Tea at Trianon: Marlene Dietrich's Marginalia

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

Monday, January 2, 2017

Marlene Dietrich's Marginalia

From The New Yorker:

She coped with isolation by running up a three-thousand-dollar-a-month phone bill and reading everything from potboilers to the pillars of the Western canon. She consumed poetry, philosophy, novels, biographies, and thrillers—in English, French, and her native tongue, German. When she died, in May, 1992, her grandson Peter Riva was tasked with clearing out nearly two thousand books from her apartment, many of which arrived at the American Library in Paris.

Simon Gallo, the library’s former head of collections, told me recently that only a few hours separated Riva’s initial phone call and the arrival of a truckload of books at the library’s back door. A portion of Dietrich’s collection was given to the Film Museum in Berlin, and some items—such as her personal copies of “Mein Kampf” and first editions of Cecil Beaton—were sold to private collectors. Many books donated to the American Library were simply marked with a bookplate and put into circulation. As of 2006, students could still check out Dietrich’s personal copy of “The Collected Works of Shakespeare.”

Dietrich wrote poetry—a book of her poems was edited by her daughter and published, in 2005, as “Nachtgedanken” (“Night Thoughts”). She wrote often in her bed-bound later years, and her poetry addressed Ronald Reagan, AIDS, and the loss of the use of her famous legs. Her book collection includes Baudelaire, Rilke, and many inscribed books by the poet Alain Bosquet, who was born in Odessa and raised in Brussels, and whose wife, Norma, was Dietrich’s secretary from 1977 to 1992. Shortly after Dietrich died, Bosquet published a recollection of decades of phone conversations with her, titled “Marlène Dietrich, une amour par telephone.”

Perhaps the most moving books in the collection are Dietrich’s volumes of Goethe. In her autobiography, she speaks of “deifying” Goethe in boarding school; after her father’s early death, she looked to Goethe as a father figure. “My passion for Goethe, along with the rest of my education, enclosed me in a complete circle full of solid moral values that I have preserved throughout my life,” she wrote. In her copies of his books, Dietrich noted passages of interest with small “X”s and with sheets torn from a notepad with a stamped red directive: Don’t Forget. (Read more.)