Not all rats are kings
RAT KING, n. This newsletter has discussed etymologies related to foxes, butterflies, lobsters, and dogs, and this week, it’s all about rats—or rather, rat kings.
A rat king, in case you are blessed not to know this, is a bunch of rats knotted together by their tails or hair or straw or some other sticky material, through a process I shudder to investigate further.
a thing i think we don’t talk enough about is the fact that rat kings are actually mounds of rats and, as far as i know, have zero ruling authority over other rats
January 2nd 2018 8 Retweets 50 Likes
The English term is a calque (loan translation) from German Rattenkönig. I guess Germans had the misfortune of discovering this phenomenon first. French also borrows from the German to make roi-de-rats, so the authority metaphor exists in at least three languages.
French Wikipedia tells me we call this a “rat king” because of German folklore that the King of Rats would have used the piled bodies of the other rats as a dais, a very Revolutionary concept of monarchy. (It’s not wrong.) English Wikipedia says the term did not originally refer to rats at all, but to a person who lived off others. Martin Luther wrote that friars carried the Pope “as the rats carry their king,” with no further explanation, suggesting that everybody in the Holy Roman Empire in 1535 just nodded along with this idea of rat monarchy/mooching.
Sometimes people refer to the antagonist of The Nutcracker as the Mouse King, but either way the ballet dancer in this interview is very handsome.
Should you wish for more information on rat kings, here is Mental Floss’s comprehensive history, but I gotta warn you, there’s a lotta pictures of gross dead rats in that article. Click at your own risk, friends.
We can take comfort in the fact that maybe rat kings are a hoax; the preserved specimens that exist might be frauds created by human hands. Much like the ruling authority of actual kings, rat kings are only as real as we make them.
HERE SHE GOES ABOUT FRENCH HISTORY AGAIN
Well, now that this discussion of rat kings has me sufficiently up-in-arms about monarchy, I will say that in Capital-R Romance, the only things I read in French this week were passages of the first official edition of the Code civil des Français, AKA the Code Napoléon, the basis for French law since 1804 (Year XI if you’re feeling Revolutionary).
I was trying to confirm that a widow would inherit her husband’s property. As far as I can tell, she would, as long as the married couple had no legitimate or natural children. This information is relevant to one (1) sentence of the draft I am writing.
Also, my draft is set during the July Monarchy (1830-1848), so the 1804 Code civil isn’t perfectly applicable, since France undergoes two regime changes between 1804 and the latter half of 1830. The Code Napoléon survives both of them, but not without alteration. Still, perhaps it’s time to set this single-sentence research question aside until my draft has a workable ending.
I have also been reading The Black Count by Tom Reiss, which is not in French but it is a work of nonfiction about France, and as a biography of a dashing, heroic figure from history—General Alexandre Dumas, father of the novelist—it is very Romantic. It tells the tale of an extraordinary life, and it is great and I highly recommend it.
If you think you might wanna read this book, just scroll until the next horizontal line. For real. I’m gonna spoil the entire thing. I gotta put my feelings somewhere.
Alex (his preferred name) was born in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, to a free Black mother named Marie Cessette Dumas and a white French marquis named Antoine Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, who was—like most aristocrats of the time, I assume—a selfish pile of garbage. The marquis was hiding from his family, obligations, and debts in a little town in Saint-Domingue for almost thirty years. He got married and had a bunch of kids, and then after his wife had passed away, he one day decided to go back to France and claim the title of marquis again. To fund his voyage home, Antoine sold his older kids into slavery (this monster, good lord) and he temporarily sold his youngest and ““favorite”” son, twelve-year-old Alex, to the ship captain in exchange for passage. Yikes yikes yikes yikes yikes. When they got to France, Antoine bought his son back, reclaimed his title, and then raised Alex with all the education and luxury and privilege of a white French aristocrat.
It’s unclear to me if Alex ever forgave Antoine that whole “sold you and your siblings into slavery” thing, but he did live large in Paris for a few years on his dad’s money. By the time he was grown, Alex was 6’1”, great with horses and sabers, smart as hell, and by all accounts a total babe. Paris loved him.
