Tea at Trianon: Our Lady of Lourdes

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

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Our Lady of Lourdes

On February 11, 1858 a young girl felt a gentle breeze come from a grotto on the side of a precipice. Unlike Elias (3 Kings 19:12), she was not praying on Mount Horeb, but sitting in a garbage dump in a remote village in the mountains of the south of France. Like Moses, she was removing her shoes, but not because she thought she was on holy ground, but to cross a river to gather firewood. She turned, and instead of beholding a burning bush (Exodus 3:5), or a cloud (3 Kings 18:44), she saw a Lady. From that moment, her life was transformed, as if the universe had been altered in it very essence. Little did she know that millions of people would come and kneel on that very spot, the sick, the despairing, those who are of little use to the proud, efficient, utilitarian world. Many would find healing and peace in that Grotto where the Lady said: "I am the Immaculate Conception."

Here is the chronology of events. Share