#I do know Goodreads Jesus girl's name I'm just not putting it here in case she googles herself

[pollywiltse]

It's always funny when people write André as acting like he thinks he's hot shit because from what people said about the real guy, one of the things that everyone found so charming about him was that he didn't act like he thought he was better than everyone else.

I was flipping through Finishing Becca again. I really desperately want to know where that characterization came from.

Though speaking of batshit characterizations I need to find that girl on Goodreads again who thought André was a deeply religious Christian and also possibly gay* (he is in her novel but idk if she believes that or just thinks it's hot) and see if she's read any of André's actual biographies yet because boy is she in for a surprise when she finds out there's no evidence for André being either gay or religious. They were all on her to-read list last time I checked. Which didn't stop her from including him in her novel.

She posted a part of her in-progress novel where André finds the main character (who might also be a slash fic character?) making paper crosses and the mc is embarrassed and André's like, "No, it's ok, my one true love is actually Jesus like my mother taught me and I'm just in denial about it and going to all these wild parties to repress my deep love for Jesus" and then he picks up one of the crosses and starts making out with it. It was definitely a take.

Also for someone whose Protestant ancestors were driven out of their home by Catholics, her version of André is really chill around Catholics. Like regardless of whether he was a religious Huguenot (she thinks) or a borderline Deist Anglican (I think), I'm pretty sure he'd hate Catholics.

*Because she's clearly a repressed slash writer and also I'm pretty sure she picked it up from Donna Thorland's awful awful romance novel where André's a sociopathic spy master in Philadelphia and his one redeeming characteristic is his true love for Caleb Cope the 17-year-old youngest son of the Cope family, which is fascinating because their oldest son, John, was 12 when André was in Lancaster, so having their youngest son be several years older than their oldest son would take some doing, and also Peggy Shippen is a dumb bitch who can't tell André can't stand her and who everyone hates even the people who were historically enchanted by her and there's this whole thing where she somehow manages to have André's baby but pass it off as Arnold's even though she didn't marry Arnold until nearly a year after the British army left Philadelphia and she couldn't just wander around being pregnant and unmarried that whole time (also there's this whole thing where André inexplicably makes birth control the sheltered 17-year-old girl's problem even though he claims he didn't want to get her pregnant) and way too many people are convinced this is historically accurate because Donna Thorland has a background in history but frankly after reading this book I'm now worried about what exactly was going on in the part of the Peabody Essex Museum up in Salem where she worked because this book is not winning any prizes for historical accuracy, unless maybe it's a literary equivalent of the Razzies. Also I kind of think Thorland is one of the people who thinks straight men are masterful and dominant and aggressive and their relationships with their one true loves are really kind of antagonistic, and that's why André ended up being gay, because a man who is nice to women is inherently sus. This is of course very depressing because my ideal man isn't Petruchio and of course the people who think like this don't believe in lesbians either. I'm not sure any of the women in that Thorland novel even liked each other platonically, let alone romantically. But to be fair I didn't read most of the book, because it also wasn't that interesting. I was just there to see if she had, in fact, made André Chester the Molester who gets handsy with the 12-year-olds. (I still think she meant Caleb Cope to be John Cope, she just slacked on the research. Caleb was John Cope's father and none of the other kids in the family were named Caleb. The youngest at the time André was in Lancaster was Jasper, who was like a year, so presumably not having a torrid affair with André. This is A Record of the Cope Family by Gilbert Cope, p 32 of whatever edition Google has scanned.) This version might be worse, honestly, because it's sexist but with plausible deniability.

I think Goodreads Jesus girl might have assumed he was from a deeply religious family because the Huguenots were religious refugees, but just because you're from a religious disapora doesn't mean you're super religious and in fact he seems to have been the only child to have been baptized in a Huguenot church and from his oldest sister's birth they were going to Anglican churches because they seemed to care more about social climbing than Jesus, and I'm not even sure how religious the average Huguenot refugee was. There was also this story that a copy of "The Hiding Place" in his handwriting was found in his coat pocket after his execution, but the source seems to be Roger Lamb repeating a story that he heard from someone else who he just says is a "respectable person, a native of America" and no idea how they knew, especially since they're incorrectly crediting André as the writer and even Sargent the Victorian thinks it's nonsense. The actual evidence for André's religious belief suggest that he didn't have very much, though I sort of assume he vaguely believed in Christian mythology on the grounds that you might have had to care a lot more than I think he did about religion to believe in something else if you were from a Christian background living in 18th century England.