Tea at Trianon: Pilgrimage to Annecy

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

Sunday, August 11, 2013

Pilgrimage to Annecy

From Once I Was a Clever Boy:

The countryside got increasingly spectacular as we traveled through the Ain gorge to Nantua and on to Bellegarde,which still feels like a frontier town, which it was until the ebvents of 1858-60, and into Haute Savoie. Here is what was until that time part of the Savoyard Kingdom of Sardinia, the modern regional authority uses the Savoy arms of a white cross on red and these were much evidence as asign of local identity. The landscape subtly changed at ground level, whilst at Annecy we were in an Alpine setting, the mountains looking down on the lake. This forms a very spectacular setting for the city. As with so many French cities the outskirts were rather depressing, with a closed up, dusty aspect, and too much architecture in the style of Le Corbusier, but the old city itself is. charming. It is small and the buildings suggest a similarity to the architecture of other Alpine countries such as Switzerland, Germany and Austria - it is not especially French in feeling.

We parked up near the basilica of St Frances and walked down into what is very much the city of St Francis de Sales, the erstwhile Oratorian who based himself in Annecy as Bishop of Geneva, being unable to occupy his episcopal city which was under Calvinist control. There is an online life of St Francis de Sales here. (Read entire post.)