Tea at Trianon: 'Hemingway in Toronto'

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, August 8, 2026

'Hemingway in Toronto'

From Old Hollywood and Beyond:

“Paris in the Dark Ages,” wrote Belloc, gave way to an ‘awakening Europe’ in which “the Normans show first how true a kingdom, with peace and order and unity, may be established” and how “Rome did not die; it was transformed” and how “the philosophy of the Empire had been touched with mysticism” and “the shrine, the miracle, the unseen had replaced the clear and positive attitude, the speculative and cold intelligence, which had distinguished the philosophy of Rome.”
In its place was “medieval religion, its legends, its marvels . . . the one good counterbalance that ultimately saved the world from barbarism.”
Hemingway absorbed it all and gave it back to us, brilliantly, in The Sun Also Rises. While many think this, his debut novel, is just about drinking and debauchery, underlying that decadence is an iceberg of spiritual healing.
Its protagonist, “Jake” Barnes, is inspired by St. James—whom Mary, i.e., Our Lady of Pilar, appeared to shortly after her Assumption into Heaven. On the eve of his trip to Pamplona, Jake refers to the Paris street named for St. James as “the rigid north and south of the rue saint-Jacques.” A curious description, Stoneback thought, since there’s nothing rigid about it, unless the underlying spirituality along this medieval main street is, in fact, the whole point of the literary device.
Le long de la rue, there’s the famous Church of the Val-de-Grâce, meaning “vale of grace”—an architectural splendor King Louis XIII’s wife, Queen Anne of Austria, built to celebrate the birth of their son Louis XIV (“The Sun King”); and the adjoining monastery, later converted into a hospital for wounded soldiers, imaging Jake’s war wounds—Hemingway’s, too. Then there’s that plaque dedicated to Pamplona, a town along the Chemins Pèlerinage—the Way of St. James. (Read more.)