(Paris also loved Alex’s friend and mentor, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, another mixed-race aristocrat who was a brilliant fencer, violinist, and composer. Dumas and Saint-Georges were the most famous, but there were many other people of color living in Paris, because it was a diverse major world city. The next time somebody says that putting characters of color in a historical romance novel isn’t ~accurate~, especially if said characters are wealthy and powerful and generally having a good time in life, we now legally have the right to cut that person with a saber.)
Eventually, Alex decided that he was tired of spending Dad’s dwindling fortune and that he wanted to make his own way in the world. He enlisted in the army under his mom’s name (suggesting that he was still rightfully angry with his shitty father) and started a military career that would eventually see him rise to the rank of General.
Giving up his aristocratic name and title turned out to be a real smart move on Alex’s part, since it was the late 1780s and being a French aristocrat was about to go violently out of style. I don’t mean to make him sound cynical; he was an avowed Republican (again, this is “Republican” in the French-Revolution sense of believing that voting is a right, not the contemporary-US sense of believing that it’s a privilege). Alex was proud to be Citizen Dumas instead of the Marquis de la Pailleterie. The French Revolution—unlike the US Revolution and its evil compromise on slavery—was a rare moment in history when it wasn’t awful to be a Black person in a majority white environment. The Revolutionaries granted full rights and citizenship to free Black and mixed-race people, and then abolished slavery.* They elected Black legislators. Alex believed in and loved the Revolutionary cause; in its best moments, the Revolution loved him back.
FIRST DIGRESSION ON THE NATURE OF THE REVOLUTION. Something that often gets glossed over when we talk about the French Revolution is how bellicose it was. We tend to think of revolutions as happening within a country, and certainly there was massive, massive violence and upheaval within France during the Revolution. But the Revolutionaries were not satisfied with France alone. Being so Enlightened—more Enlightened than everybody else—it was their duty to bring their cool new invention of modern republics to the rest of Europe.**
With military force.
(Does this whole dress-your-war-up-in-democracy thing make any other Americans feel ill?)
It’s not just that monarchs in Spain and Austria and elsewhere were conceptually threatened by the fall of the French monarchy. The threat was literal. The French Revolution produced many armies—among them the Army of the Alps, commanded by General Dumas, and the Army of Italy, commanded by some Corsican nobody had ever heard of—and started multiple wars in the 1790s.
SECOND DIGRESSION BECAUSE LOOK AT THIS PAINTING. The Revolutionaries felt duty-bound to conquer Europe, leaving a trail of little republics in the wake of their armies. (Naturally, these republics would be allies to France, out of gratitude.) They also believed that because Paris was now the capital of the modern world, a shining beacon of democracy, it necessarily had to have all the coolest art. A natural combination: freedom, suffrage, and pillaging the hell out of the places you just invaded.
The Wedding at Cana, Paolo Veronese, 1563
If you’ve ever been to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa (acquired by France during the Renaissance through ethical, nonviolent means), you might have turned around to find this gigantic marvel of a painting looming over you: Paolo Veronese’s 1563 masterpiece The Wedding at Cana, seized—liberated from Venice by the Revolutionary Army of Italy.
(If you’re wondering which particular Revolutionaries first started using the fancy language of liberation to justify their plunder, it was a guy named Napoleon.)
You can’t tell from this tiny digital image of it, but this painting is 22’3” by 32’ (6.77 by 9.94 meters if you’re feeling Revolutionary). In other words, incomprehensibly huge. It remains the largest painting in the Louvre. Transporting it from Venice to Paris in 1797 required cutting it into pieces and rolling it up like a carpet. Looting this thing was a lot of work. When the Venetians asked for the painting back as part of a reconciliation treaty in the early 1800s—the Revolution was dead by then, stabbed in the back by the same guy who stole this painting, who was already well on his way to being Emperor—the French claimed it was too fragile to transport. Yeah, I wonder whose fault that could be.
(France Culture’s La Série documentaire did a fascinating podcast series on looting and repatriation through history, if you speak French and want to know more about this topic. It’s educational, but… grim.)
