"Je Reviens En Trois Jours, Ne Te Laves Pas!"
French Cheese Ain't The Only Thing That's Stinky!
Eric begged me to write something about the Napoleon/Josephine hygiene issue. Well, I'm nothing if not accomodating. Nice to know I'm the go-to guy for tales of unwashed twat...
I'd actually heard the story many years back. During my years at UTA, I became a Napoleonic War junkie. Closely following my discovery of the superlative Sharpe series of books by Bernard Cornwell, I spent most of 1991-1993 immersing myself in the years 1789 to 1815, from the French Revolution to Napoleon's final defeat.
I bought and/or borrowed dozens of books on the subject and read them with an intensity that really ought to have been devoted to Biology and Economics. I spent an entire summer painstakingly designing, plotting out and painting a 4 foot by 6 foot map of Waterloo (accurate to the 2nd decimal place, I'll have you know..) on hex-grid paper for a wargame I was designing.
Somewhere I've still got the MacPaint files on disk, where I carefully laid out every single British, French, Allied and Prussian military unit that was within 50 miles of Waterloo between June 16-18, 1815. Each tiny square (down to battalion level) had the unit ID, unit type, by infantry, artillery, cavalry, etc, and the relative strength, morale, & movement allotment whether in column, line or square. All that needed doing was to cut out the hundreds and hundreds of tiny squares and paste them onto plastic chips to have my gaming pieces. Oh, yeah... I knew that era.
It wasn't until I read Lady Longford's biography on the Duke of Wellington that I realized my knowledge of Napoleon the man was sorely lacking. I was never a huge fan of Napoleon, but I ingested some volumes on the life of Le Petit Caporal just to round out my knowledge. As I recall, it was a British writer with a bit of cheek that had added the anecdote about Napoleon's proclivities towards unwashed women.
As the (possibly apocryphal) tale goes, Napoleon once sent his Josephine a billet doux that said, "Je reviens en trois jours, ne te laves pas!" which translates (more or less) to "I return in three days, don't bathe."
In all honesty, I prefer the tale of Napoleon getting bit by Josephine's pet pug during a session of bed-bouncing. It's much more amusing to imagine a pug homing in on L'Empereur's pasty white fundament before "turning his flank", so to speak.
Since we're on the subject of odiferous women, though, I'll have to relate the tale of my friend Connecticut Yankee and Lainie the Skank. I'm sure he's spewing out beer onto his monitor as he reads this, as he's likely not given her a thought in nearly 12 years.
During the aforementioned years at UTA, Connecticut Yankee and I used to hang out at the Limey Bastard's apartment just off campus whenever we weren't in class or working. Various hangers-on and girlfriends used to come and go at infrequent intervals, and periodically we'd throw parties that would shake the foundations. Connecticut Yankee moved in for a brief period, though that didn't last long for reasons I don't recall.
Now, in those years, Connecticut Yankee was seriously on the prowl. There was a new female with him almost every month. Some were fun to hang out with, others, less so. MUCH less so... I can't remember exactly how Lainie entered the social circle, whether she was a pizza-delivery pal of Limey Bastard, or one of the many 18-20 year old girls that used my over-21 self as an alcohol connection. Yes, I contributed to the delinquency of minors. This surprises you, perhaps?
Somehow Connecticut Yankee decided that Lainie was acceptable as a snogging partner, and every so often LB and I would get to his place, open the door and find ConnYank and Lainie on the couch, with flushed faces and trying to adjust clothes back into some sort of order. LB and I would give ConnYank shit about his choice of women, since she did have that aura of skank about her.
LB & I kept waiting for the inevitable "gloat moment", when ConnYank would finally admit to putting a shot between the goalposts. I mean, sooner or later he's gotta get past 2nd base, we assumed.
Lainie stopped showing up so often at the apartment. I seem to recall she took some convincing that Connecticut Yankee wasn't interested anymore. It took a while, but we finally got the story from Connecticut Yankee. I'll try and relate his explanation, though I'll admit to it being 12 years ago, and I'm not 100% accurate as to his exact wording. But it went something like this:
"Dude, I was heading downtown! Had her pants off, and was heading for the groinal-crotchable area! When I got down to her stomach, though, there was this... smell. It just kept getting stronger the further down I went. So, I turned around, went right back up, kissed her, and told her I needed to go home. Got dressed and left."
ConnYank & I used to joke a lot about the movie 'Grumpy Old Men', specifically Burgess Meredith's role as an incredibly horny old man. He had a bunch of euphemisms for having sex that ran during the end credits. The funniest one was "taking the skin boat to Tuna Town". Funny how Connecticut Yankee was never quite so amused by that line after the Lainie incident...
UPDATE: Found the below picture online somewhere. It's one of a collection of drunk & passed out people that circulates on the web. I post it not so much because the girl looks quite a bit like Lainie, but because that IS the Limey Bastard's couch. It *has* to be. There can't be more than one couch in the world of that particular style and design that had that degree of filth and abuse heaped upon it. That couch was the product of 3 or 4 different owners in our circle of friends, all of which were less than careful about care and upkeep. I can only hope someone gave it a Viking funeral before it became an EPA/CDC hazard.
