Gardening in French

The jardin français of Marie-Antoinette at Trianon

Some great ideas here, although Marie-Antoinette never pretended to be a milkmaid. Of course she would wear simple clothes and an apron when she visited the farm. From Frenchly:

The ‘French garden,” or jardin français, is a concept dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Enlightenment was at its peak, and new discoveries in science and technology produced an ideology formatted around reason, above all else. Everything in nature could be bent to the human will, or so it was believed… including gardens.

While ‘English gardens’ of the time were treatises on romanticism, cobbled together from different themes to create a meandering experience left to each viewer’s interpretation, the French garden was formal, exacting, and precise. Picture Versailles from above: its distinctive curlicues and segmented pathways and flowerbeds and shrubberies, which must be meticulously maintained in order to retain their shape. (Though Versailles did have an English garden, the very one where Marie Antoinette built a miniature hamlet and pretended to be a milkmaid.) Louis XIV commissioned the gardens from André le Nôtre in 1661, personally overseeing every detail, in a process that took 40 years to complete, a fit comparison to the King’s ruling style. (Read more.)

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The Ukraine Biolab Collapses

From Stone Cold Truth:

For more than four years, Americans who questioned the true nature and scope of United States’ taxpayer funded biological laboratories in Ukraine were ridiculed, smeared, censored, and denounced as conspiracy theorists. Television pundits dismissed them. Corporate media outlets mocked them. Members of the political establishment insisted that any discussion of American involvement in Ukrainian biolaboratories was nothing more than Russian propaganda. Now, thanks to a sweeping declassification ordered by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, the American people are finally learning that much of what they were told was false.

The newly released Intelligence Community (IC) documents reveal that American taxpayers funded and supported an enormous international biological research network consisting of more than 120 laboratories in over 30 countries. Among the most significant concentrations of those facilities were more than 40 laboratories located throughout Ukraine. According to the declassified material, approximately $200 million in American funding flowed into these facilities through the Department of Defense’s (now the Department of War) Biological Threat Reduction Program, an initiative that traces its origins to post-Soviet efforts to secure dangerous biological materials left behind after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The disclosure is remarkable not because it proves the existence of an active offensive biological weapons program. The documents do not establish that conclusion. Rather, the significance lies in the extraordinary gap between what the public was told and what government officials privately knew. (Read more.)

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Drive-Thru Intimacy

 From Of Home and Womanhood:

Fast food, we all know is crap nutrition for the most part, it fills you for a moment, satisfies a craving, scratches an itch, it is quick, it is cheap, it is accessible, engineered to be desirable, easy to consume, and it is everywhere.

But you can’t live on it, not really if you care about your long term wellbeing. You will be full but you’ll end up malnourished, and casual sex does the same thing to your soul.

It gives you the illusion of being wanted without any of the real substance that comes when you are actually loved. It gives warmth to the body, but it gives you no safety, it gives you attention, but it will never give you devotion, it can give you pleasure, but it will never give you sacrifice and meaning. It gives us the feeling of being chosen for a night only to wake up the next morning feeling like trash.

Sound familiar? Yeah. Sounds like all the fast food we eat out of convenience and hunger for something real, hoping it fills the need only to then feel even worse after.

This is the part that hurts to say, but women are hungry, and we are hungry because human being are hungry. As humans, we hunger to be known, to be desired, to be cherished, and loved. The problem is that our culture has taken this real hunger, this real desire, and handed women, and men, it has handed us the worst cheapest possible substitute. (Read more.)

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The New York City Unicorn Apartment

 

From Architectural Digest:

Many try their luck at finding the New York City unicorn apartment—the charming, affordable, off-market unit. And most fail. But interior designer Sam Masters achieved the unthinkable: a prewar, one-bedroom in the heart of the West Village. Of course, this wouldn’t be a true New York City fairy tale without a bit of drama. It took Masters 16 years and six apartments to land here. But when he did, it almost felt scripted: “When I first moved to Manhattan, my friends and I went out one night and walked down Bleecker Street. It was just so alive, and I looked up at these very windows and wondered who lived there.” Of course, like any true New Yorker, Masters is quick to temper that memory with the caveat that the Village has “become overrun and a little annoying.”

 But Masters isn’t afraid of leaning into the (well-earned) city cliché. “[My apartment] definitely has a very 2000s-ish New York City feel,” the designer says. “It’s got that Sex and the City vibe of the West Village, which I love, and it’s quirky—you know, crumbling plaster walls and paper-thin windows, so it’s loud.” Manhattan is, after all, an island of trade-offs. (Read more.)

 

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The Iran Deal

 From Tierney's Real News:

The Deal is scheduled to get signed tomorrow, and immediately after it is signed, the Hormuz Strait is OPEN TO ALL. Our relationship with Iran is a much different and better one than previous Administrations have had. Unlike Obama’s Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in payments to them, including 1.7 Billion Dollars in green, cold cash, no money will exchange hands.

At the appropriate time, when all is calm, we will go in and get the Nuclear Dust, buried deep under the powerful sunken granite mountains, thanks to our beautiful B-2 Bombers and their brilliant pilots, and downblend and destroy it, whether in Iran, or the United States. We look forward to working with Iran, and the entire Middle East, long into the future.

Hopefully, this process will all work out quickly, easily, and smoothly. If it doesn’t, we have the ultimate alternative, hopefully never to be used again! Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!"

If you didn't know, the IRGC booby-trapped the openings to the nuclear dust - just like they booby-trapped the Hormuz Strait with mines - so it's not an easy one day mission to get the so-called “nuclear dust” as the fake news would have you believe. Even CNN admits that now:

CNN: Iran has 𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐩𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐮𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬 at its nuclear facility in Isfahan — the site where its cache of near-weapons-grade uranium is believed to be buried underground. The stockpile: 𝟒𝟒𝟎.𝟗 𝐤𝐢𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝟔𝟎%-𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐝 𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐮𝐦, the IAEA’s own figure as of June 11. Sixty percent enrichment is one technical step from weapons-grade. At that quantity, Iran holds 𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐱𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝟏𝟎 𝐧𝐮𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐰𝐞𝐚𝐩𝐨𝐧𝐬. That entire cache is now locked inside collapsed tunnels beneath a mined facility.

(Read more.)