BACK TO ALEX DUMAS. So anyway, the Revolution aims to win a lot of wars, and they need good leaders for that. Alex Dumas is one of them. He rises through the ranks fast thanks to his competence.
Napoleon’s soldiers spent the early and mid-1790s pillaging Italy, and meanwhile General Alex Dumas was stuck in the Alps, trying to win battles in snowy mountains and not get called back to Paris to be publicly shot or guillotined by the Committee of Public Safety, the ominously named, ultra-suspicious, murder-happy Revolutionary organization that was basically running France during the Terror, in 1793-4. They killed a lot of other generals. (They killed a lot of everyone.)
Alex managed to survive the Alps with a well-deserved reputation as a brilliant strategist and a decent human being, which was no easy thing. After the Alps, he got sent to put down the counterrevolutionary insurrection in the Vendée (western France). He came out of that atrociously violent horrorshow with both sides commending his honor, which is a miracle. Unlike Napoleon, Alex considered it wrong to steal from civilians, and this difference was the first of many conflicts between them.
“Wow,” I bet you’re thinking, “Alex Dumas seems really cool. He had an extraordinary life and played such a huge role in history. How come I’ve never heard of him?”
The short answer is Napoleon. (That fucking guy.)
The long answer is also Napoleon, Rat Emperor—just in more detail. (He was just a regular old Rat General at the time, soon to become Rat First Consul. Technically he doesn’t crown himself Rat Emperor until 1804. But you know what I mean.)
Boney’s appetite for conquest took the French military into Egypt, which was a disaster. While in Egypt, all the locals assumed the 6’1” dark-skinned, Herculean babe who looked so good astride a horse was the man in charge, and that made Napoleon jealous as hell. There’s a reason we named a whole inferiority complex after the man. (He wasn’t above using Dumas’s appearance to his advantage when it suited him, though.)
The Egypt Expedition involved a whole lot of violence and disease and suffering. The Egyptians hated having the French there just as much as the French hated being there. One time, Dumas pointed out that the whole thing was a mess and the French really should go home, thinking he was in the company of a few likeminded generals. But someone ratted him out to Napoleon and Boney never forgot or forgave.
Since things were not going well in Egypt, Napoleon bounced and left all his generals, Dumas included, to handle it. When Dumas finally got permission to go home to see his wife and child, the ship he boarded wasn’t in good enough shape to make it across the Mediterranean, so Dumas and company came ashore in Taranto, in southern Italy.
They thought they were making landfall in the Republic of Naples, but things were so chaotic in the Italian peninsula (thx, France) that it was, in fact, the Kingdom of Naples, a regime that was extremely hostile to all things French and Republican. Dumas and everyone on the ship were taken prisoner.
The other men were eventually freed or transferred, but Dumas and another French general, Manscourt, were held prisoner for almost two years with no recourse to justice and no way to communicate with the outside world. During that two years, the Kingdom of Naples collapsed into lawlessness. Dumas didn’t get out until after Napoleon’s coup d’état, and by then, the world looked drastically different.
The Revolution was over. France was no longer a republic. The state became steadily more racist as Napoleon stripped Black and mixed-race citizens of their rights and ultimately reinstated slavery, perhaps the most monstrous of his many crimes. (France didn’t abolish slavery again until 1848. Still better than some nightmare countries I could name.)
Free at last, Alex did get to go home and be with his family for a few years, but he never got his military pension and he’s the only general of the Revolution who never received the Légion d’Honneur (an honor Napoleon invented, one he denied Dumas on purpose). For a while, there was a statue of Dumas in Paris, but the Nazis destroyed it during their occupation. The Nazis destroyed a lot of statues, but they had a particular interest in erasing the memory of a French general of color who fought for liberty, equality, and brotherhood.
The statue was never replaced, but there is a monument to Alex Dumas. It’s one of the most famous novels ever written. You might have recognized it already, in this story of a wrongfully imprisoned man wasting away for years in a fortress—a man who returns to society only to find himself forgotten and his enemies in power. Alexandre Dumas, Alex’s son, was able to give his fictional protagonist in The Count of Monte Cristo the satisfying revenge that Alex never got.
