Served Cold
The Fateful Consequences of Going to Dinner Parties

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Roses of Elagabalus, 1888

5, 207 words

Part 3

(Read Part 1 here. Part 2 here.)

Rebecca (1938)

Christie’s concluding lines about “possessed,” “depressed,” and “homicidal” “love” would sum up the themes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca as well. The main event in her novel was not the final, cathartic destruction of Manderley House. It always seemed to me that the true denouement was the costume ball held by aristocrat Maxim de Winter and his new, middle-class wife (the narrator of the book, never named), during which the House’s Gothic power achieved its apogee. The place seemed to turn everyone into ghosts, or shades of themselves – strange, obsessive creatures in thrall to a more formidable spirit that bled victims dry to feed its own empty corridors and great halls that were nonetheless filled with a heaviness – a something. The narrator described this near-animate malignancy through natural imagery and the man-made world of dishes and dinner-parties that all made up the stuff of Manderley’s setting.

After a whirlwind marriage and honeymoon, the narrator and the once-widowed Maxim de Winter drove to Manderley, Maxim’s old family residence in Cornwall. I’m told that Cornwall is a place that cannot be mistaken. Once there, strangers notice a magical quality that sets the landscape apart. Perhaps the light is different there, throwing itself in rawer, fresher ways. Maybe its peninsular coast that juts bravely into waters where English Channel, Celtic Sea, and Atlantic Ocean meet, betrays some unconscious desire to be separate from the rest. Rebecca’s narrator was struck, too, by the differences. Surrounding Manderley there grew “the tangle of the deep woods . . . dark, uncontrolled” that only “the stout-hearted” could endure, a likely reference to the beautiful, but forbidding Wistman’s Wood, located nearby in southern Devon.[1] The old oak forest there – its root-gnarled ground scarcely navigable, its layered canopy of wooden arms that bend and twist their way to grasp at the very floor – surely has inspired fantasy settings, like Mirkwood, Fangorn, or Oberon’s “mazèd world.”[2]

Her first glimpse of the house caused the bride’s “self-possession” to shrivel. It seemed to her “that even the most elementary knowledge of behaviour was [now] unknown.” She feared that she “should not know [her] right hand from [her] left, whether to stand or sit, what spoons and forks to use at dinner.” The flagstones of the great hall caused her heels to ring from floor to rafter, and the sound seemed like the “guilty,” “self-conscious” foot-fall of a “public-visitor” gawking from side to side at the walls – or of a foolish schoolgirl in church. She did not belong. The butler explained that the hall was seldom used anymore, except on “great occasions, such as a big dinner, or a ball.” But the figure who most personified this intimidating structure was the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. The woman seemed intent on bringing the past back to life – of reincarnating the ghost of the dead Rebecca de Winter and reducing to a revenant the living mistress of the manor. Mrs. Danvers’ face was a death-mask, her “hollow eyes watching” the new arrival “from [her] white skull’s face.” It was even worse when she smiled – “a false, unnatural thing.” After this chilly welcome at Manderley, the young narrator “dreaded the [inevitable] formality of dinner.”[3] Everyone would be watching and judging and comparing as she sipped her soup incorrectly, said the wrong thing, or fidgeted with her napkin. They’d all shake their heads. “Can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” they’d whisper.

Just as she felt those “hollow eyes” of Danvers on her, always glowing with cold fire, so the narrator began, little by little, to be subsumed by the house, possessed by the beautiful occupant who had “been there before her, and surely left an imprint [of] her person” on every cushion; left her lingering touch on every “silver coffee pot.” Du Maurier’s decision to leave the narrator nameless, while naming the very book after the protagonist’s predecessor heightened the effect of this anxious, weak sense of self. After finishing the story, readers will realize that she never inhabited the role, or fit the name of “Mrs. de Winter.” The housekeeper relentlessly whispered in her ear how much it seemed like Rebecca, the first Mrs. Maxim de Winter, had never left, but “had just gone out for a little while.” By evening, surely the household would once again hear “the sound of her dress sweeping the stairs as she [came] to dinner”[4] – an effortless elegance at odds with the clopping of a “schoolgirl’s” shoes. Even if Rebecca had used the wrong spoon at dinner, or spilled a glass of wine, it could never have been truly gauche, or wrong.

