Tea at Trianon: The Vampire and the Pope: Remembering My Brief, Beautiful Catholic Friendship with Anne Rice

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, May 6, 2024

The Vampire and the Pope: Remembering My Brief, Beautiful Catholic Friendship with Anne Rice

From Mark Judge at Splice Today:

Catholicism brought Anne Rice and me together. Rice had announced a return to the Church in 1998, an unexpected piece of news that shook the media—the vampire queen herself had turned towards Rome. I too had come Back to Catholicism. In 2005, around the time Rice published Christ the Lord, I published a book called God and Man at Georgetown Prep. We were both members of the One True Faith.

Rice and I became personally connected, through mutual friends in the faith. I’d read her first novel Interview with the Vampire at my brother’s suggestion in 1980, and like everyone else immediately recognized it as not an exercise in genre horror but a beautiful philosophical work. I’d been a fan for years. Now it was 2005 and I was friends with the author. We emailed every day and she invited me to visit her in California—a trip I didn’t make due to illness. That illness is when I experienced Rice’s true Christian kindness, which you never really heard about much in public. (Read more.)