Tea at Trianon: Changing Times

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, January 10, 2020

Changing Times

From Maryland Matters:

Little Cara Erskine stood in the cold gray damp of a November day nearly 68 years ago, up on a temporary stage of slight elevation, before a gathering of grownups, most of them in overcoats and hats. The mayor of Baltimore, Thomas J. D’Alesandro Jr., leaned over to present her with a mock key to the new park and playground they had come to dedicate. The “key” was almost half her size. Not quite 5, she seemed frightened, maybe even a little bewildered, by all the hoopla and solemnity and talk of her grandfather, Ambrose J. Kennedy, the well-known former city councilman, state senator, U.S. congressman and Democratic chieftain who hailed from this Johnston Square neighborhood in East Baltimore’s Tenth Ward, once an Irish stronghold. (Read more.)