Still, I think Paris has room for one more statue.
*The law abolishing slavery was not carried out in all colonies, mostly due to white slave-owners stalling/ignoring the legislation. Kind of a Juneteenth situation, but without the parts worth celebrating. And never forget that Haiti didn’t wait around for France to pass any laws.
**As far as I know, there wasn’t discussion/intention of letting France’s overseas colonies rule themselves. That’s not ideologically consistent with the whole “liberty for everybody” thing, but it is consistent with the apparent Revolutionary objective of conquering and looting Europe. You know, for freedom.
FREEDOM, EQUALITY, ROMANCE NOVELS
In small-r romance, I did not read anything with dictators or kings or rats or rat kings in it, and that is a huge relief to me. (In fact, I have never read a romance novel with a rat king in it. The closest I’ve come is An Unseen Attraction by KJ Charles, which features a variety of horrifying taxidermy, or A Case of Possession, also by KJ Charles, which features a plague of giant, magical rats. KJ has us covered, I guess.)
Anyway.
Price of Honor (2 f/f couples, all cis lesbians, contemporary, romantic suspense) by Radclyffe. I bought a print copy of this book at The Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles as a “blind date,” and it looked like this:
The image is of a book in shiny silver wrapping paper, and the handwritten nametag on the paper says “Hello, my name is… F/F. One is the daughter of the President. The other is the daughter of a domestic terrorist. Also they’re in love.”
It was the only f/f book in the blind date pile, so I picked it up even though romantic suspense isn’t my preferred subgenre. I like the enemies-to-lovers trope enough to let a lot of things slide. But the description is not accurate! Also missing from that description, and the entire cover and synopsis of this book, is the fact that this book is number NINE in a series. That knowledge would really have changed my reading of it—perhaps I would have started at the beginning of the series—and now I feel like I can’t accurately evaluate this book, which is a continuation of the previous eight books that follow Blair, the president’s daughter, and her Secret Service agent Cam. The romance between supporting characters Dusty and Viv—respectively a K9 agent and a journalist—was my favorite part, and not coincidentally, it begins and concludes within this volume. Content warnings: violence, domestic terrorism (bombs), a character gets seriously injured.
Playing House (m/f, both cis het, contemporary, novella) by Ruby Lang. This novella stars urban planners Fay Liu and Oliver Huang. They are both adorable, and Playing House is so funny and sweet. Fay and Oliver meet on a tour of historic homes, where Fay pretends Oliver is her boyfriend in order to get rid of an aggressive guy. Then they take the ruse further, pretending to househunt as a wealthy couple just so they can nerd out about architecture together—among other things. Fay is driven and ambitious, and her previous marriage fell apart because her ex couldn’t deal with it, but Oliver admires and respects her drive, which I love. Content warnings: a divorce in the past, an absent father (mentioned), nothing else I can think of.
A Summer for Scandal (m/f, both cis het, historical) by Lydia San Andres. This book is delightful all the way through, and I am so glad the library dropped it into my lap just after I wrote last week that I love it when characters in a romance novel read romance novels. Emilia Cruz, the heroine of this book, is writing a scandalously sexy newspaper serial under a pen name; Ruben Torres, the hero, is respected writer who moonlights as a lowbrow critic/gossip columnist, also under a pen name. Ruben reads and reviews Emilia’s serial every week, and he’s vowed to find out the author’s identity. Isn’t that delicious? I also loved this book’s beautifully drawn historical setting, the early twentieth century in a Caribbean town on a fictional island neighboring Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. There are so many wonderful details about fashion (wearing corsets and shirtwaists in the tropical heat) and food (Emilia and her sister trying to make guava jelly!) and the fight for women’s suffrage. The atmosphere is so rich that it gave me one of those moments where I was surprised to look up from the book and remember that I am in rainy, autumnal New England. Content warnings: alcoholism, death of a parent prior to the story, a supporting character commits adultery, grief.
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