Tea at Trianon: Bearing Witness

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, December 1, 2010

Bearing Witness

A magnificent piece by Jennifer Pierce on François Mauriac and Elie Wiesel. To quote:

The result of that meeting between the elderly, Catholic Mauriac and the young, Jewish Wiesel resulted in La Nuit or Night, the Nobel Prize-winning testimony of Wiesel's experience in the camps and his career as witness -- to both the travesty of the Shoah and his unfailing belief in God in the face of ineffable horror. A witness supported and enabled through another man's loving witness, a man unafraid to say the name Christ into the blackest of pits. The original title for Wiesel's work was Un di velt hot geshvign, Yiddish for "And the World Stayed Silent" -- a link to Celan's despairing cry that no one bears witness to the witness. Celan, who entered his poetry into that silence, took his own life in the River Seine. Wiesel, however, still stands as a living witness, replacing the poison Mauriac drew from him with an intonation of the name we are promised will stop any deadly thing from doing us harm.