Eric begged me to write something about the Napoleon/Josephine hygiene issue. Well, I'm nothing if not accomodating. Nice to know I'm the go-to guy for tales of unwashed twat...
I'd actually heard the story many years back. During my years at UTA, I became a Napoleonic War junkie. Closely following my discovery of the superlative Sharpe series of books by Bernard Cornwell, I spent most of 1991-1993 immersing myself in the years 1789 to 1815, from the French Revolution to Napoleon's final defeat.
I bought and/or borrowed dozens of books on the subject and read them with an intensity that really ought to have been devoted to Biology and Economics. I spent an entire summer painstakingly designing, plotting out and painting a 4 foot by 6 foot map of Waterloo (accurate to the 2nd decimal place, I'll have you know..) on hex-grid paper for a wargame I was designing.
Somewhere I've still got the MacPaint files on disk, where I carefully laid out every single British, French, Allied and Prussian military unit that was within 50 miles of Waterloo between June 16-18, 1815. Each tiny square (down to battalion level) had the unit ID, unit type, by infantry, artillery, cavalry, etc, and the relative strength, morale, & movement allotment whether in column, line or square. All that needed doing was to cut out the hundreds and hundreds of tiny squares and paste them onto plastic chips to have my gaming pieces. Oh, yeah... I knew that era.
It wasn't until I read Lady Longford's biography on the Duke of Wellington that I realized my knowledge of Napoleon the man was sorely lacking. I was never a huge fan of Napoleon, but I ingested some volumes on the life of Le Petit Caporal just to round out my knowledge. As I recall, it was a British writer with a bit of cheek that had added the anecdote about Napoleon's proclivities towards unwashed women.
As the (possibly apocryphal) tale goes, Napoleon once sent his Josephine a billet doux that said, "Je reviens en trois jours, ne te laves pas!" which translates (more or less) to "I return in three days, don't bathe."
In all honesty, I prefer the tale of Napoleon getting bit by Josephine's pet pug during a session of bed-bouncing. It's much more amusing to imagine a pug homing in on L'Empereur's pasty white fundament before "turning his flank", so to speak.
Since we're on the subject of odiferous women, though, I'll have to relate the tale of my friend Connecticut Yankee and Lainie the Skank. I'm sure he's spewing out beer onto his monitor as he reads this, as he's likely not given her a thought in nearly 12 years.
During the aforementioned years at UTA, Connecticut Yankee and I used to hang out at the Limey Bastard's apartment just off campus whenever we weren't in class or working. Various hangers-on and girlfriends used to come and go at infrequent intervals, and periodically we'd throw parties that would shake the foundations. Connecticut Yankee moved in for a brief period, though that didn't last long for reasons I don't recall.
Now, in those years, Connecticut Yankee was seriously on the prowl. There was a new female with him almost every month. Some were fun to hang out with, others, less so. MUCH less so... I can't remember exactly how Lainie entered the social circle, whether she was a pizza-delivery pal of Limey Bastard, or one of the many 18-20 year old girls that used my over-21 self as an alcohol connection. Yes, I contributed to the delinquency of minors. This surprises you, perhaps?
Somehow Connecticut Yankee decided that Lainie was acceptable as a snogging partner, and every so often LB and I would get to his place, open the door and find ConnYank and Lainie on the couch, with flushed faces and trying to adjust clothes back into some sort of order. LB and I would give ConnYank shit about his choice of women, since she did have that aura of skank about her.
LB & I kept waiting for the inevitable "gloat moment", when ConnYank would finally admit to putting a shot between the goalposts. I mean, sooner or later he's gotta get past 2nd base, we assumed.
Lainie stopped showing up so often at the apartment. I seem to recall she took some convincing that Connecticut Yankee wasn't interested anymore. It took a while, but we finally got the story from Connecticut Yankee. I'll try and relate his explanation, though I'll admit to it being 12 years ago, and I'm not 100% accurate as to his exact wording. But it went something like this:
"Dude, I was heading downtown! Had her pants off, and was heading for the groinal-crotchable area! When I got down to her stomach, though, there was this... smell. It just kept getting stronger the further down I went. So, I turned around, went right back up, kissed her, and told her I needed to go home. Got dressed and left."
ConnYank & I used to joke a lot about the movie 'Grumpy Old Men', specifically Burgess Meredith's role as an incredibly horny old man. He had a bunch of euphemisms for having sex that ran during the end credits. The funniest one was "taking the skin boat to Tuna Town". Funny how Connecticut Yankee was never quite so amused by that line after the Lainie incident...
UPDATE: Found the below picture online somewhere. It's one of a collection of drunk & passed out people that circulates on the web. I post it not so much because the girl looks quite a bit like Lainie, but because that IS the Limey Bastard's couch. It *has* to be. There can't be more than one couch in the world of that particular style and design that had that degree of filth and abuse heaped upon it. That couch was the product of 3 or 4 different owners in our circle of friends, all of which were less than careful about care and upkeep. I can only hope someone gave it a Viking funeral before it became an EPA/CDC hazard.
posted by El Capitan | 6:13 AM
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