Tea at Trianon: The High Cost of Being Experienced

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

Tuesday, December 2, 2025

The High Cost of Being Experienced

From Of Home and Womanhood:

Sex was once regarded as something that could bind two souls with a permanence stronger than any contract written on paper. Because that is what sexual intimacy really is. Our ancestors were mocked for treating sex with reverence. “How prudish,” we said, “that they believed the body had anything to do with the soul.” And with arrogant pride, we declared ourselves free. Free from shame, free from limits, free from the old insistent truth that deep pleasures require deep commitments.
We are modern men, and women, after all. We don’t need the old fashioned ways of our grandparents. We know better. We are better. Much of modern day suffering, I believe, is really due to our rejection of what was just common sense for most of human history. Children need their parents. Marriage is more than just romance. Discipline builds character. (Read more.)