After weeks of this psychological torture, the narrator began to agree with Danvers’ sentiments. As she sat down “in the dining-room in [her] accustomed place, with Maxim at the head of the table, [she] pictured Rebecca sitting where [she] sat now, picking up her fork for the fish.” All this time – perhaps even before her coming to Manderley, she’d been existing as little more than a bit-player, lost in her own skin, lost to the present, and “gone back in thought and in person to days that were” past. Sometimes, when she imagined herself as some other Mrs. de Winter, Maxim caught “queer” expressions flitting across her face. “Are you practicing for the fancy-dress ball?” he asked. For a moment, he thought she’d looked “like a little criminal . . . older suddenly, deceitful.”[5] But along with self-diminishment, there followed doubt. Was the “deceitful” “criminal” really Maxim – the man who refused to talk about his first wife, the man who was many years her senior and of whose previous life she knew nothing, except that Rebecca’s death haunted him, as it haunted everyone else?

Because of Mrs. Danvers’ encouragement, Maxim’s continued cryptic behavior, and her own loss of control, the narrator planned to reenact a scene from another era. It was tradition for the modern de Winters to indulge the surrounding neighbors, and in a show of noblesse-oblige put on a grand party in the style of “days that were gone.” At this ball, she would come dressed as Maxim’s eighteenth-century ancestor, Caroline de Winter (a costume that Rebecca had also worn just before her death). Like those scions in “the old days,” she would sweep down the marble staircase to greet her guests – the picture of aristocratic grace.

As the date drew nearer, the house itself “began to wear a[n] . . . expectant air.” Workmen laid a floor for dancing in the great hall. In the drawing-room, “long buffet tables [were] placed against the wall.” Manderley came alive with a certain “reckless” abandon, “rather triumphant, rather pleasing.” It was as if it “remembered other days, long, long ago, when the hall was a banqueting hall indeed, with weapons and tapestry hanging upon the walls”; when revelers “sat at a long narrow table in the centre laughing louder than [they] laughed now, calling for wine, for song, throwing great pieces of meat . . . to the slumbering dogs.” The whole bloody, wonderful array of Cornish history filled the narrator’s imagination of the place, from Uther’s dragons to the last, great rising of its people that closed the chapter on the Wars of the Roses.[6]

Later, in other years, the house “would still be gay,” but with a quieter “grace and dignity, and Caroline de Winter . . . would walk down the wide stone stairs in her white dress to dance the minuet.”[7]

With all this in mind, the narrator arranged for a wig, a period dress, and other accouterments to complete her ensemble. If she wore the mask that had begun to seem more real than her own face, would Maxim’s mask slip? Would he love her more? Would he admit his guilt? Just as Hamlet and Barton raised a ghost to haunt the feast, so the housekeeper manipulated her victim into playing the part of a dead woman and thus to confront Maxim with secrets and crimes he’d sought to bury.

On the morning of the main event, the narrator and her bevy of local friends felt giddy with “the . . . cheerful humour of people after a funeral,” or before an execution – hearty, laughing, but with a touch of the hysterical. Upstairs in her room, the narrator put on the dress and the wig of bouncing curls. At last, she’d transformed herself “into someone quite different altogether. Not [her] at all. Someone much more interesting, vivid, alive” (not that it would have taken much). To a bemused Maxim, she’d earlier promised “the shock of [his] life.”[8]

Indeed, her debut moment had arrived. When the guests had all come through the doors, waiting expectantly for their hostess, the narrator slipped down the landing in a rustle of skirts and whispers. Wouldn’t they think now that she was worthy of Manderley? Wouldn’t everyone be amazed? What she got was an amazed silence. Maxim’s face went “ashen white.” The whole lot of them stood around “like dummies, like people in a trance.” But behind this dumbstruck mask was horror. Her husband’s eyes were the worst, for they “blazed in anger.” As for Mrs. Danvers, her mask had also fallen, revealing an expression that was “loathsome, triumphant. The face of an exulting devil.” Mortified by the crowd’s reaction and Maxim’s furious demand to “go and change,” the narrator’s last, fraying tendons of confidence snapped.[9]

