Tea at Trianon: Growing Up Fatherless

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, April 5, 2014

Growing Up Fatherless

From The Huffington Post:

Growing up without my father was, by far, the hardest thing I've ever dealt with in my life. His choice to leave before I was born felt like a curse. It was "the unknown" that scared me so much. The unknown things like the why, the how, the what of growing up without him there. As a young child, I never really missed him because I didn't know any better. He just wasn't there, and that was that. My mom and the man she eventually married, the man I call Dad, never left me wanting for anything, but there was nothing they could do to fill that void that was in the shape of the idea of my father.

I was in 8th grade when I began putting things together and asking questions about him. It started with little things: walking down the street wondering what he looked like or if I had walked past him. Unknown. I wondered how he dressed and how he talked. Unknown. What kind of music did he like? What were his favorite movies? Unknown. Those questions ate at me constantly. The more I thought about him, the more I missed him. The more I missed him, the more the unknown scared me. (Read more.)