The Queen's Market

Marie-Antoinette is frequently associated with shopping, but how did she shop? It is often forgotten that Versailles, being open to the public, was a place of commerce; vendors set up their stalls in the courtyards and galleries of the palace. As for the Queen, she would usually receive tradesmen in the morning while her hair was being dressed. However, she always sought ways to celebrate the life of the ordinary French people, particularly the peasants whose industry fed the nation. In September, 1777 Marie-Antoinette had a farmers' market in the park at Trianon to inaugurate the opening of her new gardens. The Queen wore peasant attire and served at an outdoor "tavern." Pierre de Nolhac describes the market thus:

A market-place was set up on the lawn...where the baker, the confectioner, and the purveyor of charcuterie dispensed their wares...and even the cook's shop was busy in the open air. All these stalls were connected by a garland of roses....

There were shows of all sorts....Actors...gave several performances on an improvised stage....The avenues leading to Trianon were lined with the booths of Paris shopkeepers who had been engaged to come, their expenses being paid.
(Pierre de Nolhac's Marie-Antoinette, 1905, pp.226-227)

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Scandal ‘Million Times Worse Than Epstein’ Explodes

 From the Daily BS:

For years, Britain’s political and bureaucratic elite insisted critics were exaggerating, stereotyping, or simply stirring up trouble. Now, thanks to a bombshell citizen-funded investigation and a megaphone provided by Elon Musk, one of the darkest scandals in modern British history is back in the spotlight — and the questions are getting harder to ignore.

Musk lit the fuse this week when he blasted Britain’s handling of the grooming-gang scandal and called for consequences not just for the predators, but for the officials who allegedly stood by while vulnerable girls were abused.

“The politicians who turned a blind eye to the Rape of Britain must go to prison,” Musk wrote on X after the release of a sprawling independent report commissioned by Member of Parliament Rupert Lowe. (Read more.)

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Signs of the Times – the Handwriting of Richard III

 From The New Murrey and Blue Blog:

I have recently reread an interesting book about analysing handwriting and have had fun playing about with my friends’ writing and seeing if their handwriting matches their characters; it mainly does. So, being interested in Richard III, I thought I would (just for fun) have a go at analysing his writing at different times in his life and see if I could get any insight into the man.

I know there have been others who analysed his writing, one of which I know concluded that he suffered with depression. I have used what I learned in the book (link to follow) but also added some of my own thoughts. There are some aspects which puzzle me and I will leave these open for discussion. First of all, let me make it clear, once again, that this is purely for fun. Also, you will understand that, as mediaeval writing differs quite a bit from modern writing, there are some aspects which might be confused or difficult to interpret because of that. For example, the letters are generally written in a more angular way, in that the rounded letters (a, o, p, d, etc) are squarer. Perhaps this is because of the writing implements used, but interestingly, the more sharp and angular the writing the less soft and more aggressive the character is. Well, we all know what a generally violent and aggressive period of history it was; maybe their writing reflected that.

Looking at Richard’s writing, let us first examine his earliest known signature, written in about 1465, with the motto ‘Tant le Desiree’ in one of his books on chivalry. (Read more.)

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Marie-Antoinette à la Rose

From the time I first started to write about Queen Marie-Antoinette, I have received comments from devout people about the low-cut gowns that she wore. Let me explain once again that, in the decadent old world, it was etiquette in most of the courts of Europe for ladies' formal attire to include a plunging décolletage. It was considered perfectly correct as long as the proper corset was worn.

The gown which evoked some disapproval for Marie-Antoinette was not one of the low-cut court gowns (shown above) but the simple white linen dress which she favored for her leisure time at Petit Trianon. The portrait in which she is shown thus had to be withdrawn from the public gaze because people took offense at seeing their Queen painted in casual attire. Now to us, the white dress is perfectly modest, but to people of the eighteenth century, it looked as if she were in her chemise, without the stiff corset prescribed for ladies of the royal family. Furthermore, it was interpreted as being a pro-Austrian picture, since linen came from Flanders, one of the Habsburg territories, and the rose the Queen held was seen as a symbol of the House of Austria.

In order to quell the outrage, Madame Vigée-Lebrun had to quickly come up with another painting. In 1783 the artist completed the portrait above, called "Marie-Antoinette à la rose" showing the Queen appropriately garbed in a silk court gown and headdress, trimmed with lace, ribbons and plumes. She is wearing pearls, as befits a Queen, with hair powdered and face rouged, in accord with court etiquette. She looks as if she has just stepped into her garden on a summer evening, bathed in moonlight. The nocturnal quality of the portrait softens the formality of her attire, alluding to Marie-Antoinette's love of nature, and the fact that she was much more at ease in her gardens than she was in the Hall of Mirrors.
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The Mullahs and the Lefty-Left

 From James Howard Kunstler:

It would be distasteful most of all to the mass formation lunatics of America’s Lefty-left “Resistance.” Anything that advances our country’s actual interests is hateful to them. In fact, when you think of it, the Lefty-left is in thrall to the same sort of world-ending chaos as the mullahs and their IRGC henchmen. The mullahs have their vision of the post-apocalyptic Islamic utopia and the Lefty-left has its dream of a post-revolutionary socialist nirvana where everyone is equal (except those who are more equal — and get to boss around the rest of us.)

Yeah, it’s an old story here in Western Civ, this recurring drive to level the existing social hierarchy so as to abolish the tendency of some people to do better in life than others. It never works out. It always leads to mass slaughter of some kind. It always ends in rueful disappointment and a return to the free-for-all that is the human project. The outstanding question might be: why do so many in the West continue to believe it?

The current uprising comes out of the strange conversion of Liberalism to Lefty-left Democratic-Socialist Progressivism. Remember, liberalism was pure live-and-let-live, with an emphasis on minimal government intrusion in our affairs, especially economic affairs. The Liberals of Boomerdom — the campus nirvanas of the 1960s — were contemptuous of government generally, but especially the FBI and the CIA. And, of course, the hippie vanguard was socially and culturally all about the freedom to do your own thing. Freedom of speech was a leading concern. (Read more.)

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The Shaky Case For the Borderless Utopia

 From Splice Today:

There’s a utopian vision shared by a sizable number of people in Western nations (i.e. the nations that the people of the world want to emigrate to) that involves opening up the borders and letting everyone in—like a free concert in Central Park.

An episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast I listened to dealt with the question of whether or not nations have the right to keep people out. Sarah Fine, a professor of political philosophy at Kings College London, explained why they don’t have that right in the moral sense; they do obviously have the legal right to choose who crosses their borders.

Fine came out of the gate limping. When the podcast host expressed skepticism about his guest’s opinion, Fine brought up the hypothetical of a country not allowing the spouse of a citizen to enter, suggesting that this scenario might make him feel differently about the issue. That was disingenuous, as she knows that opponents of open borders (the majority view in the U.S.) aren’t fixated on denying entry to spouses, unless they happen to be, for example, known terrorists or convicted pedophiles.

The professor said that the usual defense of the right to exclude is, “The state is the kind of entity that needs the right to exclude because it’s essential to the functions of the state.” Countering, Fine cited the fact that some states once claimed to have rights that’ve since been discredited, such as the right to control exit from the state and the right to control the movement of individuals within the state. She asked, “Why should we think that the right to exclude is one of those rights that states are able to still claim with impunity.”(Read more.)

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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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