Tea at Trianon: The Real Mata Hari

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, October 20, 2017

The Real Mata Hari

From The Guardian:

She was born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle into a prosperous family in the capital of Friesland, Holland, in 1876. Despite her father’s relative wealth as the owner of a millinery shop, his speculation in oil shares ended in financial disaster and, penniless, he departed for the Hague. Her mother died when Gretha was only 15 and she was sent to live with relatives, away from her twin brothers. At 18, she responded to a lonely hearts ad in a newspaper and, four months later, was married to Rudolph “John” MacLeod, who was almost twice her age and a hard-drinking officer in the East Indies army. According to a relative, “she passed from the hands of a caddish father into the hands of a caddish husband”. (Read more.)