(2.20) Head down to the Providence Athenaeum today for part three of “What use is the giraffe?” postponed from last April.
In the summer of 1827 a very young giraffe arrived in Paris, a gift for King Charles X from Muhammad Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, who had reason to curry political favor from the ruler of France. The giraffe’s first stop in France had been Marseilles, where she had arrived by ship from Alexandria in the fall of 1826, and where she and the two men who had attended her on the voyage – one a Beduoin and one of Sudanese origin – had spent the winter.
. . . Bard Graduate Center Assistant Professor of European and American Textiles Michele Majer on “La Mode à la girafe: Fashion, Culture, and Politics in Bourbon Restoration France,” – The Evolution of Science, Society, and Spectacle in the Cosmopolitan 19th Century, a series on the giraffe who went to Paris in 1827.
Free and open to the public, 5pm to 7pm, Friday, February 20, Providence Athenaeum, 251 Benefit Street