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40 Things Every House in the 70s Had That No One Sees Today

Memories light the corners of my mind....From Country Living:

The 70s—it sure does seem like it was a more laid-back, dare we say more mellow, time, doesn't it? Disco was king, Jaws menaced moviegoers, and everybody was on roller skates. Houses were one-story ranch-style, or split level and filled with never-before seen design choices (most of which have been never seen again). But whether good, bad, or just plain tacky, home interiors were certainly unique. A little nostalgia is never a bad thing, so let's step inside the time machine and into a typical 70s pad. Just a warning—you might want to put on your sunglasses first! (Read more.)

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Garden Party at Trianon

 As has been described before on this blog, Marie-Antoinette loved gardens and nature. She wanted her domain at Petit Trianon to be like a natural landscape, albeit a fabricated one. As consort of the most powerful monarch in Europe, it was expected that the queen entertain foreign visitors in grand style. Entertaining heads of state was an expensive enterprise, however, even when they visited incognito, as did Emperor Joseph II and the Grand Duke Paul and Grand Duchess Maria of Russia. The French government was nearly bankrupt due to the help given by King Louis XVI to the American colonists in their war for independence from Britain. To save money, Marie-Antoinette would use her private gardens as the site of the entertainments by illuminating the gardens and having everyone wear white. She would have musicians playing amid the shrubbery, so that it seemed that the music was wafting through the gardens in an ethereal manner.

In May, 1782, the Russian Grand Duke and Grand Duchess visited as the "Comte and Comtesse du Nord." Madame Campan wrote of their visit in her Memoirs:

They were presented on the 20th of May, 1782. The Queen received them with grace and dignity. On the day of their arrival at Versailles they dined in private with the King and Queen.

The plain, unassuming appearance of Paul I. pleased Louis XVI. He spoke to him with more confidence and cheerfulness than he had spoken to Joseph II. The Comtesse du Nord was not at first so successful with the Queen. This lady was of a fine height, very fat for her age, with all the German stiffness, well informed, and perhaps displaying her acquirements with rather too much confidence. When the Comte and Comtesse du Nord were presented the Queen was exceedingly nervous. She withdrew into her closet before she went into the room where she was to dine with the illustrious travellers, and asked for a glass of water, confessing “she had just experienced how much more difficult it was to play the part of a queen in the presence of other sovereigns, or of princes born to become so, than before courtiers.” She soon recovered from her confusion, and reappeared with ease and confidence. The dinner was tolerably cheerful, and the conversation very animated.

Brilliant entertainments were given at Court in honour of the King of Sweden and the Comte du Nord. They were received in private by the King and Queen, but they were treated with much more ceremony than the Emperor, and their Majesties always appeared to me to be very cautious before these personages. However, the King one day asked the Russian Grand Duke if it were true that he could not rely on the fidelity of any one of those who accompanied him. The Prince answered him without hesitation, and before a considerable number of persons, that he should be very sorry to have with him even a poodle that was much attached to him, because his mother would take care to have it thrown into the Seine, with a stone round its neck, before he should leave Paris. This reply, which I myself heard, horrified me, whether it depicted the disposition of Catherine, or only expressed the Prince’s prejudice against her.

The Queen gave the Grand Duke a supper at Trianon, and had the gardens illuminated as they had been for the Emperor. The Cardinal de Rohan very indiscreetly ventured to introduce himself there without the Queen’s knowledge. Having been treated with the utmost coolness ever since his return from Vienna, he had not dared to ask her himself for permission to see the illumination; but he persuaded the porter of Trianon to admit him as soon as the Queen should have set off for Versailles, and his Eminence engaged to remain in the porter’s lodge until all the carriages should have left the chateau. He did not keep his word, and while the porter was busy in the discharge of his duty, the Cardinal, who wore his red stockings and had merely thrown on a greatcoat, went down into the garden, and, with an air of mystery, drew up in two different places to see the royal family and suite pass by.

Her Majesty was highly offended at this piece of boldness, and next day ordered the porter to be discharged. There was a general feeling of disgust at the Cardinal’s conduct, and of commiseration towards the porter for the loss of his place. Affected at the misfortune of the father of a family, I obtained his forgiveness; and since that time I have often regretted the feeling which induced me to interfere. The notoriety of the discharge of the porter of Trianon, and the odium that circumstance would have fixed upon the Cardinal, would have made the Queen’s dislike to him still more publicly known, and would probably have prevented the scandalous and notorious intrigue of the necklace.

In June of 1784, King Gustav III of Sweden arrived under the alias of the "Comte de Haga." Marie-Antoinette did not care for him, because of what she had heard concerning his private life. As Madame Campan relates:

The Queen, who was much prejudiced against the King of Sweden, received him very coldly.All that was said of the private character of that sovereign, his connection with the Comte de Vergennes, from the time of the Revolution of Sweden, in 1772, the character of his favourite Armfeldt, and the prejudices of the monarch himself against the Swedes who were well received at the Court of Versailles, formed the grounds of this dislike. He came one day uninvited and unexpected, and requested to dine with the Queen. The Queen received him in the little closet, and desired me to send for her clerk of the kitchen, that she might be informed whether there was a proper dinner to set before Comte d’Haga, and add to it if necessary. The King of Sweden assured her that there would be enough for him; and I could not help smiling when I thought of the length of the menu of the dinner of the King and Queen, not half of which would have made its appearance had they dined in private. The Queen looked significantly at me, and I withdrew. In the evening she asked me why I had seemed so astonished when she ordered me to add to her dinner, saying that I ought instantly to have seen that she was giving the King of Sweden a lesson for his presumption. I owned to her that the scene had appeared to me so much in the bourgeois style, that I involuntarily thought of the cutlets on the gridiron, and the omelette, which in families in humble circumstances serve to piece out short commons. She was highly diverted with my answer, and repeated it to the King, who also laughed heartily at it.

As Baroness Oberkirch relates in her Memoirs, the Swedish king was charmed with both Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, in spite of various misunderstandings. Especially he was enchanted by the illuminated gardens of Trianon, which he thought resembled the Elysian fields. A Swedish scholar once told me that the because of Louis and Antoinette, Gustav was seriously considering becoming a Catholic; I have not yet substantiated that information myself, but it would not surprise me. He certainly did all he could to save their lives, especially through his delegate, Count Fersen. Gustav said of the French king: "Louis XVI is the best and most benevolent prince in existence. His soul radiates serenity. I am filled with admiration."

