Tea at Trianon: The Story of Kaspar Hauser

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, February 12, 2016

The Story of Kaspar Hauser

From Reid's Reader:

Yet the (romanticised) version of Kaspar’s story has inspired many capable writers. Stories of wild – perhaps feral – children hold a fascination for those who want to speculate on how the human mind would develop without conventional forms of socialisation. My first encounter with the Kaspar Hauser story was when I saw, nearly 40 years ago, Werner Herzog’s excellent film released in English as The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Its original German title was Jeder fur sich und Gott gegen alle [Every man for himself and God against everybody]. It was made in 1974. It did not attempt to “solve” the “mystery” of Kaspar’s background, but used Kaspar as a case study in a radically innocent mind, never socialised, and encountering the strangeness of the world for the first time. Herzog cast in the leading role an actor billed as “Bruno S.” (real name – Bruno Schleinstein) who had a history of mental illness and who played Kaspar as a sort of overgrown autistic child. Even if it was (probably) a complete fiction, it was a very interesting reflection on what an unsocialised mind in an adult body could be like. It bore many comparisons with one of Francois Truffaut’s best films, L’Enfant Sauvage (The Wild Child), made in 1970 and dramatising the historical case of a doctor trying to educate a feral child.

As a legend, then, rather than as an historical fact, Kaspar Hauser has become an interesting figure in European culture and literature, with many poems, novels and plays written about him. (Read more.)