were clear: annihilation with no quarters. 

The Infernal Columns

Children, women, the aged, even the sick and farm livestock were not spared from massacres. The Republican army practiced scorched-earth and sought to obey decrees from Paris aimed at starving or exterminating the population. 

The army possessed twenty columns led by several Republican generals. Some, like those commanded by General Grignon, were more cruel than others. These columns became known as the ‘infernal columns’ for the very hell they spawned. 

The living defend their dead. War of the Vendée. 

Georges Clairin, 19th century

The words pronounced by General François Joseph Westermann are powerful illustrations of the atrocities that followed: 

“There is no more Vendée. I have trampled the children to death with our horses, I have massacred the women, and they are no longer able to give birth to any brigands. I am not guilty of taking a single prisoner, I have exterminated them all… The roads are covered with corpses. There are so many of them at several places they form pyramids. The firing squads work incessantly… Brigands arrive who pretend that they will surrender as prisoners… but we are not taking any. One would be forced to feed them with the bread of liberty, but compassion is not a revolutionary virtue.” 

Writing the French Revolution 

In Julien’s Terror, my desire was to convey what might have been the experience of a young girl in these violent times. The journey begins when she is a spoilt child, daughter a well-to-do merchant, living on the prestigious Île Feydeau in the heart of Nantes. It follows her life after the Terror, when she is a spirited but destitute orphan. What she sees and lives in-between, and the aftermath of her horrendous psychological journey provide both drama and mystery, but more importantly, it casts a light on the hardships faced by many French women in this period.

My female character is barely nine when she loses her parents to Carrier’s butchery. She is reunited with relatives in war-torn Vendée, staying with them first in Montaigu, La Guyonnière and then later in Les Epesses—all communes that were swept by the infernal columns.

The Underground and the Hidden Places of the Vendée

What is less well-known about the conflict in Western France is how much the peasants’ knowledge of their natural surroundings supplied them with advantages for surviving the Republican army. Like the Viet Cong of Vietnam, the people of Brittany and Vendée crawled in secret undergrounds. They also waged a guerrilla war long before the word ‘guerilla’ officially surfaced, when Napoleonic French troops encountered fierce resistance in Spain.

As François Pagès describes in Secret History of the French revolution—the soldiers of the Catholic royalist army ceaselessly disappeared and then re-appeared to fight. The underground, the woods, the stones and the marshes in the West would conceal and then suddenly release hordes of former valets, brigands, priests, ex-nobles, and peasants. They were everywhere and yet they remained unseen. 

In his final novel, Quatre-Vingt Treize, Victor Hugo wrote of his father’s experience in the war against Breton royalists. He too mentions the forests that sheltered thousands of peasants in Brittany: 

“The peasant had two points on which he leaned: the field which nourished him, the wood which concealed him.”

“There were wells, round and narrow, masked by coverings of stones and branches, the interior at first vertical, then horizontal, spreading out underground like funnels, and ending in dark chambers. [ ] The caves of Egypt held dead men, the caves of Brittany were filled with the living.”

“The subsoil of every forest was a sort of mad repose, pierced and traversed in all directions by a secret highway of minds, cells, and galleries. Each one of these blind cells could shelter five or six men.”

In Les Epesses, my female character follows her great-uncle, a giant Breton man who walks everywhere with his large wooden staff, and seems to know all the secrets of the underground. He hides his family in an underground cavern where they remain for months. 

As the infernal columns advance in the Vendée countryside, my character witnesses horrors beyond her years. Later she will hide in the secret Gralas forest, south of Nantes, and meet one of the most courageous men to lead the Vendée rebellion – General François Athanase de Charette de la Contrie (Charette). In Gralas, she will also discover the strong, independent women who fought to death alongside Charette, and one of these women will change her life forever.

"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death" 

- the original motto of the French Republic

Further Reading:

1. Histoire secrète de la Révolution française depuis la convocation des notables jusqu' a la 
prise de l'ile de Malthe..., François Pagès, 1798.
2. Quatrevingt-treize, Victor Hugo, 1874.
3. Souterrains de Vendée, Laurent et Jérôme Triolet, Editions Ouest-France, 2013.
4. Colonnes Infernales - Wikipedia 
5. A French Genocide: The Vendée, Reynald Secher, University of Notre Dame Press, 2003.

