Tea at Trianon: The Conversion of Alexander Rzewuski

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

Friday, May 4, 2012

The Conversion of Alexander Rzewuski

Thanks to Paula B. for sending me this extraordinary story.

Alexander was descended from a long line of Poles who had played a prominent part in the history of their country as hereditary "Hetman of the crown." At the last partition of Poland in 1795, they passed over to the service of the Russian Empire. Rzewuski's grandfather was in the personal suite of four Tsars, and his father, General Adam Rzewuski, born in Ukraine, was military Governor of the Caucasus region at the time of Alexander's birth there in 1893.

Alexander's mother was a Russian, from the St Petersburg aristocracy. He was baptised into the Russian Orthodox Church and spent his childhood partly in the Caucasus (with forays into Azerbaijan and Chechnya) and partly in Ukraine, where a series of French and English governesses educated him and his sisters at home.

As an adolescent of 14, he was sent north, far from the mountains of the Caucasus, to school in St Petersburg at the Imperial Alexander Lycée. Schooling completed, he passed on to the University there. As an undergraduate, he was profoundly, if imperceptibly, affected by the philosophy lectures. A cast of mind which was to stay with him until his student days as a Dominican, was introduced.

It is hard to imagine the life of careless comfort and extreme wealth lived by the nobility and aristocracy of the Russian Empire. It is even harder to try to depict it: a society multi-lingual, yet with a bias towards French, reverencing the values of personal honour and family tradition, possessed of a broad education in the humanities, but not a noticeably deep one. This was the world to which Rzewuski belonged, and it all came tumbling down after June 1914 with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo.

Rzewuski served during the war as an officer in command of organising fleets of ambulances for the wounded. Two events, one public and universally cataclysmic, the other personal and hidden, set the pattern for his future career. The personal event was his sudden reception into the Catholic Church. With scant knowledge of religion, and lacking any insistent habit of church attendance, he could justify this sharp turn, only by stating that the idea of joining the Catholic Church would not leave him. He had very little knowledge of Orthodoxy, and less of Catholicism.

One night, towards the end of the war (at the very time when his friend Prince Felix Yussoupoff was planning the assassination of Rasputin), he knocked at the door of Italian Capuchins in Trebizond (of all places!) demanding to be received into the Catholic Church on the spot. (Read entire post.)