Tea at Trianon: Frenchman Street

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

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Frenchman Street

Southern Living invites you to meet the musicians in the heart of New Orleans.

Frenchmen Street in the Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans is a pulse, a holdover, an invitation, a gumbo, a front line, a late night, a memory, a wish, a tonic. It is Creole town houses, packed together and toeing property lines. It is peels of paint and wrought iron dust and the scents of oyster factory, confectionery, and laundromat, all wafting down the arrow-straight street. It is bartender, mailman, sax player, concierge, barista, priest, lowlife, wanderer, tenor, and shopkeeper.

The thin asphalt lane locals used to call Little Canal Street begins on a bend of the Mississippi River where the eastern French Quarter ends and passes between Seventh Ward, Treme, and Bywater, then runs north toward Lake Pontchartrain. Under the shimmery asphalt lays a parish gravel; and beneath that, a cobbled row laid atop a silty bed of fine antebellum earth washed up from hundreds of years gone by. And beneath it all, it is a melody.