Tea at Trianon: No Fathers, No Hope

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 13, 2022

No Fathers, No Hope

From Dr. Esolen at Law and Liberty:

Why do men work, says the poet Charles Peguy, if not for their children? The father throws himself away in hope, looking forward to the time when he will be no more on earth than a name or a rumor of a name but his children will be alive, and people will say of him—if they remember him at all—that he was a good man but his children are better. He hands on his old tools to his sons, tools shiny with the wear of his hands. He watches his children grow and is proud: he does not want them always to be babies. And when the young children come up to him for a kiss before they go to bed at night, and “they bend their neck laughing like a young, like a beautiful colt, and their neck, and the nape of their neck, and their whole head,” the father places his kiss right upon their crown, “the center of their hair, the birth-place, the source, the point of origin of their hair.” (This is from The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, published posthumously in French in 1929; Peguy himself died a hero’s death in 1914, in the first weeks of the Great War.)

Marcel picks up on this insight from Peguy, that fathers are the “great adventurers of the modern world,” accepting the risk of a big family, instead of simply “acquiring life as one puts electricity or central heating into a house.” The father, he says, makes a creative vow. He does not say, “I will give only so far.” I knew a woman once who told her husband that she would agree to have a second child only on condition that he buy her an expensive sports car. He found the arrangement to his taste. That was, as Marcel says, “incompatible with the inward eagerness of a being who is irresistibly impelled to welcome life with gratitude.” No one in our time looks askance at a woman living alone with five cats. Our politics and economics seem aimed at producing old women with cats. And whole great sections of society, formal and informal, public and private, look askance at a happily married woman with five children, who devotes her day to making a lively home for them. A lonely revolution has it been. (Read more.)