(Sources: Vincent Cronin's Louis and Antoinette, Madame Campan's Memoirs, Nesta Webster's Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette before the Revolution, Baroness Oberkirch's Memoirs and Antonia Fraser's Marie-Antoinette:The Journey) Share

Data Centers Are Not Your Enemy

 From Tierney's Real News:

Jump on any social media site today or attend any town hall across rural or suburban America right now, and you’ll hear a terrifying script about data centers. You will be told they are monstrous energy hogs that will eat up prime farmland, drain local water supplies, blast disruptive noise, and spike your monthly utility bills. You will be told it is all a scheme by out-of-touch Big Tech elites to expand their power at your expense.

If you are already fed up with government overreach, corporate greed, and the destruction of our rural landscapes, these arguments sound completely reasonable. In fact, they sound patriotic. But there is a massive, dangerous piece of the puzzle being deliberately left out.

While we are told these facilities are just glorified warehouses hosting social media apps and streaming video, our adversaries see them for what they truly are: the foundational infrastructure of modern warfare. The hard truth is that America cannot defend the future with yesterday’s infrastructure. The debate over data centers is no longer a localized zoning dispute—it is a matter of national survival.

In fact, our enemies know just how important data centers are to our survival that they are paying digital “influencers” an average of $7,000 for every article they write bashing data centers in America, running as high as $20,000 for a single story. (Read more.)

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Little Social Etiquette Rules Everyone Should Follow

 From Country Living:

Etiquette is not just about which fork to use. It’s showing respect for yourself and everyone else in your little corner of the planet. In a world where rudeness often reigns, why not stand out for being polite and thoughtful? You don’t even have to go to charm school or binge-watch Downton Abbey to learn the rules! Here are 50 easy ways to share more kindness and less saltiness this year. (Read more.)

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Vow of Louis XVI

Here is an English translation of the Vow of Louis XVI made in the Tuileries palace in the spring of 1791:

Well dost Thou see, O my God, the great sadness that oppresses my heart, the grief that wounds it and the depth of the abyss into which I have been cast. I am assailed by countless evils from all sides. To the oppression of my soul, the horrible tragedies that have befallen me and my family add up to those that cover the whole extension of the realm. The clamoring of all the misfortunate and the moans of our oppressed religion reaches my ears, and an inner voice suggests to me that perhaps Thy justice holds me accountable for all these calamities for not having restrained, during the days of my power, their main causes, which are the people’s licentiousness and the spirit of irreligion, and for supplied heresy, now triumphant, its weapons by favoring it by laws that gave it redoubled strength and enough boldness to dare anything.
 
O Jesus-Christ! Divine Redeemer of all our iniquities, today I come to find relief for my soul in Thy Adorable Heart. I call to my aid the tender Heart of Mary, my august protectress and Mother, and the assistance of Saint Louis, my advocate and the most illustrious of my ancestors. Open Thyself, adorable Heart, through the most pure hands of my powerful intercessors, receive benignantly the vows of which confidence inspires me and that I offer Thee as the frank expression of my sentiments. If, as a consequence of Divine goodness, I were to recover my liberty, my crown and royal power, I solemnly promise:

1. To revoke at once all the laws that will be indicated to me by the Pope, or a Council, or by four of the more learned and virtuous bishops of my realm, as contrary to the purity and the integrity of the Faith, and contrary to the discipline and the special jurisdiction of the Holy, Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Church; and especially to revoke the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.

2. To take, within a year, all the necessary measures to establish, with the approval of the Pope and the episcopate of my realm, and in accordance with canonical standards, a solemn feast in honor of the Sacred Heart of Jesus to be celebrated forevermore throughout all France on the first Friday immediately after the eight days following the Feast of Corpus Christi and to be always followed by a general procession. This feast will be celebrated in reparation for the outrages and desecrations perpetrated in our holy temples by schismatics, heretics and the bad Christians in these times of so great turmoil.

3. To go in person on a Sunday or a holy day within three months of the day of my deliverance to the Church of Notre Dame of Paris, or to any other principal church in the place where I will be at that time, to pronounce a solemn act of consecration of my person, my family and my realm to the Sacred Heart of Jesus next to the main altar after the Offertory of the Mass and through the hands of the priest, promising to give to all my vassals an example of the worship and the devotion due that adorable Heart.
4. To erect and adorn within a year of my release and at my own expense, in the church that I will choose, a chapel or an altar to be dedicated to the Sacred Heart, which will stand as a lasting monument of my recognition and limitless confidence in the infinite merits and inexhaustible treasures of grace that this Divine Heart contains. 

5. Finally, to renew every year, wherever I might be on the Feast of the Sacred Heart, the act of consecration stated in the third point and to participate in the general procession that will take place right after that day’s Mass.

 Now I cannot pronounce this pact except in secret, but I would sign it with my own blood if necessary; and the most beautiful day of my life will be when I will be able to proclaim it aloud in the Temple.

  O Adorable Heart of my Savior, may I neglect my right hand and my own being if I were to ignore Thy benefits these my promises, if I were to cease to love Thee and place all my trust and comfort in Thee! Amen.”
  
Louis XVI, King of France

 (Read more,)

 The original French version is HERE. In the spring of 1791, after signing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy a few months earlier, King Louis XVI fell ill at the Tuileries, where the royal family were living under house arrest. His illness was undoubtedly the result of the stress of the upheavals which he had tried to prevent, as well as the fact that his conscience was troubling him about signing the Catholic Church in France over to the revolutionary government, severing the ties with Rome. Louis had signed it under duress but deeply regretted his decision immediately.

According to biographer Bernard Fay, Louis made the Vow under the guidance of his non-juring confessor, a Eudist priest Fr. Hebert. In the 1600's a Visitation nun, Saint Margaret Mary, had claimed that Jesus had requested that the King of France consecrate France to His Sacred Heart. The consecration had never been performed. So, with the help of Fr. Hebert, Louis drafted the following Vow, which he sealed in the walls of his apartments.

