Tea at Trianon: Illustrations of Tibetan Fairy Tales

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

Friday, November 3, 2023

Illustrations of Tibetan Fairy Tales

From The Marginalian:

Selected and retold by the American author Eleanore Myers Jewett, Wonder Tales from Tibet (public library | public domain) appeared in 1922, collecting “tales of wonder and magic” that had traveled orally from India to Tibet centuries earlier, then continued their migration to become “as familiar to Kalmuck and Mongolian children as St. George and his dragons are to us.” When European travelers first reached Tibet, these wonder-tales captured their imagination and followed them home, until in 1866 a German scholar published a pamphlet of the stories. They were eventually translated into English and made their way to the young Jewett in New York. When she told the tales to a small group of local boys and girls “one hot, happy summer,” she was moved by the lively enchantment the tales cast upon the children and set out to make that enchantment available to every child. (Read more.)