Tea at Trianon: A Matter of Life and Art

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, June 25, 2024

A Matter of Life and Art

From Andrew Klavan at The New Jerusalem:

In Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, Mandy Patinkin as Georges Seurat sings about letting life pass him by while he performs the essentially meaningless task of painting an article of clothing: “You watch the rest of the world from a window while you finish the hat.”
I was thirty when Sunday in the Park opened on Broadway. I was just beginning to emerge from the darkest period of my life. I had tickets to the show one night, but I was volunteering at a suicide hotline then. I arranged to meet your mother at the theater after my shift.
But that evening, I received the one and only emergency call I ever got. A guy phoned and said he had taken a fatal dose of pills and just wanted to talk to me while he died. Working desperately against the clock, I managed to wangle his address out of him and sent an ambulance to fetch him. (Read more.)