The Vow was not found until the palace had been partially burned by the Commune and was being torn down in 1871. It was discovered still sealed in the wall of the king's room. Louis was a locksmith and was fascinated with construction, so building a hiding place for his papers would not have been beyond him. He was known for his penchant for secrecy and his hiding of private papers from prying eyes. The fact that the Vow was not discovered until the 1870's demolishes the claim of some that it was merely a product of pious forgery during the 1814-1830 Restoration. The methodical legality of the document is typical of Louis XVI, who as an amateur cartographer was characterized by his precision and attention to detail.
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Bishops Consecrate US to the Sacred Heart of Jesus

 From The Pillar:

Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, was the main celebrant at the Mass, which was held at the Basilica of Mary, Queen of the Universe.

Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, the first Catholic diocese in the United States, delivered the homily at the Mass.

“As we approach this great anniversary of our nation, we may be tempted towards nostalgia for the past or anxiety about the future,” he said.

“Today we choose something better: trust. Today we place the Church in the United States, and this nation we love, into the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Not because we have everything figured out, but because we know the One whose love endures forever. In his Heart, we find gratitude for the past, strength for the present, and hope for the future.”

He called for a recognition of both the successes and shortcomings of the past 250 years.

“There have been moments of extraordinary witness and holiness. But there have also been moments of failure, division, and sin,” he said.

“Consecration requires the humility to acknowledge both. We cannot come to the Heart of Christ while pretending we have no need of His mercy. To consecrate ourselves and our nation is to place our wounds, our shortcomings, and our sins before the One whose love is greater than all of them.”

The consecration of the nation is also a time for hope in the future, he said.

“It is a declaration that the future does not belong merely to political movements, economic forces, or human plans. The future belongs to God. And so we place into His Heart, not only ourselves but generations yet unborn, and all those who will inherit the Church and the nation we leave behind. Remaining in the Love of Christ in a culture that prizes independence and self-reliance, we gather publicly to acknowledge that our deepest identity and our truest hope come, not from ourselves but from the Lord.”

Lori emphasized that all Catholics must work together for the renewal of the Church.

“We consecrate our nation, not because it is perfect, but because it is beloved by God,” the archbishop said.

“We entrust to the Heart of Christ our achievements and failures, our hopes and anxiety, our present challenges and our future aspirations. We ask him to heal what is wounded, strengthen what is good, and guide us towards a future marked by justice, peace, freedom, and respect for the dignity of every human person.” (Read more.)

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Roger Scruton: Philosophical Christian and Scourge of Nihilism Par Excellence

 From The Public Discourse:

Carl R. Trueman has written yet another lucid and penetrating book that gets to the heart of our present cultural and spiritual discontent. Published earlier this year to critical acclaim, The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity persuasively argues that the death of man is a necessary byproduct of the rejection of God, and that no decent or morally serious society can long survive the absence of Christian faith and theistic affirmation. Divorced from the truth that human beings are created “in the image and likeness of God,” human dignity cannot be credibly upheld. So far, so good.  

Trueman, however, goes further. He is convinced that anything less than a robust recognition of the imago dei is nihilistic, a rejection of man that flows from a “refusal of God-given obligations, the transgression of God-given limits, and the rejection of God-given ends.” We must therefore choose between the truth of Christ’s Gospel and nihilism tout court—there is, Trueman insists, no “middle path” available to us. This leads him to define nihilism in such a broad and capacious  way that many who self-consciously fight against, and indeed reject, the nihilist temptation nonetheless are, or would be, relegated to the camp of Nietzsche’s “Madman” (who thunderously declared that “God is dead,” modern man having killed him).   

There is something unjust and peremptory about Trueman’s all-or-nothing approach. For example, despite his own obvious indebtedness to the English conservative philosopher Roger Scruton (drawing freely as he does on Scruton’s accounts of desecration and pornography as “moral pollution” and his Goethe-inspired identification of Satanic evil with “the spirit that forever negates”), Trueman ultimately consigns his intellectual “hero,” as he once called him, to the camp of nihilism. Too many reviewers, moreover, have uncritically followed Trueman in this judgment. Here, I hope to set the record straight.   

For Trueman, Scruton’s evident sympathy for the Christian religion is reduced to an “instrumental” appreciation of it “as a profound source of cultural good.” Trueman thus reduces Scruton’s remarkably rich reflections on religion and the “sacred” to the rather crude view that neither of them is true, but they “are good things for the organization of society.” Even here one has to note: tertium non datur. That is, there are more options than these binaries. Indeed, one has to say that Trueman presents a caricature of the late English philosopher and man of letters as a defender of the “spiritual residue” of Christianity rather than the Christian faith itself. Because, in Trueman’s view, Scruton is insufficiently dogmatic (which one can acknowledge), he turns out to be a mere aesthete, a defender of “exalted and beautiful thoughts about truth, goodness, and beauty.” By pigeonholing Scruton as nothing but a Kantian philosopher, Trueman makes him appear nothing more than “a cultural Christian” who appeals to “the language of truth … to justify taste.”  

However, Scruton’s intellectual debts went well beyond the German philosopher of the noumenal and phenomenal distinction and were remarkably wide ranging. He drew on Plato’s as well as Jan Patočka’s rich conception of the “care of the soul”; Aristotle’s articulation of the cardinal virtues; Burke’s eloquent defense of tradition, prudence, and ordered liberty against ideological fanaticism; and Hegel’s account of the necessarily “situated” character of ethical community. To these, he added careful attention to the moral witness of those who struggled in the east of Europe against the totalitarian lie in the second half of the twentieth century, and, not least, the New Testament’s affirmation and highlighting of forgiveness and neighbor love in lives lived well, lives truly open to the manifold intimations of “eternity” in time. Moreover, one could argue that Scruton was more indebted to Kant’s refusal to reduce human persons to impersonal objects bereft of souls and lacking in moral responsibility or “mutual accountability.” None of this is remotely the thought of a nihilist. (Read more.)

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Coronation Robes

June 11, 1775. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette in their coronation robes in an allegorical setting. Notice the monogram "LA" for "Louis and Antoinette." Via Vive la Reine.

 Vive la Reine quotes a contemporary account:

His Majesty entered the metropolitan church, where he was greeted by the Archbishop-Duke of Reims—who was at the head of his Chapter—and listened to the Te Deum. After the Benediction, the King withdrew to the archbishop’s palace where all the Nobles complimented Him. The next day, the King listened to the first Vespers in the Cathedral, and on Sunday, June 11th, around seven o’clock, His Majesty—with the greatest pomp—went back to the same Church and was crowned in the usual ways. (Read entire post.)

