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I love puzzle books and Pierre the Maze Detective is one of those visually stunning oversized books in the tradition of Where’s Waldo. You’ll spend hours…

By Daniel Parker

Be honest: did you once believe that spaghetti could grow on trees? That cats needed headphones? Or that the moon was made of cheese? Actually, don’t worry about that last one; I’m still sure that’s true. However embarrassingly you may have been hoodwinked on April Fool’s Day in the past, it is incredibly unlikely that you’ll have ever been swindled by French confidence trickster Georges Pierre des Clozets, who represented a completely fictional secret Alchemy society called ‘The Asterism’. That dubious honour fell to Robert Boyle, philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor, who was duped in the latter part of the 17th century.

Between 1677 and 1678 Robert Boyle became the victim of a progressive French confidence trickster from Caen called Pierre, who claimed to be the agent of a secret international society of alchemists known mysteriously as ‘The Asterism’. The leader of The Asterism was described as the ‘Patriarch of Antioch’, resident in Constantinople. Pierre claimed to be able to work as an intermediary between Robert Boyle and the head of this exclusive society, Georges du Mesnillet, who Pierre referred to as the Patriarch of Antioch. The Asterism was, allegedly, a society comprised of the leading alchemists from around the world, a society that held the secrets to the riddles that had notoriously plagued Robert Boyle throughout his career. Pierre promised that Boyle would be made a member of The Asterism and, therefore, be privy to these alchemical secrets if he followed his orders.

There were a few problems with this. Firstly, The Asterism was an entirely fictional society made up by Pierre. Secondly, Georges du Mesnillet was not the Patriarch of Antioch (nor was there ever a French Patriarch of Antioch). Georges du Mesnillet was just an old acquaintance of Pierre’s. And thirdly, many of the alchemical secrets Pierre promised to impart were chemically impossible. Of course, Robert Boyle wasn’t to know any of this. Pierre expertly played on Robert Boyle’s obsessive fascination with alchemy, and toyed with Boyle’s perception of what was plausible and, more importantly, what was implausible. At one point during their correspondence, Pierre even managed to convince Boyle that one of the Chinese members of the society based in France had grown a fully formed homunculus in a jar.

So how did Pierre manage to successfully dupe the otherwise incredibly intelligent Robert Boyle?

As well as making a good personal impression on Boyle when the two met in early 1677 – Pierre is alluded to as the ‘illustrious stranger’ and ‘foreign virtuoso’ in Boyle’s An Historical Account of a Degradation of Gold by an Anti-Elixir – the French conman manipulated leading European periodicals to corroborate his fanciful tale. For instance, the stories Pierre told Boyle, such as the Patriarch of Antioch working towards the “reunification of the Greek and Latin Churches”, were backed up in France’s Mercure Galant and Holland’s Haerlemse Courant. The latter was published by Haarlem printer Abraham Casteleyn and it had an excellent reputation for reliability, and for acquiring sensitive international information ahead of its rivals. We also know that Robert Boyle read this publication during the years that Pierre fed ‘information’ to the publishers, and that Boyle was an irenic Christian, so these stories would have appealed to him and helped him believe the lies Pierre was telling him. The artifice of Pierre was such that he made Boyle trust him implicitly.

In early 1678 Robert Boyle was promised by Pierre that a triple-locked chest containing the alchemical secrets of The Asterism would be delivered to him as his membership had been approved by the (pseudo) Patriarch of Antioch. It was at this point that Pierre’s letters to Boyle started to dry up. Pierre’s silence was only punctuated by his bizarre excuse that the delays were due to a freak canon accident that had resulted in him breaking his lower jaw bone and losing part of his forehead. Needless to say, this triggered Boyle’s long overdue scepticism, and soon he found out the embarrassing nature of his correspondence with Pierre and the fictional society of The Asterism.

