Behind the Scenes Minis: Mademoiselle and the Tunneler

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday and Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Annri Louis d'argeon this week. Yeah, I didn't realize that the timing of her life dovetails nicely with Vandyck. Oh. Yeah, that's kind of like, here's two things that were going on kind of simultaneously, since he was trying to get the commission to decorate some of the palace for Louis the thirteenth and didn't get it. There are several things we did not that Die didn't include in the actual show for various reasons, some that it would just require. I mean, I felt like we had to spend so much time explaining how the frond worked, because there anytime I've read about it in the past, when I haven't done like a deep enough dive, I always walk away scratching my head and going, wait, I thought those guys were friends, like not under standing that whole turn that happened right when Parliament was like we got a good deal for us, guys and the nobility were like, excuse one of the things that we didn't talk about though, is Anne of Austria and Mazarin's rumors we have no substantiation that they were in fact romantically involved. Yeah, we talked about that in our hortenth the Marie. Yeah, like we can talk about it. It was a brief mention, right that. Yeah, which you know, there are even rumors that they secretly got married. Yeah. And this is a thing that I don't know how to feel about, not specific to them, but in general, I feel like any time, especially when there is a woman regent, like a mother to a monarch, who is kind of running things and she is a male advisor, the rumor is always that they're having an a fan or that they are in love or possibly even married. I mean we even see this with like Queen Victoria's mother and her advisor, Like there are even theories that that man is actually Victoria's father in some circles, and then even Victoria and her advisors, And like, there's part of me that's like, is there no way people could imagine that a man and woman could be working together and not have some sort of romance between them, right, And then on the other hand, I'm like it's all so insulated and weird. I could see it being very natural for two people in that position where they're constantly together and the only two people that can really understand the other's life situation, where that would kind of magically set the alchemy to in play of like a romance developing. I don't know. I mean, the bottom line is people will always speculate about whether or not any two people secretly are having some sort of romance. It just always makes me think about these things. I have no like summation or position on it. I just always find myself going, yeah, but it just is that the only thing we could possibly massine, the only option, right, like maybe they could just be BFFs you. I mean, I don't know. The other thing that we didn't mention is that Anne Marie Louise connects to another podcast we did not that long ago, which is Jean Baptiste Lulie h the Conductor, because she is the one who brought him to French court for the first time, and so that's pretty fascinating. Nothing more than that fascinating. Okay, here's the gross part. Okay, gross parte. If you are squeamish about post mortem yuckiness, I don't know, maybe skip ahead a minute and a half. Allegedly at the funeral, something had gone wrong with her embalming, and there was an urn. I don't know why this would be the case. I'm sure there's some reason, but there was an urn that would have had entrails in it, okay, and allegedly it exploded. Oh gross. And this was at the brand new area that had been built of Versailles. So her, like some people have joked, her parting gift was just to stink up Versailles on her way out because it was apparently utterly disgusting. I don't know if this is true or not. Yeah, I'm having question marks about like exactly what right? Me too, Like what was happening with embalming at this point? Well, and the thing is, even if embalming was well established at this point, there is always the possibility that one guy got it wrong. Now, Yeah, like I know, in North America, it's a compareative recent thing, like a nineteenth century thing, not a so yeah. Yeah. But still there's also the factor that, right, we are getting these accounts. This came up in that Sackville West biography, and so we're getting that account translated, and I also have that thing of like has anybody gone back to retranslate it, or even are there things that the best translator might not get because there's some nuance in the wording that we that is completely out of practice now that nobody that wasn't even very popular to begin with, like some turn a phrase, so don't I don't know. That's why I didn't want to include it. One because yuck, and two because I feel like there's some mystery as to whether or not it's true. But it's it's a funny thing to think about that. Even on the way out, she kind of flipped the bird to the mark. Uh nope. So two things. The first thing is what you were saying about like very old documents being translated. It reminded me a little bit of these annotated editions of Jane Austen's novels that I have, where it really is like the page of the novel on one page and the facing page and all annotations on it, and how much of that is just explaining things that is not not terminology we use now, not how we think about things now, stuff like that, where like it would be like that furnishings meant furniture like that one came up several times reason I remember it. But when there was one of the things that we were reading that was a quote from her, and I stumbled over it and you were like, I don't know what that means. And I had a moment where it reminded me of that, of like reading through all of these annotations that just explained things that just aren't things that we say or do now so much. The other thing is I was reading the outline for this episode when you sent me out, when you sent it over to me, and I got to the part where it said Victoria Sackville West, and I was like, oh, that's funny. Is she related to Vita Sackville West? Because it had just never occurred to me that her full first name was Victoria. Yeah, Like I have never heard her referred to as anything. I've admittedly, like never read a full complete biography of her or anything, but like, I have always heard her referred to as Vita Sackville West. So I just immediately assumed that this Victoria was some other person. She was not one and the same. Yes, listen, I'm always gonna say Victoria because I love it.