She rushed back to her room and refused to come out. Her friend Beatrice – a descendent of the aristocracy as it was in “the old days” – could not convince her to emerge. Once again, the narrator knew she was found lacking. Beatrice “belonged to another breed . . . another race . . . they had guts, the women of her race.” Had the same humiliation happened to Beatrice, or Caroline/Rebecca, she would simply have removed one costume in exchange for another: a smiling fake that nevertheless derived from something real and steely. A true de Winter would have “put on her other dress and gone down again to welcome her guests without a hitch. She would have stood . . . and shaken hands with people, a [pleasant expression] on her face.”[10] The scandals of the past, whether committed centuries or moments ago; whether small improprieties or bloody murders – she would handle it all by drawing from a special kind of defiance that might have appeared to a less insightful person like avoidance. It was an interesting kind of dinner-mask, an acknowledgement and refusal, an engaged disengagement that has become rare in women of our own age. It had blends of Roman “stateliness,” a detective’s assuredness, and amicable meetings between two mortal foes over lunch.

After wallowing for some time, the narrator eventually forced herself to return downstairs and confront real life amid the surreal throngs of costumed guests. Memories of this, her first and last party at Manderley, were hazy. Out of the sensory soup of the evening, all she recalled was “a sea of dim faces . . . and the slow drone of the band harping out a waltz that never finished, that went on and on. The same couples swung by in rotation, with the same fixed smiles.” They seemed like music-box people, or “marionettes twisting and turning on a piece of string, held by some invisible hand” – perhaps by the hand of Manderley, itself. A male friend in a pirate outfit brought her a plate of chicken that she didn’t eat and glasses of champagne that she couldn’t drink. Time passed by, but had little meaning. At one point, Beatrice whispered in her ear that she should sit down: “You look like death.” Finally, after singing “God Save the King,” people began to make their tipsy way back to their cars. Behind them, the house and grounds were in a tawdry state. The musicians “had turned . . . the lights off in the gallery . . . Pieces of music lay about the floor. One chair had been upturned. There was an ashtray full of the stubs of their cigarettes. The aftermath of the party…” – words that could describe the aftermath of a crime, the evidence discovered “as the grey morning light found its way through the gaps at the side” of a curtain.[11]

The fire that eventually destroyed Manderley and its secrets should have been a release that allowed Maxim and the narrator the freedom to make another home together. But it seemed that Manderley took their sense of identity and wholeness with it, down to a Cornish grave. The couple moved abroad, not to settle, but to merely dwell in the manner of two restless souls, going through life like “marionettes,” or the way people go through rehearsed motions at dinner. The narrator admitted that she savored “old copies of the Field,” and read British newspapers whenever she could – all to “sweeten this exile [they’d] brought upon” themselves, and to face the “glittering [foreign] sky with greater courage.” They kept their meals and tea-times as traditionally English as possible.[12]

Then, there were the visions of Manderley that the narrator constantly replayed. While she picked at her plate “on this clean balcony, white and impersonal with centuries of sun, [she thought] of half past four at Manderley, and the table drawn before the library fire.” As in “the old days,” when the servants “flung open” the door, “punctual to the minute, [their] performance, never varying, of the laying of tea, the silver tray, the kettle, the snowy cloth . . . the arrival of cakes,” so on this sunny, but “indifferent island,” that “feast was laid before [them] always.” And yet, she confessed, “we [ate] so little.” On occasion, Maxim would be lost in thought, “all expression dying away from his . . . [features] as though swept clean by” that same “unseen hand.” In place of Maxim’s “dear face . . . a mask [would] form, a sculptured thing, formal and cold, beautiful still but lifeless.” The pair of them did more brooding than either talking or eating, just as they had at that godawful party. The narrator tried to reason that the practices they maintained on the Mediterranean made them feel like themselves. As she had throughout the novel, the narrator deceived herself. They were still strangers and now “exiles.” Still, she did not belong. The table-manners they kept only proved that everything they did was done in the shadows cast by that supernatural Cornish light; every “feast laid before” them was but “the aftermath of the party.”[13]

