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 The portrait in which she is shown thus had to be withdrawn from the public gaze because people took offense at seeing their Queen painted in casual attire.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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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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