A Selection of Mitres

 

From Liturgical Arts Journal:

As mentioned, the use of precious stones to add ornamental colour and texture (as well as a sense of preciousness) was common in this period (and really was so up until the most recent centuries), as for example in the case of this Neapolitan mitre made circa 1300-1325.  In this instance we can see how even the edge of the mitre has decorative ornamentation applied to it.  This was a design feature that was more commonplace in later medieval mitres.  Once again you'll see the same inverted 'T' design as well as the circular medallions and the entire face of this mitre has been covered with small white pearls.  While images of saints on mitres if very common in the medieval period, this is a good example showcasing the fact that not all mitres felt compelled to include them. Something similar can be seen in this mitre from the Cathedral of San Lorenzo at Scala/Ravello which is dated to the thirteenth or fourteenth century.  One can here too see the Italo-Byzantine influence which here comes in the form of small gold enamels depicting various apostles and saints.  (These enamels may well have come from the workshops of Constantinople). (Read more.)

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Fact Checking Brennan and Clapper

 From The Reactionary:

In the face of recent revelations concerning intelligence abuses that took place at the end of the Obama Administration, former CIA Director James Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper took to The New York Times to defend themselves and their legacies.

The title is one for the ages: “Brennan and Clapper: Let’s Set the Record Straight on Russia and 2016.”

There’s a bit of audacity in that effort – those who twisted and manipulated the evidence to help manufacture the Trump/Russia hoax are now here to speak truth to power. And their piece deserves review.

First, their claim about the use of the Steele Dossier in the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (which we addressed here and here), in which Brennan and Clapper state:

“We have testified under oath, and the reviews of the assessment have confirmed, that the dossier was not used as a source or taken into account for any of its analysis or conclusions.”

This is absolutely false. As DNI Gabbard’s recent release showed, the ICA’s conclusion that “We assess the [Russian] influence campaign aspired to help [Trump’s] chances of victory” was supported by four bullet points of “evidence.” One of those bullet points referred the reader to the Steele Dossier, stating “For additional reporting on Russian plans and intentions, please see Annex A: Additional Reporting from an FBI Source on Russian Influence Efforts.” (Read more.)

 

From The Daily BS:

In a stunning development that could reshape public understanding of the Trump–Russia investigation, FBI Director Kash Patel has uncovered a cache of sensitive and potentially explosive documents stashed inside a secret room at FBI headquarters. According to multiple sources who spoke exclusively to Fox News Digital, the trove was found inside several “burn bags”—containers typically used to destroy top-secret material—hidden in a previously undisclosed Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF).

The documents, which span thousands of pages, include key materials relating to the origins of the FBI’s now-discredited Crossfire Hurricane probe, launched in 2016 to investigate alleged links between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives. Notably, among the documents discovered was the classified annex to former special counsel John Durham’s final report—an annex that outlines the intelligence Durham reviewed during his investigation.

The process of declassifying this annex is currently being coordinated at the highest levels, involving CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and acting NSA Director William Hartman. Once the declassification is complete, the document will be transmitted to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, who is expected to release it publicly. (Read more.)

 

From The Gateway Pundit:

Investigative journalist John Solomon declared that former President Barack Obama can now be compelled to testify before a grand jury — and he CANNOT invoke the Fifth Amendment due to his presidential immunity.

But here’s the kicker: if Obama lies as a private citizen about what he did during his presidency, that immunity evaporates, potentially exposing him to criminal prosecution.

Once called before a grand jury, Obama must testify under oath. If he misrepresents or lies about any matter related to his official conduct—he loses that immunity from the date of the lie onward. That single moment as a private citizen could nullify the entire blanket he once relied upon. On January 5, 2017, Obama presided over a White House meeting in which the FBI had just cleared Mike Flynn. (Read more.)

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The Queen of Carthage

 From The Collector:

Dido and Aeneas are perhaps the two most iconic lovers in an ancient epic. Their brief relationship becomes a haunting episode in the Aeneid, creating profound repercussions for Aeneas and his quest. Dido, the legendary queen of Carthage, and Aeneas, a Trojan prince fated to establish the Roman race, meet in book one of Virgil’s Aeneid and soon fall passionately in love with one another. However, their intense romance is soon transformed into tragedy, as Aeneas leaves Dido to fulfill his mission, which drives the Carthaginian queen to despair and suicide. (Read more.)

 

From The Times:

Eve MacDonald, a historian and archaeologist at Cardiff University, sets the record straight in these pages about Carthage, whose ruins can be found near modern Tunis. She discards the priestesses and perfumed altars and disentangles the truth from the fog of Roman disinformation and Flaubertian fantasy. Her Carthaginian Empire — which stretched across north Africa, southern Spain, Sardinia and Sicily — is no more barbarous than Rome, and just as sophisticated.

For one thing, they were pretty high-tech with iron and steel production, which we know thanks to archaeometallurgical analysis. Politically, too, they were advanced. From the 6th century BC, Carthage functioned as a “republic-style oligarchy” complete with a senate and term-limited rulers. The ancient Greek historian Polybius conceded that they were rather democratic, although for him this was not praise; like his contemporaries, he disdained hoi polloi. What’s more, the Carthaginians were accomplished seafarers. The explorer Hanno apparently sailed round the west African coast — which was teeming with hippopotamuses and active volcanoes — in the 5th century BC with his crew of 30,000. Ancient chroniclers were incorrigible exaggerators.

What of Carthage’s unpleasant association with child sacrifice? Here again, Flaubert is one of the culprits, having leant heavily on the discovery of cremated infant remains at a Carthaginian necropolis to tart up his morbid tale. MacDonald briskly points out that the matter is still unresolved. We have no mass graves, just individual burials. Archaeological evidence, moreover, gives the lie to the 1st-century BC historian Diodorus’s claim that 200 noble children were slaughtered to appease the gods during a Syracusan siege. Besides, even if true, human sacrifice was hardly unusual in that age. Even the Greeks and Romans resorted to it, when push came to ritual shove.

 All of which is to say that writing about Carthage is a tricky business. Nearly everything we know is refracted through Roman propaganda, some of it outright lies. All sources have to be read against the grain –— especially Polybius, who was in the employ of the Scipio family that duked it out with the Barcids (Hannibal’s family) in the final decades of the Carthaginian Empire. MacDonald, having excavated at Carthage, is well placed for the job. Her book is admirably lucid and free of tendentious axe-grinding, although some lay readers might prefer the more urbane, literary style of Richard Miles’s Carthage Must Be Destroyed, published in 2010, with which MacDonald’s account will inevitably be compared. Still, she has the merit of brevity and a no-nonsense command of her material. (Read more.)

