Marie-Antoinette and Carnival

I usually do not use photos from the 1938 Marie Antoinette film; the costumes were glitzy and the wigs, too platinum. However, Norma Shearer's portrayal of Marie-Antoinette was soulfully authentic; the photo above captures the zest of the young Dauphine taking Paris by storm at Carnival. As a young girl, Marie-Antoinette embraced the festivities of Carnival with alacrity, especially the masked balls. Since members of the royal family were constantly surrounded by semi-liturgical ceremonies, at the masked ball the princes and princesses could engage in something vaguely resembling normal human interaction. The wearing of a mask, although it did not always endow total anonymity, lightened the tight protocol so that royals could mingle and converse with others in society.

In February of 1773, Marie-Antoinette wrote to her mother Empress Maria Theresa, relating how she went with her husband the Dauphin Louis to the Opera ball in Paris:

We went- M. le Dauphin, the comte, and comtesse de Provence and I- last Thursday to the Opera Ball in Paris; we kept the utmost secret. We were all masked; still, we were recognized after half an hour. The duc de Chartres and the duc de Bourbon, who were dancing at the Palais Royal right next door came to meet us and asked us pressingly to go and dance at Madame de Chartres's; but I excused myself from it as I had the King's permission for the Opera only. We returned here at seven and heard Mass before going to bed. Everybody is delighted with M. le Dauphin's willingness to have this outing since he was believed to be averse to it. (Secrets of Marie Antoinette: A Collection of Letters, edited by Olivier Bernier. New York: Fromm International, 1986, p. 102)

In January of 1774, Louis and Antoinette once again ventured incognito into Paris to the Opera ball, accompanied by Louis' two brothers and their wives. Here is Comte Mercy's description of the event in a letter to Empress Maria Theresa:

The three Princes and Princesses came on the 30th of January to the masked ball at the Opera; measures had been so well taken that they remained a long while without being recognized by anyone. M. le Dauphin [Louis] behaved splendidly; he went about the ball talking indiscriminately to all those he met on his path, in a very gay and decorous manner introducing the kind of jests suited to the occasion. The public was enchanted with this conduct on the part of M. le Dauphin, it made a great sensation in Paris and they did not fail, as always happens in these cases, to attribute to Madame la Dauphine the improvement they noticed in her consort's way of showing himself....

The Princes and Princesses came back a second time to the Opera ball on Sunday, the 6th of this month [February]; but this time their presence was less well concealed and consequently there was a greater influx of people to the theater. However, nothing improper or embarrassing resulted, and Madame la Dauphine, who did not unmask, drew on herself all the applause and admiration with which all the public always hastens to do homage to her, both owing to the people to whom she spoke and the things she said to them. (Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette before the Revolution by Nesta Webster, p. 21)

It was at the Opera ball on January 30 that Marie-Antoinette chatted with Count Fersen behind her mask, in the presence of her husband and in-laws, but no eyebrows were raised by this playful incident. The Empress Maria Theresa was more concerned with her daughter getting sick from exhaustion than with anything else, and at the end of the 1773 Carnival wrote: "Thank God it is all over...." (Secrets of Marie Antoinette, p. 104) Later, she expressed reservations about the young Queen's taste in fashion. On March 5, 1775, after Louis XVI had ascended the throne of France, the Empress penned:

Thank God the endless Carnival is over! That exclamation will make me look very old, but I must admit that all those late evenings were too tiring; I feared for the Court's health and for the order of it's usual habits, which is an essential point....In the same way I can't prevent myself raising a point which many gazettes repeat all too often; it is the coiffure you use; they say that from the forehead it is thirty-six inches high, and with so many feathers and ribbons to adorn it! (Ibid.,p.159)

Marie-Antoinette responded by saying:

Although Carnival did amuse me a great deal, I agree that it was time it was ended. We are now back to our usual routine....It is true that I take some care of the way I dress; and, as for feathers, everyone wears them, and it would be extraordinary not to wear them. Their height has been much curtailed since the end of the balls....(Ibid., 160)

After Marie-Antoinette became a mother in December of 1778, her participation in Carnival was greatly mitigated, since she preferred not be too far away from her babies at night. It is sad that the enjoyment of the masquerade balls during her teenage years would later lead to many false rumors about her lifestyle. Share

"Bus Tape" Hoax

 From Tierney's Real News:

FLYNN: “Mike Pence and Paul Ryan wanted Trump out. They had a plan for when Trump steps down, they would step in.”

In other words, Pence didn’t just decide to become a traitor on J6. He was a traitor from the very beginning working with Paul Ryan and his pals in the Koch-funded Freedom Caucus.

Why is this important? Because many of the same bizarre elements and people involved in the Guthrie case were also involved in the “bus tape” hoax. CONNECT THE DOTS WITH ME.

