12 thoughts on “Top 5 Questions About Versailles: Ep. 1

  1. Wolves=GOt craze thing.
    Swimming in shirt in a pond= P&P craze over Dracy thing
    Lady doctor=The Outlander craze thing.
    Only my suggestions, didn’t see the series (yet). The choco baby is truly horrible from every aspect (perhaps noone in the staff has a bay or ever saw a newborn).

  2. Henriette probably would go swimming, though perhaps not in a lake. :) Louis XIW was a keen swimmer at least until his mid-forties and the whole court had swimming tournaments every summer, both men and women. And women did swim in their shifts.

  3. The accent thing makes sense if you figure she’s speaking French with a bad foreign accent.

    Gilbert and Sullivan played this for all it was worth in The Grand Duke, in which a bunch of English people were playing Germans, but with “translated” English accents. The one English character—played by a Hungarian actress—had a German/Hungarian accent to indicate that she was supposedly speaking German with a bad foreign accent. There is even a reference made to her broken German.

    It’s still done that way, and it’s hilarious.

  4. Thank you so much for using the correct past participle form of “swim”–“swum”! I’m constantly having to explain to my students that it is, actually, a word. Bravo!

    1. I constantly deal with writers—many with master’s and doctoral degrees—who couldn’t distinguish between the simple past tense of a verb and its past participle. Unfortunately, they won’t have me around much longer to make them look good since, because I’m old enough to have learned the mechanics of English, I’m heading for retirement soom.

  5. I think Henrietta Anne may have had a French accent. She left England when she was about 2 years old -if memory doesn’t fail me- and was brought up in the French entourage of her French mother at France, so I would go with a French accent here. However, I remember having red letters written to her by her brother Charles II in English, so she clearly wasn’t ignorant about the language.

    PS: please forgive any grammar mistakes, English is not my first language. Thank you.

  6. The accents thing is all bec. the series consciously chose to use mostly British & Canadian actors, so, oops, a French actress slipped in. While it’s a French production, filmed in France, they didn’t want it to be spoken in French & subtitled / dubbed (or use accented French actors, apparently) so the series would have broad appeal & sell worldwide. This article sums it up: https://www.thelocal.fr/20150305/versailles-series-french-tv-english

    The black baby / black nun rumor seemed really thrown in so there’d be EVEN MORE controversy, but yeah, could the visual dept. have not made it look so gross? Wtf?

    I’m right there with you on the whole ‘lady doctor’ cliche, & I agree with the comment that it feels like an Outlander ripoff (at least that had the excuse of time travel).

  7. With all due respect, your remark about “mixed race babies” was a bit odd to me. Lol. I’ve seen friends with mixed race babies look any number of ways, not all mixed babies have lighter skin. That being said, THAT baby did look just covered in something so I do agree with you there. Also, I found the series dry and pretty formulaic. I’m disappointed as I was excited for this one.

  8. The accent thing is bonkers. I don’t mind if they all have English accents, but when they throw what seems to be 3 actual French actors in with French accents it messes it all up. So I thought well Henriette is foreign so she is “different”, but then they send her to England to meet her brother who alas also has an English accent. So it is just awful. One of these things is not like the other.

  9. There were more than a few ‘women in men’s “industries”‘ in real life- why make sh*t up?

    For example, I read about a movie concerning a real female artist (of which there’s over 60, in the 17th c alone, according to Wikipedia), Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c. 1656)- if the plot/ critics’ opinion is anything to go by, I won’t be watching the movie itself, & in terms of history (I found extracts of the actual trial) it sounds like a travesty.

    Now, in terms of the sciences (according to Wikipedia, not the greatest of sources, but not a bad starting point)- there were some 28 in the 17th C, including at least one who was a pharmacist (it said so in brackets), two duchesses & the famed Aphra Behn.
    One of the 28 was Louise (Bourgeois) Boursier (1563–1636); a French midwife called ‘The Scholar’: midwife to the French royal family of King Henry IV & Marie de Médicis- Louis & Philippe’s father & siblings (including Minette’s mother) were delivered by her, & she ‘helped raise the art from folklore to science through her prodigious writings & methods which were based on common sense’ – she was married, & had children (what I mean, is she had a life- women could have lives & careers, it wasn’t a case of either, or)… she also had a daughter, & a descendant who were midwives, in the case of the latter, she too was a royal midwife. Though she retired as a ‘royal midwife’ after Henrietta’s birth, she was, in fact, still working- & in 1627 delivered (pardon the pun) a hell of a written smackdown in the aftermath of the Duchess of Orleans’ childbirth death to her opponents, using her maiden name- she’s also known as the first woman to have written about obstetrics; the first of 4 (though 2 are regarded as expanded editions of the first) published in 1609.
    There’s also Marie Meurdrac (c. 1610-1680); a French chemist & alchemist- she too was married, & wrote a work in 1656- scholars have argued that this was ‘the first work on chemistry by a woman since that of Maria the Jewess’ from the late classical period.

    See– there’s real historical inspiration, right there- right place, right century- & within the industry, as it were- what does it cost them to do some more research, to get closer to history?
    Sorry if this is a bit long, lol.

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