Tea at Trianon: Different Doesn’t Mean Better (or Worse)

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

Friday, August 22, 2025

Different Doesn’t Mean Better (or Worse)

From Mater et Magistra:

It’s a funny thing to watch your child grow up in ways that feel foreign to you. I am not an engineer. I don’t wake up early to check on livestock. I’ve never, not once, thought about how to build a treehouse without YouTube.
But he does. Naturally. Fearlessly.
And I find myself both in awe, and in fear, of what’s coming.
The awe is easy to explain. He’s wonderful. He surprises me daily with what he can do, how he sees the world, what he remembers, what he builds, and how deeply he cares (in his quiet, sneaky way).
The fear is harder. It’s not fear of him misbehaving…he’s generally thoughtful and kind. It’s more the fear of not knowing how to parent him. To guide this kind of child, one I didn’t grow up beside.
Because his boyhood doesn’t fit into the neat lines of the childhood I knew.
And that’s not bad.
It’s just a thing. (Read more.)