• Kind to Be Cruel

 Truly fortune has played us a good turn in this . . . I mean to sacrifice thank-offerings . . . [and] I look to have thee a guest at the banquet – Herodotus, Histories

Astyages (585 -550 BC)

Sometimes, dinners didn’t simply recreate the scene of the crime, but became the crime scenes themselves. In this category, the host lured his guest-victims to the table with promises of generosity and favor. The Greek historian Herodotus recounted the macabre tale of Astyages, king of Media,[14] who plotted revenge against an official named Harpagos. Harpagos, the king learned, had long ago defied his orders to murder Astyages’ son. By now, it should be clear that crimes or deceits at dinner were not cases of impulsive fury, but the stuff of cold and calculated design. Astyages “at first conceal[ed] within himself his anger.” Feigning good will, he told Harpagos to send his own son to the palace, so that he could act as his royal patron. Let bygones be bygones, he soothed the frightened man. To further prove his beneficence, Astyages invited Harpagos to dinner that evening. Harpagos rejoiced at his luck and immediately sent his thirteen-year-old son to Astyages’ court with admonishments to “do whatever the [king] ordered.”[15]

Readers might guess what happened next. The moment Harpagos’ son arrived, Astyages had the boy slain and cut apart “limb from limb.” Of these dismembered pieces, he “roasted some” and “boiled other[s],” until they were “ready to serve.” That night at dinner, Harpagos, along with other dignitaries, sat at a table along which their the plates were piled high with lamb’s meat. Almost all of them. At Harpagos’ appointed spot, there “was served the body of his son, except for the hands, head, and feet.”[16] Those lay hidden in a covered basket nearby.

The unwitting Harpagos dug in with relish, until he “decided he had eaten enough.” Turning a pleasant face to his guest, Astyages breezily asked if he’d enjoyed the meal. Harpagos nodded, and chased the last bite with a swallow of bright summery wine. Good, Astyages smiled, because the generous host was not done showering Harpagos with gifts. He gestured toward the basket. Open the party-favor with which I’m sending you home, along with my compliments, the king bade him. Harpagos dutifully lifted the cover and received “the shock of [his] life.” But unlike Maxim, Harpagos could not allow his eyes to “blaze in anger.” Just as the king had betrayed no reaction to Harpagos’ earlier deception, so Astyages’ subordinate managed to “contain himself.” The sadistic host wondered if Harpagos now knew what he’d consumed with such gusto at dinner. Harpagos nodded and answered in a deferential voice “that it was pleasing – as was everything the king did.”[17]

James II of Scotland (1430-1460)

It’s hard to match the diabolical chill of Herodotus’ tale, but for sheer quantity of fatal dinners, the Scots might best all contenders. After flipping through the fifteenth-century Auchinleck Chronicle, readers might get the impression that life in medieval Scotland was one long series of parties, in which a “pleasing,” or successful evening meant the murder of one’s guests. An aristocrat in Scotland had to be bold, ever ready for a duel, or a stab in the back; a battle on the field, or betrayal at the table. When James II of Scotland was a child, he’d witnessed the brutal slaying of his cousin, the sixteen-year-old William, 6th Earl of Douglas, at an Edinburgh banquet – an event that later authors would call “the Black Dinner.” Sometime during the meal, a black boar’s head was paraded into the great hall – a sign of impending death – and placed in front of the Earl. Over James’ protests, the Lord Chancellor and several envious Douglas relatives seized the Earl and his younger brother, dragged them out of the hall, then executed them at nearby Castle Hill. One of the key conspirators was another William, who eventually inherited the title as 8th Earl of Douglas. It was a scene that James never forgot.