This embarrassing episode did not just impact on Robert Boyle’s pride, but his bank balance too. Pierre, and the fictional Patriarch of Antioch, swindled Robert Boyle to the tune of several hundred pounds worth of gifts. Amongst many other things, here are a few items Robert Boyle sent Pierre, on the ‘request’ of the Patriarch of Antioch: a telescope, assay balances, a globe, one hundred glass vials, jackets of fine fabric, eight rods of gold-coloured moiré, and a chiming clock over three feet tall. The only gift that we can be sure Boyle received in return, based on the correspondence between them, was a basket of fruits and cheeses. I think it’s fairly obvious who came out on top of that exchange.

Pierre used the gifts and money he had received from Robert Boyle, and numerous other victims throughout the 1670’s, to purchase an extravagant estate in Bretteville in the spring of 1680. While building and planting on the site, Pierre became ill with inflammation of the lung and died in May 1680. His family inherited the estate and the missive that announced his death summed up his mysterious existence perfectly: “Such was the end of this man, whose character had been so little known, and after his death we know even less than when he was alive”.

This article was written by Daniel Parker, Publicity Assistant at OUP, with the help and guidance of the Electronic Enlightenment team. Electronic Enlightenment currently has 13 letters from Georges Pierre Des Clozets to Robert Boyle written in French, along with their English translations. Electronic Enlightenment is a scholarly research project of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, and is available exclusively from Oxford University Press. It is the most wide-ranging online collection of edited correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas, and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century.

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Image credit: Robert Boyle by Johann Kerseboom via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Georges Pierre des Clozets: the 17th century conman appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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At the meal following the YoungArts gala, I had the privilege of being seated near Michele Oka Doner, the renowned sculptor, jewelry maker, fashionista, space maker.  Her work can be seen at MOMA, the Louvre, the Cooper-Hewitt, and the FIU-Wolfsonian, where a mural painted by my great uncle Lloyd Morgan, an architectural designer in the firm of Schultze and Weaver, is hung (below).  Michele's art can be experienced in retail stores (Tiffany's, say, or Macy's, or Fifty One East, the luxury superstore in Doha, Qatar), in public sculpture gardens, in the Herald Square Subway Station of New York City, and at the Miami International Airport, where she created a nearly mile-long floor of dark terrazzo celestial sea forms in bronze and mother of pearl. 

Actually, I'm just scratching the surface here.  Michele's work is everywhere.

I'll be joining Michele as one of her new pieces gets cast, and I'll be writing about the experience for the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

This is how fate takes us.  This is the experience we lean toward.

My great uncle Lloyd Morgan, a visionary architect, painted this imaginary skyline of the many buildings he helped design as a member of the Schulze and Weaver design team—the Pierre, the Waldorf-Astoria, the Sherry-Netherland, the Miami Biltmore, the Breakers—and hung the painting in his Tarrytown, NY, home throughout the years when we visited him as a family.  After he passed away, the painting was adopted by my father, who ultimately had it restored and shipped to the FIU-Wolfsonian.  I was able to reconnect with the painting for the first time two weeks ago, when I visited the quite beautiful Wolfsonian during my experience at YoungArts.

#79 Pierre by Maurice Sendak (1962)
25 points

Growing up, my first exposure to Pierre came when I joined the Kalamazoo Civic Youth Theater, a program for the kids of Kalamazoo, and did tech work on their production of Really Rosie.  There I saw firsthand a sung version of the ultimate in children-being-eaten literature (here’s a close approximation of what I saw).  Finding the book after the fact, I discovered my favorite Sendak.  Keep your Wild Things, your Mickeys, your Pops, your Bumble-Ardys, your everything.  Pierre is Sendak at his best, in my book.  Simple. Sublime. Ridiculously twisted and with a moral I live by to this day.