The Child in the Temple: the Fate of Marie-Antoinette's Son

The fate of Marie-Antoinette's second son fascinates. The heir to the French throne upon his brother's earlier death, the Dauphin, Louis-Charles was only eight-years old when in 1792, his entire family was imprisoned in the Temple prison of Paris. Then began his torment, abuse and neglect until three years later, he died - a fate that no mother would wish for her child. 

That the child who perished on 8 June 1795 was indeed Louis-Charles and not another, was only confirmed seventeen years ago following DNA analysis of his preserved heart. The scientific findings put to rest 200 years of rumours that he may have escaped or exchanged places with another. 

While the enigma surrounding Louis-Charles' death vanished, his last years were rendered all the more tragic now that their certainty had been established. Two years after these DNA findings, French Legion of Honor recipient and author, Françoise Chandernagor, published a disturbing and moving account of Louis-Charles' journey through imprisonment and death. Titled La Chambre (The Bedroom) her novel often embraces a child's point of view in an attempt to recreate the fear, distress and emotional pain the young boy - King of France - may have experienced from 1794 to 1795. La Chambre also presents a poignant psychosocial analysis of what it meant to be a jailer of Louis-Charles in a time of Terror, where suspicion and miserliness were rife, and how Louis-Charles' neglect arose not so much from malice and royalist hatred but rather from both fear of arrest and a dysfunctional system. 

La Chambre could be seen as reckoning, a way to cast national guilt aside, and deal with the horrors inflicted on this child. It remains a well-researched and haunting account.

The long agony of Louis Charles' imprisonment haunted me to such a degree that I wanted to give voice to this child's crushed spirit. A child that was forgotten, who by all accounts, was once told by his father, Louis XVI to never seek revenge - yet what if he had?  What if his revenge manifested as a haunting?  In occult belief, there is an understanding that spirits cannot rest when they have suffered a great violence or injustice, and that they or some energy they have left behind, will remain forever to roam the place of their torment. What if Louis-Charles had returned to his austere prison tower? 

This is the premise I play with in my latest novel, Julien's Terror.

Yet this haunting could not have lasted long, because today, nothing remains of the Temple prison or of the surrounding Temple buildings. All were demolished by 1811. When Napoleon was crowned emperor in 1804, he was all too aware of the royalists' disfavor. In March 1808 at which time the Temple no longer served as a prison, royalist pilgrimages to the Temple had increased.  Not wanting to arouse the royalists' fever, Napoleon ordered the Temple's demolition. On 7 October 1808, Robert Morel purchased the temple prison under the condition that he would carry out Napoleon's orders - removing every stone until nothing was left. Robert Morel, or rather my fictional rendition of this historical figure, is featured in Julien's Terror. He is presented as a profiteer, intent on delaying the Temple's deconstruction to raise as much profit as possible from pilgrimages and from the sale of every object having belonged to the royal family. 

Door to the large Temple tower - preserved in Vincennes

Writing about a hypothetical haunting is one thing, but how does one write about a structure or building that no longer exists? At least when I wrote about the construction of the 15th century Forbidden Palace in Beijing for my first novel, The Ming Storytellers, I was aided by a real-life visit to the somewhat changed yet still standing palace. But in modern Paris, nothing remains of Le Temple. Nothing. Napoleon got his wish.  

With some research and thanks to several sources, not excluding Chandernagor's La Chambre, I was able to piece out the logistics of this tower, notably how the second and third floors of the temple prison would have been laid out at the time of Louis-Charles' imprisonment. 

 Temple prison floors - August 1792 to December 1795 

with my English lettering added

The second floor (shaded purple, left) had been the residence of Louis XVI prior to his execution in January 1793.  The King's bedroom (directly below the Queen's bedroom shown in the red-shaded floor) eventually became Louis-Charles' bedroom a year later. Since July 1793, the boy had been taken away from his mother and submitted to the injurious care of Antoine Simon, a cobbler. Now they would remove him from Simon's care. This could only be better for the poor nine-year old. One would think. Alas, no. 