A post on the music for the coronation mass and the religious devotions that followed, HERE.

From Vive la Reine: "Detail from The Coronation of Louis XVI by Jean-Michel Moreau, 1775."

 

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Meet The Press

 From Tierney's Real News:

President Trump just did what millions of Americans have been dreaming of seeing for years. President Trump stood up, dropped his microphone and crushed it under his feet and then walked out of an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press host Kristen Welker.

He told her that “elections are crooked and you’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked and so is ABC and CBS and CNN.” He was livid, Welker was befuddled and it was glorious!

Excellent! Many people don’t understand why Trump even gives interviews to NBC, and specifically Kristin Welker. Well, first of all NBC News has the highest ratings of all the networks. They reach more people than Fox, Newsmax, CNN and MSNBC combined. That’s reason number one.

Second, Trump worked with NBC for 12 years when he ran the Apprentice so I think he has a soft spot for NBC. I also think Trump believed that he might be able to use Kristin Welker to turn NBC around into the light. I think Trump sincerely liked Kristin Welker because she got married late in life and tried to have a baby late (44) and was infertile and struggling with having a child so she and her husband tried IVF for months and eventually had children using surrogates. She was very open about that and I think Trump cared about her journey.

I’m not saying this to defend her - I’m just telling you that her story pulled at the heartstrings of many Americans - including Trump - and he tried to help her. In return, she screwed him! (Read more.)

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Lost Remains of Maryland’s Second Governor

 From Maryland Matters:

Using a groundbreaking method, researchers have likely identified the lost remains of the second governor of the colony of Maryland.

They’ve also found 1.3 million genetic relatives of Maryland’s first colonists who are alive today.

“Then we have 9,000 people who are close enough that they’re very likely direct descendants or very close relatives,” Éadaoin Harney, a senior scientist at 23andMe Research Institute, told WTOP.

She is the lead author of a study published last month in the journal Current Biology. In addition to the genetic testing company 23andMe, the study involved scientists from the Smithsonian, Harvard University and St. Mary’s City.

Their work was built on previous studies and the discovery over decades of dozens of bodies in a graveyard in St. Mary’s City. Established in 1634 in what is now St. Mary’s County, it’s recognized as the first permanent English settlement in Maryland.

In 2016, through genetic testing, it was revealed that remains found in three lead coffins in the city’s Chapel Field cemetery belonged to the colony’s fifth governor Philip Calvert, his first wife and a son he had with his second wife.

The latest study was aimed at identifying the remains of 49 other people buried in the graveyard. (Read more.)

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Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette in a Eucharistic Procession

Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette in the Eucharistic procession that opened the Estates-General in the spring of 1789. (From Vive la Reine.)

On May 4, 1789, she put Louis-Joseph and his sister with Madame de Polignac on a balcony above the stables so they could watch the magnificent Eucharistic procession which marked the opening of the Estates-General. The procession wound from the Royal Chapel, across the vast courtyard of the palace, through the streets of the town of Versailles, to the Church of Saint Louis. The monstrance, in the hands of a bishop, was under a rich canopy carried by Provence, Artois, Berry, and Angoulême. Everyone held a candle, except for the standard bearers, with the fluttering silken banners, and the royal falconers, with falcons on their wrists, looking both noble and fierce. The King, with a lighted taper, walked directly behind the monstrance. He wore a cloth of gold mantle and a plumed hat with the famous Regent diamond. He was wildly applauded by the crowds that lined the route. But when Antoinette, who with her ladies followed the King’s household, passed by in her gown of gold and silver tissue, every tongue fell silent. She could almost taste the hatred. It frightened her. 

When passing beneath the balcony where her sick boy was lying, she glanced up to blow him a kiss. The cry “Long live Orléans!” resounded in her ears. The extent of the malice overwhelmed her. That someone could hate her so much that they would use her child’s suffering as an opportunity to humiliate her; that they would praise her known enemy at a moment when as a mother she was most vulnerable, within the hearing of her pain-wracked Dauphin, stunned her as much as if she had been whipped or burnt. She halted, dizzily, then turned to see who had insulted her. In doing so, she staggered, but before she lost her balance, Princesse de Lamballe took her arm and steadied her.

 ~ from Trianon by Elena Maria Vidal

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Media Shrug At Aborting Down Syndrome Baby

 From The Federalist:

When Sydney Sweeney showed off her “great genes jeans” in a series of playful American Eagle ads last summer, people — specifically the corporate media — feigned panic that the Euphoria actress’ tastefully clothed curves were a clandestine campaign to promote the “American eugenics movement” and white supremacy.

Nearly one year later, a real-life example of the selective breeding ideology the press tried to pin on Sweeney’s denim debuted in a viral post by a couple that aborted their unborn child after learning the baby might be born with Down Syndrome. Professional YouTube couple Jesse and Ashley Ridgway were more than halfway through their first pregnancy and had already bought baby clothes and designed a nursery when they decided birthing and raising a kid with Trisomy 21 would be too “rough.” Just one month after the “McJuggerNuggets” stars bragged about saving their dog with stage 4 kidney disease, they solicited an abortionist to tear their unborn baby apart limb by limb simply because that baby likely had an extra chromosome.

 Shortly after the abortion, Jesse turned to the Internet for sympathy over the “very difficult decision.” In his June 3 X post, Jesse rejected a Down Syndrome diagnosis as a “blessing,” instead calling it a “glitch” and “objectively shitty.” He concluded by teasing plans for a future pregnancy that would “hopefully have a better outcome.” (Read more.)

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The UN, Slavery, and History’s Selective Amnesia

 From The European Conservative:

In March 25th, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution describing the transatlantic slave trade and the enslavement of Africans as “the gravest crime against humanity.” The text was adopted by 123 votes to 3, with 52 states abstaining, including France, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and most European countries. The United States, Israel, and Argentina voted against.

The symbolic significance of this resolution is considerable. No one would dispute that the transatlantic slave trade constitutes one of the greatest tragedies in human history. For several centuries, millions of Africans were deported to the Americas under appalling conditions, reduced to the status of commodities, and integrated into an economic system based on their dehumanisation. The memory of this crime deserves to be acknowledged and passed on.

But it is precisely because the history of slavery is too grave to be exploited that we must question the ideological assumptions underlying this resolution. For the controversial nature of the text does not lie in its condemnation of the transatlantic slave trade but in what it omits.

