Tea at Trianon: 'The Sun Also Rises' at 100

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

Thursday, July 30, 2026

'The Sun Also Rises' at 100

From First Things:

The Sun Also Rises shows men and women trying to salvage a life they can call “good” from the wreckage of their own hopes, and the ruin of an entire civilization. Those aureate obscenities now proscribed had meant a great deal before Verdun and the Somme and Passchendaele. They had defined the things men owed to Caesar and to their comrades and to themselves, and decreed what was worth killing and dying for. After the war’s pointless carnage, the vocabulary of the moral life shrank to the bare essentials.

Hemingway offers his own definition of the good under the new dispensation—the word that his narrator, Jake Barnes, uses dozens of times to connote the union of physical pleasure and moral rightness: You feel what is good, you know it without thinking about it, as though simple sensation were the only guide to right living. “It felt good to be warm and in bed”; “It was a good dinner. Food had an excellent place in the count’s values. So did wine. The count was in fine form during the meal. So was Brett. It was a good party”; “You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time.” A good time, for this expatriate crowd attending the fiesta in the Spanish town of Pamplona, means good fishing, good bullfighting, a good hotel room, a good meal, lots of good drink, and good drinking companions.

What it emphatically doesn’t mean, at least for Jake, is good loving. The beautiful Brett, Lady Ashley, loves Jake, and Jake loves her; but Jake suffered a war wound that disqualifies him from sexual pleasure, so she takes up with several perfectly wrong men one after the other, including a superb matador fifteen years younger than she, who takes a bad beating from a previous lover of hers adept with his fists. (This jilted and jealous lover, once the middleweight boxing champion of Princeton, is an anti-Semite’s dream so odious that the poisonous caricature nearly spoils the novel.) Brett is feeling quite virtuous, between spasms of self-hatred, after she decides to leave the love-besotted torero for his own good. “You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch,” she says. “It’s sort of what we have instead of God.” “Some people have God,” Jake replies. “Quite a lot.” (Read more.)