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Inside Edwardian High Society

 

From ArtNet:

 Edward VII, his wife Queen Alexandra, and their successors King George V and Queen Mary, were two of Britain’s all-time most fashionable royal couples. As well as throwing endless parties, concerts, and sporting events, they expressed their elevated tastes through the acquisition of hordes of art, fashion, and jewelry. Each gallery practically glitters with all of the expected treasures, including tiaras and bedazzled opera glasses, sumptuous ball gowns, gilt porcelain, silverware, and adorable Fabergé animals cut from an array of precious stones, like lapis lazuli, sapphire, and ruby. Ceremonial and other handcrafted items from across the globe are included courtesy of king and queen’s international tours to British colonies, including Malta, the Cook Islands, New Zealand, and India....

One hundred years after Sargent’s death in 1925, he remains a firm favorite among art lovers, as evidenced by one celebratory blockbuster show currently on view at the Met and set to travel to the Musée d’Orsay this fall. King Edward VII was certainly a fan, describing Sargent as “the most distinguished portrait painter in England.” His brush was so coveted and his list of commissions so exhausting that, in around 1907, Sargent retired from painting large-scale portraits. This 1908 image of the King’s sister-in-law, Louise, Duchess of Connaught, was one of his very last. Its sense of character and richly opulent fabrics are hallmarks of the Sargent’s style. (Read more.)

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Cities Are Turning Into War Zones—And It’s No Accident

From Overton News:

The system has COLLAPSED.

American cities are now lawless wastelands—where criminals roam free and the innocent suffer.

A man and woman were knocked out cold by THUGS in Cincinnati.

A mass shooting just rocked Manhattan in broad daylight.

Bill O’Reilly has a theory why this is allowed to happen.

The justice system isn’t broken by accident. It’s broken ON PURPOSE.

By now, most of us have seen it.

It is the kind of video that makes your stomach turn.

A man and woman were BRUTALLY assaulted in the middle of downtown Cincinnati after a jazz festival by a gang of rabid THUGS.

The man was left motionless on the pavement. The woman’s head hit the concrete with such force she was knocked unconscious.

No one intervened. No police. No help.

Just a growing crowd and more violence.

The footage went viral.

Not just because of brutality, but because it captured something much deeper: the complete and TOTAL unraveling of public safety in American cities.

A sense that the ground has shifted.

This video is a symbol for America’s Mad Max era. (Read more.)

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The Bovadium Fragments

 From The One Ring:

Edited by Christopher Tolkien, this book will feature Tolkien’s The End of Bovadium, a story that has never been published before, and Tolkien’s illustrations for it. Tolkien worked on the tale from the late 1950s through the early 1960s. Also included will be the essay “The Origin of Bovadium” by Richard Ovenden OBE.

The story reflects Tolkien’s disdain of industrialism. This is represented in The Lord of the Rings by the scenes in Isengard and the “Scouring of the Shire” where the destruction of trees is a central focus. Tolkien, a lover of nature, and trees in particular, wanted the earth’s natural resources to be preserved, and he saw the lack of regard the burgeoning industrial complex held for them. 



His desire to balance preservation with progress can also be seen in the story of Yavanna and Aulë. When Aulë reveals to his wife, Yavanna, that he created the Dwarves, she fears they will destroy her own creations, the olvar (plants) and kelvar (animals), but mostly the trees, because they could not fight back or escape Dwarven axes. When she asks Manwë what will happen to her creations, he tells her that it was written in the Song that spirits will enter some of the trees, and they will become protectors of the others. These chosen trees are the Ents, and their purpose is fulfilled in the destruction of Isengard, a center of “industrialization” in Middle-earth. (Read more.)

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The Exile of Charles II

 

 From Caroline Willcocks at The Seventeenth Century Lady:

Shakespeare’s play “As You Like It” has been seen by historians as a metaphor for Charles’s exile.  He is likened to the exiled Duke, living in the magical Forest of Arden.  It is this dreamlike quality which I find fascinating.  There is no doubt that Charles and his court lived for some of the time in a pleasurable limbo, where dancing, music and hunting were engaged in with passion, as were affairs of the heart. But there were also times when he struggled to keep any form of court going. In my books, I have a running joke about the quality of the wine the courtiers drink. Most of them were not paid and had to support themselves. My protagonist earns his keep from acting as an escort to wealthy but lonely women.

There was no secure future.   Looking forward a few months, the exiles could have found themselves back in the splendour of Whitehall, or dead on an English battlefield. What was possibly even worse, they might have been inexorably relegated, as time went on, to insignificance and poverty. No wonder they escaped into living for the day. Here were a number of young, good-looking aristocrats facing a fearful future. Is it any surprise that the licentiousness which marked Charles II’s later Restoration court started in exile?

At this time, spies were suspected of lurking at every corner.  Both Charles and the Parliament used spies.  And who was to know whether a fellow Englishman or woman was exactly who they said they were?  The idea that many had something to hide has intrigued me.  While they were hiding their political allegiances, who was to say they weren’t hiding anything else?   There was always the threat of assassination. As writer, I revel in this high-stakes game where death is always in the background.  At times, I’ve felt I was writing a farcical seventeenth-century version of “You Only Live Twice.” (Read more.)

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The Conspiracy Against Trump Is Ongoing

 From Real Clear Politics:

"The Federalist" editor Mollie Hemingway comments on CIA Director John Ratcliffe telling FNC's "Sunday Morning Futures" that the next declassification will open up James Comey, John Brennan, and Hillary Clinton to perjury charges over false testimony regarding "Russiagate."

"People are so worried about a statute of limitations because some of the crimes that were committed were prior to five years ago," she said. "But the conspiracy is ongoing—it’s going on right now, not just with these same officials, Brennan and Obama, but also the media." (Read more.)

 

Is John Brennan still giving orders at the CIA? From AND Magazine:

Sources talking to AND Magazine say clearly that inside CIA, significant numbers of powerful, senior officers are still taking direction from Brennan and doing all they can to ensure that no true lasting reform takes hold. This is not the view of a few isolated individuals. This is the near-universal opinion of those with access to what is happening inside the Agency right now.

“Brennan controlled promotions in the agency and NSA through Hayden for about 12 years. First from the White House for 4 years, then as DCI. The agency was disloyal to their constitutional oath for the first term of Trump and simply resisted or ignored Trump during his first term. Then Brennan heavily influenced and steered the agency during Biden’s term. After 12 years of seeding the intel community, you can permanently alter the complexion and effectiveness of any federal department.”

Former Senior CIA Operations Officer Speaking Anonymously

“Brennan's loyalists still run the top levels of the CIA.”

J. Michael Waller, Former CIA Operative

The average person probably thinks there has been some kind of wholesale house cleaning at Langley. Nothing could be further from the truth. Outside of a handful of positions, the same people are in charge as were under Biden. As new appointments are made, all too often, they are being made from the ranks of Brennan devotees that still crowd the top levels of the organization.

The analysts who crafted the corrupt Intelligence Community Assessment (“ICA”) on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of disgraced former CIA Director John Brennan are, for example, still in place at CIA. Those individuals were interviewed by Congress recently, still in place at their desks. Some of them have been promoted since they participated in crafting the false Russiagate narrative.

