Since school started last week, I’ve been up to my neck in summer reading papers. So I thought now would be a good time to celebrate one of the fun parts of reading by sharing the opening lines of some of my favorite romances.
“When Tiberius Lamartine Flynn heard the tree singing, his first thought was that he’d parted company with his reason.” —Grace Burrowes, Once Upon a Tartan
“In the tender green time of April, Katherine set forth at last upon her journey with the two nuns and the royal messenger.” —Anya Seton, Katherine
“The spy called Saint hunkered down in the bottom of the wardrobe she’d occupied for the last four hours and attempted to stifle a yawn.” —Shana Galen, Lord and Lady Spy
“Kate squinted up at the sky. Her nine-year-old imagination raced as fast as the wooly clouds that floated above her. A lamb, a dragon—and that big one, surely that was a giant with a horrid hooked nose.” —Anne Easter Smith, A Rose for the Crown
“ ‘Whatever fool claimed females to be the weaker sex never met my sister.’ ” —Candice Hern, The Best Intentions
“He was dead. However, his nose throbbed painfully, which he thought odd in the circumstances.” —Diana Gabaldon, Voyager
“Not every fairy tale begins with a prince or a princess. Some begin with a kiss that turns a man into a frog, or a tumble on the road that turns a basket of eggs into scramble.” —Eloisa James, Storming The Castle
“Gwen’s pulse beat so loudly in her ears, the sound drowned out the rumble of voices in the hall. He was here! And he still loved her!” —Sarah Woodbury, The Uninvited Guest
“So this was how it felt to be a conquering hero.” —Courtney Milan, Unveiled
Okay, so which ones did I forget? What are some of your favorite first lines?
No, that’s not a typo. This article is not about Napoleon’s victories on the battle fields of Europe. It’s about his victory in the farmers’ fields in France.
Sugar beets (Beta vulgaris) are white, conical roots, with a rosette of leaves above ground. The leaves absorb sunlight and produce sugar by photosynthesis (remember your high school biology?). The sugar is then stored in the root—the part we dig up and process. Sugar beets are grown in temperate climates like Germany, France, the UK, and the northern US, rather than the tropical locales sugar cane prefers.
But what do they have to do with the self-proclaimed Emperor of France?
In 1806 Napoleon attempted to destroy British trade lines and weaken the country by banning the import of British goods into Europe (including those from Britain’s colonies). George III and his Parliament responded by ordering a blockade of all French ports. So the only goods Napoleon and his people were getting (legally) were those they could grow or make themselves. Since all of the sugar in use at the time came from plantations in the West Indies, that meant no sugar for France.
Yikes!
Sugar beets were already known at this time—in the mid-1700’s, a German chemist named Andreas Margraff discovered that the sucrose contained in the beet’s root was indistinguishable from the sucrose in sugar cane. One of Margraff’s students, Franz Karl Achard, later experimented with ways to extract the sugar from beets, and was successful (he’s now considered the father of the sugar beet industry).
So when France found herself sugarless in the first decade of the 1800’s, a starting point already existed for her scientists. In 1809, a commission repeated Achard’s experiments, producing two loaves of beet sugar. One of them was eventually passed on to Napoleon himself, who realized he held the answer to his problem (one of them, anyway). He ordered 32,000 hectares of sugar beets to be sown, and more than 40 small factories were built to process them. In January 1811, the order was upped to 100,000 hectares and licenses were given to build 334 factories throughout the French empire.
In 1813, however, the tide of the war turned. Napoleon was on the run, and the blockade was lifted. Cane sugar once again became readily available, and beet sugar was no longer competitively priced. All of the beet processing factories that had been built in Germany and Austria (part of Napoleon’s territory) were closed down. The following spring the Sixth Coalition defeated the French empire, and Napoleon—champion of the sugar beet—was exiled to the island of Elba.
Napoleon’s Farewell to the Imperial Guard by Antoine Alphonse Montfort
Then why do we eat beet sugar today?
France never quite gave up on sugar beet refinement. Between 1820 and 1839, the number of factories began to slowly climb again in response to a duty imposed on imported cane sugar. Once again, beet sugar was a cheaper alternative. The production of cane sugar also had an ugly stigma attached—it was only possible on large plantations using slave labor. Sugar beets could be grown and processed right at home, in factories that employed paid workers.
