Tea at Trianon: Down and Out in Paris

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, May 9, 2023

Down and Out in Paris

From Nation:

Paris is a difficult place,” Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to a friend on New Year’s Eve, 1902. “And the beautiful things here and there do not quite compensate for the cruelty of its streets and the monstrosity of its people.” Then 26, the writer had recently moved to the city from the German countryside, leaving behind his new wife and their young child. His plan was to work there for a year and send money to his family, which had been relying on a trust fund that his father had abruptly withdrawn. For reasons that remain hard to pin down, however, he stayed for six years, without warming to the cruel streets and monstrous people or, for that matter, earning much money. It was a period of loneliness and frustration, during which he was wracked with doubts about his art. And yet a part of him seemed obscurely drawn to its hardships. In “Turning Point,” a poem about spiritual growth, he quotes as an epigraph these lines from the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Kassner: “The road from intensity to greatness / passes through sacrifice.” His fictional record of Paris would likewise turn on ascetic withdrawal and renewal. (Read more.)