Tea at Trianon: The Copenhagen Trilogy

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, October 20, 2019

The Copenhagen Trilogy

From The Spectator:

Little Tove feels herself ‘a foreigner in this world’, a gangly oddball accidentally dropped with her gruff socialist dad (a stoker, often unemployed), her inscrutable maidservant mother, ‘full of secret thoughts I would never know’, and cheerfully hapless brother Edvin. With her penniless family barely surviving the interwar decades on the fringe of the Copenhagen working class, Tove must hope for nothing better than marriage to a ‘stable skilled worker’ who doesn’t booze too much. Instead, she reads and writes, thinks and observes, gathering enamel-bright memories of childhood into a ‘library of the soul’ she will browse over a creative lifetime.

In Youth, the teenage wonder tangles with a succession of creepy male mentors, from aesthetic Mr Krogh in his silk dressing-gown to the pudgy, oily editor Viggo F. Møller, with his green suits and green wallpaper. These cut-price Svengalis pretend to guide her down the ‘dark and twisting roads’ that lead to the literary life. Meanwhile, in a string of dead-end office jobs skewered with a comic relish Alan Bennett might envy, she makes extra cash by composing ditties for birthdays, promotions, funerals and so on. Want a rhyme for ‘Sven Åge’? Try ‘Boa, Noah, protozoa, Balboa’. She also endures a Nazi landlady, with a picture of Hitler on the wall, who thinks the beloved Führer’s oratory ‘goes right through your skin like a steambath’.

Ditlevsen can pivot from hilarity to heartbreak in a trice. Neither the ‘miracle’ of published volumes nor the adventures of sex can dent her mortifying sense of a thick veil ‘between myself and reality’. Literature liberates but shackles her. She comes to believe ‘the only thing I’m good for… is forming sentences’. (Read more.)