Tea at Trianon: Rice Pudding

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

Sunday, December 1, 2024

Rice Pudding

A beloved poem in our household. From Poems Ancient and Modern:

Children naturally find this kind of thing very funny. Sometimes it’s only children who find this kind of thing very funny. But what impels children to listen over and over and over to poems from Milne’s 1924 When We Were Very Young is the same thing that makes even sensible grownups consent to read them aloud. These poems do far more than simply push that button of the child’s desire to delight in getting one over on the adults.
In “Disobedience,” for example, the precise Latin hexameters give the tale of James and his mother its irresistible bounce, even while they are an echo of something more elevated. That frisson of dissonance extends the joke. In today’s Poem of the Day, in which the adult speaker can’t figure out why Mary Jane is kicking and screaming, the humor is similarly twofold and embedded in its form. (Read more.)