WASTED ALL DAY KILLING ALL THE CAPULETS

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

I’d totally like to see a YA story where the epilogue is like “oh, and they broke up three months later; once the we-saved-the-world-together high wore off, they released they literally had nothing in common, and also that shared life-altering trauma is a poor basis for a stable relationship”.

Amusingly, several days after I posted this, I stumbled upon a real-life scenario that basically worked out like this.

I’m sure we’ve all heard of Julie d’Aubigny; there have been a number of popular posts going around about her adventures, including a well-publicised incident in which she snuck into a convent to shag a nun.

Well, it turns out that the most commonly related version of the story omits several critical details:

• Julie was very young at the time; though the chronology of her early years is somewhat confused by poor record-keeping, she was probably fifteen or sixteen years old.
  
• In spite of her age, she’d already been living as a wandering adventurer for at least a year, having fled Paris after the young fencing master she was having an affair with killed a man in an illegal duel. (She later dumped him because he was boring.)
• She didn’t target that particular convent by chance. After giving the fencing master the boot, she’d become romantically involved with a young lady of Marseille, whose parents, upon discovering the relationship, forced her to become a nun. (Being sent to a convent was the era’s equivalent of reparative therapy for lesbians; it worked about as well as you’d imagine.)
• Julie followed her girlfriend to Avignon and joined the same convent as a postulant in order to continue the relationship. Eventually, the two hatched a scheme in which Julie would steal the corpse of a recently deceased nun (!), place it in her girlfriend’s bed, and burn down the convent, thus faking her death and freeing her from her parents’ demands.

(If this sounds completely deranged, bear in mind that we’re talking about a pair of love-addled teenage girls here, one of whom could legitimately put “wandering adventurer” on her resume.)

Long story short, the plan worked, the convent burned, and the young lady joined Julie on the road. Sadly, it wasn’t to last. The life of an adventurer proved to be less romantic than the young lady had imagined; it involved rather more sleeping in ditches than she’d anticipated, for one, and also Julie turned out to be kind of a jerk (you know, if the grave robbing and arson hadn’t clued you into that fact). The pair broke up - you guessed it - just three months later, and the young lady returned home to her parents.

I don’t know about you, but that’s a YA movie I kind of want to see now!

(As a final punchline, the scheme was eventually discovered, and Julie was sentenced to death by burning for a list of crimes including kidnapping, arson, desecration of a corpse, and contempt of court. However, the sentence proved unenforceable due to a failure to properly identify the culprit; the court had assumed that Julie was a man, being unwilling to believe that a teenage girl could have pulled all that off.)