Tea at Trianon: A Life in Nature

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

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

A Life in Nature

Under the Gables examines the life and work of Beatrix Potter.

All of her life, Beatrix leapt from science to art to fancy and back again as effortlessly as a child playing hopscotch. She started out at as a precocious naturalist, sketching and painting the animals that she managed to draw close to her during summer vacations in Scotland. Her purpose was to capture the subject with ever-increasing accuracy. For every adorable mouse in a print apron or rabbit in a blue coat on the pages of her little books, there were probably hundreds of sketches and paintings of this animal over years. The secret to the charm of her anthropomorphism is the precision of her knowledge of the responses of the creature in movement and emotion.