  

Contrary to what is shown in the above floor layout, from January 1794 the King's bedroom was no longer accessible from the antechamber. The wall between the antechamber and the bedroom was sealed and a compartment, housing a heating stove was constructed in its place. This permitted heating but had the effect of immuring the child so that entry to his room was only accessible after having crossed into the valet's room (Clery's bedroom), across right and down the corridor. This made his isolation complete. 

And from 1794 to the end of the Terror in July, this room is all Louis-Charles ever saw. He was in solitary confinement for over six months. No toys. No books. No images. Little light. Love? Hugs? The voice of his mother? He did not even know what had become of her. No one had told him. Was he being punished? His imagination being that of a nine-year old's, might have interpreted his isolation as punishment. He was no longer cherished, no longer loved, it was clear. That could only mean he had done something wrong. 

Putting aside the lack of light, the longing for any comfort in a darkness that children so fear, putting aside the absence of books, toys - one can only imagine the psychological torment that solitary confinement would have had on any child who had once known complete adoration and been lavished with care. A time of pain and sorrow is only more vivid when we have known joy, and so Louis-Charles' long-lost carefree days only exacerbated the destitution that he now found in this miserly room with its lurid yellow wallpaper.

His meals were pushed through an opening and no one cared whether he ate or not. In fact Louis-Charles, after he had surmounted fear, distress and sadness, descended into such a neglected state that he began to not care at all about his own person.  His degradation is made all too clear in La Chambre. He lived in filth - excrement piling up in every corner of the room, lice and bed bugs infesting his bed and crawling upon his skin. He developed tuberculosis. 

TO BE CONTINUED... 

Julien's Terror - Imagining the French Revolution

Julien's Terror, my latest novel, is the story of a haunting - a haunting that is either metaphysical or psychological, or is it both? 

Set in the dramatic period of the French Revolution, culminating into Napoleon's empire, it revolves around a young couple from different walks of life. Yet both have lived tragedy and both are touched by it. 

Julien's Terror features impressive figures of the French Revolution, including Charette, the Vendée counter-revolutionary and Marie Anne Lenormand, the celebrated Parisian fortuneteller.

Historical figures who play a minor role in the story but which I place on a pedestal, are the author, Madame de Staël who Napoleon hated, and the famed Austrian physician, Franz Anton Mesmer, whose works laid the foundation for hypnotism and psychotherapy.

The novel is dedicated to Charette.

While some dates around Charette’s presence in the Gralas forest may have been modified or blurred to aid the narrative, the events of the Vendée war depicted in Julien's Terror and the tragic massacres that unfolded in Western France are historical. 

When I was a teen, enamoured of art, I reproduced a centuries old drawing depicting Charette’s entry into Nantes on February 1795. At this young age, I knew not the significance of this drawing and its relation to the French Revolution.

Many years later, I learned the meaning of this drawing. It was a truce (not in the novel). Charette had agreed to a truce with the Republic and one of the secret conditions of this truce was that the revolutionaries would free the young king, Louis Charles. The truce was later ignored, as more fighting between Republicans and the Vendéens insued. 

Meanwhile, the young King, Louis Charles died in the Tower of the Temple in Paris. He was neglected and suffered the worst conditions. 

Ah, I almost forgot. Louis Charles is a central figure in Julien's Terror. 

There are many things that drove me to write Julien's Terror. On the one hand I was unsettled by the disturbing fate which an eight year old was forced to suffer until his death.  I wondered at times whether Louis Charles' soul might not haunt Le Temple had Napoleon not demolished it... 

There were also personal reasons - my awe for Charette is one of them.

Recently, while researching my Breton and French genealogy, I discovered that one of my 18^th century ancestors, had hidden Charette in the area of Montaigu, south of Nantes. It was that perilous time, prior to Charette’s capture in 1796, when the Vendée general had been abandoned by most, and erred from farm to farm in search of an asylum. I was proud of my ancestor for hiding Charette.

There was also the urge to tell the world of something tragic, to reveal a past...

Nantes is my home city in France, the city of my ancestors and a place that I have returned to many times since childhood. But when I visited in 2013, I experienced an urge to write about the drownings, the “noyades”, and to depict the tragedy that befell Nantes during the Terror.

And then, there was a fascination for the psychology of the people of France in those times. 

