‡ Anastasiya Gibbon provides no explanation of this name, and little need be added to that in the text, except to say that the name was and remains ubiquitous among Baltic, Nordic, and Slavic peoples, in many slightly varied versions, and that it long ago entered English as Anastasia. Other than that, the narrator’s interpretation of its meaning is quite accurate; although we may pause in wonder at how many times it has been the name of females destined for remarkable feats of survival in fact, legend, or both. The most obvious of these cases, of course, is the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, famous in legend as the sole child of that country’s last tsar and tsarina, Nicholas II and Alexandra, to have (purportedly) survived the family’s savage massacre in Yekaterinburg, in the Ural district, in 1917: even if this “survival” is wholly apocryphal, it only underscores the resurrectionary associations of the name. —C.C.
† “… companion …” It is worth noting, here, the true meaning of the word “companion” in the Manuscript (and indeed the English language), especially as it relates to the old man and his great cat. Because of one of the many misapprehensions popularized by Dan Brown’s engaging yet nonetheless terribly misleading The Da Vinci Code—this one claiming that the word “companion,” from before the time of Christ to well after it, could indeed imply “wife” (as Brown claims was the true meaning of biblical and Gnostic gospel references to Mary Magdalene as Jesus’s “companion”) — one might be tempted to assume that some sort of bestiality was occurring inside the great panther’s cave. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, however, and a list of experts too long to list here, such a connotation only applied retrospectively: in other words, a man’s or woman’s “companion” (say, in the phrase “companion in life”) could indeed be their legal spouse — but only if they were established as being in such a relationship. It did not mean, in other words, that companion was always an alternate word for “legal spouse,” if the couple in question had not already been legally joined. This point needs to be stressed because Stasi is so often referred to as “the old man’s companion,” and because her very intimate — but, of course, platonic — relationship with the old man was used by the rulers of Broken (and even, at first, the Bane) as further evidence that he was actually a sorcerer. —C.C.
† “… traces of those markings …” Although he could not have known it, the narrator is describing both the metallurgical formula and the color associated with the gold amalgam that would gain great popularity, in the 1920s and thereafter, as “white gold.”—C.C.
‡ “… the long, dipping spine …” Gibbon, again, dismisses the panther’s dimensions, since fossil evidence that such massive creatures existed so comparatively recently in Europe was either unknown or seriously misunderstood during his era. Regardless of whether this particular specimen was a representative of what is today known as the European jaguar or the European cave lion (the latter being somewhat older and larger), we cannot help but be struck once more by her amazing — and yet, for her species, apparently unremarkable — size: with a nine-foot body (excluding the tail, meaning nine feet from nose to rump) that stood roughly half that at its spine, this is an animal more than capable of all the remarkable feats attributed to her in the Manuscript. The “white” fur was not, if we are to judge by the color of both the eyes and the dark “eyeliner” around them, an indication that she was either an albino or a separate species or, indeed, truly white; rather, it is a color that still appears, occasionally, in lions and other great cats around the world, which is very nearly white. (The faint, light markings also confirm the presence of pigmentation.) We also can see, with the revelation that the “warrior queen” was in fact a great cat, why the old man’s medicines and poultices would have been so helpful to her: his treatments appear to have been grounded in opiates, willow bark (the “natural aspirin”), and naturally occurring antiseptics, none of which are or would have been toxic to cats, as so many other, seemingly milder, drugs are. Acetaminophen, for example (most popularly known by its major brand name, Tylenol) is generally considered an extremely benign drug, among humans — but it is fatal to cats, even in very small doses.
†† “… against his nose and face …” It will not need stating or restating, to those who live with and/or work with cats, large and small, that this delicate touch is their most intimate indication of affection, and of the granting of their trust — usually not easily gained (particularly in areas like northern Europe, the nations of which, especially France, have a long history of believing cats the familiars of witches and creatures of Satan). —C.C.
† “the Northeastern Sea” Gibbon writes, “Having reliably determined that the ‘Seksent Straits’ to which the narrator refers is our own Channel, we may infer that this ‘Northeastern Sea’ is that which lies in the direction indicated, relative to the position of the mountain Brocken—in other words, the Baltic Sea. Yet, even if this is so, we can draw few conclusions from the fact, little as yet being known of the tribes who inhabited the Baltic coast during this period.” We are, as already noted, at no such disadvantage today, however, and this interpretation only reinforces the notion that the old man came from the trading peoples who had been pushed to the Baltic coast by larger and more warlike tribes like the Huns. —C.C.
† “… should stir disbelief …” Gibbon writes, “While we may indeed, as the narrator suspects, scoff at the further idea of a crippled and bleeding old man being taken in and cared for by so carnivorous a beast as a panther, aneċal Natural History is too full of tales of humans thus cared for by various animal species (for what reasons, we may never know) to permit our immediate dismissal of this part of the tale.” Indeed, the fact that the panther had very recently lost her cubs in the most traumatic manner possible actually reinforces the Manuscript’s account, according to the results of recent experiments on animal brains ranging from our relatives, the apes, down to the tiny wasp and bee: it has been discovered that the brains of every species of animal life contain that core region — the amygdala — that both feels and preserves emotional trauma. Thus, as Gibbon suspected, we have no good reason to reject the narrator’s account at face value; rather, we have sound cause to accept it, most recently, the case of the “lion man” of modern Africa, George Adamson (foster parent, along with his wife Joy, of Elsa the lioness, in Born Free), who lived among and was protected by lions until his tragic death at the hands of poachers. Indeed, the story of Caliphestros and Stasi has many elements that closely resemble the tale of Adamson and his lions, too many for us to be able to dismiss the former as mythological. —C.C.
† “legitimate legislature” Gibbon refers to the French Revolution’s second phase, during which the National Assembly that had sworn the famous “Tennis Court Oath” became, in response to the persistent refusal of the royal, aristocratic, and clerical sectors of the ruling class to evolve with anything like real alacrity, the National Constituent Assembly, which issued the famous “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” and declared as its noble purpose the official abolition of feudalism and the formulation of a French constitution. Unfortunately, the makeup of this Assembly also saw the emergence of wily leftist members who sought to prostitute the Revolution to their own ends — chief among them such characters as Honoré Mirabeau, a particular target of Gibbon’s ire in other letters, and the chief “manipulator” of whom he speaks here, as well as far more radical revolutionaries (Gibbon’s “basest scoundrels”), the most extreme of whom, of course, was the man whose name would all too soon become synonymous with the “Reign of Terror,” Maximilien Robespierre.—C.C.