Tea at Trianon: Stolen Vases Returned

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, August 9, 2019

Stolen Vases Returned

Most of the art stolen by the Nazis and the Communists will never be returned, but when it does happen, it is like a miracle. From Fox News:

Two stunning vases stolen by the Nazis 80 years ago were returned to the heirs of their original owners at a ceremony in Berlin Thursday after a joint effort by the American embassy and an FBI art crime team.

The vases, which the FBI said were worth about $120,000 today, belonged to the family of Harry Fuld, a German Jew who founded the first modern telephone system in the country, the Frankfurt-based H. Fuld & Co. Telefon und Telegraphenwerke AG.

“Finding ways to bring small measures of justice to the victims of the Holocaust and their families, even after so many years of injustice, is a priority of the Trump Administration," Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, told Fox News on Saturday. "From the very beginning, President Trump instructed his team to be aggressive in this work. Returning these Nazi stolen works of art to their owners’ families was a group effort by the team at the US Embassy in Berlin, the FBI, German private citizens and many others.”

He continued: “We hope this one success story will encourage others to keep researching and pushing auction houses and governments to return the thousands of other Nazi stolen items on the market to their rightful owners.” (Read more.)

More HERE.

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