Tea at Trianon: The Saboteur

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, January 6, 2018

The Saboteur

From USA Today:

Robert de La Rochefoucauld was still in his teens when he decided to follow an exiled Gen. Charles de Gaulle's call for resistance against the Nazis in 1940. He walked from France — where his family tree reached back to 900 A.D. and included Hundred Years' War soldiers, the duke who woke up Louis XVI during the storming of the Bastille in 1789, an abolitionist friendly with Benjamin Franklin and associates of acclaimed writer Marcel Proust — to Spain and ultimately made his way to England. de Gaulle gave the young man the thumbs-up to join the British, who were training agents from the Continent in special operations.

La Rochefoucauld learned how to help local resisters in countries under Nazi rule fight back — everything from how to make and place explosives to how to kill an attacker with one's bare hands to how to withstand torture. Scenes include his dressing up as a nun to evade German authorities and, once the Nazis captured him, escaping en route to his execution. (Read more.)