Tea at Trianon: Pensées on the Pascal Institute

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

Wednesday, July 8, 2026

Pensées on the Pascal Institute

From The New Criterion:

The third-oldest college in the United States is small and, to borrow a word from the headline of a recent positive article about it in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “weird.” Founded in 1696 as King William’s School, St. John’s College in Annapolis has since 1937 provided its undergraduates, all of whom study Ancient Greek and are working toward a BA in liberal arts, with a University of Chicago–inspired curriculum in the great books that eschews nearly all secondary material. My mother-in-law went there, and two of my most talented former students are “tutors,” as the members of the faculty who teach small groups of self-motivated “Johnnies” are referred to locally.

Great books programs are a North American, and largely American, phenomenon. And there is—or, rather, has been—nothing like St. John’s outside the United States. What is surprising, in view of the Eurocentric nature of the curriculum, is that the idea of great books hasn’t had much of a hold in Europe. At least, that is, until now, with the advent of the Pascal Institute, in the Netherlands, with which St. John’s has formed a partnership.

This is the first thing one sees when going to the St. John’s website: “The following teachers will return to St. John’s College next year,” followed by a scrolling list with such names as Sappho, Sophocles, Lucretius, Virgil, Thomas Aquinas, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Jane Austen, Abraham Lincoln, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Flannery O’Connor, and James Baldwin—and, oh yes, Blaise Pascal. Some are American, true. But most of these remarkable figures are European.

Also European, by birth, was St. John’s most famous tutor-teacher of the past few decades, the classicist and philosopher Eva Brann (1929–2024), though she became as American as apple pie. To quote the beautiful appreciation of Brann in The Lamp by St. John’s best-known current tutor-teacher, the classical philosopher Zena Hitz, “Her American identity was the strongest of anyone I have known.” (Read more.)