She entered the world behind prison walls. She left it quietly, in a school she founded for girls who, like her, had little at the start and everything to prove. In between, she lived a life most women of her time could barely imagine, full of contradictions, quiet power, and a love story that remained unofficial but no less real.
Françoise d’Aubigné was born in 1635 to a disgraced nobleman locked away for fraud. Her childhood wasn’t shaped by privilege but by confinement. Her mother, either out of loyalty or nowhere else to go, stayed with her husband in prison, and brought their daughter up there too. When Françoise was old enough, she was sent off to live with relatives. One of them, Madame de Neuillant, had plans: get her ready for marriage and get her out of the way.
She did marry, but not the man of any girl’s dreams. Paul Scarron was much older, disabled, and far from wealthy, but he was well-connected in the world of letters. His salon became her unexpected training ground. She learned how to hold her own in a room full of Parisian poets, philosophers, and society players. She didn’t just listen—she absorbed, adapted, and began to understand how words and presence could open doors.
When Scarron died, she could’ve faded into the background. But Françoise had already learned how to make herself indispensable. She secured a position as governess to the illegitimate children of Louis XIV and his long-time mistress, Madame de Montespan. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it brought her into the king’s orbit, which changed everything.
She was devout, intelligent, and calm—everything Madame de Montespan was not. As the king’s relationship with his fiery mistress cooled, Françoise quietly became something else entirely: his confidante, advisor, and eventually, his wife. Their marriage was secret and morganatic, which meant she was never officially queen. No title. No crown. But make no mistake, her influence was immense.
Some praised her for guiding the king toward piety and restraint, while others accused her of manipulating him from behind the scenes. Depending on who was speaking, she was either a saint or a schemer. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the grey space history rarely illuminates.
After Louis XIV died in 1715, Françoise didn’t cling to power. She left Versailles and returned to Saint-Cyr, the school for girls she had founded years earlier. There, she found her final role, not as a royal consort, but as an educator. Perhaps she saw those girls as versions of herself, young, uncertain, capable of much more than the world expected.
She died in 1719 at Saint-Cyr. Not in a palace. Not surrounded by court intrigue. But in a place she created, far from the pageantry that once defined her. She had lived like a queen, though never called one, and chose, in the end, to leave behind not a throne, but a legacy.
Sarah Emma Edmonds specialized in disguises. It was a way of life you could say. One which began in her teens.
Back then, she lived on a farm in New Brunswick, Canada, being raised by a doting mother and an abusive father who resented Emma for not being born a boy. He wasn’t good to her. And when he tried to marry her off at fifteen, she decided to leave.
She traveled alone to the U.S. And this is where Emma Edmonds became Franklin Thompson, probably because Franklin had more opportunities than Emma did. And Franklin became a bible salesman living in Hartford, Connecticut, and then a bookseller in Flint, Michigan.
Soon the Civil War started. Emma, an ardent supporter of the Union, felt a duty to serve. So, she joined. As Franklin, of course. Physical checks were sparse then.
Emma worked as a nurse but yearned for something more. She wanted to become a spy. That chance came.
Emma needed to infiltrate the Confederate camp stationed near her own. So, Emma did what Emma knew how to do well. She changed her identity. Using silver nitrate to darken her skin, Franklin Thompson became Cuff, a southern black man.
And then she wandered near the Confederate camp, expecting to be picked up for some work need. Which she was.
Over a few days in camp, she learned important information, including the Army building “Quaker Guns,” or cannons that looked real from a distance but were just wooden logs in reality. Then she escaped from the camp and returned to her own, where she told leadership what she learned.
Emma, or Franklin, or Cuff, or an Irish peddler by the name of Bridget O’Shea, which was a future identity, would take part in eleven spy missions during the war.
At the end of the war, in 1865, she published a popular fictional account of her experiences as a nurse and a spy. She married in 1867 and thereafter, moved often.
Emma was eventually granted a military pension, the only woman to have ever received a regular pension from the Civil War, and when she died in 1898, was buried with honors at Washington Cemetery in Houston, Texas.
There have been many books written about her and one movie. Still, we should know her better.
In May 1921, American polymath Walter Russell entered a 39-day coma-like state, during which he claimed to have accessed “the source of all knowledge.” Upon awakening, he frantically wrote down what he had seen—pages filled with philosophical, scientific, and spiritual revelations that would later form the foundation of his manuscript The Universal One.
Though he sent his findings to 500 leading minds of the time, nearly all dismissed him as mad—except one. Nikola Tesla, the visionary inventor, was so struck by Russell’s insights that he urged him to seal the work away for a thousand years, insisting that humanity was not yet ready for its truths.
Walter Russell’s revelations reimagined the very structure of reality. He argued that matter was not solid but crystallized light slowed by thought—that everything around us, from rocks to human bodies, was composed of light patterns, shaped by consciousness.
He believed the universe was fundamentally mental, not material, and that all things moved in rhythmic cycles—expansion and contraction, like breath. He dismissed opposites like good and evil as illusions, asserting instead that everything sought harmony and balance. To Russell, death wasn’t an end but the release of compressed light returning to its source. Even time, he claimed, wasn’t linear, but a spiral where past, present, and future coexisted.
These ideas were radically ahead of their time, blending metaphysics, wave dynamics, and a deep sense of universal unity. He believed electricity was a living spiral of energy, not merely electrons in motion, and that the vacuum of space was in fact a vibrant sea of untapped potential.
Health, in his view, was the natural rhythm of the body, and disease was simply a disruption of that flow.
Though ignored or ridiculed during his lifetime, Russell’s work now draws new attention in an era where quantum physics and consciousness studies begin to echo the same questions. To many, he is no longer a forgotten eccentric, but a prophet of a paradigm yet to come.
I do indeed buzz plants in magic. 🤪