Two more specimens came to light this week, and I’m not willing to wait until late October to share them with you. First, the Simone de Beauvoir centenary has led to newspaper articles like this one; second, an erudite colleague has drawn my attention to a passage from Charles Fourier, in which he argues that the dilapidated state of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Frenchwomen gives us just as little insight into what women might be like one day as the torpor of the beaver in captivity gives us any clue to the real nature of the beaver (or something like that, anyway).
This exhibition at the Imperial War Museum features a splendid poster of beavers, bearing a slogan along the lines of “Keep All Canadians Busy!” I think it was selling war bonds.