More than simply creating a character who had lived those events of the Revolution, I wanted to create a dynamic between two people, both damaged by their experience of the reign of terror. I examined the psychology of that period. What was fascinating was the increased resort to fortune telling services; the arts practiced by Marie Anne Lenormand were never more popular than from the revolution to the First Empire, where people sought answers and were deeply anxious about their future, and the future of France.

Delving into the past, with a psychological lens, I envisaged these historical events as a major cause for the rise in suicides, the growing number of asylum patients and the rise in depression. And then I remembered the majority. The majority which in all appearances seemed to not exhibit mental problems. If they did, then these poor souls never sought help, because such psychological help did not exist as it does today. This majority whose mental illness would remain concealed in a domestic realm, would resume living, but it would forever hide wounds.

That’s when I realised that this majority, it was an entire nation. And perhaps just as France’s wounds were never healed completely, so too, there exists today, in most parts of the world, wounds that have not healed and psyches that are forever marked by historical events. In essence, it is the psychohistorical dimension of this novel which most drove me to write.

The Nantes of Jules Verne

In 1828, the world-renowned science-fiction author, Jules Verne, was born in what was then called the Venice of the West - the city of Nantes, in France.

Around the same period, when Jules Verne was only a baby, the English landscape painter, JMW Turner, drew sketches of Nantes.

Nantes - view from Île Feydeau, Turner 1828

The wonderful drawing above illustrates the lively canal activity around Île Feydeau. Then the home of Nantes' wealthiest families, Île Feydeau's majestic residential buildings can just be discerned on the right-hand side.

In the early 20th century, major diversion projects began in Nantes and lasted through WWII. Before this time, the Erdre, the Loire's tributary, flowed through a number of canals, lending the city a somewhat Venetian aspect. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, Nantes' port thrived with large vessels destined for Africa and the Americas, including sadly, slavers. Dark as Nantes' past may be, one easily forms an impression of a bustling trade city comparable to Venice.

Banks of the River Erdre, looking North - Turner

Touring through Nantes one finds much history. There is first the medieval Chateau along the banks of the Loire. The Dukes of Brittany had their seat here and it serves as a wonderful museum today.

The unforgettable Chateau des Ducs de Bretagne, Nantes

Turner's sketch of the castle is lovely too.

Chateau of the Dukes of Brittany - Turner

But a rare treat, if you are a fan of Jules Verne, is to follow the Loire River from the Chateau, past Place Bouffay, all along key spots where one of Brittany's finest authors lived.

18th Century map of Nantes before the diversion of the Erdre

Ile Feydeau lies in the center of the Loire

Stop 1 -  4 Olivier de Clisson Street
An island within a city.
Such is Île Feydeau, which today following the diversion of the Erdre, is accessible on foot.
Parallel to the quay is the old Rue Kervégan which is lined with restaurants and fine mid-18th century buildings. Ile Feydeau is the area of Nantes which was once inhabited by rich slavers and merchants. Its edifices are ornate with marine monsters and creatures that evoke the intense relationship between the island's ancient dwellers and the sea.

Beautiful balconies on Île Feydeau 

The head of marine creatures gracing Île Feydeau homes

It is also on Ile Feydeau, at 4 Olivier de Clisson Street to be precise, that the founder of science-fiction (a title he shares with H.G. Wells), was born. Jules Verne's father was a lawyer and barely of middle-class.

Plaque on 4 Olivier de Clisson Street

"The 8 February 1828

Jules Verne

Novelist

Precursor of Modern Discoveries

Is born in this house."

4 Olivier de Clisson Street

It is no surprise that from a young age, Jules Verne became well-aware of Nantes' trans-atlantic slave trading. He turned out to be a staunch opposer of slavery and of the slave trade, denouncing these in his book, Dick Sand, A Captain of Fifteen. Later in his twenties, he would become a good friend of author, Alexandre Dumas, whose own father had been borne of a slave.

Stop 2 - 2 allee Jean Bart (cours des Cinquantes otages)

At 2 Allee Jean Bart, long before the Erdre was diverted to give birth to what is now the Cours des Cinquantes Otages, we find Jules Verne's other childhood home. His family moved to Jean Bart when he was barely a toddler. They remained there until Jules Verne was 12 years old.

