Descended from both Louis XIV of France and his younger brother, Philippe of France, "Duke of Orléans", Bathilde was born a "princesse du sang" and baptised with the names "Louise Marie Thérèse Bathilde". She was the youngest child of Louis Philippe d'Orléans and Louise Henriette de Bourbon. Bathilde was born at the Château de Saint-Cloud on 9 July 1750.
Her mother died in 1759 when Bathilde was just eight years old. Her father, pressured by his mistress, Madame de Montesson, sent her to a convent. During her time at the convent, she became a very spiritual person.
Initially, Bathilde was considered as a possible bride for a distant cousin, Ferdinand, Duke of Parma, the favourite grandson of King Louis XV of France, however, that marriage never materialised.
Finally, in 1770, when she was twenty years old, she was allowed to leave the convent and marry her younger cousin, the "Louis Henri de Bourbon", son and heir of Louis Joseph de Bourbon, Prince of Condé and his wife Charlotte Élisabeth Godefride de Rohan.
The scandal of her husband's adultery came out in 1778, and the consequences fell entirely on her shoulders. The couple separated in 1780. As a separated spouse, she was never received at court and was forced to reorganise her life at the Château de Chantilly.
In her isolation, she discreetly had an illegitimate daughter with a marine officer. Later, she passed the child off as the daughter of her secretary, in order to keep the little girl close to her. In 1787, she purchased the Élysée Palace from Louis XVI and had a hamlet constructed there.
During the French Revolution, just like her brother Philippe Égalité, Bathilde discovered democracy. She fell out with her royalist husband and son, who both chose to leave France after the storming of the Bastille. As the "Ancien Régime" crumbled, she took the name, "Citoyenne Vérité", "Citizeness Truth". Threatened by the new revolutionary government, she offered her wealth to the First French Republic before it could be confiscated.
In April 1793, her nephew, the young Duke of Chartres (future Louis Philippe of the French), fled France and sought asylum with the Austrians. In retribution, the National Convention decreed the imprisonment of all Bourbons remaining in France. While other members of the Orléans family still in France were kept under house arrest, Bathilde, Philippe Égalité and his sons were imprisoned in the Fort Saint-Jean in Marseille. Badly rewarded for her fidelity to the democratic ideals of the Revolution, she survived a year and a half in a prison cell. In November of the same year, her brother was guillotined. Miraculously spared during the Reign of Terror, Bathilde was freed during the Thermidorian Reaction and returned to her Élysée residence in Paris. Poverty-stricken, she was forced to rent out most of the palace.
In 1797, the Directoire decided to exile the last of the Bourbons still living in France. With her sister-in-law, Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon, she went to Spain with her illegitimate daughter. Despite being forty-seven years old at the time, during the months which this journey took, she had an amorous intrigue with a handsome twenty-seven year old police officer ("gendarme") under whose responsibility she had been put. The two maintained a correspondence during her exile.
Relegated to a place near Barcelona, Bathilde founded, despite her small means, a pharmacy and dispensary for the poor, and her house became a gathering place for those who needed aid. She became completely republican during this time period, despite her exile.
In 1804, she learned that Napoléon I, whom she admired, had had her only son, Louis Antoine, Duke of Enghien, kidnapped, and executed by firing squad in the moat of the Château de Vincennes. For ten years, the emperor kept the mother of his most famous victim from setting foot in France. Bathilde got her revenge in 1814, when the people, seeing in her the mother of the "Martyr of Vincennes," cheered her as she travelled the route back to Paris.
In 1815, at the start of the Bourbon Restoration, she returned to France. Louis XVIII traded with her the Hôtel Matignon for the Élysée Palace. Bathilde promptly installed a community of nuns on the premises and charged them with praying for the souls of the victims of the Revolution. Her family, in the new moral order of the day, wanted to see her rejoin her husband after a separation of thirty-five years, but she refused. Instead, she resumed her affair with the police officer who had escorted her to Spain in 1797.
In 1822, while she was taking part in a march towards the Panthéon, she lost consciousness, and drew her last breath in the home of a law professor who taught at the Sorbonne. After her death, her nephew, Louis-Philippe, wanting to give an air of respectability to her bohemian lifestyle, burned the manuscript of her memoirs and a file on her young police officer located in the war archives.
She was buried in the Orléans family chapel the Collégiale de Dreux.
Robert Del Naja
Robert Del Naja (pron. ; born 21 January 1966, in Bristol, England), also known as 3D, is an English artist and musician. Originally famous as a graffiti artist and a member of the Bristol group known as "The Wild Bunch", Del Naja went on to become a founding member of the band Massive Attack where he is active to this day. However he has also admitted that he got his own way by "being stubborn, throwing tantrums — the usual fucking childish behaviour."
Sue Gardner
Sue Gardner (born 1967) is the former executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco from 2007 to 2014. She was the director of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's website and online news outlets. She is currently the executive director of The Markup.
Gardner grew up in Port Hope, Ontario, Canada. She is the daughter of an Anglican minister and school principal. Gardner earned a degree in journalism from Ryerson University. She began her career on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) radio in 1990. She worked on the program "As It Happens" at first. Gardner worked for more than a decade as a producer, reporter and documentary-maker for CBC Radio current-affairs. She also worked for Newsworld International. Her time at Newsworld dealt mainly with pop culture and social issues.
In March 2006, she replaced Claude Galipeau as Senior Director. She was in charge of 150 people who worked on CBC.ca, the CBC website.
In May 2007, Gardner left CBC. Soon after that, she started working with the Wikimedia Foundation. She helped as an advisor on how the foundation worked and how it was governed.
In December 2007, she was hired as the Foundation's Executive Director. Over the next two years, the number of employees of the foundation grew. This included the addition of a fundraising team. She also guided the foundation as it moved its office from Tampa to San Francisco.
In October 2009, the "Huffington Post" said Gardner was as one of ten 'media game changers of the year'. They said this because of the affect she had on new media because of her work for Wikimedia.
Interviews
Chiba Lotte Marines
Chiba Lotte Marines are the baseball team in Chiba, Japan. Their stadium, QVC Marine Field, is placed in Makuhari, Chiba Prefecture.
They were founded in 1950 as the "Mainichi Orions". In 1958, they changed their name to the "Daimai Orions", the "Tokyo Orions" in 1964, the "Lotte Orions" in 1969, and finally the Chiba Lotte Marines since 1992. Chiba Lotte Marines has been a Pacific league champion six times, 1950, 1960, 1970, 1974, 2005, and 2010. Then, 4 times they won Japan series, 1950, 1974, 2005, and 2010.
Tsuyoshi Nishioka entered into Chiba Lotte Marines in 2002 and played for 8 years in Japan. He was a captain of Chiba Lotte Marines in the 2010 season. He transferred to the Minnesota Twins after Chiba Lotte Marines won the Japan series in 2010. He is well known as switch hitter and recorded high averaged hitting in WBC-2006.
Na+/K+-ATPase