Tea at Trianon: On Being Over-Fond of Pets

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, November 19, 2016

On Being Over-Fond of Pets

From Dance's Historical Miscellany:

I was recently rather amused by a chapter in an 18th-century advice manual for women, entitled ‘On being over-fond of animals’. This anti-pet diatribe comes from a 1756 publication called The Wife, which also features charmingly-named chapters such as ‘The danger of living in the same house with any Relation of the Husband’s’, ‘Sleeping in different Beds’, and ‘The great indiscretion of taking too much notice of the unmeaning, or transient gallantries of a Husband’. (Read more.)

Unknown said...: Amusing indeed. Another anti-puritanical venue you may enjoy, in defence of so-called "bad taste" of the bon vivant 18thC France: "Carl Magnusson (lecturer at the University of Lausanne) Too Pretty and Exotic to be Neo-Classical?" I stumbled upon recently at the Courtauld Institute here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72cxgeZiu8Q
Recall Pope Benedict professed to prefer the whimsical-humanist Baroque over perceived 'absolutist' excesses of classicism, a wisdom developed within the bosom of 'feminine' receptivity of Mother Church, methinks?; November 20, 2016 at 6:28:00 PM EST