Tea at Trianon: Remembering Evelyn Waugh

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, April 14, 2026

Remembering Evelyn Waugh

From Chronicles:

Evelyn Waugh was the 20^th century’s finest satirist and perhaps the greatest in the English-speaking world after Jonathan Swift. Born in 1903 in London, Waugh was the second son of a prominent publisher whose firm, Chapman and Hall, published many of Waugh’s own books. He was educated at Oxford, where he read history for two years and lived a rather dissipated, rebellious life, leaving without a degree. Waugh turned seriously to writing only in the late 1920s. In 1930, he married his first wife, also named Evelyn. Within a year, she abandoned Waugh for another man—a sense of betrayal haunted Waugh for decades and may have contributed to his conversion to Roman Catholicism that same year. In 1937, after his first marriage was annulled, he married Laura Herbert, a Catholic. They produced seven children.

Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), announces his lifelong preoccupation with the theme explored by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West. Though Waugh never embraced Spengler’s ponderously Teutonic theorizing about the morphology of civilizations, he shared Spengler’s view that the sun had all but set upon the West. Everywhere he turned, Waugh saw the collapse of classical and Christian moral standards and the erosion, driven by egalitarian envy, of the hierarchies that had sustained the European social order for centuries.

In five early novels, Waugh explored the follies of the London set known as the Bright Young Things. Employing emotionally detached narrators, these novels expose—without any explicit moralizing—the utterly vacant lives of a generation of listless souls who parrot faux Cockney dialect and perpetually gad about in search of superficial distractions: champagne parties, car races, jazz clubs, scavenger hunts. Driven by ennui or apolitical nihilism, they are the disenchanted children of
the British aristocracy. (Read more.)