Tea at Trianon: A Deep Sense of Place

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, May 17, 2019

A Deep Sense of Place

From Website, Ink:

"The Mind of the South" was written by Cash, a non-academic and a non-professional historian, but he examined the South of his day with laser-like precision. This book has been required graduate school reading ever since. One of the concepts about the South he put forth was the "sense of place" — from the architecture, the landscape, the soil type, to the terrain and the regional differences in architecture and the differences in accents that separate someone from Charleston from someone from Hattiesburg — that had all been jealously preserved by its inhabitants. To this day, the New York elites like to bottle and sell and examine this essence. I've lived in many places, and people remain fascinated. And if they have the good fortune to visit Homewood, they never forget it.(Read more.)