Tea at Trianon: Deplorable Duke

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

Thursday, April 25, 2019

Deplorable Duke

From Tom Piatak at Chronicles:

Wayne was well-known to be a partisan Republican, and the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, but Congress was no more able to ignore O’Hara than Wayne’s Sean Thornton had been able to ignore O’Hara’s Mary Kate Danaher in their most memorable collaboration, The Quiet Man. The bill honoring Wayne passed the Senate by voice vote, passed the House unanimously, and was signed into law by Jimmy Carter, with the medal bearing the inscription requested by O’Hara.

O’Hara had plenty of support, of course, from figures as diverse as General of the Army Omar Bradley, Frank Sinatra, and Hollywood liberals Gregory Peck and Katherine Hepburn. And Wayne’s greatness was also recognized by another liberal, film critic Roger Ebert, who wrote in 1979 that Wayne “brought life to his bad movies and greatness to his good ones.” (Read more.)