Tea at Trianon: Jane Austen Exhibit

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

Friday, March 19, 2010

Jane Austen Exhibit

At the Morgan Library. Madame Delors shares her thoughts, saying:

One can admire Cassandra's handiwork with the scissors, deftly snipping here and there an offensive word or two, or sometimes boldly amputating an entire corner of a letter. So few letters, so few manuscripts are left... but they are there, all the more precious.

Gillray's crude, unforgiving caricatures of Regency life immerse us in a bawdy world, decades before Victorian mores took over England. And Jane Austen's influence and literary legacy are also reviewed, from the timid succès d'estime she enjoyed during her lifetime to her current immense fame. And yes, the inescapable Colin Firth is there to remind us of the more or less questionable film adaptations of her works.