In 2018, I suggested - in my first blog - that the “infamous” bus tape that was released on Trump right before the 2016 election could have been engineered in the NBC studios at the Today Show and used to smear and set up Trump - to force him to step out of the race.

If the hoax worked and drove out Trump before the 2016 election in November - it’s obvious that Pence would step up and run for President - instead of Trump - and Speaker Paul Ryan would be his VP - line of succession. (Read more.)

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C.S. Lewis and the Greatest Arthurian Epic

 From The Library of Lewis and Tolkien:

Violent, lewd, celebrating deception and sexual immorality on the one hand; gracious, sensitive, revering mercy and humility and rejecting all that is crude, ugly, and obscene on the other — it would be natural to conclude that Ascham and Lewis were talking about two different books, two different portrayals of the Arthurian legend. Lewis must be demonstrating the way such stories could appear in a noble and Christian light, contrary to the book lambasted by Ascham.

The only problem is that Ascham and Lewis were not discussing two different books. They were both describing — or claiming to describe — the same book: Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Arthurian epic, Le Morte d’Arthur.

Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur is a massive, sprawling narrative that chronicles the rise, decline, and eventual downfall of Camelot — the adventures, and later the breaking, of the fellowship of the Round Table. All of what we regard today as the classic, quintessential features of the Arthurian story are there (and then some): Arthur’s sword Excalibur; the wizard Merlin; the Lady — really Ladies — of the Lake; the quest of the Holy Grail, the healing of the Maimed King and restoration of the Waste Land; Lancelot and Guinevere’s love affair; the rebellion of Arthur’s ill-begotten son, Mordred; Arthur’s final departure over the waves into the distant isle of Avalon. More than any other single work, Le Morte d’Arthur is the one that later storytellers have most drawn upon, whether Tennyson’s cycle of blank-verse poems Idylls of the King, T.H. White’s novel The Once and Future King, or John Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur. (Read more.)

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Carnival

 P. Bernaigne, "A Carnival Ball"

José Benlliure y Gil, "At the Carnival"

Carnival season officially began on January 6 and ends on Shrove Tuesday or "Fat Tuesday," called Mardi Gras. It is now Shrovetide, when most parishes used to have Forty Hours devotions in order to atone for the excesses of Carnival. Outside of certain exotic places such as New Orleans, LA and Bellefonte, PA, Carnival is not celebrated to the extent that it once was in the Christian west, when the season was a time of joyful merry-making before undertaking the rigors of Lent. At home, we usually have a "king cake;" HERE is an easy recipe. Amid the festivities, the traditions of the liturgy remind us that Lent is near. Not only Lent approaches, but death as well; the hour of reckoning for each soul is unknown.

"If Ever I Cease To Love" was the theme song of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. It is a song which does not make sense, but then neither does love, most of the time.

In a house, in a square in a quadrant
In a street, in a lane, in a road.

Turn to the left on the right hand
You see there my true love's abode

I go there a courting, and cooing to my love like a dove;
And swearing on my bended knee, if ever I cease to love,
May sheep-heads grow on apple trees, if ever I cease to love.

Chorus:
If ever I cease to love, if ever I cease to love,
May the moon be turn'd to green cream cheese,
If ever I cease to love.

Winslow Homer, "Dressing for Carnival"

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Trump Exonerated on Epstein

 If Trump were implicated in the Epstein Files, surely the Biden administration would have made it known. From Tierney's Real News:

“The Miami Herald, the first to report on the document, reported that the local Palm Beach Police launched the first investigation into Epstein’s network in 2005.

The police chief’s name -- Michael Reiter -- is redacted from the document on the Department of Justice’s website, but the information in the FBI statement tracks with previously public information about Reiter’s role in the investigation that began in 2005.

A Palm Beach woman reported that her 14-year-old stepdaughter had been recruited to give Epstein a massage and was assaulted.

Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter eventually assembled a roster of 40 underage victims. When the local district attorney refused to prosecute the case, Chief Reiter went to the FBI, triggering a federal investigation that ultimately led to Epstein’s disappointing first conviction —formally, a “non-prosecution agreement”— in 2009.

The newly released DOJ files included the transcript of a 2019 FBI interview with Chief Reiter when Epstein was prosecuted under President Trump. At one point, Reiter mentioned Trump. Chief Reiter told the FBI that in 2006, Trump was one of the first people to call his office after Epstein’s charge became public record. “Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Trump told Reiter. (Read more.)

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Real Classical Education

 From American Mind:

In 1991, Pastor Wilson published Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning: An Approach to Distinctively Christian Education. This book remains the blueprint for Christian Classical Education across America. Its title was inspired by “The Lost Tools of Learning,” a 1947 lecture by Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957). Outside Pastor Wilson’s movement, Sayers is mostly known, if at all, as the author of some moderately entertaining detective stories. Her translations of Dante for Penguin Classics are still in print, but so dated as to seem older than the medieval original.