By designating the transatlantic slave trade as ‘the gravest’ of crimes against humanity, the UN appears to be establishing a moral hierarchy among historical atrocities—as if certain sufferings could be considered superior to others and as if one could objectively measure the horror and declare that one crime surpasses all others. This wording partly explains the numerous European abstentions, for whom, for many years, the Holocaust has been held up as the ultimate benchmark of human barbarity. Regardless of the comparison with the Second World War, the motivations for which may be suspicious, several states argued that it was not for the UN to establish a hierarchy among crimes against humanity. Should we place Auschwitz and Kolyma, the Armenian genocide and the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda on a graduated scale, as if ranking the competitors in a macabre contest?

But the main difficulty lies elsewhere. This resolution completely ignores the existence of other slave systems which have nevertheless shaped the history of Africa and the world for over a millennium. (Read more.)

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The Desolation of Madame Royale

Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte of France alone in prison. She was haunted by the fate of her Aunt Elisabeth, saying:

I remained in great desolation when I felt myself parted from my aunt; I did not know what had become of her, and no one would tell me. I passed a very cruel night: and yet, though I was very uneasy about her fate, I was far from thinking I should lose her in a few hours. Sometimes I persuaded myself that they would send her out of France; then, when I recalled the manner in which they had taken her away, my fears revived.

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Republicans Supported Gay Marriage ‘Rights’ Until They Saw It Destroy Children’s Rights

 From The Federalist:

The reason is simple: Republicans were told that supporting same-sex marriage meant supporting their gay brother, daughter, coworker, or friend. They were told that opposing it meant they hated gay people, and many bought it. If supporting same-sex marriage was simply the price of treating loved ones with dignity and respect, they were willing to pay it.

What they were not told was that same-sex marriage would victimize kids. No sooner had gay marriage been achieved on the grounds that marriage had nothing to do with children than activists, judges, and lawmakers turned around and demanded parenthood too.

Republicans have no interest in persecuting their gay friends and family members. What they reject is the claim that adult equality requires making children lose their mother or father. And after a decade of watching the consequences unfold, it has become obvious that “equal marriage” was never just about adult “rights.” It was about parenthood and children. (Read more.)

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1,300 Years of History Preserved in Ancient Parchments

From Archaeology News:

The study appeared in the journal Manuscript Studies. Researchers examined 91 parchment manuscripts preserved at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The collection included religious texts, scrolls, legal records, fragments, and manuscripts written in several languages. The documents came from England, different parts of Europe, the Middle East, and northeastern Africa.

For more than a thousand years, parchment served as the main writing material across Europe and much of the Mediterranean region. Unlike paper, parchment came from animal hides, usually sheep, goats, or cattle. Millions of parchment documents still survive in libraries and museums today. Researchers involved in the study describe those collections as a large biological archive preserved across centuries.

Scientists faced a major obstacle for years. Traditional ancient DNA studies often require researchers to cut, scrape, or drill into material samples. Archivists and conservation experts rarely allow such methods on rare manuscripts because even small damage matters when dealing with cultural heritage objects.

The team used a different technique. Researchers gently rubbed the parchment with small cytology brushes, the same type often used in medical testing. The brushes collected tiny traces of cells from the surface without leaving visible damage.

After sampling, scientists extracted DNA from the brushes and analyzed the material with next-generation sequencing technology. These sequencing methods work well with old and fragmented DNA, which often survives in poor condition inside ancient material. (Read more.)

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Louis XVII: The Pretenders

The Dauphin Louis-Charles (Louis XVII) and his sister Madame Royale.

 
Marie-Antoinette's younger son, her chou d'amour. 

The prince is probably three or four in this picture.

                                                     Dauphin Louis-Charles a couple of years later, at six or seven. 

                                                     Small boys wore pink in those days.

Louis XVII, the eight-year-old imprisoned monarch, was removed from his mother Marie-Antoinette in August 1792. He was abused and forced to testify against her. After his mother and aunt were killed, he was was ill and locked up. His sister Marie-Thérèse, who was upstairs, was never allowed to see him, even when he was dying. He died on June 8, 1795. Marie-Thérèse was not allowed to see his body, either, but was kept locked in her room in the Temple Prison until his body was removed.  From Ancient Origins:

By the time Marie-Thérèse was released in December 1795, rumors had already begun about the fate of Louis XVII. In what has been dubbed “the fauxdauphinomanie of the early nineteenth century,” dozens of fraudsters attempted to adopt the identity of the lost dauphin over the coming decades. While some of their stories were ludicrous, the hounding she suffered must have been unbearable.

The most successful amongst them was Jean-Marie Hervagault, who, inspired by a book published in 1800 entitled Le Cimetière de la Madeleine , copied the plot and claimed to be the lost boy-king rescued from the Temple. Meanwhile, Karl Wilhelm Naundorff claimed to have been smuggled out in a basket. His tomb in Delft was inscribed Louis XVII, roi de France et de Navarre . There were even allegations that the young king had been rescued during a royalist plot and was living in the New World. To that end Reverend Eleazer Williams, a missionary of Native American descent in Wisconsin, somehow convinced several people that he was in fact the lost king. (Read more.)

When Louis XVII died in the Temple Prison, there was no public funeral and his body was not publicly displayed. Not even his sister, who was kept in the same prison, was allowed to see him. From History:

“There is no real and legal certainty that the son of Louis XVI is dead,” wrote the Austrian diplomat, Baron von Thugut. “His death, up to now, has no other proof than the announcement in the Moniteur, along with a report drawn up on the orders of the brigands of the Convention and by people whose deposition is based on the fact that they were presented with the body of a dead child who they were told was the son of Louis Capet.”

According to Cadbury, the mystery surrounding the “orphan of the tower” led to 500 books on the subject and an Edwardian-era monthly journal. The first book, a fictional account called The Cemetery of Madeline, about Louis-Charles’s supposed escape from the tower, came out only a few years after his death. Memoirs were also written by claimants themselves, including the Historical Account of the Life of Louis XVII, dictated by an illiterate, drunken vagabond named Charles de Navarre. Even Mark Twain got into the act, writing of a transient pretending to be “the little boy dolphin” in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The first claimant appeared in Châlons-sur-Marne only three years after the Dauphin’s death. The charming, handsome teenager had been found wandering the countryside and put in the local prison. For months he refused to say who he was, and then said he was a member of a non-existent ducal house. Enamored villagers became convinced the seemingly aristocratic young man was Louis-Charles, and the teen did not disabuse them of this notion. (Read more.)

