Tea at Trianon: The Final Word Is Love

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

Thursday, November 23, 2023

The Final Word Is Love

The Marginalian:

“Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks,” Walt Whitman counseled in his timeless advice on living a vibrant and rewarding life. Hardly anyone has embodied and enacted this ideal more fiercely than the great journalist, social activist, and Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day (November 8, 1897–November 29, 1980) — a woman who practiced what she preached and lived her values in every way: Amid a postwar culture that embraced consumerism as an act of patriotism, she advocated for and lived in voluntary poverty; she defied the IRS by refusing to pay federal taxes on war; her protests against racism, war, and injustice landed her in jail on multiple occasions.

Although Day’s lifetime of activism, altruism, and infinite compassion for the fragility of the human spirit were motivated by her faith and she is now being considered for sainthood, her legacy remains an instrument of secular motivation for the pursuit of social justice and the protection of human dignity. She belonged to that rare breed of people who manage to live righteous lives without slipping into self-righteousness in the face of human imperfection in others, for they are all too intimately familiar with its existence in themselves. A century after Whitman embraced his multitudes, Day remarked of the contradictory parts of herself: “It all goes together.” (Read more.)