Because they were such wealthy and powerful landholders, the Douglas clan had long posed a threat to the Scottish monarchy. The new Earl William had engaged in supposed rebellious alliances with other noble houses, and James II – now an adult and perfectly ruthless – “sent out of Stirling [Castle], with [his emissary] a speciale assoverans and respit under his preve sele, and subscrivit with his awne hand.” The messenger delivered the conciliatory missive to the Earl and his allies. “All the lordis that war with the king [at] that tyme,” the note instructed, should “kepe that respit,” and attend James at his Stirling Castle residence. In other words, the king, under his privy seal and in a message written by “his awne hand,” had called for a truce and invited the troublemakers to share a cozy evening with him. The Earl and his entourage were not naive, and they all feared that “the king would brek the band forsaid.” Nevertheless, Douglas agreed to accompany the emissary back to Stirling on a “monunday . . . the XXI of Februar.”[18] After all, it was not acceptable to appear to suspect their sovereign. A Scottish nobleman could die of a blood feud if he accepted such an invitation, but skipping the meal could start a blood feud, or worsen an existing one. Refusal of the royal summons would be an insult and a tacit admission of guilt.

Once within castle walls, the Earl found himself at the king’s tender mercies. After they “spake” together, the king “callit him . . . in the myrne to the dyner and to the supper.” Indeed, the next day the Earl “dyned and sowpit” with the Scottish ruler, who seemed all mildness and hospitality. The group retired to an “inner chalmer,” where moods quickly soured. James demanded that Douglas break the alliance of chiefs that plotted a bloody rebellion against his authority. The Earl denied any wrongdoing and “said he mycht nocht, nor wald nocht” bend to royal demands. This impudence was the excuse the king needed. Known for a red birthmark that covered his entire left cheek, James not only bore a “fyr mark in his face,” but a fire in his heart. “Fals tratour!” he shouted, and descended on his prey with a knife.[19] Four or five of Douglas’ aristocratic companions were also attacked and killed, one with a pole-axe to the head, another under a frenzied barrage of twenty-six stab-wounds. Attendants threw the bodies out of a window. In the span of a single evening, James II had avenged his childhood trauma and smashed one of the most serious revolts of his reign, all the while demonstrating his versatile skills with a dinner-knife.

Elagabalus (AD 218-222)

Though lacking James II’s austere Scottish nature, like the medieval monarch, Elagabalus’ “kindness” was killer. Historia Augusta claimed that “concerning [Elagabalus’] life, many filthy deeds have been put into writing . . . [few of them] worthy of being recorded.” The author(s), however, felt justified in “relat[ing] such deeds as illustrate[d] his extravagance,” many of them committed at dinner.[20]

By the third century AD, Romans had long suffered identity crises, due in no small part to their own sprawling, multicultural empire, whose officials were constantly trying to incorporate foreign peoples and their alien customs. Sometimes, even Roman emperors were foreign. Elagabalus (204-222 AD)[21] was a Syrian adolescent when his mother and several Roman army factions arranged for his accession to princeps.[22] They soon had cause to regret their choice. The spoiled boy-emperor “came to feel contempt . . . for the very people whom he claimed to have come to help.”[23]

One of his greatest offenses was in the religious domain. The insult “consisted, not in introducing a foreign god into Rome” – such adoptions had been common for ages – “but in his placing [his god Elagabal] even before Jupiter himself.”[24] He abstained “from swine’s flesh” and clad himself “in the barbaric dress which the Syrian priests use[d],” all of this earning him the nicknames, “the Assyrian” and “Elagabalus.” He established the sun-god as the god on Palatine Hill, and “transferred all the emblems, shields, and sacred objects of the pagans and Christians to this place,” in order to subject all else to Elagabal’s crimson altar.[25] In the manner of his “native rites,” sacrificial victims died there after prolonged “torture.” Despite his dietary restrictions, the emperor “was forever killing vast numbers of animals, both wild and domesticated” to satisfy a vacuum that could only be filled, it seemed, with blood and pointless death. In all he did, “he was hot-headed and very fickle . . . possess[ing] the craftiness of . . . the Syrians.”[26] According to Cassius Dio, Elagabalus kept “Scythians and Germans about him . . . whom he had taken away from their homes and armed as bodyguards, apparently placing more confidence in them than in the soldiers [of Rome].” This “barbarian” ruler called his “barbarian” attendants “lions” and “centurions,” which rankled. Tales of his cross-dressing and rumors that he assumed a “feminine pose” with his male lovers did not endear him to the many Romans who bemoaned the fraying masculine virtues of old Rome.[27] What they held natural, or sacred, he profaned. This continued until “all the Romans, especially the praetorians, were angered and disgusted.”[28] And emperors crossed “the praetorians” at their peril.

