Tea at Trianon: A Tale of Valiant Women

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

Sunday, August 4, 2019

A Tale of Valiant Women

From iBenedictines:

One October morning in the year 1793, twenty English nuns and one novice were turned out of their monastery in the Rue des Anglaises, Cambrai, by French Revolutionaries. They were Benedictines who had lived quietly in the city since 1623, because the Penal Laws of the time forbade the establishment of monasteries in their home country. They had known what was likely to happen, but they kept hoping it wouldn’t. They stayed on as Revolutionary fervour made their position more and more insecure, fretting about their diminishing income and worrying about the future. D. Ann Teresa Partington wrote a spirited account of the nuns’ travails during this period while another, D. Anne-Joseph Knight, sent a series of letters to her family after her return to England which suggest the shock and horror of events. It was night when the knock on the door finally came. (Read more.)