Tea at Trianon: Birds and Stargazing

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, May 7, 2021

Birds and Stargazing

From Space:

Like many people staying home during the coronavirus pandemic, I have recently gotten into a new hobby: bird-watching. Last fall I set up a bird feeder in my backyard and immediately became fascinated by the number of different avian varieties attracted to it. When I identified a red-bellied woodpecker using a pocket guide on birds, I think I became almost as excited as when astronomer Leslie Peltier identified his first star, Vega, using Martha Evans Martin's classic work, "The Friendly Stars."

And it was while doing some bird-watching that I began to consider the number of birds that are constellations. I later looked it up and found that there are nine birds in our night sky. Besides the two most noteworthy, Cygnus the swan and Aquila the eagle, there's a dove (Columba) and even a mythological Phoenix, which dies in a show of flames and combustion, only to come alive again from its ashes. (Read more.)