Tea at Trianon: The Soldier

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, June 4, 2023

The Soldier

From Dr. Esolen at Word and Song:

When I was a boy, I saw, every week when we had Sunday dinner with Grandma and Grandpa, a studio photograph of my father’s father in uniform, as a soldier in the American army during World War One. He looked rigid, uncomfortable, but proud. He’d arrived in America from Italy only a few years before. But when my father was small, he told him that if anybody should ever ask him if he was Italian, he was to answer, “I’m an American!” My father didn’t see action in wartime, but he too served his two years as a soldier, attaining the rank of sergeant. I used to have a couple of photographs he took when he was stationed in Europe. He had a few days’ leave, so he and a couple of his buddies took a train from their post in Germany down into the Campagna, in Italy, to the small mountaintop village, Caserta Vecchia, where his parents’ people came from. Those people welcomed him with open arms. That was around 1955. In those days, Italians, especially in the south, were fond of American soldiers, and the soldiers were fond of them too. In 1983, I traveled to that same Caserta Vecchia, where I met my great-uncle Luigi, and my great-aunt Rosina just this side of 100 years old, and a few others who remembered my father’s visit. But I was no soldier. (Read more.)