00:07:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, Anne, Marie Louise, Yeah, I really, I mean I said it to you during one of our breaks, but I really marvel at her being actively engaged in battle.

00:08:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I likened it too. You know, if if somebody like Paris Hilton was like, yeah, I'm gonna get involved in active combat, you'd be like, what it was that sort of unusual. And there are a lot of interesting paintings of her that kind of borrow from that Amazon nickname. She was apparently a very big personality and people liked being around her, whether she liked being around them or not. That I do also find it really interesting that someone that was so central to life at court and seemed to love it was suddenly like let's run away and not be part of this at all. But that's also, you know, kind of the beginning of that trend that happened by the time we get to Louis the sixteenth, like where you know, like Marie Antoinette got really into Russou and was like, let's live out in nature and had a tiny farm built for herself. Those are connected ideas, they're just yeah, they're a little ways apart on the timeline, but like they're in the same vein of trend in the royalty. Yeah, I don't, I don't. I don't want a farm. I mean, farms are neat to visit. But I can't imagine me like, let's go live in the middle of nowhere. We'll put some hermit holes in the forest. And also, to me, it's one of those things that just seems like the indulgent fantasy of a privileged mind, right, Like the more appealing thing to me would be like kind of like a neighborhood. Yeah, but more like the houses are arranged around like a central common area. Yeah, and all of my friends live in them, and so I can just like walk next door to my friend's house and in the summertime we can all, you know, hang out in the nice weather, cook some food, and not have to do this situation where it's like I got to drive twenty minutes or take an hour on the train to go, yeah see a friend. Yeah, that's really the options. Twenty minutes in the car an hour on the train, right. I always say that if I magically were to like win the lottery, yeah, I would just make offers to all of our neighbors, yeah, to buy their houses. So one is obviously for like shoes, shoe house, and you know, the various things I have purchased too much of and need more space for. But that others we would fix up to be like, you know, anybody who needs a place to live can hang right, just maybe put a roller rink in one of them. That's one of the that's one of my big things lately to think.

00:11:03
Speaker 3: About, right, come on, lottery.