"Jules Verne, as a child lived here from 1829 to 1840."

Stop 3 - Church of Saint Nicolas
Nearby, the basilica of Saint Nicolas, whose earliest building dated from the 12th century and which had undergone a number of evolution through the centuries, was re-constructed starting in 1844 based on plans that had been finalised on the eve of the French Revolution.

Jules Verne's father belonged to the parish council that commissioned this wonderful building.
This neo-gothic church is classified as a historical monument since November 1986.

Neo-Gothic Church of Saint-Nicolas

There are other Jules Verne residences or landmarks in Nantes that are worth mentioning, including 1 Rue Suffren, 6 Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Chantenay country home on 29bis rue des Reformes, but all are old stone houses and it can get a little dull.

But if you follow the Loire River toward the Jules Verne Museum, you come across a more recent statue, created as an homage to the celebrated author - it is Captain Nemo looking out across the Loire...and just behind him, a fictitious statue of the young Jules Verne sits on a bench, dreaming of the sea.

And that is a rare treat.
Because to dwell upon the imagination of a child who would one day become one of the world's greatest science fiction authors, well, that is sheer bliss.

Tommaso Mocenigo

Tommaso Mocenigo (1343 - 1423)

Tommaso Mocenigo was Doge of Venice from 1414 right up to his death from a long illness in 1423. 

Mocenigo was an admiral  and merchant by profession. He traded in pepper with Syria. Prior to being Doge, he was Duke of Candia (the Venetian name for the island of Crete) and in 1405 was named Procurator of San Marco. In his younger years he was also elected to the Council of Ten, Venice's highly secretive security body.

Under his reign, he encouraged commerce, and Venice's dominion over the sea was at its apogee.  It is said that knowing well that he would be too ill to benefit from a new palace, he organised for the reconstruction of the ducal palace, then known as the Ziani Palace, and commenced the library of Venice.

Prior to his death, in 1423, Mocenigo made an impassioned plea to his Pregadi (Senate) warning them against electing Francesco Foscari as his successor. The brazen and military minded Foscari, he said, would ruin Venice. The main difference between these two men was that Foscari favored military expansion into terrafirma, while Mocenigo was all about the sea and peaceful trade.

Mocenigo is buried in the Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo. 

Tomb of Mocenigo

Various excerpts from The Mascherari: A Novel of Venice, featuring Doge Mocenigo.

“Tommaso Mocenigo is very ill,” he explained, gesturing gravely toward the Doge apartments to our left. “He has been confined to bed for weeks already. When the New Year commences next March, do not be surprised if the patricians are called upon to appoint a new Doge. It is not known how many months Tommaso has to live but I feel his time is near.  And between you and me,” he whispered, “our young procurator, Francesco Foscari*, would want this time to be nearer still.” - Almoro Donato from the Council of Ten 

As the door opened, I saw that it was a much afflicted man, pale in face with a thin aquiline nose and eyes so transparently gray that they seemed to belong to another world. By the sunken cheeks on his pallid face I took him to be at least eighty in years.

“Bonna notte,” he began, his frail voice, at first, barely audible.  - Antonio da Parma describes his encounter with Doge Mocenigo

“I understand you, Antonio.” His voice rose. “In the words of our great Petrarch, ‘you wish to go beyond the fire that burns you’.  I see it in your eyes.  This sentiment you have, that something must be, I know it well.  I know how it devours and urges.

“Then I will ask you to yield to what must be.  Pay heed to your inner voice, as I do mine.  Let it guide you to your destiny.  - Tommaso Mocenigo in The Mascherari: A Novel of Venice

“I bid you go, Antonio. Pray for me, your Doge, that I may persuade my Pregadi and save Venezia from the wars Francesco Foscari would have her wage upon my death.  You do that for me, Antonio?” - Tommaso Mocenigo in The Mascherari: A Novel of Venice

_____*Francesco Foscari - was elected Doge shortly after Tommaso Mocenigo's death. Despite the tradition of electing patricians who were at least 60 years of age, Francesco was only 49 when he became Doge. 

Renaissance Man

Do you often meet people who defy categorization? Those whose interests and talents are so varied that they baffle the mind? Most humans are so fond of classifying one another that they often find it strange, and even stupefying, when one of them seems to excel at a multitude of disciplines.

