Tea at Trianon: Giovanni Maria de Agostini

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

Tuesday, December 3, 2019

Giovanni Maria de Agostini

From Smithsonian:

About 50 miles east of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, Hermit Peak rises some 10,000 feet amid the pinyon-juniper woodland of the Pecos Wilderness. The hermit for which it was named was an Italian-born monk, Giovanni Maria de Agostini. For three years in the 1860s, Agostini lived high up on the mountain, foraging for food and getting water from a spring. Despite his self-imposed solitude he managed to attract a following during an era of religious fervor and experimentation in America. At the end of the 19th century, a local organization created in his honor, the Sociedad del Ermitaño, or the Society of the Hermit, counted 62 members. Their main practice was a long trek to the peak to pray and erect crosses.

Today, the Society of the Hermit’s solemn tradition has faded almost to the vanishing point, and might be lost entirely if not for one family. “I go to Mass on Sundays and I take my kids, but I feel closer to God praying in that cave, remembering that my uncle used to be right here and my grandpa used to be right here,” said Joseph Abeyta, a 36-year-old resident of Las Vegas, New Mexico. There are a handful of other Society members still in the area, but this past September, the Abeytas were the only ones who made the trek to Hermit Peak. The photographer Gabriel Ellison-Scowcroft accompanied the family to document this unique rite of faith. (Read more.)

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