Tea at Trianon: John Quincy Adams and Madame de Staël

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, December 1, 2017

John Quincy Adams and Madame de Staël

From author Shannon Selin:

John Quincy Adams was then the US Minister to Russia. On September 6, 1812, Madame de Staël invited him to call on her at noon “concerning something relative to America.” (2) Though John Quincy Adams had never met Madame de Staël, he was familiar with her work. In 1797, when serving as US Minister to the Netherlands, he had sent his father John Adams (America’s second president), a copy of Madame de Staël’s A Treatise on the Influence of the Passions upon the Happiness of Individuals and of Nations. In an accompanying letter, John Quincy Adams described the publication as “curious.”

It contains many very sensible and smart remarks; a profusion of sparkling sentences, and a perpetual proof of that half-reflected system, that absurd mixture of ignorance and experience of nonsense and wisdom, of depravity and virtue, which characterizes the school of French politicians ever since the opening of their Revolution. One great object of this publication was doubtless, to offer a sort of expiatory sacrifice to the present rulers in France, and to recommend the authoress to the restoration of their good graces. (3)
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