Tea at Trianon: A New Novel Featuring Marie-Antoinette

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, June 17, 2024

A New Novel Featuring Marie-Antoinette

From Aleteia:

To Crown with Liberty follows the life of a fictional character named Alix de Morainville Carpentier, a noblewoman born in northern France who, after her society debut at Versailles, becomes lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution. Forced to flee as a result of the violence of the Terror, Alix ends up in Louisiana, no longer and aristocrat but now the wife of her former gardener and attempting to make a life among French settlers in the new world.

Alix struggles to make peace with her past, including the choices she had to make in order to escape France. Her personal story takes place in the wider context of humanity’s search for political freedom, human fraternity, and the role of spirituality in promoting human happiness. Alix must come to peace with her past in order to be free for a happy future. Cultures and nations must do the same. Revolutions that reject the entire history and traditions of a nation don’t end well. (Read more.)