Tea at Trianon: The Spiritual Mysteries Beneath Our Feet

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

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

The Spiritual Mysteries Beneath Our Feet

The grotto mentioned in the article was not far from my home and a very special place for me. From Lit Hub:

A campanile marked the grotto’s entrance. From time to time bells rang out, bouncing off cliff rock before settling into pastureland below. The site was built to simulate Lourdes, a cave in Southern France where, in 1858, the same year Millet was hard at work on L’Angélus, a young miller’s daughter named Bernadette perceived apparitions of the Virgin Mary. At the Maryland shrine, a statue commemorates these visits, Mary’s eyes gazing skyward from a half-shell curve cut into the stone. On a knoll opposite, plaster Bernadette kneels in awe.

By the 1980s, the time of our Sunday visits, a long gravel path led the way. A few yards in stood a round pond, maybe 20 feet across, rimmed with black iron fencing. Thick vertical spears topped by arrowheads gestured upward. In the center of the pond, another statue of Mary stared, upward. Old trees above soughed and swayed in a loose leafy knit, drawing the eyes upward. But at the bottom of the shallow pond, greening yet intact, a newspaper lay. With each visit, I expected its disappearance, but impossibly, it was always there. (Read more.)