The Olympics has removed most of the fractious, spiky energy out of the media ecosystem that I swim through day to day. It’s hard to get too wound up about this injustice or that slight or the continued fuckwittery over there, when people are accomplishing incredible feats every day. Simone Biles twisting and bouncing to new heights, Katie Ledecky stroking her way to her 9th Gold, the infectious smile on the face of Leon Marchand as he holds up four fingers to the rambunctious Nanterre crowd, the Turkish Dad with his hand in his pocket shooting to silver; all bringing smiles to the faces of audiences around the world. Paris seems to be defying its normal dismissive, annoyed August vibe and with over half the tickets being sold to the French it’s noisily partisan with loud renditions of the Marseillaise but with good humor, probably because most of the Parisians have fucked off for the duration, happy to rent out their apartments to BMX, archery and dressage fans. Snoop is still having fun and so are we.
By some measures, all politicians are weird. To want to put oneself through the emotional wringer of the escalator of ever increasingly more important elections to reach high office requires something unusual. The recent jibes emanating from the Dems accusing firstly J.D.Vance of weirdness made some sense, he is, everything coming out of his mouth is slightly unbalanced, if not carpet-chewingly nutso, and just what is it with the eyeliner, is he a Cure fan? But using weird as a catch-all for slinging shade at Drumpf and the Republicans makes little sense. The Orange one may be deranged, he is a spoiled, fat rich boy with a ridiculously outsized sense of his own importance, his comb over weave is risible, he is losing his shit over Kamala’s unstoppable rise, but he is not weird. He is a horrible piece of shit that should never be put in charge of the shoes rental at a bowling alley, let alone the largest capitalist democracy in the world. His MAGA cult is scary, dangerous and an overt demonstration of everything that is wrong with the US educational system; but it is not weird. The liberal coalition, if it still limps onwards and upwards under the chartreuse banner of Kamala, towards some coordinated sense of preserving freedoms, should represent all the weird mess of humanity. We are the weird. I know I am weird, so stop with the lazy stereotyping of the Republicans as weird. They are deranged, deluded and dangerous, so attack them on their half-assed policies, their destruction of personal liberties and the fact that they will unwind every single effort this current administration has made towards solving the climate crisis, as pathetic as they have been so far.
Saturday was the Feast of St. Lydie or St. Lydia in English, but it actually only means a woman from Lydia, a part of Macedonia in modern Greece, and the story is pretty thin. Much more interesting is the story of Madeliene Coraboeuf. I listened to a new BBC podcast called something unoriginal like ‘Interesting Histories of Daring You Have Never Heard’ narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. It’s actually about the resistance and spies in World War 2 and was about a one legged American SOE agent called Virginia Hall who came from a wealthy Maryland family, the kind of wealth that allowed her to go to Radcliffe and then cruise around Europe on her own for 8 years. She referred to her prosthetic leg as Cuthbert, and was known to the family by the sobriquet ‘Dindy’, things that you might call a bit weird. She was however ridiculously brave and within a couple of years is running major resistance networks in France. For “her courage and ingenuity”, she was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross—the only civilian woman to ever be awarded it. Anyway, down this rabbit hole I went and researched Mauzac prison camp, which is mentioned, as it is near Bergerac. In France the prison break that Virginia Hall orchestrated hardly gets a mention, but it’s known for its famous prisoner Magda Fontanges. Born Madeleine the daughter of a semi famous artist, Jean Coraboeuf. Madeleine loses her mother at 7 and is sent to boarding school, which for women in the 1910s meant convents, and they do not agree with her. She marries young to a local politician, who then quickly gets a promotion to the wilds of the Lozere which is way too boring, so she leaves him after 2 years and goes to Paris where she adopts the name of Fontanges, the name of an infamous mistress of Louis XIV. Magda Fontanges becomes an actress, she appears in a Fernandel movie called ‘Not a word to the wife’ in 1931, she trades off her looks and becomes a girl about town, seen on the arms of politicians and stars. But just as quickly, she moves on to become a journalist.
Using her powers of seduction, she becomes the Rome correspondent of the Geneva daily La Liberté. In Rome, she managed to get an interview with the Duce, and before you know it she becomes his mistress. However, the affair was short-lived, partly because Magda made a big deal about it publicly, twice in her articles. Furious, the married, catholic, upstanding Mussolini had her expelled from Italy. For some reason, she thinks it was the work of the French ambassador in Rome, Count Charles de Chambrun. So as he gets off the train in Paris, at the Gare du Nord, on March 17, 1937 she shoots him twice. She gets away with a one-year suspended prison sentence and a fine for 100 francs which at the time was about two bucks. She then had a relationship with her lawyer, which is a theme with her, although she did owe him her freedom. Magda tries to go to the US where this kind of moxy would have seen her marry someone like Fred Trump, but the US refused to let her off the Normandie liner, and she is expelled. She is in Germany at the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 and is expelled from there too. When the French surrender, she tries to get to Spain but gets arrested and imprisoned at Hendaye on the border with a false passport, the German military intelligence service the Abwehr recruit her as a spy in return for her freedom.
She manages to piss them off, partly because she is also at the same time trying to be a spy for the Vichy government using her Italian contacts. The Abwehr let her go, and she gets picked by the SD, the SS’s Secret Service, and they find her a job at a newspaper in Paris. She gets fired by the SD for bad behavior, although I am not sure what you have to do to get let go by the SS. She goes south to Nice and tries to get into Italy, but finally in 1943, she returned to Paris, and falling on her feet again, she became the mistress of the head of the French Gestapo, the ‘Carlingue’, Henri Lafont. Paris falls, and she manages to get out and hides out in the village in southwest France where her father had lived until she is found in 1946 and put on trial. She was sentenced to 15 years of forced labor and a twenty-year ban on residence in Paris or any large city, to national indignity for life (a unique legal status used as a punishment for general collaboration acts) and to the confiscation of all her property, for "intelligence with the enemy and treason". She declares, “My only regret is that I wasn't hanged with the Duce instead of his last mistress, Clara Petacci”.
Fontanges was imprisoned at the women's prison in Mauzac, which is where I found her. She was released in 1952 and placed under house arrest in Melun. She ignored that and went to Paris and tried to run a bar under a pseudonym. Arrested again for not respecting the terms of her parole, she was locked up at the Petite Roquette prison in Paris before being freed again in 1955. She hooks up with her lawyer, Maître Floriot, but she tries to steal a painting by Utrillo of his, and so the Maitre has his revenge and arranges for her to be interned in a psychiatric asylum for four years. Shortly after release in 1960, she finally escapes from all of it, commits suicide by taking a lethal dose of sleeping pills at the Women's Protection Centre in Geneva, where she had been provided temporary accommodation.