Tea at Trianon: Audubon's 'Birds of America'

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, May 26, 2026

Audubon's 'Birds of America'

From Country Life:

In November 2023, shortly after taking up the position of Heritage Lead at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, Claire McDade, a woman who positively thrums with all the compact energy and bright-eyed good cheer of a goldfinch on a sunny spring morning, removed the dust sheet that for the previous 30-odd years had covered a waist-high cabinet, about the size of a foosball table or perhaps a little larger, in a corner of the college’s upstairs library.
What lay beneath left her speechless.
A first edition of the first volume of John James Audubon’s Birds of America. ‘I hate to use the word, but, honestly, I was,’ she told me, ‘gobsmacked. I thought, “We’ve got to do something more with this.” I made it my mission.’
By May 2026, with necessary funding secured and conservation work done, her mission was accomplished. As of this week, the college’s Audubon is, for a few precious hours every Monday, available for public inspection. (Read more.)