Rare Portraits of Marie-Antoinette

From Le Boudoir de Marie-Antoinette, HERE, HERE, and HERE. 

The Dauphine painted by Duplessis in 1773, for her mother the Empress.

And from around the web, it seems that one of the the popular "diary" novels written in the last twenty years was mistaken for a genuine diary of Marie-Antoinette by a researcher. From Anna Gibson:

Reminder to check the sources of your sources!

So an article by a fashion historian in a peer-reviewed journal thought that Kathryn Lasky’s The Royal Diaries novel was real and cited the information in it for an article about the evolution of the chemise dress. (Marie Antoinette had no diary, and she certainly didn’t somehow write in 1769 about dresses that start showing up in fashion journals in the late 1770s; nor did Rose Bertin time travel to meet Marie Antoinette when she was just an archduchess, or design her wedding dress, etc.)

So far I’ve uncovered two articles that cited this historian’s article while repeating the false information regarding Marie Antoinette’s diary and the robes à la créole. Completely understandable that these second writers would take this historian at their word because one would assume they know their stuff, but not understandable that the historian behind the original article found Lasky’s book, read the page in question, and then cited it as fact.(Read more.)

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The Karmelo Anthony Trial

 From Culturcidal:

Today, the Karmelo Anthony case is still in the news, and even before the trial, you wouldn’t have thought that it would be a particularly controversial case. Post-trial, where Anthony got 35 years in jail, we have an even fuller picture of what happened.

There was a track meet. Anthony went to another team’s tent, which he almost certainly knew he wasn’t supposed to do. He was asked to leave something like 12-15 times, nicely at first, but more insistently when he refused and became belligerent. Anthony began trying to goad Austin Metcalf into a fight. He dared him to touch him. He called the people in the tent “p*ssies” who couldn’t make him move. He challenged Metcalf to a fistfight, which Metcalf responded to by saying, “I’m not going to fight at a track meet.” Eventually, Anthony baited Metcalf into shoving him and immediately stabbed him, which killed him.

In other words, Anthony was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be, he was asked many times to leave, and instead of doing so, he tried to start a fistfight, and then, when he finally got a reaction, he immediately responded with lethal force.

It all seems very clear-cut, right? Yet, what have we seen in this case?

Karmelo Anthony’s family raised 630k in a GiveSendGo (that was happily pulled after his murder conviction in accordance with their rules). Setting aside the fact that a large number of black Americans pretty clearly chipped in money just because Karmelo Anthony murdered a white guy, what happened to those funds is still a bit of a mystery. Anthony’s family has been staying in a 900k home in a gated community (this was apparently rented), and he had a public defender. (Read more.)

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The Bolshevik Sale of the Romanov Jewels

 From Nicholas II:

There is no greater example of such a large-scale criminal sale in history, than that of the jewels of the Russian Imperial Court – perhaps, the finest collection in the world. The Bolsheviks inherited an impressive legacy, and wasted little time in profiting from the sale of many pieces to eager buyers in the West during the 1920s.

Interesting testimonies have survived to this day about how the jewels were sorted and catalogued, and how the fate of these historically important treasures was determined. They are today preserved in the RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Social and Political History) in Moscow.

The Bolsheviks made their first attempt to sell the Romanov jewels in May 1918. Then, in New York, customs officers detained two visitors with jewels (worth 350 thousand rubles) that belonged to Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna (1882-1960), the youngest daughter of Emperor Alexander III.

The following year, the founding congress of the Third Communist International was held in Moscow. From that time, the agents of the Communist International (Comintern) regularly exported gold jewellery and precious stones from Moscow. At first, there was practically no control over the agents, so many items were stolen rather than helping to “finance a world revolution”. (Read more.)

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A 'Kempis' and a Book of Morals

An Italian translation of The Imitation of Christ (left) and Collection de Moralistes Anciene (right) were once owned by Marie-Antoinette.

A bookstore on the Strand has had books which belonged to Marie-Antoinette. To quote:

In a safe, Terpsopoulos and Sutherland keep a first edition of “Gone with the Wind,” priced to move at $15,000. On a nearby shelf is a 1784 collection of moralist stories from Plato and Socrates. It’s marked at $750 — with the same yellow discount stickers that are used downstairs.

Also under lock and key is perhaps the biggest rarety: “Commentary on the Psalms” dates back to 1480 — and remains a beautiful example of a Medieval manuscript (priced accordingly at $35,000).

Perhaps the greatest feature of the collection is not a rare book, but the room’s accessibility. Unlike other antique book dealers, the Strand’s historic library is open to anyone who heads upstairs. (Read more.)

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The Meaning of America’s Consecration to the Sacred Heart

 From NCR:

The first is that June 11 was the date in 1899 when Pope Leo XIII consecrated the world to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Exactly one century later, on June 11, 1999, St. John Paul II wrote, somewhat astonishingly, “The consecration of the human race in 1899 represents an extraordinarily important step on the Church's journey.”

