Tea at Trianon: Sardines and Marseilles

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

Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Sardines and Marseilles

From Forbes:

The story begins in 1779, in a place called Puducherry in India. Throughout the 18th century, it was one of several key trading posts in the region, which the British and French fought over — notably during the Anglo-French wars and the Siege of Pondicherry (which is what the region is sometimes called). In 1779, the British orchestrated a prisoner exchange, swapping some captured French soldiers in exchange for their own. The Frenchmen boarded a frigate called the “Sartine”, named after King Louis XVI's Maritime Minister, Antoine de Sartine, and the prestigious boat headed for the Mediterranean to take its men back to France. (Read more.)