Tea at Trianon: Agatha Christie's Home

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

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Agatha Christie's Home

From Madame Guillotine:

After quite a few years of hopeless longing, I finally managed to visit Agatha Christie’s holiday home Greenway last week and it was every bit as magical as I could ever have anticipated. I’ve been a huge fan of Christie, or Mrs Mallowan as she was known to the locals of Greenway, for literally almost as long as I can remember. My grandparents discouraged me from reading children’s books but everything else was fair game, including my mother’s collection of vintage Agatha Christie novels, which I absolutely devoured when I was about eight years old. My favourite then was Death on the Nile and in fact that still remains one of my favourites to this day, although it’s been mostly surpassed by her Miss Marple books.

Although Greenway, which rests on a hill overlooking the river Dart in Devon, was not Agatha Christie’s principal residence, it is the one that is most irresistibly connected with her as it was here that she retired every summer after finishing her latest book and here too that she played hostess at house parties and celebrated birthdays and Christmases. (Read more.)