Few Catholics today are aware of the consecration of the human race to the Sacred Heart 127 years ago. Few would consider that act, as John Paul II did, “an extraordinarily important step on the Church’s journey.” But John Paul II saw something that most historians and journalists, secular and Catholic, miss: the objective significance of an act of consecration.

Our prayer matters. Our entrusting ourselves and the world to God matters — just as Jesus’ consecration to the Father and self-offering on Calvary for our salvation matters, and matters a lot. (Read more.)

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Femininity Used To Rule The World

 From Of Home and Womanhood:

Before this modern version of feminism that expects in all ways that women should be, work, talk, have sex, and act like men, before all of this, women used to inspire men not by being like them, we used to instead inspire men by being different from them. Women used to move men, not with these tired cringe slogans, not with shaming. Instead we did it with a force of feminine virtue, the kind that only a woman could ever possess, the kind that only a woman could understand.

Look at any civilization, men are driven by conquest, by power, by risk. This instinct that men carry is a lot of times raw, it is aggressive, and it is untamed, but as we all know, conquest alone does not civilize. What transformed this manly power into order, what gave it direction, what civilized men, was a woman. Men build civilizations, but women civilize men.

We see this all throughout history, and we see it even today. (Read more.)

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Gardening in French

The jardin français of Marie-Antoinette at Trianon

Some great ideas here, although Marie-Antoinette never pretended to be a milkmaid. Of course she would wear simple clothes and an apron when she visited the farm. From Frenchly:

The ‘French garden,” or jardin français, is a concept dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Enlightenment was at its peak, and new discoveries in science and technology produced an ideology formatted around reason, above all else. Everything in nature could be bent to the human will, or so it was believed… including gardens.

While ‘English gardens’ of the time were treatises on romanticism, cobbled together from different themes to create a meandering experience left to each viewer’s interpretation, the French garden was formal, exacting, and precise. Picture Versailles from above: its distinctive curlicues and segmented pathways and flowerbeds and shrubberies, which must be meticulously maintained in order to retain their shape. (Though Versailles did have an English garden, the very one where Marie Antoinette built a miniature hamlet and pretended to be a milkmaid.) Louis XIV commissioned the gardens from André le Nôtre in 1661, personally overseeing every detail, in a process that took 40 years to complete, a fit comparison to the King’s ruling style. (Read more.)

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The Ukraine Biolab Collapses

From Stone Cold Truth:

For more than four years, Americans who questioned the true nature and scope of United States’ taxpayer funded biological laboratories in Ukraine were ridiculed, smeared, censored, and denounced as conspiracy theorists. Television pundits dismissed them. Corporate media outlets mocked them. Members of the political establishment insisted that any discussion of American involvement in Ukrainian biolaboratories was nothing more than Russian propaganda. Now, thanks to a sweeping declassification ordered by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, the American people are finally learning that much of what they were told was false.

The newly released Intelligence Community (IC) documents reveal that American taxpayers funded and supported an enormous international biological research network consisting of more than 120 laboratories in over 30 countries. Among the most significant concentrations of those facilities were more than 40 laboratories located throughout Ukraine. According to the declassified material, approximately $200 million in American funding flowed into these facilities through the Department of Defense’s (now the Department of War) Biological Threat Reduction Program, an initiative that traces its origins to post-Soviet efforts to secure dangerous biological materials left behind after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The disclosure is remarkable not because it proves the existence of an active offensive biological weapons program. The documents do not establish that conclusion. Rather, the significance lies in the extraordinary gap between what the public was told and what government officials privately knew. (Read more.)

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Drive-Thru Intimacy

 From Of Home and Womanhood:

Fast food, we all know is crap nutrition for the most part, it fills you for a moment, satisfies a craving, scratches an itch, it is quick, it is cheap, it is accessible, engineered to be desirable, easy to consume, and it is everywhere.

But you can’t live on it, not really if you care about your long term wellbeing. You will be full but you’ll end up malnourished, and casual sex does the same thing to your soul.

It gives you the illusion of being wanted without any of the real substance that comes when you are actually loved. It gives warmth to the body, but it gives you no safety, it gives you attention, but it will never give you devotion, it can give you pleasure, but it will never give you sacrifice and meaning. It gives us the feeling of being chosen for a night only to wake up the next morning feeling like trash.

Sound familiar? Yeah. Sounds like all the fast food we eat out of convenience and hunger for something real, hoping it fills the need only to then feel even worse after.

This is the part that hurts to say, but women are hungry, and we are hungry because human being are hungry. As humans, we hunger to be known, to be desired, to be cherished, and loved. The problem is that our culture has taken this real hunger, this real desire, and handed women, and men, it has handed us the worst cheapest possible substitute. (Read more.)

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