Brennan himself is not hiding in a cabin somewhere in obscurity. He continues to live in Washington, DC. He is a principal with WestExec Advisors, which is, in effect, the next Democratic administration in exile. Amongst the anti-Trump crowd, he is a hero, the man who fought to keep the “great unwashed” from daring to presume they could decide who would be President.

Brennan is “a Distinguished Fellow at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, a Distinguished Scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a senior intelligence and national security analyst for NBC and MSNBC, a member of the Board of Directors of ImmunityBio Inc, and an advisor to a variety of private sector companies.” (Read more.)

From Tierney's Real News:

I have no doubt that Epstein worked for OTHER intelligence agencies around the world - either as a double agent or triple agent or as a free agent to the highest bidder. You've all seen the same CIA shows on Netflix that I have! Why else would Epstein have those weird pictures of Bush & Clinton on his wall!?!

That's what is likely in the Grand Jury files that they don't want us to know. That’s likely what Ghislaine will testify to.

I also believe that one of the major reasons that the swamp is trying to tie Epstein to Trump is because Epstein was allegedly a co-founder of the Clinton Foundation - and even came up with the idea - and that's one of the reasons that Bill flew on his plane so many times. That was reported 10 years ago. That’s nothing new. It was in the court files sent to the SDNY.

"Mr. Epstein was part of the original group that conceived the Clinton Global Initiative," read the July 2007 letter to the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of Florida. “Focuses of this initiative include poverty, climate change, global health, and religious and ethnic conflicts.”

What do they use the Clinton Foundation NGO for? LAUNDERING MONEY ALL OVER THE WORLD. That's what they use all the "foundations" and NGOs for. There is MUCH MORE to Epstein than sex trafficking - he was likely financing coups, covert operations, intelligence shakedowns and false flags all over the world for the CIA, the WEF and the NWO. WAKE UP.

The Epstein hoax is a typical "limited hangout." A limited hangout mingles lies with truth and only reports part of the story to mislead and misdirect the public. They report on Epstein’s sex trafficking but ignore the fact that he co-founded the Clinton Foundation and blackmailed elites and laundered money for elites all over the world. (Read more.)

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The Unholy Trinity of the American Public School

 From Charles Coulombe:

Perhaps nothing is more indicative of the decline of American culture than the development — if it can be called that — of the American public school system in the past five decades. In every possible respect — academic, cultural, moral, and yes, religious, it has been in a flight from excellence for decades. But For those who believe this to be a process beginning in the 1960s — or even the 50s, when such provocative reports as Why Johnny Can’t Read were published — this writer must submit that, ultimately, it began with independence. Of course, given the strength of the Western Academic Tradition, from whence our system derives, it took a long time; but it seems well-nigh accomplished in our day.

In Christendom, education was intended to open the student’s mind to God and assist his salvation; to teach him to use his intellect for that end and for the lesser ones encompassed in employing a free and formed intellect for understanding the world around him and taking his place at his own level in both Church and State. Naturally, this implies a society ordered to Man’s true last end.

But the newly independent United States would require a new model; this was to make good Americans of the disparate peoples of the colonies, and to assimilate the immigrants as they arrived. Over time, three men would arise who would transform the face of American public education into what we have now.

The first was Noah Webster (1748-1853), a New England Yankee, best known for the fact that in his famous dictionary, he created our idiosyncratic English spelling — a move resisted by Washington Irving, no less. Extremely influential in education as well, he sought to tear American students’ attention away from the Old World whence their fathers had come. Moreover, education for Webster must do more than educate; it must indoctrinate: “It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.” While this last may sound laudable to us to-day, it was revolutionary then. Moreover, as we see now, a lot depends upon whose definition of “just and liberal ideas of government” is used.

His near contemporary, fellow New Englander Horace Mann (1796-1859), is called the “Father of Public Education.” He took things further, and made of public education itself a sort of secular religion: “What the church has been for medieval man, the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God would be replaced by the concept of the public good.” For him, reduction of all religions and ethnicities to a single “American,” who would think in a manner Mann considered rational, was the whole point of education. But coupled with this in Mann was a rigid moralism — a sort of secularised Puritanism. (Read more.)

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Marie-Antoinette’s ‘Trianon Guitar'

 
 

Madame Clotilde of France, sister of Louis XVI

Madame Clotilde of France, later Queen of Sardinia

Armand playing a guitar

I could not find a painting of Marie-Antoinette playing the instrument now called the "Trianon Guitar." Probably because she gave it as a gift. There are two portraits of Madame Clotilde, sister of Louis XVI, playing a similar guitar. There is also a picture of Marie-Antoinette's adopted son Armand playing a guitar, but not the same one, since it looks smaller. From Artnet:

A lover of music who played several instruments and sang, Marie Antoinette regularly held carefree musical and theatrical performances in her bucolic Trianon retreat in France, just outside the Palace of Versailles, while the rest of the country was heaving towards bloody revolution. In this haven from palace pressures, including her Petit Trianon, a chateau given to her by her husband, King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette also offered instruments to friends and members of her inner circle.

What is believed to be one of them, a rare “en bâteau,” or boat-shaped guitar, made by Jacques-Philippe Michelot ca. 1775, will go on sale at the Aguttes auction house in Neuilly-sur-Seine on December 9. Kept in “remarkable condition,” the so-called “Trianon guitar”—decorated with ivory rosettes depicting the “Temple of Love” from the Trianon estate—was also “at the forefront” of French craftsmanship at the end of the 18th century, said Aguttes house expert Grégoire de Thoury, speaking to Artnet News.

Thoury researched the instrument’s provenance and relied on family documents, carefully kept over centuries, stating that the queen had given the guitar to her friend, the Marquise de La Rochelambert-Thévalles (1758–1835), who survived the French Revolution by fleeing to Switzerland. No official palace records exist for the personal gift.

About the same age as the queen, the marquise was a member of the queen’s inner entourage, praised for her musical talent and voice. The two women performed together, and the marquise’s parents were regulars in the king’s court. Her godfather was Louis de Bourbon, Dauphin of France.

The marquise’s family preserved the queen’s guitar in the ensuing centuries, and one of her descendants has put it up for auction. With French institutions reportedly interested in acquiring the instrument, according to the French daily Le Parisien, Thoury said its owner “would think it wonderful…if it became available to the whole world to see” in a museum. (Read more.)

From Tatler:

Aguttes writes that ‘although to date there is no document to formally certify that this guitar was the subject of a gift from Queen Marie Antoinette… Patrick Barbier, music historian, reports in his book Marie Antoinette and Music that Marie Antoinette used to buy many musical instruments’ and ‘gladly gave them’ as gifts. With this in mind, ‘considering the attested proximity of Queen Marie-Antoinette and the Marquise de La Rochelambert, it is therefore quite probable.’ Aguttes describes the instrument as a ‘rare so-called boat guitar’, with a rosewood body inlaid with mahogany and ‘adorned with ivory and ebony stringing’. It features a ‘spruce top with a beautiful tight grain’, plus ornate decoration of ‘openwork ivory rosettes representing two doves kissing on a temple of love.’ It originally had five strings but was reassembled with six strings around 1810.(Read more.)