00:11:18
Speaker 1: He talked about Harrison Dyer. This week we did we're recording other episodes after this one that are coming out next week. And I have said this is accidental drama week because there's so much drama in this episode and then there's so much drama that's a little sneak preview also accidental but high faith theme, oh yeah, yeah, random, And I didn't go into that very much here. There's so much I didn't go into. I don't either in the upcoming ones. And I this this may sound frightening initially, but I feel like I understand Harrison Dyer on one level, yeah right, because he is clearly compulsive. Like you know, Mark Epstein kind of lays out the case in his book that like if you look at the way he did all of his work, like the way he kept his notes, the way he lived his life in all other ways. He had compulsion issues. Right, he never did anything by half measure. He had to have all of the insects specimens. Yet and I totally get that. I have that that same drive to like I wanted to dig to the center of the earth as a kid, I tried to cordon off the playground sandbox so that people would not mess up my project. I understand. I understand all of that. I understand. I listen. I have a shoe problem, I have a fabric problem, I have all of the collecting of things problems. I get compulsion. But where I'm like, wait a minute, is that like then to kind of make that into like a tool of cruelty is very weird to me. Sure, And That's where I'm like, dude, you could have just been a fun cook instead of a jerk and we would have loved you. And who made up a whole person in order to be a big a mess in order to be a big a miss? And there are some interesting theories about his bigamy. One thing that came up that I thought was really really interesting was in that Nevada Supreme court case where they heard the appeal of Wileska's divorce is there's nurse testimony where they have the nurse who delivered or was present at the hospital where they delivered several of Wileska's kids. I don't know if it was all three or just one or two, but she was like, oh, you know, I thought it was odd that this other guy was there and that he would lie down in bed with her at the hospital. And I'm like, what, there's like an element of it where they're they're both so cloak and daggery and so brazen about the whole thing that I'm like, this is just bananas. Yeah, And the idea that like, she tied up so much valuable time in the legal system trying to divorce her imaginary friend because she accidentally had a paper trayl of that imaginary friend that she had to get rid of to marry the guy she actually wanted to be married to who was her imaginary friend. Like, it's just it's very Yeah, it's a lot. There's a whole lot. And that's not even the tunnels. No, I mean I find that whole part way more interesting than the tunnels. Actually, obviously, I just find the tunnel part scary because the idea that he was I mean, it does seem like some of his neighbors knew about it at least at one point. Yeah. I kind of think if I had been a neighbor, I might have raised the alarm of being like, hey, this guy's tunneling big giant tunnels and my house is going to be struck really unsound. Well, I will say this. Here are my two thoughts on why nobody raised a stink Okay, even though he was not an engineer. I think because he was respected as an intellectual, they thought like, he knows what he's doing. And also, I don't think they realized how extensive. They weren't sure. I think they just thought like that guy just loves to dig. I don't know, he's just moving dirt around down there. Yeah, I bet they did not realize how far it went. That also seems to be the case with the person tunneling on TikTok. I have not been into the tunnel TikTok very much, but it digbors are mad about it. Her neighbors are mad about it, for sure. But it also seems like the projects she initially started of I'm gonna make like a sort of bunker slash shelter expanded into something much much bigger, and like that was when it really became a problem for the neighbors. That's at least my cursory understanding of having not gone down that rabbit hole on the TikTok because it stresses me out. Yeah, that's more or less my take on it as well. And I too have not gone deep into it because I'm just like, ugh, I can't with that level of drama. Here is an interesting thing that ties some of this weird bigamy issue together in a strange way. There's still okay, we're making a constellation of data points here that I'm like, huh. Five days after Zella and Harrison got married, Harrison's sister Pearl got married to a man named Siguard Adolphus Knop. Was this a real person, Yes, to a real person who was a doctor and a eugenicist. Oh dear, Oh, so I'm surprising to have eugenics at this point in history. And there have been some efforts at trying to understand Harrison's behavior in this double life, and eugenics plays a part in it because there are two big chunks of material where a lot of information that we have about him in terms of availability to present day come from. And one is a series of articles that came out in The Washington Post in twenty twelve written by John Kelly where he kind of lays out the whole story. And then we have Epstein's book, and both of them mentioned that it seems as though Harrison was himself a eugenicist who believed his genetics were superior, oh dear, and that this may have been both the real catalyst for his conflicts with Zella, because she was not and also she ended up having hearing loss that she thought was genetic, and so that is why she did not want to have more children, and thus he went, well, I got to have more children with someone, oh dear, and that that may have been his It's a little bit tricky, right, because I don't want anyone to think like that justifies it, or we're trying to say that that explains it, but it is an explainer of his behavior, which is still bad. Right. And there's also this thing that comes up periodically, and I'm like, this gets real squirrely of people wanting to kind of carefully suggest that Zella had stopped having sex with him, and that that's why he was driven to another woman. I have very strong feelings about this, which are like, cool, if that relationship is a worker for you anymore, get out of it and then go find what makes you happy. But don't this degree of concoction of a completely fake thing and very purposely lying right unacceptable? Yeah, it's super duper weird to me, and it's so yuckis I don't?

