Marie and Me
Curiosity…well, thankfully it did not kill our cats, but it did kill any genomaginings [genome-inspired imaginings] of exotic ancestry on my part. After doing the 23&Me genetic testing, my anticipation of discovering something unexpected in my background was quickly dashed. My results: 100% European broken down into 93.3% Northwestern European broken down further into 26.5% Scandinavian (so much for the pure Viking blood), 25.3% British and Irish, and then a smattering of French, German, Finnish, and “Broadly Northwestern European” thrown in to complete the mix. Good to know, I guess, but totally boring. But not all was lost I discovered. In a separate report titled “Maternal Haplogroup,” I found that, in my group, H5a1, I get to hang with Marie Antoinette; Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh; and the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.
Reading this report was educational. I learned that the migratory path of your ancestors can be traced through the maternal line. This line, for all living persons today, originated in eastern Africa between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago. That’s the “L” in the illustration below. My group, the “H” shown there, tracks to a woman who lived nearly 9,000 years ago, probably in southeastern Europe. From there, we branched out as shown to western Europe and Scandinavia. Maternal haplogroups are determined by the genetic variants in our mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which resides in the mitochondria, the structures inside our cells that turn food into energy.
Okay, this is all way too much scispeak [science blather] for me. Let’s focus on the fact that Marie Antoinette and I share identical bits of mtDNA. As you may recall, Marie was the last queen of France before the French Revolution deprived her and many others of their cognitopositories (what normal people call heads). As wife of Louis XVI, Marie was not disliked by the people at first but then came the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, something that’s new to my previously wafer-thin MA knowledge base. Here’s the story. Louis XV loved his mistress Madame du Barry so much that he commissioned a little trinket to show his affection — a diamond necklace that would go for about $14 million in 2015 US dollars. Before the jewelers could finish, however, Louis XV died of smallpox and Madame D was banished from court by Louis XV’s grandson Louis XVI. The jewelers, desperate to recoup their money, tried to get MA interested. She turned up her nose once and then again when Louis XVI wanted to buy it for her and then again when the jewelers offered it after her son Louis Joseph was born.
Now things get complicated. A grifter named Jeanne de Valois-Remy became mistress of Cardinal de Rohan, someone MA disdained for various and sundry reasons. The cardinal sent Jeanne to court hoping she could get him back in the queen’s good graces. Jeanne faked letters from the queen to convince the cardinal that this was happening and then even faked a meeting with the queen by substituting a prostitute that looked like MA. Along the way Jeanne was defrauding the churchman out of huge sums of money. Somehow the diamond necklace jewelers learned about Jeanne and thought she had legit influence over the queen. They offered her a commission if she could convince MA to buy the $14 million albatross. Jeanne, in turn, sent letters to the cardinal that included an order to buy the necklace, saying the queen wanted him to act as secret intermediary in the purchase.
The poor cardinal fell for it and arranged to pay for the diamonds in installments. He took the necklace to Jeanne, thinking she would hand it to the queen. Instead, her husband carried it off to London, broke it up, and sold the diamonds individually. The jig was up when the jewelers complained to the queen about not getting paid and she said, “Quel collier? Je n’ai pas besoin de collier puant!” The king was furious and probably MA as well. At trial, the duped cardinal was acquitted, but Jeanne was condemned to be whipped, to have a V for voleuse (thief) branded on each shoulder, and to life imprisonment (she escaped eventually).
In all this the queen was innocent of wrongdoing, but the French people came to believe she had used Jeanne and Jeanne’s husband as instruments to satisfy her hatred of the cardinal. This and the cardinal’s acquittal led to a huge decline in her popularity and that of the monarchy and four years later heads rolled…literally. (Okay, maybe not as the guillotineers employed a loose-noggin basket to prevent such a thing.)
Wow. TMD [too much drama]. Now that I know this story, I think I will not be bragging about my distant relationship to Marie Antoinette. And having just few bits of mtDNA in common is not enough connection for me to lose sleep at night imagining the French still have me on their statute-of-limitationless chopping list. Still, I do have this constant nagging desire every time I reach for a healthy slice of preservative and chemical-free, locally baked whole-grain bread. Each time it’s almost as if I hear a tiny, tiny feminine voice coming from within my vittles-to-energy-converting mitochondria saying, “Allons. Vous devriez manger du gâteau à la place. Quel est le mal?” Good thing I never learned the language, isn’t it?
(Published originally on RatBlurt™, March 3, 2018.)