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Can We Ever Know How Many People Were Killed in Rwanda?

 From It Can Always Get Worse:

While the incentives for perpetrators to be deceptive in interviews are obvious, the incentives for survivors are no less apparent, especially in the years after 1994 when such stories are being told in the context of Paul Kagame’s stiflingly despotic Rwandan government having made speech that deviates in any way from the official narrative a crime under the laws against “genocide ideology” that can carry a life sentence. People making, or wishing to keep open the possibility of, asylum claims to try to escape the Kagame regime likewise have incentives to shade their stories.

But make the heroic assumption that data gathered from survivors is not polluted by wilful deception: the frailty of human memory and finding a representative sample—even for a prefecture, let alone if results from one area are going to be generalised to a national estimate—mean the confidence in any resultant estimate should be low.

The authors highlight six sources of data:

1. African Rights, an NGO founded in 1993, produced a report in September 1994, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, compiling “all available eyewitness accounts” and in its 1995 second edition reached previously inaccessible prefectures. Purporting to cover the whole country, it documented about 130,000 fatalities.

2. Human Rights Watch released, Leave None to Tell the Story, in 1999, again mostly from oral accounts: of Rwandans on all sides, diplomats, and United Nations officials. HRW’s intention was overtly activist—to “educate” and “bolster public support” for the trials of the accused genocidaires—but it ostensibly also gathered data from the whole of Rwanda. It documented about 40,500 fatalities.

3. IBUKA (“REMEMBER”), a Tutsi advocacy group formed in late 1995, undertook the “Kibuye Dictionary Project” from 1996 to 1999 that tried to identify all the victims in that prefecture and the circumstances of their deaths. Over 25,500 fatalities were listed.

4. The Ministry of Higher Education, Scientific Research, and Culture—a Cabinet Ministry of the Rwandan government—gathered data, in collaboration with other ministries, from November 1995 to January 1996 in a project called, “The Commission for the Memorial of the Genocide and Massacre in Rwanda”. The nationwide survey recorded approximately 755,500 fatalities.

5. The Ministry of Youth, Culture, and Sport was deputised—for reasons best-known to the Rwandan government—to identify and excavate mass-graves. Other ministries helped, including Defence. Forensic evidence was gathered and the country-wide project was completed the same year it was initiated: 1995. Nearly 823,500 fatalities were reported.

6. The Ministry of Local Administration and Department of Information and Social Affairs began, in 2000, an effort to count and name the victims of the 1994 killings, with the goal of discovering the most impacted zones for the purposes of deciding on aid allocations. Survivors and neighbours of the dead—or, in practice, missing—were interviewed and the 2002 report, “The Counting of Genocide Victims”, estimated nearly 940,000 fatalities. (Read more.)

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The Most Controversial Religious Artwork of All Time

Personally, I never saw anything controversial about it. From ArtNet News:

Made by Bernini, arguably the greatest artist of the Baroque era, between 1647 and 1652 the sculpture depicts Saint Teresa of Àvila, also known as Teresa de Jesús (1515–1582), a Spanish Carmelite nun, who was canonized in 1622, merely 25 years before the sculpture’s creation.

Born to an aristocratic Spanish family, Saint Teresa was a religious reformer who founded the Discalced Carmelites order. She experienced mystic visions, which she described in penetrating detail in her influential vernacular writings, most famously in her autobiography The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus.  

The sculpture was commissioned by Venetian Cardinal Federico Cornaro (1579–1653), who had chosen the church, which was home to an order of Discalced Carmelites, for his burial chapel, making Saint Teresa a fitting subject matter. (Read more.)

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La Maison de Frédéric

An English country house in France. From House and Garden:

‘I always say that it’s an English country house in France,’ says Utah-based Kyong Millar when describing La Maison de Frédéric, her charming holiday home in the south of France. If the English influence seems unexpected for a couple from Salt Lake City, Kyong – founder of clothing boutique Koo De Ker – explains that years before buying their holiday home near Uzès, she and husband Donnie almost moved to the UK. In preparation, many trips were made to the Cotswolds, taking design notes from National Trust houses and poring over issues of House & Garden.

Their transatlantic move fell through, but the couple had already fallen in love with Europe, and Kyong in particular had discovered an affinity with traditional English decorating. She references those early lessons in room layout, arranging objects and layering patterns as being pivotal to her vision for La Maison de Frédéric.

Kyong and Donnie had holidayed in the south of France for a decade before their 2020 ‘now or never’ purchase. They loved the slow lifestyle, but the houses they rented always felt lacking in design or functionality, so the couple often mooted buying a place of their own. The fairytale villages of the Luberon didn’t appeal. ‘We wanted to learn to speak French in a working town where people actually live,’ says Kyong. Uzès, 40 kilometres west of Avignon, felt like such a community, and so it became the central point of their search. (Read more.)

 

 

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Ensuring the Israeli Hostages in Gaza Are Not Forgotten

 From It Can Always Get Worse:

Last night, JNF UK organised a screening of the new documentary, Home: Omer Shem Tov Speaks, at a north London synagogue. Omer was abducted by HAMAS during the 7 October 2023 pogrom, and finally released after 505 days, on 22 February 2025. After the film, there was a question-and-answer with Omer and the director, Yoram Zak.

Omer, days short of his twenty-first birthday, was at the Nova music festival when he was kidnapped along with his sister, Maya Regev, and his younger brother, Itay. A young man they had met at the concert had driven some to safety then drove back for Omer and his siblings, but their car was stopped by HAMAS. The driver was subsequently murdered in captivity. Both Itay and Maya were shot, and Omer was severely beaten, then forced to the ground in front of a truck; he was sure the terrorists were going to kill him by driving it over his head. Thankfully, that did not happen, and Omer’s siblings were released during the first ceasefire in November 2023. The tortures of HAMAS’s “doctors” left Maya with injuries that multiple surgeries have tried to correct.

After being displayed to a euphoric Gazan crowd, Omer was initially kept with Itay in an above-ground apartment. Once Itay was released, Omer was taken into the tunnels, and placed in a tiny cage with no light—where the darkness was so total there were “no shadows”, as he puts it. (The film is in Hebrew with English subtitles.) Omer immediately had an asthma attack. HAMAS eventually found him an inhaler. The attempts of Omer’s parents to get his inhaler to him through the Red Cross went nowhere as the “humanitarian” organisations have not been allowed access to the Israeli hostages, and have not made it a major part of their public advocacy to try to change this situation.

In the documentary, Zak recreates the image of this confinement such that Omer seems to be telling his story from within the underground cell. Given a torch with enough battery for two or three hours per day, Omer tried to save this meagre light for mealtimes. Initially, Omer was given two pittas per day and some salty water. This was steadily reduced down to half a pitta, and then he was on one biscuit per day and some salty water. He made efforts to protract the process: waiting two or three hours before having half the biscuit, then again for the other half.