 

Portrait of Louis-Charles, Dauphin of France, later known as Louis XVII.  Several years ago, some scientists have found a DNA link between the little king and the descendants of the claimant Naundorff. We discussed it on the Tea at Trianon Forum, HERE. The historical background of the mystery is explored in the novel Madame Royale.

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This Is What's Next

 From Welcome to Absurdistan:

What we are looking at on the streets of Europe, the U.K. and in the Republic of Ireland, is a revival of the culture that was deliberately replaced by a fully evil ideology. It is my opinion that this will not result in violence. Important as the rallies and protests are, what is happening is a massive cultural retrenchment based on the founding of America.

It is why there are American flags at the marches, and why so many wear a MAGA hat. MAGA is world-wide now, it will take over the entire world, including China, including Russia. Going forward in the next few years, there may be scraps on the U.K. streets with Muslim gangs but if - as Muslims did last week in England - go hunting British men with baseball bats, they will swiftly learn how Britain conquered the known world with muskets. There is simply no force on earth that can fight it. The ferocity is based in the thousand-year heritage of the northern clans and it has no match on earth, in this or any other century.

And it transferred to America slowly, relentlessly, during the 18th century, as the British oligarchs and their bankers - essentially the same vicious bastards as the ones exploiting us today - sent off all their unwanted to the colonies. These men, their character marked by their ancestral memory, formed the base of the American army and the American economy today. It is they that all the skanks and skunks, the army of migrants, “legal” immigrants, filthy Marxists, and our wretched socialist/globalist intelligentsia, who have never earned an honest dollar, are stealing from. How much? Estimated by Scott Bessent to be $1 trillion annually.

And now, today, they, we know it. We know we are human cattle being farmed by the worst people on earth, all of whom are fully, without mitigation, evil.

But they overplayed their chaos monkey hand. We are sick of violence and emotionality. They, these kids coming up, want stern common sense. They want God. They want their lives to have meaning. They want their time to be sacred again. (Read more.)

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Writing Seventeenth-century Fiction

 From The Seventeenth Century Lady:

Not a Chronos title, but reviewing Gerard Fitzgibbon’s Kingdom Overthrown: Ireland and the Battle for Europe 1688–1691 for the Irish Examiner also profoundly broadened my understanding of the 1600s, revealing it as an era of international conflict, sectarian violence, and colonial ambition. Through accounts of the Williamite-Jacobite wars in Ireland, one witnesses how Catholic and Protestant divisions were not theological disagreements at all, but a means to determine land ownership, political rights, loyalty, and often life itself. To a budding novelist, the story created a rich framework for writing about conflict. Accounts of the battles of the Boyne, Aughrim, and Limerick reveal not heroic romantic warfare but exhaustion, famine, mud, terror, and brutality. Fitzgibbon’s descriptions of soldiers dying slowly from musket wounds, starvation spreading after scorched-earth campaigns, and divided leadership among the Jacobites all help strip away modern romanticism about war which I strive to bring to the novel.

Recurring truths about the 17^th century kept popping up. Reputation could destroy lives. Religion shaped identity and loyalty. War was brutal and constant. Empire displaced entire populations. Survival depended on adaptability. People feared God, plague, famine, and political betrayal. Honour mattered. Bloodlines mattered. Religious identity mattered. Death was common and often sudden.

Having been provided with the building blocks of a believable historical world, dynastic ambition, war, exile, colonial expansion, and survival inside brutally unstable political systems, slowly my novel started taking shape. The sensory details contained within works I’d read were equally valuable to help me write about the texture of daily life… velvet gowns, sweat beneath brocade, banquets, candle wax. (Read more.)

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Charles I and Henrietta Maria at Oxford

 From Merton College:

The assassination of Buckingham in 1628 saved the marriage. Charles and Henrietta Maria found solace together and eight children were born between 1629 and 1644, a family famously celebrated in the portraits of Van Dyck. She developed into a discerning patron of the arts, an enthusiastic developer of houses and gardens, a confident participant in court politics and a committed patron of the Catholic cause in England. King and queen commissioned and participated in court masques that held up their mutual love as a model for the harmony of a wise king and his ordered realm. As tensions grew over Charles’s religious and fiscal policies across his three kingdoms, tensions that would lead in 1637 into a revolt in Scotland, his more anxious subjects saw in such productions evidence not of harmony, but of papist conspiracy at the heart of the court and of the queen at its head. Her elaborate baroque chapel, built by Inigo Jones at Somerset House, her cultivation of continental sacred music, her squad of French Capuchin priests, her encouragement of noble lady converts to Rome and her welcome to papal agents at court all fitted the picture.

As Charles turned reluctantly to his English Parliament to resolve the deepening crisis, criticism of the queen mounted. It was in part fear for her safety that led them to leave London in January 1642 and soon afterwards she crossed to Holland. She was both escorting her daughter to a marriage into the House of Orange and looking for support for her husband’s cause. Early in 1643, she sailed to Bridlington and set herself up at York, helping to direct the royal armies in the north, but her aim was always to re-join the king, who had made Oxford his base and Christ Church his home. Already in February she was writing to him, ‘I am in the greatest impatience in the world to join you’.

By mid-March 1643, rooms at Merton were being prepared for the queen and a route cleared between their host colleges so that king and queen could readily meet. She finally arrived on 14 July, entering the city by coach. There were speeches of welcome and the university authorities presented the queen with gloves and books of poems. Then she walked with Charles from Christ Church through one of the Canon’s gardens and ‘Corpus Christi backeside’ to Merton, where she settled into the Warden’s Lodgings at the junction of Front Quad and Fellows’ Quad. These were conveniently vacant as the Warden, Nathaniel Brent, had fled to London and sided with Parliament, which was by then busy trying to impeach the queen as well as to besiege her husband.

Henrietta Maria already knew Oxford. When she and Charles visited in August 1636, four-year-old Anthony Wood, the great chronicler of 17th-century Oxford who grew up in Postmasters Hall, saw them and remembered it for the rest of his life. Indeed, she already knew Merton, for Warden Brent had entertained the royal couple in 1629. Welcomed to the College with an oration by James Marsh, a long-serving fellow, they spent an hour in the long gallery that stretched from Brent’s lodgings along the top of Fellows’ Quad, enjoying afternoon sweetmeats.

