More recently I bought a history of France expressed as a series of short, natty essays by eminent French men and women of letters, no more than five pages each, around 150 of them, moving up through the years at an accelerating pace, rather than the steady pace of the ruler, and altogether occupying around 750 pages. Nice looking book, but rather badly bound. I would have preferred to have spent more to have had it bound properly. See references 3 and 4.
Then late last night, fortified by Bells, I took in a couple of chapters, one about Versailles and one about Coco Chanel. From the first, I learned that the Bourbon kings regarded the money spent on Versailles as well spent to the extent that it drew in free spending rich foreigners to look at it. A sort of real life theme park. From the second, in among the mysteries of the mass production of perfume, I came across the word 'septentrionale'. And rather than skipping over it, I looked it up, to find that it was a long winded way of saying 'north' or from the north.
Companion words to midi, orient and occident. Old French for north, south, east and west, before they learned the error of their metaphor mixing ways.
Delving deeper, named for the seven bright stars of the constellation Ursa Major. And with the word once being the Latin for the phrase 'seven oxen'. Two of which stars point at the star in Ursa Minor which presently does service as the pole star. With the pole moving about a bit over the centuries, not always being more or less coincident with a convenient star, as it is now.
An excellent book for dipping, which I imagine was the idea.
Reference 1: http://www.metermorphosen.de/.
Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septentrional.
Reference 3: Histoire Mondiale de la France - Patrick Boucheron - 2017. Seuil.
Reference 4: http://www.seuil.com/.
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