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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, March 12, 2021

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And we enjoyed the film Herself. From Dwell:

Carpenters use the adage "measure twice, cut once" as a reminder to double-check before committing—and it’s uttered by a character in the new film Herself (2020) to a group of novice builders. But it’s also an apt metaphor for the entire journey of Sandra (played by Clare Dunne), a single mother in Dublin trying to solve her housing problem. The saying cautions her to plan and prepare—then take action.

Having left her violent husband, Sandra has to declare herself homeless to qualify for government assistance. She is put up in an airport hotel, where she has to use the "poor door" to access the room she shares with her two daughters while she waits for her number 653 to come up on the public housing list. (Due to a dearth of available housing stock, Dublin has become one of the most expensive cities in the world—pricier than Tokyo, Sydney, and Singapore. Pre-pandemic, the number of people without housing had quadrupled in five years.) (Read more.)