Julie Kavanagh > Quotes

“She replaced her wardrobe with marvels of the season bought from boutiques of the Palais-Royal and rue de la Chaussee-d'Antin. Outfits for a ball detailed in the fashion pages of the January 1839 edition of Paris Elegant describe dresses of pale pink crépe garnished with lace and velvet roses and accessorized with white gloves, silk stockings, and white cashmere or taffeta shawls. In the spring of that year, misty tulle bonnets came into fashion worn with capes of Alencon lace - “little masterpieces of lightness and freshness.“

Her bed was her stage, raised on a platform and curtained with sumptuous pink silk drapes. The adjoining cabinet de toilette was also a courtesan’s natural habitat, its dressing table a jumble of lace, bows, ribbons, embossed vases, crystal bottles of scents and lotions, brushes and combs of ivory and silver.

She indulged her sweet tooth with cakes from Rollet the patissier, glaceed fruit from Boissier, and on one occasion sent for twelve biscuits, macaroons, and maraschino liqueur.”
― Julie Kavanagh, The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis

“...l'uomo, allo stato di natura, nasce virtuoso; il vizio deriva dalla vita nella società mondane, esposta alle artefatte pressioni urbane.”
― Julie Kavanagh, The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis

“Confidence depends upon the people in whom you are to confide. You would not confide free representative institutions to the Hottentots, for instance. Nor, going higher up the scale, would you confide them to the Oriental nations whom you are governing in India. . . . [Self-government] works admirably well when it is confided to the people who are of Teutonic race, but it does not work well when people of other races are called upon to join in it.”
― Julie Kavanagh, The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge and the Murders that Stunned an Empire

“Waiting with hands behind his back until the tumult subsided, Parnell calmly resumed: Now I think I heard somebody say, “Shoot him!” [Cheers] but I wish to point out to you a very much better way, a more Christian and a more charitable way.… You must shun him on the roadside when you meet him, you must shun him in the streets of the town, you must shun him at the shop counter, you must shun him in the fair and in the marketplace, and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a moral Coventry, by isolating him from his kind as if he was a leper of old.”
― Julie Kavanagh, The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge, and the Phoenix Park Murders That Stunned Victorian England

“Queen Victoria had written to Spencer saying how “most painfully interested” she was in the Dublin examinations. They are quite thrilling. Will the not finding of the knives (which she fears is likely) cause any difficulty in condemning these monsters? She trusts not. What has struck & shocked her, she must say, is the evidence of that gentleman who described (in May) having seen people wrestling—but no more—proving now that he actually saw all & yet never gave the details before. Surely it is very wrong that he did not do so sooner. A few days later, she impatiently quizzed Harcourt, “Is there any further news? The Queen sees that Mrs. Byrne (who must be a worthy mate of such a Husband), was taken on Sunday.”
― Julie Kavanagh, The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge, and the Phoenix Park Murders That Stunned Victorian England

“When question time in the House was over, Forster picked up his red box of papers and left his front bench seat by Gladstone’s side for the last time.”
― Julie Kavanagh, The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge, and the Phoenix Park Murders That Stunned Victorian England

“Young fops and lordlings of the garrison Kept up by England here to keep us down . . . And doubtless, as they dash along, regard Us who stand outside as a beggarly crew. ’Tis half-past six. Not yet. No, that’s not he. Well, but ’tis pretty, sure, to see them stoop And take the ball, full gallop . . . Polo was still dominated by British cavalry officers, and the stretch called Nine Acres was seen by militant nationalists to be an offensive appropriation of public land—a little enclave of England—as was the cricket ground. Phoenix Park’s statues—the robed figure in the People’s Garden commemorating an earlier lord lieutenant, the Seventh Earl of Carlisle, as well as the bronze equestrian memorial of the war hero Lord Gough—were further reminders of British rule (both demolished by twentieth-century nationalists). Ferguson’s verses, however, express more than national resentment. The poet, later to be worshipped by the young W. B. Yeats, cannot have known about Patrick Egan’s plan for James Carey, and yet, with remarkable insight, he reveals it: “Lord Mayor for life—why not?” Carey muses,”
― Julie Kavanagh, The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge and the Murders that Stunned an Empire

“One was led by a gentle, white-whiskered philanthropist named James Hack Tuke, who set off for Donegal at the beginning of March.”
― Julie Kavanagh, The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge and the Murders that Stunned an Empire

“Among James Mullett’s recruits was Joe Brady, “a giant in stature and a boar in strength,” one of twenty-five siblings brought up in the tenements of Dublin’s North Anne Street. With his huge block of a face, tight lips, and shock of black hair, Brady embodied the primal, brute strength necessary to act on orders without thought or scruple.”
― Julie Kavanagh, The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge, and the Phoenix Park Murders That Stunned Victorian England

“Scotland Yard men were responsible for following her—and at this point, things went badly wrong. “Whether she had left before the watch began or whether she is still there, I am powerless to say,” reported an exasperated Robert Anderson. “The police [are] utterly unfit for work of this kind.”
― Julie Kavanagh, The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge, and the Phoenix Park Murders That Stunned Victorian England