Tea at Trianon: Tragic Abundance: Spring Cleaning as Mortification

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

Saturday, April 4, 2026

Tragic Abundance: Spring Cleaning as Mortification

From Matriarch Goals:

It is true that I love interior design and making things look nice, but my husband and I are terrible at home organization and at keeping things nice. We are both descended from legit hoarders, which does make us susceptible to imbalance when it comes to material possessions. But more than our genetic misfortunes, we both suffer from a similar type of impatience and a hatred of maintenance that really just amounts to a wholesale failure to keep up appearances.
My husband suffers from a true Spartan hatred of material possessions, which you’d think would deliver us unto minimalism but it doesn’t work that way. I suffer from an overabundance problem, too many hobbies, too many interests that lend themselves to collections and displays. My brother-in-law calls my particular brand of garden and home design tragic abundance, and nothing could be more true. I love old stoves and chimneys and decaying structures that lie out in people’s yards, curing, covered with roses or lilac bushes. That’s the dominant art form around the California Gold Country: natural, botanical abundance growing over the old steel and wood skeletons of a previous civilization. In some ways all of California is late-stage Republic in its artistic presentation, but this looks better in the northern part of the state because we have the granite boulders and hollowed out industry to give it a more romantic setting than the “this is basically Mexico” deserts of Southern California. (Read more.)