Tea at Trianon: The Dream Cities

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

Saturday, January 8, 2022

The Dream Cities

From Charles Coulombe at The European Conservative:

Now, at first glance, the two metropoli could not be more different. One is a major port, the other tucked away quite literally in the centre of Europe. Vienna was first settled under the Romans, if not before, while the Crescent City is a mere stripling dating back to 1718. The old Kaiserstadt is resolutely German speaking, while New Orleans jettisoned its native French over a century ago. Vienna is a world-class capital, while New Orleans is merely the biggest city in an American state that is far from the largest—either in territory or population. One could go on and on. But the truth is, they have a very great deal in common.

The most obvious resemblance is the importance of Carnival season—Fasching in Vienna, Mardi Gras in New Orleans. From the Epiphany until the stroke of midnight issuing in Ash Wednesday, the two cities give themselves up to masked balls, parades, and all sorts of merrymaking, which spread out from their storied centres (the Erste Bezirk in Vienna; the Vieux Carré in New Orleans) through newer and older suburbs and into the rural hinterland beyond. Indeed, Vienna and New Orleans are among the few remaining great cities in the world that retain an organic white-tie ball culture.

It must said that for both of these places, the Carnival season is in a sense the prototype of life “as it should be.” New Orleans boasts of being “the City that care forgot,” while Vienna calls itself the “City of Dreams”—perhaps echoed further by the Creole City’s other sobriquet of “Land of Dreams!” This devotion to pleasure and an escape from unpleasantness is heightened by the role that both music and cuisine play in lives of the metropoli. Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and the rest are as much the tutelary spirits of the Viennese mind as Waller, Armstrong, Gottschalk, and company are of the New Orleanian. If Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans is the anthem of the one, Wien, du Stadt meiner Träume is that of the other. There is a strange convergence in sentiment between New Orleans blues and the Wienerlieder. So too with food; both cities have a local cuisine that has achieved world renown and plays a key part of their identities – from gumbo to Altwiener Suppentopf. Without a doubt, the late lamented Drei Husaren restaurant played a role in Vienna’s dream that Antoine’s thankfully continues to play in New Orleans. As regards hotels, one may equally compare the Sacher and the Roosevelt.

Love and romance have always also been considered an integral part of each city’s character—preferably doomed. If Vienna exhibits a seemingly endless chain of tragic Habsburg and aristocratic love affairs, New Orleans may respond with her Quadroon Balls and forbidden alliances across racial or class lines—even between locals and Yankees, or worse still, French and Anglos! Predictably, both sets of lachrymose unions have produced bumper crops of ghost legends, much to the delight of locals and tourists alike.

This last may be fitting, because both Vienna and New Orleans have a unique relationship—and perhaps fascination—with death. As befits historically Catholic cities, cemeteries in both places become candlelit wonderlands on the Feast of All Saints, and into All Souls. The cemeteries themselves are showcases of ornate sepulchral architecture. Viennese and New Orleanians alike will spare no expense for an impressive funeral. In Vienna, these still often feature horse-drawn carriages instead of hearses with bicorned drivers and footmen; New Orleans’ jazz funerals with their ‘second lines’ of dancing mourners are world renowned.

Our urban duo have another thing in common, and that is a peculiar class structure—in one sense stratified to the point of invisibility, and in other ways weirdly egalitarian. Ever since the odious Karl Renner banned the use of noble titles in 1919, Austria’s nobility in general have been sort of underground. But in such exclusive places as the Jockey Club für Österreich and the St. Johanns Club, they may congregate and enjoy one another’s company. So it is with the white aristocracy of New Orleans’ Boston, Pickwick, and Louisiana Clubs, and the black elite’s Autocrat Club. But on the opposite end of the social scale, Vienna’s lowest of the low developed the Gaunersprache—“Crook’s Language”— which has had a major influence on Viennese German. In a similar manner, Irish and German immigrants gave New Orleans its famous English dialect “Yat,” while Gombo French or Creole (not to be confused with the refined French once spoken by white and black Creoles). Yet, in a strange manner, these two extremes in both cities have an odd relationship with one another—most visible at Carnival and other public observances, and in their mutual disdain for newcomers. Indeed, these two ends of the social scale, in a sense, serve as the repositories of the genuine spirit of their respective cities, with all those in between seeming in some sense to range between newcomers and interlopers. (Read more.)