Tea at Trianon: The American “Empress of Journalism” and Oscar Wilde’s Feckless Brother

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

Tuesday, April 5, 2022

The American “Empress of Journalism” and Oscar Wilde’s Feckless Brother

I did not know that Oscar Wilde even had a brother. From LitHub:

Mrs. Frank Leslie was an American celebrity, the “Empress of Journalism,” when Oscar Wilde and his family entered her life with such fateful consequences. Miriam Leslie had just rescued her late husband’s empire from bankruptcy with her President Garfield assassination coup, and become a power on Publishers’ Row. A brilliant business executive, she took command of the giant Frank Leslie Publishing Company and put it back on the road to marketplace dominance.

In 1882, Oscar arrived in New York for his American lecture tour and sought out Miriam. At forty-six she was an icon of glamour—a charismatic showman and fashionista—and they bonded at once. The next year, she accepted his invitation to his mother’s London salon where Miriam and Jane Wilde struck up an intimate friendship, so intimate Jane tried to keep her in the family. At a strategic moment she presented her live-in, feckless older son, Willie, and said: “Mrs. Leslie, I want to introduce you to your future husband.”

A joke until it wasn’t. Five years later Miriam again visited Jane Wilde’s soirée. This time she was amid a romantic dry spell and Willie was there in courtship mode. A layabout and congenital wastrel, he had reached the end of his tether. He was deep in debt and the effects of his dissipated life were beginning to tell: his eyes were bagged, features bloated, and whiskers streaked with grey. But he could be charming if he liked and amuse friends with mimicry, recitations, bon mots, and droll anecdotes. It was in his interest to charm Mrs. Leslie and he was en forme. Although she pretended to equivocate, she agreed to marry him in the fall.

Willie never seems to have doubted the outcome and forged a check in her name after she left. He arrived on the S. S. Havre on the first of October and three days later the wedding took place in the pastor’s study at the Church of the Strangers, with Miriam in a beaded Worth ensemble of pearl gray satin with a matching bonnet. She deducted twelve years and entered her age as forty-three in the church record book, the better to approximate Willie’s thirty-nine. Reverend Charles Deems, former editor of Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine, officiated, and best man, Marshall P. Wilder, gave her away. (Read more.)