Via http://www.patreon.com/creation?hid=1130644.
A preview! A shameless tease, meant to intrigue and lure with the promise of secrets to come. To wit, an excerpt of “L’Académie Scientifique pour les jeunes dames,” Benjamin Baugh’s first new creation for The Kerberos Club. It concerns the Blanc sisters, twins, Ursuline nuns with astonishing gifts for comprehending the natural world. They dabbled briefly in Paris’ Société Scientifique…
The sisters did not get on well with the Société’s male and socially conservative leadership. To a man, of course, the leaders of the Société considered themselves quite free-thinking and enlightened—often ready with scientific ‘proof’ that woman is, as unarguably demonstrated by the relative weakness of limb, excitable temperament, and soft affection for children and small animals, clearly suited best for the role of wife, mother, and mistress of the domestic space. ‘Oh my,’ they said, ‘though of course we have greatest respect for such vital endeavors, we simply can not endorse such radical notions as communistic economics, equality among the sexes, or mathematical models of Q-Space transformations which exclude dimensions three through seven!’
As the Paris Commune collapsed in 1871, and with their tempers still hot from rejection by France’s leading society of scientific enquiry, the sisters did not rest. They founded the Scientific Academy for Young Ladies and funded it by the sale or license of several useful patents: one for the improvement of water pumps in coal mines, one for a filter to remove the stink of coal gas lamps, and one for an instrument which measured the purity and material properties of industrial metals. The sisters bought a narrow Paris row house and had the interior and cellars completely demolished and rebuilt.
Les sœurs Blanc searched out and recruited geniuses, girls with insights uncanny and sometimes frightening. ‘Strange’ minds for their strange school. They sought to make an explicit reality of the teacher’s platitude: that training young minds can change the world.
They would train minds which could each, with application of their singular talents, remake the universe.
When we reach the $250 milestone we’ll share “L’Académie Scientifique pour les jeunes dames” with all our Kerberan patrons. Pledge now!
Malum necessarium.