In some circles, we jokingly label these people, freaks. A more sober qualification might be, 'polymath'. If they reach world renown and professional recognition, we label them geniuses.

You may be familiar with What's My Line, in which contestants are blind folded and have to arrive at the identity of a guest after this one answers a series of questions about their abilities and achievements.  In one particular episode, the contestants were confronted with a most puzzling personality to identify.

For each discipline in which the personality was asked if they had achieved, the response was affirmative. The contestants grew increasingly more confused given their inability to easily associate the guest with a unique dimension of excellence.

"Is there anything this man has not done?" cried one of them, in gentle exasperation.

The personality of course, is Salvador Dali.

Is Dali the only personality with such multi-faceted talents? I do not believe so. I think the majority of individuals are capable of tremendous range, if and only if, they do not limit themselves cognitively into believing that they have found their niche. Self-categorization, or rather, the lack of, is in fact, what I believe is a defining factor of geniuses.

[Self-promotion alert] While writing my novel, The Mascherari, I have been on a glorious trip to 15th century Venice. I want to bring attention to one of the geniuses I met there.  Given the gender biases of the time, the terminology for describing these 'geniuses' revolves around men. And as the title of this post indicates, these multi-disciplinary freaks were then called, Renaissance Men.

There is something elegant and uplifting about being called a Renaissance Man, especially when one happens to be extremely handsome to boot. Leone Battista Alberti was one handsome man, as you can see from this statue of him located in Florence.

He was born Battista Alberti. Later, he changed his name to "Leone".  I ought to mention his birth date, 14 February 1404. Advocates of astrology will have probably noticed that Alberti was an Aquarian.

Hold that thought.

Fans of Leonardo da Vinci will also note that Alberti was several years da Vinci's senior. In fact, he is the bona fide early Renaissance Man, and was equaled to none, except da Vinci.

I believe that geniuses have a cognitive advantage. I do not mean that exclusively in the neurological sense. Their primary advantage is that they have an inherent belief that they can do anything if they set their minds to it. As it turns out, Alberti is credited with the following empowering quote,

"A man can do all things if he but wills them."

So why is this guy so special anyway?

Alberti was known as the prototype of a 'universal man'. His breadth of knowledge is truly remarkable. He was at ease in the fields of philosophy, mathematics, science, classical learning, and the arts. He wrote pamphlets or treatises on ethics, love, religion, sociology, law, mathematics, and different branches of the natural sciences. He also wrote verses which demonstrated his aptitude for the Classics. In the arts, he was versed in painting, sculpture, and architecture.

Painting
Alberti could paint and was a good artist however none of his paintings unfortunately survive.

Classical and Law education
Alberti, or should I say, Dr Alberti, was educated at the University of Bologna, where at the age of 24, he acquired a Doctorate in Canon law.

Writing
It is said that writings poured out of Alberti, in both Latin and the Vernacular languages of Italy. Alberti scripted and wrote many love poems, fables, Latin comedy and dialogues. He wrote treatises on sculpture, agriculture, law and a host of technical subjects.

He once wrote a ten-book treatise on the technical nature of how a city should be structured (Brisbane, take note). He detailed how water should be properly channeled, how work sites should be constructed, the types of materials to be used and the different kinds of buildings that should be positioned in suitable and ideal locations.

Sounds boring? Wait, there's more.

In 1435, Alberti wrote what is known as the first book on perspective. His book, De Pictura (On Painting), sets out rules for drawing a three-dimensional picture on a two-dimensional surface. Basing himself on the principles of perspective that had been demonstrated by Filippo Brunelleschi, Leon Battista Alberti produced a book that would later guide dozens of Renaissance artists in the creation of more realistic, perspectival artwork.

Music
Alberti composed music and was a reputed organist.

Astronomy, Cartography and Geography
Alberti produced a treatise on geography that laid out the rules for surveying and mapping a land area.  The instruments and methods he described pre-dated later geographical depictions of the 15th and 16th centuries which are noted for their advances in accuracy.