To pass the time, Omer tried to sleep as much as possible. A lot of his conscious time was spent talking to God. Omer was not really praying for release: he explains a realisation that people approach Hashem with requests, but nobody every asks how He is, so Omer chose to start that way, and then offered thanks for being alive, for the food he did have. If Omer did get to asks, it was for strength and guidance, and for his family.

After fifty days, Omer was moved to a slightly bigger cell, with some light and orange walls, again recreated in the film. Omer was allowed to shower for the first time. The dirt on his body was so thick by then it could be scraped off. He was given something like an actual meal and devoured it. The HAMAS terrorists stood by insulting him as a “Jewish pig”. Understandably, he was not bothered at that stage: he had become “very skinny”, his bones visible. An interrogation had been planned for the next day but never took place because the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had appeared above the tunnel and this distracted his captors. (Read more.)

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The Maryland Project

 From author and historian Justine Brown.

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"Charming and Engaging"

 A review of My Queen, My Love from royal historian Theodore Harvey at Royal World:

Most Americans are probably not aware that the US state of Maryland was originally named after Queen Henrietta Maria (1609-1669), daughter of King Henri IV of France (1553-1610) and wife of the ill-fated King Charles I of England (1600-1649). Readers seeking an introduction to this unjustly neglected historical figure would do well to immerse themselves in this charming and engaging book by Elena Maria Vidal, who appropriately enough lives in Maryland.

"My Queen, My Love," which covers the title character's life from her childhood in France through the births of her own children in the 1630s on the eve of the English Civil War, is a historical novel, so includes fictionalized dialogue, but is firmly based on historical research like any biography. Its style vividly brings the complex and colourful world of the 17th century to life, from Italy [homeland of her mother Marie de Medici (1573-1642)] to France to England. The central importance of religion is evident from the outset. Daughter of the pragmatic convert Henri IV, the devoutly Catholic Henrietta Maria finds herself in an impossible situation as wife of the staunch Anglican Charles I in what is by then a predominantly and fervently Protestant country, with even the King's own high church Anglicanism increasingly deemed too "catholic" by some. While the author clearly shares Henrietta Maria's devout Roman Catholicism, it is to Vidal's credit that the sincerity of King Charles who believes that his Church of England is truly Catholic is depicted in a well-rounded manner. I particularly appreciated the writer's evident love of liturgical beauty as reflected in lavish descriptions of Catholic ceremonies including sacred music. Henrietta Maria's enjoyment of the secular arts, so scandalous to the dour Puritans especially her own participation in Masques, is a consistent theme as well.

Anglicans like me who revere Charles as a Martyr, aware of his and his wife's fervent loyalty to each other during the terrible trials of the Civil War which (after the time period covered by this book) would end in his execution and her widowhood, are accustomed to thinking of their marriage as an ideal devoted Christian one, as indeed it later became. However it must be admitted that this was not always the case. While vaguely aware that King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria had had difficulties in the early years of their marriage, I had not thought much about the details until I read this book. One sensitive issue is that in order to gain French approval for their 1625 marriage Charles had had to make various promises, particularly those related to the Queen's Catholicism, that once back in England he finds himself unable to keep. It particularly galls her, understandably, that money from her dowry ended up being used to fund a war with her native France! While Vidal's Henrietta Maria never falters in her ultimately heroic love for Charles, the reader can also see without dismissing his point of view how Charles might have felt frustrated at times. (Read more.)

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Baltimore’s Stunning Case Study in Government Waste

From Direct Line News:

Baltimore City’s failed website redesign isn’t just a digital misfire—it’s a poster child for government dysfunction, waste, and cronyism. After three years, three vendors, and nearly $4 million spent, the city still doesn’t have a functional BaltimoreCity.gov. But what it does have is a paper trail of political favoritism, poor oversight, and squandered taxpayer funds.

This project, intended to modernize the City’s website to be more user-friendly and compliant with accessibility standards, has instead spiraled into an embarrassing money pit. As detailed by The Baltimore Brew’s Mark Reutter in a July 17 exposé, the total cost is now pegged at $3.9 million—with no live website to show for it. Worse, the design currently in development is reportedly already outdated. Reutter’s reporting is based on city procurement documents, vendor contracts, and internal communications, which paint a picture of ballooning budgets and nonexistent results. Then came a Fox Baltimore investigation that added a troubling layer of political entanglements to the mess.

As Fox Baltimore reported on July 17, Baltimore’s IT department invited six companies to bid on the website redesign in 2021. Only two submitted proposals. One bid $300,000. The other—Fearless Solutions—came in at $1.2 million, four times higher. The city awarded the contract to the more expensive bidder. Fearless Solutions is owned by Delalai Dzirasa, a donor to Mayor Brandon Scott’s campaign and the husband of Baltimore’s then-Deputy Mayor, Dr. Letitia Dzirasa.

Mayor Scott defended the award: “This is a professional service contract. They went out and talked to multiple contractors and decided to go with Fearless.” What he failed to mention: this project never underwent a full competitive bid process. The city used a selective procurement approach, bypassing the broader competition that is usually required for projects of this scale.

The original contract was valued at $1.078 million. But five months in, Fearless asked for an additional $887,000. Then, seven months later, the city approved another $250,000, bringing the total payout to Fearless to over $2.2 million. Yet despite all that, there is still no functioning website. Inspector General Isabel Mercedes Cumming stated flatly: “There is no website at this time. In fact, the company we hired stopped working for the city a year ago yesterday.” (Read more.)

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Those Who Hate Boys

 From Becoming Noble:

Terrible solutions are proposed. No matter how much traditional masculinity is undermined, powerful voices continue to insist that the real problem is that it hasn’t been destroyed altogether. ‘Only then will boys be happy.’ My thesis for this series is that there is a need to defend true masculinity on its own terms, not on the implicit terms of progressives who either don’t understand it or actively hate it.

Take, for example, this debate at the Oxford Union on traditional masculinity. The opening argument of the opposition - who are supposed to be defending traditional masculinity - starts with asserting the need for a ‘contemporary and inclusive’ masculinity which is accessible to anyone ‘of any race, sexuality, or other identity’.

The best defence that this speaker can mount on this anaemic foundation is an argument that masculinity is useful for activism and community building like the ‘Movember Foundation’. After this slightly pathetic case she goes back to conceding “being forced to conform to a set of expectations is uncomfortable and even dangerous. We should allow people to access the gender expressions that make them feel like their truest self.” (Read more.)

 

Society will get the worst behavior it tolerates. From Culturcidal:

Although the shine is definitely off the halo these days, for a brief period of time, Rudi Giuliani had enough respect put on his name that he was considered a FRONT RUNNER for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008. At first glance, this seems ludicrous. After all, Giuliani is a moderate Republican who is best known for being the Mayor of New York City. Why were conservatives so in love with this guy?

Some of it had to do with him doing a good job during 9/11, but the thing he was most famous for was cleaning up NYC. The city was a crime-ridden hellscape before Giuliani took over, but “America’s mayor” had a plan to deal with it.

