It's Fritz, the Wonder Lurgi! No, actually, it's bronchitis. I just got back from the doctor's. No wonder the brass bands weren't doing a damn thing.
(The doctor was awesome. He told me to rest up, I mentioned I'd spent most of the week on the couch with the first season of Night Court, he recommended Boston Legal. Thoughts? I do like James Spader.)
Browsing in Rodney's a few nights ago, I discovered another hardcover of Brigid Brophy's The Prince and the Wild Geese (1983). It had been shelved with the myths and fairy tales; I took it up to the front desk and explained that it was actually a monograph on Prince Grégoire Gagarin's courtship of Julia Taaffe in 1832, illustrated with the drawings and sketches he sent her in the spring of that year, and that it had nothing to do with crane wives or swan maidens, but mostly with politics and nationalities and flirtation and art. As a small child, I had been disappointed by this myself. The book was a present from my godmother; it took me years to appreciate it properly. The title seemed to promise shape-changing. But I was reading the wrong story for that.
One of Nicholas's descendants was created first Viscount Taaffe in 1628. In the next generation, however, a Taaffe was already shewing signs either of wanderlust or of discontent with Ireland and was pursuing a military career in the service of the Austrian Empire.
By the early 18th century, that perhaps inherent Taaffe tendency had been reinforced by the disabilities imposed by Parliament on Papists, which most of the Taaffes, including Julia, were. Catholics were excluded from the Dublin Parliament, from high military rank, from the learned professions and in some circumstances from land-owning—from, that is, virtually the only occupations that the top branch of the Taaffe family would have considered fit for its members.1
Accordingly, a whole segment of the family broke away and became authentic wild geese, as the Irish migrants to the continent of Europe called themselves, serving the Austrian (or Holy Roman) court as soldiers and diplomatists.
If the wild geese had been shape-changers, they wouldn't have remained Catholic and culturally Irish wherever they found themselves. They would have assimilated more thoroughly, changed their religion or their names,2 and Frederic Morton in A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889 (1979) would have been unable to describe Eduard Graf von Taaffe as "Cork County handsome . . . parlay[ing] blarney, Gemütlichkeit and elegance into a political infallibility which kept him at the right hand of the throne longer than any other Prime Minister during Franz Joseph's long reign." But it was important to them. The end of the story of the prince and the wild geese is that Julia Taaffe returned to Ireland. Swan maidens and crane wives don't stay, either.
Then again, here I am, with diaspora on both sides of my family, so there are some limits to the genealogical applications of folklore.3 And at the minute I am not feeling even vaguely like migration. The rest of this post is canceled in favor of going and lying down.
1. I was just reading about the Catholic Relief Act 1829, too. It's one of the high points of the Duke of Wellington's tenure as Prime Minister. All roads lead to the Napoleonic Wars?
2. Never mind Ludwig Patrick Taaffe, check out Maximilian Karl Lamoral O'Donnell, Graf von Tyrconnell, Laval Nugent von Westmeath, or Gottfried von Banfield (who would be awesome even if he didn't belong on this list: "He may have been the only flying ace who flew a flying boat to five or more victories").
3. In case it needs to be pointed out, I am not descended from Julia Taaffe. She married an assistant under-secretary at Dublin Castle named Theobald McKenna. I'm not descended from the Prime Minister of Austria, either. But I remain endlessly amused that he's a character in a ballet.
(The doctor was awesome. He told me to rest up, I mentioned I'd spent most of the week on the couch with the first season of Night Court, he recommended Boston Legal. Thoughts? I do like James Spader.)
Browsing in Rodney's a few nights ago, I discovered another hardcover of Brigid Brophy's The Prince and the Wild Geese (1983). It had been shelved with the myths and fairy tales; I took it up to the front desk and explained that it was actually a monograph on Prince Grégoire Gagarin's courtship of Julia Taaffe in 1832, illustrated with the drawings and sketches he sent her in the spring of that year, and that it had nothing to do with crane wives or swan maidens, but mostly with politics and nationalities and flirtation and art. As a small child, I had been disappointed by this myself. The book was a present from my godmother; it took me years to appreciate it properly. The title seemed to promise shape-changing. But I was reading the wrong story for that.
One of Nicholas's descendants was created first Viscount Taaffe in 1628. In the next generation, however, a Taaffe was already shewing signs either of wanderlust or of discontent with Ireland and was pursuing a military career in the service of the Austrian Empire.
By the early 18th century, that perhaps inherent Taaffe tendency had been reinforced by the disabilities imposed by Parliament on Papists, which most of the Taaffes, including Julia, were. Catholics were excluded from the Dublin Parliament, from high military rank, from the learned professions and in some circumstances from land-owning—from, that is, virtually the only occupations that the top branch of the Taaffe family would have considered fit for its members.1
Accordingly, a whole segment of the family broke away and became authentic wild geese, as the Irish migrants to the continent of Europe called themselves, serving the Austrian (or Holy Roman) court as soldiers and diplomatists.
If the wild geese had been shape-changers, they wouldn't have remained Catholic and culturally Irish wherever they found themselves. They would have assimilated more thoroughly, changed their religion or their names,2 and Frederic Morton in A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889 (1979) would have been unable to describe Eduard Graf von Taaffe as "Cork County handsome . . . parlay[ing] blarney, Gemütlichkeit and elegance into a political infallibility which kept him at the right hand of the throne longer than any other Prime Minister during Franz Joseph's long reign." But it was important to them. The end of the story of the prince and the wild geese is that Julia Taaffe returned to Ireland. Swan maidens and crane wives don't stay, either.
Then again, here I am, with diaspora on both sides of my family, so there are some limits to the genealogical applications of folklore.3 And at the minute I am not feeling even vaguely like migration. The rest of this post is canceled in favor of going and lying down.
1. I was just reading about the Catholic Relief Act 1829, too. It's one of the high points of the Duke of Wellington's tenure as Prime Minister. All roads lead to the Napoleonic Wars?
2. Never mind Ludwig Patrick Taaffe, check out Maximilian Karl Lamoral O'Donnell, Graf von Tyrconnell, Laval Nugent von Westmeath, or Gottfried von Banfield (who would be awesome even if he didn't belong on this list: "He may have been the only flying ace who flew a flying boat to five or more victories").
3. In case it needs to be pointed out, I am not descended from Julia Taaffe. She married an assistant under-secretary at Dublin Castle named Theobald McKenna. I'm not descended from the Prime Minister of Austria, either. But I remain endlessly amused that he's a character in a ballet.
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