Aside from that, his bad table manners proved his unsuitability for power. Unlike Napoleon, Elagabalus was a gourmand. Too much of one. He was fond of throwing wasteful “summer banquets in [themes of] various colours, one day a green banquet, another day an iridescent one . . . the next a blue one, varying them continually every day of the summer.” He was the first such ruler, ancient authors claimed, “to use silver urns . . . vessels . . . [over] one-hundred pounds in weight, [and] spoiled by the lewdest designs.” Inside these monstrous pitchers were wines, sometimes seasoned with “mastich and pennyroyal” and at others, rose-wines made fragrant by the infusion of “pulverised pine-cone.” Historia insisted that he was also the first Roman emperor to make “force-meat [pâté or minces?]” out of fish, oysters, lobster, crawfish, and squid – effectively transferring the riches of Neptune to his own palace grounds. Throughout his “banqueting-rooms, his couches, and his porticoes,” he ordered the blooms of “roses and all manner of flowers” strewn round, as if he’d also transferred Proserpina’s wild fields to his palaces of marble. To him, the senators were “slaves in togas,” while the Roman people were but “tiller[s] of a single farm” that existed to serve his table.[29] Given all that evidence, perhaps the guests invited to his most infamous party should have been warned that when it came to this sybaritic creature, things could take a perverse turn.

In a banqueting room “with a reversible ceiling, he . . . [once] overwhelmed” attendees with his generosity – literally. A seemingly endless cascade of flower petals tumbled like scented rain from above and fell on the “parasites” below. The avalanche was so enormous that it smothered some of the emperor’s guests to death, many of them “being unable to crawl out to the top.”[30]

There is a famous Victorian interpretation of this episode titled, The Roses of Elagabalus, a painting by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Every age in the West has been subjected to self-critique and filled with commentators convinced of its decline from better generations and golden eras. The Victorian and the late Roman Empire were particularly famous for it, hence the nineteenth-century attraction to the subject of “Roman decadence.” The painting depicts this luxury and the Eastern influence smothering Rome. To the left, the teenaged emperor reclines on the raised dais. His robes catch the light in woven metallics of rose and gold, while his somewhat swarthy complexion marks him as Levantine. He and his immediate table companions seem uninterested in what’s actually on the table – grapes, pears, pomegranates, apples, and other sweets – and prefer the show taking place below them. The fat, leering character in the middle looks especially enthused. Elagabalus shows only mild amusement.

Some victims are beginning to panic, and some are barely blinking away their pinecone-wine stupors. A fair-haired flutist near the top-left, costumed in animal skins to represent her “savage” origins, provides a soundtrack to the collapse. The red-bearded man opposite Elagabalus – presumably a Germanic or Celtic “barbarian,” his hair matching the emperor’s robes – stares up at Elagabalus with affronted disgust. Harshness and violence the “barbarian” might understand, but that weirdness? Had Vercingetorix surrendered for this? Had past heroes thrown down their arms at Caesar’s feet, so that their descendents might lie supine at the feet of a self-pleasuring Syrian boy? Alma-Tadema anticipates that the native Europeans, whose vitality would awaken and survive Roman decline, are destined to become the new force in Europe. Even as they participate in Roman affairs, they see past the fancy togas and parties to what Rome has become. While this is a nineteenth-century interpretation of an improbable tale, the artist based his image of Roman moral collapse on the critiques of Roman authors themselves. In this image, Rome, like the Emperor’s trick ceiling, is in a fatal reverse.

