The manifesto written by the hand of Charlotte Corday justifying her assassination of Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat has been bought at auction by the region of Normandy, the city of Caen and the department of Calvados. It’s a good thing they were able to pool their resources to save this priceless historical record, because the autograph manuscript, estimated at 80,000 – 100,000 EUR ($92,000-108,000), blew past the high figure and sold for 215,000 EUR ($232,000). And that’s just the hammer price. The final cost with fees and taxes was 270,000 EUR ($292,000).

Born in Normandy to a penniless minor aristocratic family, Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d’Armont was sent to the convent of Abbaye-aux-Dames in Caen at age 13 to receive an education. She remained in the convent until she left for Paris ten years later, studying the great French authors, including Voltaire, Rousseau and her own great-great-great-grandfather, the tragedian Pierre Corneille, whom Voltaire declared the French equivalent of Homer.

Her intellectual ferment was stimulated by the heady philosophical debates of the French revolutionaries. She sided with the moderate Girondins and was spurred to action by the September Massacres on 1792 in which more than 1,000 prisoners, half of Paris’ prison population, were summarily executed out of fear they were in league with Prussian invaders. Corday held Marat’s incendiary rhetoric and his radical Montagnard faction responsible for this outrage.

Determined that killing Marat would end the orgies of revolutionary violence taking hold in France, Charlotte set out for Paris on July 9th, 1792. She bought a knife, wrote her three-page manifesto
Adresse aux Français amis des lois et de la paix (“Address to the French, friends of Law and Peace”) and sighted her quarry. On the evening of July 13th, she gained admission to Marat’s quarters by claiming she had information about a Girondist plot in Caen. She was shown into his room where he was in his sulfur bath. (His skin disease was so severe at this point that he basically never left the bath anymore.) She told him the names of the purported conspiracists and then stabbed him in the heart.

She had no intention of getting out of this alive. She knew she’d be arrested and executed for this crime and she came prepared: she had stashed the letter in her bodice. It was found during a search of her person after her arrest, but it was never entered into evidence at her trial because the prosecutor preferred to promote the politically expedient fiction that Corday was a royalist, nor did it square with the Montagnards’ insistence that Corday was but a tool of a vast Girondist conspiracy.

The last lines of her manifesto read:

My parents and friends should not be worried, no one knew my plans. I am attaching my baptismal certificate to this address to show what the weakest hand can do led by complete devotion. If I do not succeed in my enterprise, Frenchmen, I have shown you the way, you know your enemies, rise up, march and strike.

Charlotte Corday was tried, convicted and died four days after her victim, beheaded by guillotine. Her statement of purpose disappeared, reappearing at an auction in 1834. Since then it has been sold another seven times, passing from private collection to private collection. At first Normandy’s cultural heritage authorities tried to prevent this latest sale, fearing it could be acquired by a foreign buyer and leave the country. When they weren’t able to get it pulled from the auction, they chipped in with departmental and city authorities to bring this hugely significant manuscript back to Charlotte Corday’s beloved homeland.

An 18th century portrait of a small dog believed to be Marie Antoinette’s toy poodle Pompon sold at auction on Friday for $279,400, 56 times the high pre-sale estimate of $5,000. This was totally unexpected, as several versions of this portrait exist and none of them have generated the kind of explosive interest that sparks an auction floor bidding war. Fifteen people were bidding against each other for this piece, inexplicably driving the price up into the stratosphere.

The painter was Jacques Barthélémy Delamarre who was active in Paris in the last quarter of the 18th century through the early 19th century. Very little is known about him. The only biographical information with a paper trail about him is that he was admitted to the Académie Saint-Luc, a Paris painters and sculptors guild, in 1777.

He made several versions of this dog portrait. There are differences in the grooming style, the backgrounds and the accessories in the room. One sitting on a red velvet bed sold for 11,875 euros, 10 times its very low estimate, at Sotheby’s in 2020. That same version sold for just a hair above estimate in Paris in 2021.

There is no evidence that Marie Antoinette commissioned the comparatively unknown Delamarre to paint her pooch. There’s no evidence that the portrait was even made in the dog’s lifetime, nor in the tragic queen’s. Not even the dog’s breed is certain. It has been billed variously as a Löwchen, a King Charles Cavalier spaniel and as a Bichon Frisé/Maltese.

If this is a portrait of one of Marie Antoinette’s many dogs, it was probably painted after her death as a souvenir for people with nostalgic feelings for the decapitated monarchs. That would explain why he cranked out several versions of the pup.

So the feeding frenzy for the one that just sold cannot really be explained by the quality or backstory of the painting itself. My theory is the dog looks so meme-like with his fluff-up-top, shaved-down-below style that bidders lost their minds a little.

Two shipwrecks from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), one laden with thousands of pristine porcelain objects, the other with wood logs, have been discovered deep under the South China Sea. The shipwrecks were discovered last October on the northwest continental slope of the South China Sea off the coast of Hainan island at a depth of 1,500 meters (just under a mile).

With the wreck of Ship No. 1, the remains of the ship itself are mostly obscured by tens of thousands of porcelain artifacts intended for export trade. The porcelain is so dense that there are stacked and nested vessels six feet deep covering 10,000 square meters (2.5 acres). Archaeologists estimate there are more than 100,000 individual pieces. Analysis of a few of the pieces suggest they were produced during the Zhentoku era (1506-1521).

Ship No. 2 was carrying raw wood. The timbers were uniform in size and carefully stacked. Initial analysis of the wood indicates the ship was a Chinese importer bringing in wood supplies from overseas in the Meiji-Koji era (1488-1505). They were likely intended for use in ship-building.

This is the first time a ship with export cargo and one with import cargo have been found in the same area. It is evidence of how well-established and widely-frequented in both directions sea routes were along the Maritime Silk Road. The two neighboring wrecks provide researchers a unique opportunity to study two-way traffic in the South China Sea 500 years ago.

Underwater archaeology in such deep waters poses enormous logistical challenges. This month, the cultural heritage administration of Hainan Province launched a new investigation to map the shipwrecks using a state-of-the-art manned submersible and a new permanent surveying and mapping base point installed in the seabed at the wreck of the first ship. This marks a significant leap forward in deep-sea archaeology.

China’s scientific research vessel Tansuo 1, equipped with the submersible Shenhai Yongshi, or Deep Sea Warrior, took researchers underwater for the exploration on Saturday. Chen Chuanxu, a scientist at the Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering, said that another vessel, the Tansuo 2, equipped with the submersible Fendouzhe, or Striver, will join the mission.

Advanced technological approaches, including soft robotics inspired by bionics and material science, were employed during the operation to salvage some of the relics from the shipwreck sites. New methods of scanning, photography and monitoring were also used.

“Speaking of protection and real-time monitoring of such a large underwater site at a depth of 1,500 meters, we have no precedent in the world,” Chen said, adding that the researchers are currently trying to remotely monitor the site.

The investigation will take place over about a year. The first phase will be a thorough survey of the wrecks. The second will entail a scientific evaluation of the preservation conditions of the wrecks. The third and final phase will be determining how best to protect the wrecks going forward.