Tea at Trianon: The Death and Hope of Fall

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

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

The Death and Hope of Fall

From El Antiguo:

Michaelmas felt like a door to autumn; the golden fatness of pecans starting to turn, the heat-baked smells of hay, harvest in the heat and the coolness of lemonade in the shade. Now I watch the first blue norther come in from my porch, smell the petrichor and hear the murmuring trees creak their branches. Now—as we enter the Hallowtide Triduum—something more final has breathed across the land.
It is Death.
On the coming of Fall, it is fitting to meditate upon death. The ancient pagans knew that this was a time of thinness, where the veil between life and death was gauze-scant. And they feared the dead. The Church, which baptizes all things good and true and beautiful, and re-orients them to God, took this awareness and the traditions that surrounded it and married them to Allhallowtide. The Natural, Agricultural, Psychological, and Cultural were married to and perfected in the Liturgical, which above all, turned the fear of death and demons, veils torn and veils thin, into a triumphant Hope. Death and Haunts aren’t what they used to be; in Christ (Firstborn of the Dead, not a Ghost but Flesh) Death is a door and Spirits are souls.
It is fitting indeed. We meditate upon death, and how it is no longer the End. We pray for the souls of the Church Penitent, undergoing the sanctification in Purgatory. We pray with the Church Triumphant, worshipping and interceding for us before the very throne of the Father. And we pray as the Church Militant, who fights here on Earth, armed to the teeth against the powers of darkness.
There’s a dignity and a triumph in Hallowtide, despite the quiet presence of Death… or rather, because of the presence of Death. (Read more.)