He embraced something called “Broken Windows” policing. The general idea behind it is that when small crimes are unaddressed, large crimes soon follow. You let people smash windows, put up graffiti, and jump the turnstiles at the subway, and people assume no one cares, and they can get away with more.

Under Giuliani, the NYC Police Department got very aggressive, very visible, and cracked down on these “small” crimes. As a result, not only did it improve the look and image of NYC, but the crime rate also plunged. How much? Quite a bit, actually.... (Read more.)

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Recusant Queen: The White Martyrdom of Henrietta Maria

Queen Henrietta Maria wearing the diamond cross given her by Pope Urban VIII

 

Kristen Van Uden Theriault wrote a most insightful and poignant review of My Queen, My Love at Catholic Exchange:

After the Anglican revolution of Henry VIII, the English royal house was divided. Protestant Elizabeth I died with no issue. Despite Mary Queen of Scots’ heroic witness unto death for the true Faith, her son James was effectively hijacked by her enemies and groomed into a Tudor heir. By the time James’ son Charles ascended the throne, the Stuart dynasty was strongly within the Protestant camp, though his potential conversion remained a hoped-for (or dreaded) eventuality.The long line of English Catholic martyrs marched forward even during the “tolerant” reign of the Stuarts....Anti-Catholic sentiment reigned supreme.  The “ringing island” rang no longer, instead clamoring dissonant peals of error.

Into this hostile territory entered a young Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria of France. The daughter of Henry IV, a French Huguenot, and Catholic Marie de’Medici, Henrietta was sent not only as a political envoy, as was the routine purpose of royal marriages, but also as a religious ambassador. Her parents’ marriage, by which the Church partially attempted to heal the French Huguenot schism, provided a model, albeit a rocky one.

The marriage of Henrietta and Charles required a dispensation from the pope, as Catholics were forbidden to marry non-Catholics except in extreme or unusual circumstances. The dispensation came with a weighty caveat: that Henrietta would endeavor to convert her husband, and consequently his country, back to the true Faith. Henrietta was instructed to imitate saint Berthe, who had converted her pagan husband, and sent into the spiritual war zone.

Henrietta arrived in England at the tender age of fifteen, with this outsized supernatural mission to complete. (Read more.)

 

Book available, HERE.

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The Art of the Deal: Japan Pays Upfront, America Builds Now

 From Amuse on X:

Let us begin with the fundamentals. Trade deficits have long haunted American politics, most often serving as cudgels wielded by opposing factions. Economists debate their significance. Politicians weaponize them. Meanwhile, the public rightly senses that an imbalance exists when goods flow in and factories shut down. Traditional trade deals attempt to remedy this by offering future concessions, increased market access, or vague commitments to "level the playing field." But these promises are paper tigers, easily ignored, impossible to enforce. Trump’s Japan deal breaks that pattern by inverting it. Instead of asking for concessions in the future, he demanded compensation upfront: a $550 billion infusion of Japanese capital to finance American infrastructure and industry.

This is a paradigmatic shift. Imagine, if you will, a wealthy guest who has long overstayed their welcome, consuming more than they contribute, finally agreeing to help renovate the house. That is what Japan has agreed to do. Rather than merely apologizing for the trade imbalance, they have provided a signing bonus that allows the US to reinvest in itself, without begging Congress for a dime.

Critics may ask: why would Japan agree to such terms? The answer is simple, and it is twofold. First, Trump’s judicious application of a 15% tariff on Japanese imports, a strategic retreat from higher threatened rates, signaled credible resolve. Second, Japan understands the geopolitical stakes. A strong, self-sufficient United States is the linchpin of Pacific stability. Financing American energy, manufacturing, and AI facilities is not charity. It is insurance against Chinese hegemony. (Read more.)

 

When NASA went woke. Also from Amuse on X:

 In 1969, Neil Armstrong took a single step that echoed across centuries. Today, NASA's Artemis program trudges forward with the bureaucratic gait of a midlevel HR department pushing a PowerPoint on pronouns. How did we get here? The answer, in brief: identity politics. Artemis, the ambitious initiative to return Americans to the Moon, has become less a scientific endeavor and more a case study in the consequences of subordinating competence to quotas.

To be clear, Artemis was not always thus. There was a moment, fleeting, but real, when hope reentered NASA's orbit. That moment bore the name Jared Isaacman. But that moment was reportedly snuffed out by Sergio Gor, the Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, whose personal vendetta against Elon Musk doomed Isaacman's confirmation. Gor's obstruction did more than kill a nomination, it delayed America's lunar ambitions by at least a year, perhaps more. What might have been a renaissance at NASA became another casualty of palace intrigue.

Isaacman, a self-made billionaire, ace pilot, and commander of private orbital missions, represented precisely the kind of energetic, capable, and forward-thinking leadership the Artemis program required. As the founder of Shift4 Payments and architect of the all-civilian Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn missions, Isaacman had already accomplished feats NASA once deemed impossible. He cut through the red tape. He got Americans into space, efficiently, affordably, safely. He inspired the public. And unlike the ceremonial caretakers of the federal space bureaucracy, he had actually gone to space himself.

His nomination to lead NASA promised a return to merit, innovation, and clarity of purpose. During his confirmation hearings, Isaacman argued that Artemis should be completed "as fast as possible," advocating for near-term pragmatism (using SLS and Orion) but long-term sustainability through commercial partnerships and reusable launch systems. This was no utopian dream, it was the proven SpaceX model adapted to the public sector. Had Isaacman been confirmed, Artemis might have evolved from an aimless spectacle into a galvanizing national achievement. Instead, the Biden holdovers and bureaucratic inertia won. And what we are left with now is the Artemis experiment, not in lunar science, but in DEI. (Read more.)

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The Reluctant Student: Cultivating Fortitude and the Love of Learning

 From Mater et Magistra:

Aside from learning, behavioral, and cognitive difficulties which must be worked out through patience, love, and appropriate therapies, there are times that the average child resists learning. Why do some students resist learning?

• Fear of failure – They assume they aren’t “good” at certain subjects.

• Disconnection – They don’t see how learning applies to their real lives.

• Lack of wonder – They haven’t been given the space to be curious.

Proverbs 1:7 – “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.” We must cultivate a love for learning as a means of knowing God’s creation. Education must engage both reason (intellectual development) and faith (spiritual purpose). When students see the purpose behind learning, they are more motivated. (Read more.)

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A Who’s Who of the Gilded Age

 

 From Tatler:

Old Money vs New Money, Old World vs New World: the Gilded Age was a time of seismic change in New York society. The industrial revolution of the late 19th century led to an explosion in the middle classes, with the likes of railroad men and construction tycoons suddenly becoming extremely rich. As these so-called nouveau riche emerged into society, they inevitably found themselves confronted with the rancour and jealousy of the existing upper echelons, whose wealth could be traced back generations. Now, the merchant class were mixing with New York royalty, buying up the best houses, marrying their daughters to the most eligible bachelors, and sending their children to the finest schools. This tension forms the basis of the central plot in Julian Fellowes's drama, The Gilded Age, portraying these warring factions from the point of view of Marian Brook (played by Oscar-winner Meryl Streep's daughter, Louisa Jacobson) a newcomer to the social scene whose guiding lights are her Old Money aunts, whose lives are at odds with her New Money friends. Here, Tatler brings you a guide to the women who inspired these characters, from the warring Queen Bees who kept trying to out-do each other with their 5th Avenue mansions moving further and further uptown, to the most glamorous debutantes and dollar princesses. (Read more.)

