The empress of ice cream

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Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

Wallace Stevens, ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’

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For Louise Denne BCBA

Editors Note

For many decades the sheaf of seventeenth-century papers discovered in the Great Library at Ditchley Park, which subsequently came to be known as the Ditchley Bundle, remained largely ignored by scholars. Like many texts of that turbulent period it was written in code, one apparendy even more impenetrable than that employed by Samuel Pepys. It was not until the sale of the Bundle, along with dozens of other old manuscripts, to America in the late 1990s that an archivist - actually a bright young intern from Wellesley - wondered what might happen if the source material were written not in English but in French, and the hitherto private journal of Louise de Keroualle, mistress to King Charles II, was revealed to the world.

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