Tea at Trianon: Along a Fabled River

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, November 12, 2020

Along a Fabled River

From National Geographic:

Life back then was spacious and rich: a Southeast Asian version of Xanadu. Wealthy citizens lived in homes of timber roofed with tin. They forked their meals with golden utensils, wore jewels in their hair, and made high art of green glass, crystal, and jade. Their trade touched distant ports in modern Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines. In the first century A.D., Roman ambassadors walking to China passed through. Tang Dynasty chroniclers report that the residents of Pyu were peaceful Buddhists who abhorred war. They wore cottons over silks to avoid sacrificing the lives of silkworms. Pyu’s dead lie buried still, inside clay jars, beneath this year’s wheat and peanut crops. Farmers occasionally find them. Ghosts of a river empire. Remains so old and unloved they hardly seem human anymore.

When you reach the shining Irrawaddy banks, farmers are picking chilies. Gnarled knuckles amid soft leaves. They gift you a bag of peppers, red as rubies, without an uttered word. This is how Pyu endures. (Read more.)