Tea at Trianon: Female Agents Behind Enemy Lines

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, August 22, 2024

Female Agents Behind Enemy Lines

From historical fiction author Kathryn Gauci:

Nancy Wake, aka ‘Madame Andrée‘ and the ‘Witch’, was codenamed ‘White Mouse’ by the Germans. She was the most decorated servicewoman of World War II.

Before the outbreak of WWII, Nancy, who was born in New Zealand in 1912, moved to London where she worked as a journalist and was posted to Paris in the 1920’s eventually marrying the wealthy industrialist, Henri Fiocca, who died after being tortured by the Gestapo in Marseille where the couple lived, for not revealing the whereabouts of his wife.
It was while on an assignment in Vienna that Nancy developed her hatred of Fascism after viewing the brutality of the Nazi regime. The SS had tied several Jews to a wheel and were whipping them.

Nancy’s first involvement with the Resistance was in France in 1940 helping people escape over the Pyrenees, a route she would be forced to use herself after her network was blown. (Read more.)