Tea at Trianon: In the Berkshires

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

Sunday, June 6, 2021

In the Berkshires

From Traveler:

When Edith Wharton moved to the Berkshire Mountains at the turn of the last century, she framed her departure from city life as a personal liberation. In her autobiography, amid ecstatic descriptions of the gorgeous scenery she found in western Massachusetts, she wrote that she had “at last escaped from watering-place trivialities to the real country.” Wharton was 40 years old when she left the society circles of Manhattan and the “flat frivolity” of Newport, Rhode Island, where she had a summer home, for 100-plus acres of rolling farmland just outside the village of Lenox. It was her attempt to forge a second act, a more enriching and affirming writer's life. Still, she wasn't exactly roughing it in the country. She designed and erected a stately 35-room white stucco mansion she called The Mount, which included terrazzo floors, marble fireplaces, a stable, and a spree of manicured flower gardens. The Berkshires offered Wharton her fantasy of a pastoral paradise, along with enough creature comforts and high culture to delight snooty friends like Henry James when they dropped in for a visit. She described her Berkshires bolt-hole as “my first real home.” (Read more.)