00:19:30
Speaker 2: So?

00:19:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, he he's a monster. He also in Being a Jerk would we mentioned a little bit of his his fiction writing which we didn't get into deeply, that he did, and which he included sometimes in the publication Reality and he would do these really really it's almost like you know, self in assertion friend fiction that he would do in some of these stories, because a lot of his stories were clearly about things that were part of his life, like like having two families, like having But he did one after he went after miss Mitchell for her book and she sued him. He later wrote a short story called The Taming of a Suffragette in which she is clearly a character in it that is very thinly veiled that of course becomes like you know, not the hero of the piece, that's for sure. This is another accidental theme between today. I like this episode on Dire and like our next week episodes. I feel like people are gonna start guessing in the listener mail of what next week's episodes are because next week's episodes also have a number of purported works of fiction that were like thinly veiled autobiography. Yeah, yeah, I have such a list. I don't want to hit everything. You're probably wondering, or if you haven't, maybe you will now what happened to those tunnels? Well, yeah, that's a great question. His old neighborhood still structurally unsound. The tunnels at fifteen twelve twenty First Street got left there for a while. One of the sets of tunnels I think that second house on B Street got sold to the government, and well LESCA thought they were using it to like the tunnels to grow mushrooms as like part of a scientific experiment. And then later there was actually some discussion of and I think even legislation introduced of like hey, we got these perfectly good tunnels under Washington, d C. Why don't we use them as like raid shelters, Like why don't we fortify them and actually make them into spaces that can have public benefit. And a survey was done and it was determined they aren't really big enough to work that way, even though they're pretty big, like just in terms of like the narrowness of spaces and putting people in cramp spaces in an emergency that was not really viable. And then the Big tunnel, apparently in nineteen fifty eight, started to collapse. And one of the things that's interesting, this is kind of the end of Epstein's book, is when he mentions that there's this kind of interesting timing where as that tunnel was starting to collapse and Dyer's name came up in the news again, his kids from each of his family visited that tunnel like as a like, okay, here's what my dad did, and like that's the one thing that brought them sort of together. They didn't seem to interact or anything. It was like one was there at one point in the day and okay, and I'm just like, this is the weirdest this is the weirdest code, to the weirdest story, to the weirdest behavior. Yeah, there is a really fun note that I want to end his story on because it's not about him at all, Okay, it is about his collaborator, JB. Smith, who worked a lot in this as well, his fellow entomologist. And I mean when I say these two men went at it like there are if you wanted to do just an episode on scientific argument m we could easily do it and read their correspondence back and forth and things that they wrote to other people about each other, and things they put in journals about each other and like. But someone at some point had kind of pointedly asked JB. Smith, like, why do you still work with this man if you clearly have so many problems? And his response was, I am more interested in mosquitoes than in quarreling, okay. And I'm like, that is probably the best attitude anyone could have in dealing with someone like Harrison Dyer, I agree, who clearly loved to quarrel, loved it, and loved to make his life complicated. I imagine him down there digging, being like, man, what did I do? I'm really in it, Like I got two families to support, I got a lot of problems, and I made them all myself. I don't know compulsion. I get the cruelty not so much. Right. If this is your weekend coming up, we hope you don't have to deal with anybody quarrelsome complicated, or in any way possibly passing themselves off as a fictional person. If you have to work or have other responsibilities that don't give you this time off, I still hope you don't have to deal with any of that, and I hope you get some time for yourself. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then again on Monday with something brand new. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.