Tea at Trianon: Happy Family

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

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Happy Family

It's official. Children bring happiness.

A proper understanding of parenting means not choosing between children-as-moral-obligation and children-as-household-accessory, but instead connecting the quotidian demands and pleasures of parenthood with a responsible vision of the good life. Having children is fraught with emotional and material challenges, but in a decent society and a setting of relative affluence, parenting ought to bring satisfaction in the form of measurable and reportable emotional well-being: children ought to make us happy in the least sophisticated sense of the word. If they instead bring distress and depression, we are doing something wrong, as parents and as a culture.

Enbrethiliel said...: +JMJ+

Children bring happiness.

Was there ever any doubt???; November 10, 2008 at 3:32:00 AM EST
elena maria vidal said...: The girls I went to college with had a lot of doubts about children bringing happiness. I never did though.; November 10, 2008 at 8:45:00 AM EST