Elagabalus’ story is a suitably bizarre episode to end our discussion of dinners and the psycho-dramas they sponsored. Indigestion à la Chief Vitalstatistix was always the least of anyone’s problems. To guests (and sometimes hosts), everything seemed fine, until the scheduled twist; until the bottom fell out. Asterix smiled into the clean-shaven faces he walloped; Napoleon “evinced perfect equanimity,” while his enemy captors behaved with graciousness, both sides scheming against the other. Tiberius and Agrippina sparred, each with “stately” countenance; Denmark’s prince used “dumb-show” charades against the grand charade played by his uncle, and Christie’s characters staged elaborate “supper parties” to commit their crimes. Manderley’s grandeur masked a wickedness that struck during fancy-dress balls. Dissembling kings and emperors feigned a generosity that turned on a word, or a flip of the switch.

The food, meanwhile, was a necessary pretext, but never the point. Prepared courses mirrored and sometimes hid other, less pleasant preparations behind the scenes. Indeed, the dishes were the prop for a dinner theater of power plays and disguise; the splendor and the detritus – or “the aftermath” – of parties. In the daylight, less forgiving, there were no more legends, only spoiled leftovers, and all the golden plates had turned to dross. How ironic it is that the table – that solid structure that has represented civility and hospitality – might have been man’s favorite place over which to plot some unpleasantness, or treachery. Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t dream of “spoiling” anyone’s appetite, or telling him to decline the next invitation that comes along. Most dinner parties are perfectly innocent, of course, and free of Oriental maniacs. So wear the costumes, break out the good china, and drink the scented wine. I’m sure that everything will go according to plan.

Notes

[1] Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (London: Virago, 2003), 9.

[2] William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Washington DC: Folger Shakespeare Library Online) II, i, 116.

[3] Rebecca, 78, 74.

[4] Ibid., 86-7, 194.

[5] Ibid., 225.

[6] This refers to the failed Cornish Rising of 1497, in which an army of 15,00 rebels marched from Cornwall toward London before Henry VII’s forces defeated them at the Battle of Deptford Bridge.

[7] Ibid., 235-6.

[8] Ibid., 230.

[9] Ibid., 239-40.

[10] Ibid., 245.

[11] Ibid., 250-51, 255, 257.

[12] Ibid., 6-8.

[13] Ibid., 7-8, 257.

[14] According to ancient sources, Astyages, whose territory included parts of modern-day Turkey, Iran, and Central Asia, was the last King of the Medes. After reigning over this vast region from 585-550 BC, he was defeated by the surging Persian Empire.

[15] Herodotus, The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, Robert Strassler, ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 2009), 66.

[16] Ibid., 66.

[17] Ibid., 67. Legend has it that Harpagos avenged his son’s death at the Battle of Pasargadae, in which he led a mutiny against Astyages and defected to the Persian king Cyrus. After Cyrus captured Astyages’ capital city and took over the Median kingdom, Harpagos went on to become Cyrus’ most effective general.

[18] The Auchinleck Chronicle: A Short Chronicle of the Reign of James II King of Scots, Thomas Thomson, ed. (Edinburgh, 1819), 73.

[19] Ibid., 73-4.

[20] Historia Augusta, vol. II, “The Life of Elagabalus,” David Magie, trans. (Loeb Classical Library, 1932), 145.

[21] His names in other ancient histories included Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and Heliogabalus.

[22] Princeps is Latin for “primary,” and it roughly translates to our modern phrase: “first among equals,” since, in the style of Augustus, the Roman emperor traditionally considered himself as a Roman citizen before all other public roles. Our word “prince” derives from this unofficial title.

[23] Historia Augusta, 145.

[24] Cassius Dio, Roman History, vol. 9, Ernest Carey, trans. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 456.

[25] Historia Augusta, 113.

[26] Cassius Dio, 201.

[27] Ibid., 469.

[28] Herodian, History of the Roman Empire, Edward C. Echols, trans. (Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1961). After a brief reign of less than five years, Elagabalus did indeed meet his demise at the hands of the Praetorians. The Guard killed him and his mother, “together with all his attendants . . . and companions in evil. They gave the bodies . . . to those who wanted to drag them about and abuse them; when the bodies had been dragged throughout the city, the mutilated corpses were thrown into the public sewer which flows into the Tiber.”

[29] Historia Augusta, 145-147.

[30] Ibid., 149.