Prodigies

On May 14, 1643, Louis XIV was crowned king of France. He was four years old. History is full of four year-old monarchs, hovered over by helpful and malign viziers and privy counsellors and stage mothers, all lovingly asserting their own power. It's a familiar picture. Mary became Queen of Scots before she celebrated her first birthday. She was given lots of advice by her French uncles.

The more famous prodigies are musical. Mozart playing the piano for kings and grand dukes before his feet could reach the pedals. Judy Garland made her stage debut when she was two. Jascha Heifetz started violin lessons at three. And so on. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly picked up my book and worried that it was a catalog of prodigies. He was pleased to see it included unprodigies as well. Dolts like Albert Einstein who didn't speak until he was three, and Thomas Edison who was removed from school because the teacher thought he was too stupid to learn.

Mostly, childhood is a forbidding sort of place where children are right to be afraid and puzzled, and grateful for every friend they meet. Mick Jagger met Keith Richard when he was four, a meeting I imagine like d'Artagnon meeting Aramis. The best accounts of childhood are a bit surreal, like Alice in Wonderland, or strangely funny, like Thurber's My Life and Hard Times, or Dickens's autobiographical novel David Copperfield. In A Book of Ages you learn that James Thurber was four when his family purchased a dog that bit people. Alice Liddell was ten when she became the heroine of her famous story. Flannery O'Connor was five when she became famous for teaching her chicken to walk backwards.

Even famous childhoods are full of loss: Isaac Newton losing his mother, Ray Charles losing his sight, Jerry Garcia losing the end of his right middle finger, Mike Nichols losing all of his hair including his eyebrows, Shirley Temple losing her belief in Santa Claus. Children learn things to compensate. We begin rehearsing the things we will become as adults. Bobby Fischer learned chess at age six. J. K. Rowling wrote her first story when she was six; it was about a rabbit with measles. Prodigious or not, every childhood is an odd mix of danger and possibility. Which is why the stories we read are simultaneously funny and sad, strange and familiar.

The Sack of Rome and The Sun King moves to the Suburbs

May 6th, 1527 is the date of the infamous Sack of Rome. Most people think this took place during the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, made famous in the book by Edward Gibbon (p 158 in A Book of Ages). Actually, the Empire collapsed a thousand years earlier. This episode took place at the end of the Italian Renaissance. Michelangelo was living in Florence at the time and missed the whole thing. Three years later the greatest sculptor of the age, the painter of the Sistine Chapel frescoes, was employed designing fortifications. He was 55. Times change and we take the jobs we can get. Michelangelo appears on pages 87, 118, 135, 199, 209, 227, 250, 251, 256 and 278 in A Book of Ages.

On May 6, 1682 Louis XIV, the Sun King, moved to the suburbs. He was 43, but by most accounts looked fabulous. Why the move? Was it was the crowds or the smells or the violence? Ennui? Probably a combination. In any case, he'd had a little bijou residence thrown up in a rural hamlet called Versailles, and it it was from there that French monarchs ruled tastefully until the Revolution came along a century later and ruined everything.

The neat trick about Versailles was how it kept the aristocracy entirely dependent on the king. This hothouse world is the one seen through the eyes and machinations of Madame de Pompadour, whose rise and fall is chronicled on pages 20, 39, 73 and 100 in A Book of Ages. (Louis XIV only appears twice. Vive la femme.)