“The Lost Tools of Learning” is the sort of text that one stumbles across randomly in secondhand bookshops, usually after it has been deaccessioned by a university library on account of a conspicuous lack of scholarly interest. It was first presented as a lecture for a summer school in Oxford, and later published as a pamphlet. No doubt Sayers herself quickly forgot about it. She seems to have written it in a hurry: 20 minutes of material is stretched to an hour’s length. Perhaps this is why schoolteachers love it so much.

Educated English people tend to dismiss Sayers’ work, on the rare occasions they condescend to notice it. They also scoff at the Christian Classical Education movement and sneer at the Americans who take part in it. People like Pastor Wilson must seem barbarians to them. But are the English themselves really so civilized these days? (Read more.)

 

There are many Pied-Pipers now! From AND Magazine:

Teachers' actions nationwide are part of a broader effort under the umbrella of the Sunrise Movement. Sunrise is funded by the usual collection of radical billionaires, including George Soros, and radical dark money entities like Arabella. It began with a focus on environmental issues, but by this point, it is dedicated to virtually every radical proposition you could name, with a particular emphasis on radicalizing students and organizing in schools.

In January and February 2026, National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle participated in a virtual event series hosted by the Sunrise Movement titled "Roadmap to Political Revolution." The event description read: “It’s time we dream — and organize — at the scale that Trump and billionaires are creating nightmares. 2026 is the year we break it all open…We need mass disruption to stop authoritarian consolidation.”

The Sunrise moderator of the event described Sunrise as having a “deep partnership” with the NEA when introducing Pringle to webinar participants. During the event, Pringle characterized the current administration under Donald Trump as a “dictatorship” and “nightmare,” calling for a “big and non-cooperative” movement leading toward mass student strikes on May Day (May 1, 2026). (Read more.)

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Hellelil and Hildebrand: the Meeting on the Turret Stairs

 

From ArtNet:

Burton’s awareness and interest in the specific story of Hellelil and Heldebrand can likely be traced to his friend Whitley Stokes, a Celtic scholar who translated and published the medieval Danish ballad in the mid-1850s.

In the story, the noblewoman Helleil fell in love with one of her personal guards, Heldebrand, Prince of Engelland. When her father finds out about the affair, he, along with his seven sons, set out to kill Heldebrand. In an act of honor, Heldebrand fights her kin, killing the father and six of the seven brothers. Hellelil, watching from afar, calls out to her beloved before he slays the youngest brother, asking him to stay his hand. Though Heldebrand spared him, the brother took it as a moment of opportunity and dealt Heldebrand a mortal blow in return. Ultimately, after relating the series of events to her mother, Helleil died of a broken heart.

Like many medieval love stories, it is a tragic one, and Burton takes focus on the poignant last meeting of the ill-fated lovers. Hellelil is turned away in sorrow, stepping up the turret stairs to safety, and a trampled white rose, a symbol of innocence and purity, lies trampled near her feet. Heldebrand moves down the stairs to go meet her father, brothers, and, unbeknownst to him, his demise, holding her arm in a farewell embrace. It is a tender, prescient moment that bears the weight of what is to come. (Read more.)

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Saint Valentine's Day

This morning I was perusing Michelle Lovric's exquisite anthology Love Letters and found a line from a letter of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her husband Robert Browning: "You have lifted up my soul into the light of your soul, and I am not ever likely to mistake it for the common daylight." Beautiful. People really knew how to express affection in those days. I then went in search of her poems, still incomparable after so many years. Here is the most famous one:

Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Sonnets from the Portuguese XLIII How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. I love thee to the level of everyday's Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight. I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.

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An Unlikely Romance: King Pippin and Queen Bertrada

 From Kim Rendfeld:

The marriage was also a reward for the loyalty of Bertrada’s father, Haribert, the count of Laon. In October 741, Mayor of the Palace Charles Martel died, setting off a war for succession between Pippin and Karlomann, his sons by his first wife, and Grifo, his son by his second wife. Grifo and his mother fled to Laon, which was in his territory, but Haribert helped Pippin and Karloman defeat and imprison their half-brother and stepmother in December of that year.

At some point, Pippin did seek to end his marriage to Bertrada, but when and why is unclear. It probably had something to do with their not conceiving right away. This was an age when such a failure was a sign of God’s displeasure.

Two years after the nuptials, Pippin sent an emissary to Pope Zachary asking about illicit marriages. Perhaps he was wondering about consanguinity. He and Bertrada were relatives to the fourth degree (they shared a set of great-grandparents), rather than the preferred seventh. (Read more.)

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