The process of refining sugar beets later became popular in Germany, the UK, Russia, and even spread across the Atlantic to the US. My home state of Michigan is one of eleven states that continue to produce beet sugar today, though the European Union is the world’s largest producer with about 50% of the total. Overall, beet sugar accounts for about 35% of the world’s production.
Beet sugar: just one example of the silver lining on a very dark cloud.
Another silver lining of the Napoleonic Wars? Wounded warrior romance heroes! To celebrate the Summer Banquet Blog Hop, I’m giving away one of my very favorites: a signed, print copy of Grace Burrowes’ The Solider, direct from the author herself!
Leave a comment below to enter: tell me what you learned today, what you really think of Napoleon, who your favorite historical soldier/sailor is, what draws you to this period of history, your obsession with sweets (or wounded warriors!), or whatever else you’d like.
Comments must be left by midnight EDT on June 7, 2013 to be eligible to win. Open worldwide.
Don’t forget to check out the posts and giveaways of all the Hop participants:
Because I had to rein myself in last week replying to Barbara’s comment, and because I can use one of my favorite characters as an example (see if you can guess which one it is), this week’s blog post is about legitimacy (or the lack thereof).
In order to be considered a legitimate child during the Regency, your parents had to be married at the time of your birth. It didn’t matter what their status was at your conception, as long as they made it to the altar—together—before you made an appearance in the world. If you came before the nuptial ceremony, you were illegitimate, forever, even if your parents married later*.
If your mother was married to another man at the time of your birth, you were legitimate, but legally the child of her husband. There are all kinds of subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) jokes and references in Regency and Georgian novels about ladies letting a “cookoo” in the nest—passing off the child of an affair as one belonging to her husband. It’s even a major plot point in Julia Quinn’s It’s In His Kiss: the hero and his “father” both know he’s the product of his mother’s affair, but he’s still the legal heir to his “father’s” title and fortune.
Illegitimate offspring could not inherit titles or entailed property (property that, by law, passed to the next legitimate male heir). Ever. They could inherit unentailed property (property that could be disposed of in any manner), money, or goods by will—as could anybody else.
A great example of this is Mary Balogh’s A Secret Affair. The hero, Constantine Huxtable, was born two days before his parent’s wedding, thus rendering him ineligible to inherit his father’s earldom (this is actually the basis for the series, as a cousin inherits instead). But wait, you say. Grace Burrowes has a hero who’s illegitimate, and he’s an earl! In The Soldier, Devlin St. Just is the bastard son of a duke, and he does gain an earldom, but not through inheritance. St. Just’s title was granted for service to the Crown during the Napoleonic Wars, and it was the monarch’s prerogative to confer the honor. (Where do you think all those nobles came from in the first place?)
Bastardy was also a bar to society, for the most part. According to Allison Lane, an illegitimate daughter was not accepted or welcome at all socially, while a son could be admitted to the fringes of society with the help and sponsorship of his father. The heroine of Julia Quinn’s An Offer from a Gentleman is a good illustration: she was the bastard daughter of an earl, but never acknowledged as anything other than the earl’s ward, nor did she move in society (except once, but I won’t spoil it for you).
There were exceptions to this rule (there always are, right?), and a big one was William, Duke of Clarence (later William IV) had ten (yes, ten!) illegitimate children with an actress known as Mrs. Jordan. Being the bastard get of a royal duke was clearly a better lot than that of other illegitimate children (and many legitimate ones, too). Since their father was the son and brother of a king (then later a king himself), the FitzClarences, as they were called, did well socially. They were given the precedence of the children of a marquess, the eldest son was granted an earldom, and the rest married nobles or the children of nobles.
*For those of you that are familiar with the medieval period, you’re probably jumping up and down right now, yelling “John of Gaunt!” or “Beaufort!” (or maybe you’re yelling something else at me!). Yes, John of Gaunt (son of Edward III) had four children with his mistress Katherine Swynford and given the surname Beaufort (after one of John’s properties). And yes, they were eventually legitimized by the pope and their cousin Richard II when John scandalized everyone and married Katherine (their children were adults by then). But this was under the medieval Catholic Church, where rules could be bent for the right price, and John was a very powerful man. And this legitimacy was questioned a couple of generations later when Henry Tudor, great-great-grandson of John through his eldest Beaufort son, claimed the English throne. The Regency was several hundred years after the Reformation, andBritain’s aristocracy was (for the most part) steadfastly Protestant. Different time, different church, different rules.
And Then She Kissed Him 