Tea at Trianon: Death in the Present Tense

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, July 4, 2021

Death in the Present Tense

From LitHub:

Eager to travel to Finland where, as far as Martha Gellhorn could determine, people “looked after each other’s needs and rights, with justice: a good democracy,” she noted that it “was unusual timing to arrive in a strange frozen country one dark afternoon and be waked the next morning at nine o’clock by the first bombs, the declaration of war,” on November 30th. Her first piece for Collier’s there, “Bombs on Helsinki,” among many vignettes, showed a nine-year-old boy outside his home watching Russian bombers, holding himself “stiffly so as not to shrink from the noise. When the air was quiet again, he said, ‘Little by little, I am getting really angry.’”

Another, “Death in the Present Tense,” had a 12-year-old bellhop who stood near the door of the Hotel Kamp “listening to the dreadful music; a long-drawn siren, the sharp, angry, too-close metallic pounding of the machine guns, the faint distant thud of the bombs.” With shaking hands, the youngster closed faded brocade curtains over a rattling window, “waiting for death as those do who cannot understand it.”

In Paris at the end of December, Martha would later recall that “Paris was the Sleeping Beauty. Blue dim-out lights shone on the snow in the empty Place de la Concorde… There were no crowds, few cars, no sense of haste or disaster. Paris had never been more at peace. I felt that I was looking at this grace for the last time.”

While she was in Paris, her mother was home in St. Louis, hosting lunch for Ernest’s first wife Hadley and their son Jack. In a December 29th letter to Hemingway, Edna Gellhorn wrote that all three of them enjoyed the visit and when she asked Jack about where he planned to go to college, he told her that he “didn’t know exactly, but wanted some place where he could fish.” (Read more.)