Chuckling Giggling Hehing Cause These Two Separately And Unconnectedly Drawn Pictures Look Like:

chuckling giggling hehing cause these two separately and unconnectedly drawn pictures look like:

"you're just a little hater"

"and?"

put together

Ney wearing a banyan and my headcanon about his glasses👓✨

Metternich: Remember when you said you weren’t going to interfere with my love life?

Wellington, after setting up a date for Metternich and Schwarzenberg: Nope, doesn’t sound like me at all.

Maria Theresa’s contemporaries already praised (...) her “manliness of soul,” her virilità d’anima. Some even called her a “Grand-Homme”; “in the attractive body of a queen” she was “fully a king, in the most glorious, all-encompassing sense of the word.” Later historians reprised the theme, describing her as a “man filled with insight and vigor.” That a masculine soul could reside in a female body had long been a commonplace, albeit one used less to elevate women than to cast shame on men. Praising a woman for her manly bravery or resolution, her masculine courage or spirit, served above all as an indirect criticism of men (…) When a woman is said to be the better man, this casts a devastating judgment on all her male peers. The key point is that calling an exceptional woman like Maria Theresa a “real man” consolidates the sexual hierarchy rather than calling it into question. Such praise assumes that masculinity is a compliment and that the male sex is and remains superior.

For the eighteenth century, a period when the dynastic principle still largely held sway throughout Europe, there was nothing especially unusual about a female head of state. While a woman on the throne was perceived even then as less desirable, she was not yet a contradiction; the spheres of the public and the private, politics and the family were not yet categorically distinct. Maria Theresa’s contemporaries already found it remarkable that a representative of the lesser sex could wield such power. But they did not regard her rule as entirely anomalous: she was “a woman, and a mother to her country, just as a prince can be a man and father to his country.” Her rule proved that “the greatest of all the arts, that of governing kingdoms, is not beyond the soul of a lady.” What was extraordinary, in the eighteenth-century context, was less the fact that a woman held the scepter of power than that a monarch, whether male or female, took the task of government so seriously. Princes came in many forms—patrons of the arts, skirt-chasers, war heroes, family fathers, scholars, philosophers—and each prince could shape his everyday life as he saw fit. Very few approached the task of rule with the single-minded dedication of a Maria Theresa. She met the criteria of a conscientious ruler to a remarkable degree, far more than most other sovereigns of the time.

Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara (2020). Maria Theresa: The Habsburg Empress in her Time (translation by Robert Savage)

Always so interesting to me when I come across a historical figure who was noted to be constantly "in poor health" or "of a weak constitution" or some other shorthand for "they were always falling ill, even when others weren't and there was no obvious trigger for it." it really makes me wonder--how many of those people had what we'd today consider a chronic illness, and how many of them were just suffering from subpar sanitation in the past? how many of them had what could reasonably be considered a disability as opposed to just living in a time without modern medicine, and the people around them just couldn't diagnose them because the diagnosis didn't exist yet? this is something that I think about constantly btw

The Shopping Arcade des Panoramas in Paris, 1807 by Philibert Louis Debucourt