I believe you took us to Louisbourg that day. I distinctly remember the problem with the wells with the walls too low to keep out the sewage. The English claimed they had poisoned the wells when the English took over but the guidebook said the French had just let the sewage run down the street into the well, in a heavy rain. They didn't drink the water anyway. Once it was polluted it was unfixable.
It was the guide at the gate who told us about the modern stage "perfume" that smelled of excrement and to make the point, we smelled it when the troops walked by. It was also said that the MicMac would not spend the night because of the insanitariness of the whole situation. A good way to get e-coli and die. Perhaps it was my psycho-analytic cynicism that considered that it had to be intentional if it kept the Indians out. Perhaps the colonists were just filthy. The French military costumes had synthetic dirt on them as well. Did your daughter work that summer or was it before or after? (Sometimes realism is just a little too real.) Note the squeaky clean Williamsburg in Virginia and all of those forts where so many died from the sanitation. Today they are Clorox true. I make it a point to study waste systems in urban situations because they so often are a silent partner in whatever is happening in the Opera plots. Zefferelli felt the same when he put that outhouse on the third balcony of an apartment in Sicily in Cavalleria Rusticana. The loo was used as an old coot walked in during Mama Lucia's aria and came out as she finished. There was a long pipe that went from that third balcony all the way to the floor of the stage. Verismo!!! Unlike Zefferelli's Sicilians, it seems the English emptied their pots out the window with the words "Gardez L'eau" The London fire changed all of that and made the English catch up with the French in the sewer wars. Dickens wrote a lot about the disease from the sewer problem in London prior to the fire. It seems Paris became a paragon after the plagues because they thought that the smell, the vapors, carried the plague and killed people. It doesn't make sense to me that the same fear that created those Fox masks the Doctors wore, for the plague, wouldn't be a part of the French community here. (was Mike Spencer's Fox a doctor with short legs?) That was a wild wonderful summer in Nova Scotia. We still speak of it. If anyone has not gotten their fill of this discussion, David Peat has written about it as well in his Seventh Fire book. REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of michael gurstein Sent: Thursday, July 07, 2011 8:38 AM To: [email protected]; 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] Spare a square? 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 _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