Architecture
Despite having had no formal architectural education, Leon Battista Alberti was known as the Father of Modern Architecture. He was the principal initiator of Renaissance art theory.
Among his work, he completed the Pitti Palace, the Temple of Malatesta at Rimini and the Church of Sant’ Andrea.  Before its later renovation, Alberti was commissioned to design the first Trevi Fountain in Rome.

Since I am particularly clueless in Music and Architecture, none of this excites me as much as what follows.

Cryptology and Mathematics
Remember - I mentioned that Alberti was an Aquarian, and Aquarians are traditionally known for their cutting-edge, technical minds. Given Alberti's impressive portfolio in various technical fields, it should be readily evident that, for once, astrology seems uncannily spot on in describing its subject.

But it is in the field of cryptology that Alberti truly shines as an Aquarian specimen. Here, we find the summit of his technical mastery and visionary mind. In our modern information technology age, we take for granted that technology can obfuscate our messages and encrypt our passwords, without paying so much attention to it. Consider, then, that long before the advent of computers, Alberti developed a type of cipher to which most of today’s systems of cryptography belong, and which is known as polyalphabetic substitution. It was called the Alberti cipher.
It turns out that Alberti is known today as the Father of Western Cryptology.

Brains are sexy. But men with secrets, even more so!

Secrets of the Vatican
Alberti had, since his twenties, been appointed to an ecclesiastic post and worked many years for the Vatican. One of his friends was pontifical secretary, Leonardo Dato. It has long been believed that it was Dato who spurred Alberti’s interest in cryptology.  At the time, both the Vatican and the Venice Republic were dabblers in secret communication inasmuch as they also engaged in intercepting and deciphering foreign messages.  Decipherers were employed both in the Vatican and in the Venice Republic - two cities which incidentally hold impressive archives (the Vatican has the largest archive in the Western world and Venice is not far behind.)

According to cryptology historian, David Kahn, Alberti was strolling in the Vatican gardens with Dato (what on earth were they doing), when this one asked him, “You’ve always been interested in these secrets of nature. What do you think of these decipherers? Have you tried your hand at it as much as you know how to?”
Alberti smiled. Alberti already knew that Dato’s duties included ciphers, yet he replied as though he ignored it, “You’re the head of the papal secretariat. Could it be that you had to use these things a few times in matters of great importance to His Holiness?”
“That’s why I brought it up,” replied Dato. “And because of the post I have, I want to be able to do it myself without having to use outside interpreters. For when they bring me letters in ciphers interpreted by spies, it’s no joking matter. So please – if you’ve thought up any new ideas having to do with this business, tell me about them.”

And this exchange is supposedly what enticed Alberti to deliver a cipher treatise around the age of 63. Think of it as an off-the-shelf cipher tool complete with a set of revolving discs which Signore Dato could play with to his heart's content.

New - Alberti Gadget

Ta da! Just like that, out of the blue. Unless...

Genius in the Making
What struck me about Alberti’s conversation with Dato, is that our Renaissance man already knew of Dato’s ciphering activities long before Dato admitted to them. To me, this awareness hints to Alberti’s inherent interest in matters of ciphering (just hanging around the Vatican would do that to you, I reckon).  Alberti’s attraction to solving problems, and to mathematics in general, arose long before he ever knew Dato, back when he was a twenty year old law student.  In those days, he used to find mathematics relaxing and even mentioned that it was a welcome break from studying law, which he said, taxed his memory.

Merging these ideas together, and working on the premise that one’s great work later in life often sprouts from seeds sown when one is much younger, I speculated at length on Leone Battista Alberti’s early life.

The Lost Years
Leone Battista Alberti appears briefly in my novel, The Mascherari. I wanted to pay homage to a man who, while born a wealthy banker’s son (the Alberti bank was known in the 14th century as greatly contributing to Florence’s wealth), flatly refused to work in banking, and focused instead on contributing to humanity in various fields. I also wanted to speculate on a challenging period in his life - a period where he lost his father, lost his inheritance to his uncle, and suffered illness even while studying.

What did Alberti do to survive during this time?

The Mascherari is set in 1422, at a time when Alberti was only 18 years old. That may seem young, but it did not stop me from advancing some bold theories about our 'universal' err, young man...

After all, with a genius of his caliber, anything may have been possible.

Aquarians and other geeks can delve into David Kahn's The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication.