Tea at Trianon: The Winegrowers of Heaven

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

Monday, June 14, 2021

The Winegrowers of Heaven

From Aleteia:

They are about 30 men, lined up face to face in two rows, on either side of a path that crosses a plot of vines. They are young, vigorous and full of strength, and yet their smile is as disarming as that of children. Some of them wear a tonsure, the ancestral sign of their renunciation of the world. They are dressed in their traditional monastic habit. They are Benedictine monks from the abbey of Saint Madeleine du Barroux, whose church tower can be seen from a distance, on the heights overlooking the vineyards. At their feet are empty crates that will be filled in a moment with the first grapes of the harvest, sun-drenched clairettes.
For the time being, the monks are meditating, singing the praise of God, before picking under the Provencal sun the new fruits of the vine, which the good weather has brought to maturity. “Ora et labora” (“Pray and work”) is their motto: They work in silence with precise gestures and a regular, unfaltering rhythm. They look up from time to time to thank God for such abundance. The hard work of the vineyard assures their subsistence; it also allows them to earn a path to heaven. (Read more.)