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Trump Urges DOJ to Prosecute Obama

 From Gregg Jarrett:

“If you look at those papers, they have them stone cold, and it was President Obama… the leader of the gang was President Obama, Barack Hussein Obama. Have you heard of him?” he added.

Trump’s comments came while hosting Philippine President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. at the White House. He insisted that accountability for Obama, who served from 2009 to 2017, should be a top priority for the Justice Department.

“It’s criminal at the highest level. It would be President Obama, he started it. And [Joe] Biden was there with him, and [then-FBI Director James] Comey was there, and [then-Director of National Intelligence] James Clapper — the whole group was there, and [then-CIA Director John] Brennan,” Trump asserted. (Read more.)

 

From Tierney's Real News:

TRUMP: “Barack Hussein Obama is the ringleader. Hillary Clinton was right there with him and so was Sleepy Joe Biden, and so were the rest of them: [former FBI Director James] Comey, [former Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper, the whole group. They tried to rig an election and they got caught. And then they did rig the election in 2020. I did it a third time and I won in a landslide."

“He’s culpable. This was treason. They caught President Obama absolutely cold. This was every term you can imagine. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody’s ever even imagined, even in other countries." (Read more.)

 

Who is John Brennan?

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Should NFP Be Taught in Marriage Prep?

 All I know is that it should not be discussed when children are present. I once watched a young couple inform the congregation of the biological details of NFP as parents had to cover the ears of their small children. Just because something is natural does not mean it's for little ones to hear. From Catholic Answers:

Marriage is a natural institution that predates Christianity, but to the modern world, Christian marriage is a strange curiosity—like the Amish, or cars with stick shifts. That makes it, from our perspective, it’s an instrument of rebellion. So engaged couples should be trained as revolutionaries.

That means putting them in a mindset of being distinct from the world. Where the world pursues relationships based on sexual gratification and personal fulfilment, we offer the self-emptying model of Christ and the Church his bride. Where the world says we can redefine marriage or dissolve it at will, we say, “One man, one woman, for life.”

And when the world sterilizes sex, using pills and barriers to subordinate fecundity to pleasure, we insist on the inseparable connection between marriage and children. Underscoring this connection, education in natural family planning breeds revolutionary thinking—arguably even more than the “providentialist” approach that would have us simply tell couples not to use contraception and leave it at that. (Read more.)

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Byzantine and Carolingian Art

  

Brilliant. From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

Icons to the eastern Christian to this day, are not “illustrations of the faith” intended to “teach illiterates Bible stories,” but points of immediate contact with the reality of the Incarnation, rendered in a symbolic style meant to invite prayer and communion, not analysis. The Carolingian north, however, increasingly favoured legibility, narrative story telling, hierarchy and natural form in service of a more didactic, rationalised approach to religion and governance. In one sense, these two ways of thinking about sacred art represent the theological divergence that was already unfolding between East and West. Rome’s was consolidating power around a Latin, imperial western Christendom on the one hand, and Constantinople maintaining the ancient mystical, liturgical cosmology on the other.

These two streams would sometimes clash and sometimes blend and finally the resulting hybrid would see unique new expressions in art, architecture and monastic life, which we’ll eventually see more fully in the Norman period, with the Italo-Byzantine and early Romanesque. But in the 9th and 10th centuries, they still stood largely apart, like two rival visions of what Christian civilisation could be. (Read more.)

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Some Monsters Never Die

 From AND Magazine:

Witness Christopher Steele, author of the infamous “dossier” that launched the whole mad Russiagate hoax and started us on the path to what would ultimately prove to be the first attempted coup in American history.

Steele is a former British intelligence officer. He was hired by Fusion GPS, a research firm, to produce a dossier connecting Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin. Fusion GPS was working for the law firm representing Hillary Clinton’s political campaign. The cost of all this was borne by Hillary’s campaign and by the Democratic National Committee.

Steele produced a garbage report filled with lies and innuendo. That dossier was then effectively injected into the American law enforcement and intelligence communities, where anti-Trump partisans ignored its obvious lack of credibility and used it to launch an investigation of Donald Trump, smear him with false accusations, and produce junk intelligence “assessments”. All of this is well established by this point, and Mr. Steele’s reputation has been destroyed.

One would think Steele would be living incognito somewhere, keeping his head down and hoping he is not named as a conspirator in a plot to overturn the republic. One would be wrong. (Read more.)

 

From Overton:

TSUNAMI. Trump just crossed the Rubicon—and there’s NO going back. Inside the Oval Office, with cameras rolling, he accused Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton of orchestrating the Russia Hoax. Then he said it flat-out: Obama committed TREASON. But it’s what he revealed next that could blow the lid off the Deep State:

“And we have ALL of the documents....and from what Tulsi told me, she’s got THOUSANDS of additional documents coming.” (Read more.)

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The Rise and Fall of the Holy Roman Empire

 From Charles Coulombe:

The French Revolution would ultimately doom the venerable old Imperial edifice.  By 1795, Revolutionary France had annexed Belgium and the Left Bank of the Rhine.  The martyred Marie Antoinette’s brother, Francis II, had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1792.  In an attempt to shore up Germany against the French menace, Francis allowed the annexation of hundreds of smaller German states by the larger ones.  It was hoped that the score that remained would be better able to resist the foe, now ruled by Napoleon Bonaparte.  But the defeat of the Second Coalition in 1804 led Napoleon, who had begun to speak of himself as the new Charlemagne, to have himself crowned Emperor of the French.  At the ceremony in Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral, Napoleon took the crown from the hands of a startled Pope Pius VII, and crowned himself with it.  This in turn led Francis to suspect that Napoleon wished to make himself Holy Roman Emperor.  In response, he created a new crown and entity over which to reign: the Hereditary Empire of Austria.

Made up only of the hereditary Habsburg Lands, this new creation still featured the Double Eagle – the symbol of the Christian Empire that through long use had become associated with the Habsburgs.  In 1806, Francis led his country into another conflict with France, the War of the Third Coalition.  Defeated at the Battle of Austerlitz, he was forced to sign a treaty with Napoleon that greatly weakened Austria.  In August, Napoleon created the Confederation of the Rhine, into which he compelled Bavarian and fifteen of the other larger German States to enter – while withdrawing from the Holy Roman Empire.  On July 22, Napoleon issued an ultimatum ordering Francis to abdicate as Holy Roman Emperor by August 10.  He did so, but declared the bonds tying the estates to him and so each other dissolved – in effect, dissolving the Empire.

