Tea at Trianon: By Sword and Fire

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

Thursday, July 7, 2011

By Sword and Fire

A review of a memoir about the destruction of Manila during World War II. It is of interest to me since my family was there. Share

1 comment:

Enbrethiliel said...: +JMJ+

Thank you for the link, Elena! How could I have forgotten that your family was there at the time?

I'm still going through the second part of the book--Aluit's painstaking recreation of every long day of the liberation, based on diaries and eyewitness testimony--and find that, as gripping as it is, I can read only a few pages each day.

Just this afternoon, I read about some Spanish prisoners who were allowed by the Japanese soldiers standing guard to collect some food that had been left in the streets. It turned out that the prisoners' families had been bringing the food for them, for the past four days that the prisoners had been starved (no food, no water) in their tightly packed cells, but that the soldiers had been "confiscating" it. That day, however, the soldiers grew tired of the food (some of which was also beginning to spoil) and decided they might as well let the prisoners have it. Four men were allowed to collect it all, but they had no containers in which to carry it. Then one of them saw a half-burned book in the street, and soon they were tearing it up, page by page, to make little dinner parcels. The book was completely destroyed by the time they finished, and yet each prisoner got only a handful of food.

And that is one of the lighter anecdotes.

Now I know why my grandfather, who was a teenage boy at this time, has never spoken about the liberation or the rest of the war with anyone.; July 7, 2011 at 11:47:00 AM EDT