The mighty spirited description of the book from Amazon says, “Even when a hungry lion comes to pay a call, Pierre won’t snap out of his ennui. Every child has one of these days sometimes. Mix in a stubborn nature, a touch of apathy, and a haughty pout, and it can turn noxious. Parents may cajole, scold, bribe, threaten–all to no avail. When this mood strikes, the Pierres of the world will not budge, even for the carnivorous king of beasts. Created by one of the best-loved author-illustrators of children’s books, Maurice Sendak, this 1962 cautionary tale is hardly a pedantic diatribe against children who misbehave. Still, by the end of the lilting, witty story, most children will take the moral (Care!) to heart. Pierre’s downward-turned eyebrows, his parents’ pleading faces, and the lion’s almost sympathetic demeanor as he explains that he will soon eat Pierre, make the package perfect.”

In Selma G. Lanes’s Through the Looking Glass: Further Adventures & Misadventures in the Realm of Children’s Literature there is a particularly amusing portion where Ms. Lanes takes issue with Sendak’s lions.  Put simply, she doesn’t think he draws them particularly well.  Not in Circus Girl, not in Higglety Pigglety Pop! and not even in Pierre, though she acknowledges, “The lion in his Nutshell Library volume, Pierre (1962), suffers the same lion-suit syndrome, but being a broader rendition is less obtrusive.”  Good to know.

As she mentions, this book was part of the original Nutshell Library.  This was a set of four little books (Alligators All Around, Chicken Soup with Rick, One Was Johnny, and Pierre) sold in a tiny set.  In Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (edited by Leonard Marcus) there’s an amusing letter dated January 31, 1963 where Nordstrom responds to Sendak’s worry that future Nutshell Libraries would be created by author/illustrators other than himself.  After reassuring him to some degree she takes a rather forthright stab at Maria Cimino the Chief Librarian in the Central Children’s Room of my library.  Ah, Ursula.  Always with the jabbings.

• Browse inside the book here.
• Confusingly, Sendak worked on a very different kind of Pierre later in life.  Very different.

Until I went searching for the original animated Pierre from Carole King’s Really Rosie special I had no idea that one of my favorite bands, The Dresden Dolls, covered it.  Makes sense I suppose.  Better still, someone out there decided to put Amanda Palmer’s words onto the original animated v

Oh, subervsive cautionary tales in the guise of children's books--how I love you. Really, I do.  Maybe it's because when I was a child my cousin and I would spend the night at my Poppa's house; if we didn't go to sleep right away he would sneak outside and bang on the window with a stick and yell that he was the Boogeyman, there to "get" us. (You have to understand, my grandfather was not a traditional grandparent in any sense of the word.) So maybe my love for books like Pierre and Monsters Eat Whiny Children is just in my genes. To be sure, these books aren't for everyone--some may claim they're too scary or dark or inappropriate for young children. To those naysayers I say: I don't care.

First up, Maurice Sendak's classic Pierre. Pierre isn't a bad child, exactly. It's more that he's disengaged and refuses to show any emotion or react to his parents' proclamations, suggestions and threats with anything other than a bored, "I don't care." Pierre just doesn't care. About anything, apparently, not even the fact that he is pouring syrup on his hair. Finally, fed up, Pierre's parents leave the house without him. Soon a lion comes to the door. Predictably, Pierre is unmoved so the lion announces he will eat him. "I don't care," says Pierre, which is all the invitation the lion needs. When Pierre's parents return, horrified to find their son has become somebody's meal, they take him to a doctor who makes quick work of rescuing Pierre. Who finally cares.



Because I love Pierre so very much, I was very interested in checking out the Monsters Eat Whiny Children, which has received a lot of positive buzz this fall. Written and illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan, it is another book in which disobedient children finally get their comeuppance. Henry and Eve whine. A lot. Their father tells them that monsters eat whiny children b

PIERRE IN LOVE, written by BookArtist Sara Pennypacker is the winner of the The Society of Children's Books Writers and Illustrators 2007 Golden Kite Award for Picture Book Text.

Instituted in 1973, the Golden Kite Awards are the only children’s literary award judged by a jury of peers. More than 1,000 books are entered each year.