Political philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778), who famously wrote about education and the general innocence of children, fathered five illegitimate children and consigned all of them to an orphanage.

Painting by Frederick Remington "Coming and going of the Pony Express"

My sixteen-year-old daughter will soon be getting her driver’s license. I’ve already experienced this anxiety-ridden time once, with her older brother. We parents know all the statistics about teenagers and risk taking. We know how dangerous driving is. To make matters worse, I’m a gasper. The older kid can’t stand when I sit in the passenger seat, because even though the kid has had his license for over two years, I still gasp at everything.  (I blogged about risk-taking, fun-loving genetic predispositions here.)

Obviously, risk-taking teens are not a new phenomenon. Over a century and a half ago, teenage boys flocked to be part of the Pony Express system, a terribly dangerous job.

Lawnmowers of the mid-1800s were pulled by horses. On grand estates, the horses often wore oversized leather booties so as not to leave footprints.

Eighteen percent of the presidents of the United States have died while in office.

You may be familiar with the ongoing court case involving the shoe designer, Christian Louboutin, who claims that the designer Yves Saint Laurent stole his signature design by making and selling red-soled shoes. Louboutin believes he ought to be granted trademark protection for making shoes with a red heel. This is a heated battle and is big news in the fashion world. The color red might sound like a silly thing to fight about, but there is a lot of money at stake. Louboutin’s shoes cost between $400 and $6,000 dollars.

A central question is whether the color red can be trademarked.  As I have blogged about before, the color red has a rich and fascinating history. I see why Louboutin is steamed up about the issue, but he certainly did not invent red-heeled shoes.

A pair of men's leather shoes: c.1688-1695 The heels of these shoes were probably originally red.© Museum of London

Heels became popular during the 1500s to keep riders’ feet in the stirrups. As most women rode side-saddle, the heeled boots were mostly worn by men. In fact, up until relatively recently, men wore high heels more often than did women.

Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659 – 1743) portrait de Louis XIV

Shoe snobbishness did not begin with Louboutin, either. Diminutive French King Louis XIV wore red heels. He passed an edict saying that only those who were nobly born and in the royal favor were allowed the privilege of wearing shoes with red heels.

I remember being traumatized by Hans Christian Andersen’s story, The Red Shoes, where a girl named Karen basically dances herself to death, unable to kick off the red shoes she coveted so much from her bloodied feet. It’s a pretty harsh morality tale, and the red shoes are a symbol of overreaching social climbing and vanity.

I think Louboutin is probably aware of the history of red shoes, and, like Andersen, knows their power. And no doubt, more than one modern woman who’s danced in towering Louboutin heels has felt poor Karen’s pain.

The Gauls made a paste from wood ash and animal fat and smeared it into their hair to make it glossy.

James Madison (1751 – 1836), fourth president of the United States, was 5’4″ tall and weighed less than 100 pounds.

Anonymous, Catherine de Medici, 1555

On Friday I blogged about a notorious mother, Agrippina, in honor of Mother’s Day. Today’s Evil-Mother-Blog is about Catherine de Medici (1519 -1589), the staunchly Catholic queen of France, who gets at least part of the blame for starting the French Wars of Religion.

Catherine was rumored to have dispatched quite a few of her enemies with poison. One of her favorite methods was poisoned gloves.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, perfumed gloves were all the rage in Europe. At a time when personal bathing was infrequent, they were an excellent form of aromatherapy, a way to mask one’s own smell, or the smells around one. And poisoned gloves became a popular murder weapon during the Renaissance.

In 1572, Catherine’s daughter, Margaret, was engaged to marry the King of Navarre, Henry of Bourbon (who would later become Henry IV of France). Henry’s mother, Jeanne de Navarre (1528 – 1572) was a Huguenot (Protestant). She died under suspicious circumstances two months before her son’s wedding. Rumors circulated that Jeanne had been poisoned by Catherine, who allegedly sent her a pair of perfumed, poisoned gloves. The rumors could not be confirmed, but Jeanne de Navarre’s death unleashed the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of the Huguenots just a few weeks later, on August 24, 1572.

Francois Dubois, Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, 1572 - 1584

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Agrippina

In honor of Mother’s Day (this coming Sunday), today’s blog is about one of history’s most notorious mothers, Agrippina. She was the sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero.

It’s probably wise to take the accounts of Roman historians with a grain of sale. The Roman writers Suetonius and Tacitus were not kind to Agrippina the Younger, and also contradict one another regarding some of the events. Still, a few facts seem incontrovertible.

She gave birth to Nero in AD 37, and subsequently her husband died of mysterious causes. Then Claudius’s third wife, Valeria Messalina, was accused of conspiring against him, and was executed. Agrippina became the fourth wife of the Emperor Claudius, who was also her uncle. (Cue the music.) She persuaded him to adopt her son Nero, and then to permit his daughter, Octavia, to marry Nero. Claudius already had a son, Britannicus, heir to the throne. Still with me?

After that, the bodies began to pile up quickly. A number of people who stood in the way of Nero’s becoming emperor died under suspicious circumstances. First off, oopsa-daisy! Claudius’s son and Nero’s half brother, Britannicus, died of mysterious causes. Then, as soon as Claudius appointed Nero as his successor . . . oopsa-daisy! Claudius died, in AD 54. Natural causes? Or was he poisoned by a platter of mushrooms laced with arsenic trioxide and prepared by his wife? You do the math. The sixteen-year-old Nero was now Emperor.

Nero soon chafed at his mother’s Tiger-Momming/helicopter parenting. She saw herself as co-ruler and imperial mother, so he had her sent away, but not far enough, it seems. According to Suetonius, the last straw was that she embarrassed him in front of his mistress by kissing him with “indecent passion” in public. (Cue the film.) Whatever the reason, Nero seems to have decided that his mother had to die.

But he needed it to look like an accident. He appears to have tried three times to poison her, but it didn’t work. It seems she’d long feared being poisoned, and knew how to dose herself with antidotes. So he had to go to Plan B.

According to contemporary accounts, Nero had her lured onto a collapsible boat, designed to fall apart at sea. When it did fall apart, one of her handmaidens unwisely called for help and claimed to be the Empress. She was summarily bashed to death with an oar, while the real Empress swam to safety.

Then he arranged for a lead ceiling over her bed to fall on her. That malfunctioned.

Finally, in exasperation, Nero went to Plan D and had his mother bludgeoned and stabbed. Nice.

Some accounts assert that Nero was wracked with guilt over his treatment of his mother.

John William Waterhouse, 1878: The Remorse of the Emperor Nero after the Murder of his Mother

sources:

Women in the Ancient World, by Joyce E. Salisbury

also translations of Tacitus, Suetonius

Ming Dynasty Emperor Xuande (r.1425-1435) was such a fan of the sport of cricket fighting, he was dubbed the “cricket emperor.”