Tea at Trianon: Faithful Place

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, September 17, 2011

Faithful Place

"Things around here were more like they used to be than they ever had been." — from Faithful Place by Tana French

My BlogHer Book Club review of Tana French's mystery novel set in Ireland. To quote:

In Faithful Place, undercover policeman Frank Mackey must...go home and face the dysfunctional family he fled from twenty years earlier. Now the Mackeys are no more dysfunctional than any other family where one of the parents is a severe and brutal alcoholic but, to paraphrase Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own unique way. I suppose this applies to the Mackey family, who in spite of the boorish father and sewage-mouthed eldest brother, as well as the prodigious use of the word "feck," do have their charming moments and redeeming qualities. Their uniqueness is indubitable, and for me the members of the Mackey family are among the most unforgettable bunch of characters I have ever encountered in fiction for combining hilarity and pathos with sheer insanity. (Read entire review.)