Tea at Trianon: The Death of Van Gogh

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, January 12, 2013

The Death of Van Gogh

Accident or suicide? According to the Daily Mail:

The Vincent van Gogh story is that the poverty-stricken and unappreciated artist took his own life with a shot to the chest. But, more than a century on, two American writers have cast doubt on his suicide and instead claim he was shot dead by a teenager. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith claim that Van Gogh was fatally wounded by a friend’s teenage brother who enjoyed teasing and provoking the mentally ill artist. During a confrontation in the French town of Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890, the boy somehow opened fire with a gun. They also outline another theory, that Van Gogh was shot by two local boys who were playing with a malfunctioning pistol. Naifeh and Smith, who won a Pulitzer Prize for their biography of U.S. artist Jackson Pollock, spent ten years researching their book, which will be released in Britain tomorrow. (Read entire article.)