She made her bedroom in Brent’s dining room, now the Breakfast Room, accessible from the stately carved staircase that Brent had just had built, while her entourage occupied the Queen’s Room over the Fitzjames Arch and adjoining areas. They included several servants who died at Oxford and were buried in the College Chapel – Richard North, Ellis Roberts, Mary Skevington – and the widows of aristocratic royalist captains, such as Lady Cobham and the Countess of Northampton. The Chapel hosted her Catholic services and at least one fellow, Dr John Greaves, the Savilian Professor of Astronomy, was later accused of spending far too much time with her Capuchin confessors. (Read more.)

 

From the BBC:

A rare large gold coin from the reign of Charles I has fetched £54,560 at auction. The coin, known as the Triple Unite, was minted in Oxford in 1643 during the English Civil War and had the value of 60 shillings, or three pounds. It depicts the King holding a sword and an olive branch, possibly signifying his desire for peace. It sold earlier at auction house Dix Noonan Webb as part of the Micheal Gietzelt Collection. (Read more.)

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Could Iran Acquire A Nuclear Weapon – Right Now?

 From AND Magazine:

We have imposed a naval blockade of Iran. In the wake of the imposition of that blockade, Pakistan announced the opening of six land routes into Iran from its territory. Vessels now dock in Pakistan, and containers are offloaded there for overland transit into Iran. It’s a bit more tedious and labor-intensive than simply sailing into a port on the Persian Gulf, and overland transport does not substitute for super tankers when it comes to oil.

For pretty much anything else you want to send to Iran, it works just fine. We here at AND have documented time and again how the Chinese are continuing to provide the Iranians with everything they need to build drones and missiles. Are we sure they would not use the same mechanism to help the Iranians across the finish line to nuclear weapons capability?

In April 2026, Gwadar Port in Pakistan processed around 11,000 standard shipping containers. For context, the same port handled roughly 8,300 containers throughout all of 2025. A large proportion of these containers came from China. Gwadar sits roughly 400 kilometers from the Strait of Hormuz. It has a deepwater port that allows large cargo vessels to dock. Anything could come from China via Gwadar and then be trucked into Iran. We have done nothing to interdict any of the major overland routes.

Even if we think Beijing is too sober-minded to arm Iran with nuclear weapons, are we sure North Korea would not? What about Pakistan, or for that matter, some cabal of radical Islamic Pakistan generals in Islamabad?

North Korea has a well-documented history of assisting Iran, primarily in ballistic missile technology and related military cooperation, dating back to the 1980s. This relationship is supported by U.S. intelligence assessments, UN reports, congressional research, and open-source analyses.

North Korea operates sophisticated, long-standing transnational networks for smuggling weapons, dual-use technology, and related materiel to evade UN sanctions and generate revenue. These networks rely on front companies, diplomats, intelligence operatives, ship-to-ship transfers, and third-country facilitators. (Read more.)

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Victory of the Leper King

 From The Collector:

In his short 24-year life, Baldwin IV celebrated many victories against his long-standing rival, Saladin. But his victory at the Battle of Montgisard is undoubtedly his most famous victory. Still recalled by witnesses 80 years later, Baldwin faced impossible odds. Yet his courage and fortitude ensured the 16-year-old Leper King delivered a crushing blow to his opponent.

King Baldwin IV came to the throne in 1174, a mere 13-year-old boy following the death of his father, King Amalric. Like the other Crusader States, the Kingdom of Jerusalem was a frontier kingdom, surrounded by hostile Muslim enemies. Warfare and conflict were a fundamental part of life, and kings were required to lead their troops into battle regularly.

King Amalric had offered the kingdom strong leadership and had been, in many ways, an ideal king. The accession of a boy untested in warfare was a huge blow to the kingdom. But youth was not the only hindrance to Baldwin’s reign. Shortly after his coronation, Baldwin was diagnosed with leprosy, his illness discovered by his tutor and friend, the chronicler William, Archbishop of Tyre. (Read more.)

  

The Fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Also from The Collector:

Crippled by leprosy since his teens, Baldwin IV had been a surprisingly effective king. His illness elicited compassion from his subjects, and their loyalty to their sick king was a key factor in the success of his kingship. In 1185, Baldwin finally succumbed to his illness and died. He was buried close to his father in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Within two years of Baldwin’s death, the kingdom he had striven so hard to defend had fallen into the hands of his longstanding Muslim rival, Saladin. Events leading up to the Leper King’s death help explain why, after his passing, the kingdom fell, and the city was lost to Christendom forever.

Baldwin IV, the Leper King who defied a death sentence, was diagnosed shortly after his coronation in 1174. It was understood that he would not father any children to succeed him. His elder sister, Sybilla, and his younger half-sister, Isabella, were therefore central to the succession.

Sybilla married William of Montferrat in 1177, and by him she bore a son named Baldwin. Montferrat died shortly before the child’s birth, and Sybilla later married a second husband, Guy of Lusignan. By 1183, Baldwin became too ill to rule and needed a regent to govern alongside him. Guy, as his brother-in-law and the husband of the heiress to the kingdom, was the natural choice. Guy proved to be a poor military commander whom the nobles refused to follow, and Baldwin removed him from his post within weeks of his appointment.

Guy’s unpopularity meant that the prospect of him succeeding to his brother-in-law’s throne was deeply contentious. Most vocal amongst those in opposition to Guy was Raymond III of Tripoli, a cousin of Baldwin IV and a man who served as his regent on several occasions. To ensure Guy would not succeed him and thus tear the kingdom apart, Baldwin attempted to have Guy’s marriage to Sybilla annulled. But Guy’s disobedience, along with Sybilla’s refusal to leave the husband she loved, thwarted Baldwin’s plans. (Read more.)

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"Your Virtues and Your Kindness"

Our Lady (or perhaps the virtue of Faith, since she carries the cross) and Marie-Antoinette hold the Gospels for Louis XVI as he makes his coronation oath. The picture is accompanied by the following verse:

The hands of Divinity
Louis, sends you the crown
The scepter, the sword, the law gives to you
But it is your virtues and your kindness
Which assures you the throne in our hearts.

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