Ray, I'm fascinated to hear this as I've never heard it before either and must say that I find it a wee bit unlikely since my daughter spent a (high school) summer as a re-enacting "male" soldier at Louisbourg (there weren't female soldiers in historical Louisbourg but they had never encountered either the current Canadian anti-gender discrimination laws or my daughter :)).
I don't recall either hearing this from her or any sensory signalling of this somewhat startling archaicism. M -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Wednesday, July 06, 2011 10:20 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: Spare a square? REH wrote: Several years ago when we came to do a conference for Mike and Sally, in Nova Scotia, we visited Louisburg. They spoke of two things. Poison water from the sewage and how it kept the MicMac out of the town for more than a few hours of trading. The French only drank wine. The other was the smell of human excrement which the troops wore. The actors in the re-enactment actually had a perfume that smelled of excrement that they wore to work for the tourists. I can tell you it was effective. I'd never heard any of that, neither the historical part nor the reenactment part. Was it the case that the 18th c. French troops *intentionally* perfumed themselves with excrement in order to be more fearsome to the MicMac? Or was it a matter general absence of hygiene? I've read accounts of turds in the corridors of Versailles in Louis XIV's reign, presumably because of courtiers' desire to remain in and around the right salons rather than to traipse off to some distant house of office. One wouldn't expect the colonial troops to be more fastidious than the courtiers. I once spent a week at Louisbourg [1] teaching a metal-raising workshop for the restoration & maintainance crew but it was near the end of the season and they closed the museum part just as I was finishing up in the backstage workshop. So I only had about half an hour one day to tour the restoration, didn't encounter any of the uniformed troops. (Although there was a lovely red fox walking calmly down the middle of the street.) [1] Just looked it up. Neither of us spelled it right. The spelling was officially changed to the original "Louisbourg" in 1966. -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
