Micah arrived home today for a few days, so we're going to work out the details of a trip to Europe with her roommate, Sarah, and her mother. Of course, the Louvre is high on the list of places we have to go. The National Archives contain exhaustive records of the Revolution - from records one might expect... of trials and executions plus memoirs, and the like - to the physically minute, yet historically huge, scrap of paper on which Charlotte Corday jotted Marat's address as given to her by her coachman, the handwriting slightly irregular due to the hackney bumping along on cobbled road toward what she may have viewed a glorious destination. I don't suppose that tourists are allowed to browse the National Archives. Somewhere in Paris, perhaps the Louvre, one can see Rose Bertin's fabric notebook on which Marie Antoinette would mark, with a pin prick, the fabric she chose for her clothing. The amount of documentation and artifacts remaining from the time period is surprising to me. In a time much governed by irrational delusion, meticulous records were kept.
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