It had endured 1006 years since Bl. Charlemagne was crowned.  In 1815, there was an attempt to revive it; but Emperor Francis I (as we must call him in his role as Emperor of Austria) was against this idea.  In its place, the Germanic Confederation, a loose grouping of the German States, was erected with the Austrian Emperor as president.  In 1848, a German Empire was briefly revived, but collapsed ultimately through the then-impossibility of including both Prussia and Austria in one centralised nation.  Bismarck solved the issue in 1866 by driving Austria militarily out of Germany, as a prelude to the creation of the German Empire in 1871. Comparing it to the Holy Roman Empire, Dom Guéranger observed rather caustically in his entry on St. Boniface: “Upon its ruins, like a woeful mimicry of the Holy Empire, Protestantism has raised its false Evangelical Empire, formed of naught but encroachments, and tracing its recognized origin, to the apostasy of that felon knight, Albert of Brandenburg.” (Read more.)

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Garden Party at Trianon

 As has been described before on this blog, Marie-Antoinette loved gardens and nature. She wanted her domain at Petit Trianon to be like a natural landscape, albeit a fabricated one. As consort of the most powerful monarch in Europe, it was expected that the queen entertain foreign visitors in grand style. Entertaining heads of state was an expensive enterprise, however, even when they visited incognito, as did Emperor Joseph II and the Grand Duke Paul and Grand Duchess Maria of Russia. The French government was nearly bankrupt due to the help given by King Louis XVI to the American colonists in their war for independence from Britain. To save money, Marie-Antoinette would use her private gardens as the site of the entertainments by illuminating the gardens and having everyone wear white. She would have musicians playing amid the shrubbery, so that it seemed that the music was wafting through the gardens in an ethereal manner.

In May, 1782, the Russian Grand Duke and Grand Duchess visited as the "Comte and Comtesse du Nord." Madame Campan wrote of their visit in her Memoirs:

They were presented on the 20th of May, 1782. The Queen received them with grace and dignity. On the day of their arrival at Versailles they dined in private with the King and Queen.

The plain, unassuming appearance of Paul I. pleased Louis XVI. He spoke to him with more confidence and cheerfulness than he had spoken to Joseph II. The Comtesse du Nord was not at first so successful with the Queen. This lady was of a fine height, very fat for her age, with all the German stiffness, well informed, and perhaps displaying her acquirements with rather too much confidence. When the Comte and Comtesse du Nord were presented the Queen was exceedingly nervous. She withdrew into her closet before she went into the room where she was to dine with the illustrious travellers, and asked for a glass of water, confessing “she had just experienced how much more difficult it was to play the part of a queen in the presence of other sovereigns, or of princes born to become so, than before courtiers.” She soon recovered from her confusion, and reappeared with ease and confidence. The dinner was tolerably cheerful, and the conversation very animated.

Brilliant entertainments were given at Court in honour of the King of Sweden and the Comte du Nord. They were received in private by the King and Queen, but they were treated with much more ceremony than the Emperor, and their Majesties always appeared to me to be very cautious before these personages. However, the King one day asked the Russian Grand Duke if it were true that he could not rely on the fidelity of any one of those who accompanied him. The Prince answered him without hesitation, and before a considerable number of persons, that he should be very sorry to have with him even a poodle that was much attached to him, because his mother would take care to have it thrown into the Seine, with a stone round its neck, before he should leave Paris. This reply, which I myself heard, horrified me, whether it depicted the disposition of Catherine, or only expressed the Prince’s prejudice against her.

The Queen gave the Grand Duke a supper at Trianon, and had the gardens illuminated as they had been for the Emperor. The Cardinal de Rohan very indiscreetly ventured to introduce himself there without the Queen’s knowledge. Having been treated with the utmost coolness ever since his return from Vienna, he had not dared to ask her himself for permission to see the illumination; but he persuaded the porter of Trianon to admit him as soon as the Queen should have set off for Versailles, and his Eminence engaged to remain in the porter’s lodge until all the carriages should have left the chateau. He did not keep his word, and while the porter was busy in the discharge of his duty, the Cardinal, who wore his red stockings and had merely thrown on a greatcoat, went down into the garden, and, with an air of mystery, drew up in two different places to see the royal family and suite pass by.

Her Majesty was highly offended at this piece of boldness, and next day ordered the porter to be discharged. There was a general feeling of disgust at the Cardinal’s conduct, and of commiseration towards the porter for the loss of his place. Affected at the misfortune of the father of a family, I obtained his forgiveness; and since that time I have often regretted the feeling which induced me to interfere. The notoriety of the discharge of the porter of Trianon, and the odium that circumstance would have fixed upon the Cardinal, would have made the Queen’s dislike to him still more publicly known, and would probably have prevented the scandalous and notorious intrigue of the necklace.

In June of 1784, King Gustav III of Sweden arrived under the alias of the "Comte de Haga." Marie-Antoinette did not care for him, because of what she had heard concerning his private life. As Madame Campan relates:

The Queen, who was much prejudiced against the King of Sweden, received him very coldly.All that was said of the private character of that sovereign, his connection with the Comte de Vergennes, from the time of the Revolution of Sweden, in 1772, the character of his favourite Armfeldt, and the prejudices of the monarch himself against the Swedes who were well received at the Court of Versailles, formed the grounds of this dislike. He came one day uninvited and unexpected, and requested to dine with the Queen. The Queen received him in the little closet, and desired me to send for her clerk of the kitchen, that she might be informed whether there was a proper dinner to set before Comte d’Haga, and add to it if necessary. The King of Sweden assured her that there would be enough for him; and I could not help smiling when I thought of the length of the menu of the dinner of the King and Queen, not half of which would have made its appearance had they dined in private. The Queen looked significantly at me, and I withdrew. In the evening she asked me why I had seemed so astonished when she ordered me to add to her dinner, saying that I ought instantly to have seen that she was giving the King of Sweden a lesson for his presumption. I owned to her that the scene had appeared to me so much in the bourgeois style, that I involuntarily thought of the cutlets on the gridiron, and the omelette, which in families in humble circumstances serve to piece out short commons. She was highly diverted with my answer, and repeated it to the King, who also laughed heartily at it.

As Baroness Oberkirch relates in her Memoirs, the Swedish king was charmed with both Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, in spite of various misunderstandings. Especially he was enchanted by the illuminated gardens of Trianon, which he thought resembled the Elysian fields. A Swedish scholar once told me that the because of Louis and Antoinette, Gustav was seriously considering becoming a Catholic; I have not yet substantiated that information myself, but it would not surprise me. He certainly did all he could to save their lives, especially through his delegate, Count Fersen. Gustav said of the French king: "Louis XVI is the best and most benevolent prince in existence. His soul radiates serenity. I am filled with admiration."

(Sources: Vincent Cronin's Louis and Antoinette, Madame Campan's Memoirs, Nesta Webster's Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette before the Revolution, Baroness Oberkirch's Memoirs and Antonia Fraser's Marie-Antoinette:The Journey) Share