Shepherds with Picnic, by Jacob Wothly and Emile Mangel du Mesnil, c. 1864. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2016.

Energy

Volume XV, Number 2 | winter 2024

Miscellany

John Stow records in his Survey of London that shortly after conquering England in 1066, William I decreed that “in every town and village, a bell should be nightly rung at eight o’clock, and that all people should then put out their fire and candle, and take their rest.” English speakers call such a prohibition a curfew, a word derived from the Anglo-Norman coeverfu, “cover fire.”

If I had been born a man, I would have conquered Europe. As I was born a woman, I exhausted my energy in tirades against fate and in eccentricities.

—Marie Bashkirtseff, 1884
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