Tea at Trianon: Desperate Romantics, Then and Now

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

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Desperate Romantics, Then and Now

"Pentimento" reflects on selfishness, past and present.

The ethos of personal happiness as the highest good, a goal for which one must go through fire (though that fire destroy everything it touches), and summon all of one's misplaced courage to achieve, is one with which I'm all too familiar from an earlier chapter of my life. Though my actions, by the grace of God, did not mirror those of the players in what is essentially a story of personal tragedy (one that someone at the Times inexplicably deemed "news that's fit to print"), I can fully understand the compulsions and the lack of compunction and other social barriers that encouraged Ms. Riddell and Mr. Partilla to blow up their own lives and the lives of all those dear to them.