Tea at Trianon: A Journey to Antarctica

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, September 29, 2026

A Journey to Antarctica

From Lit Hub:

I do not remember my father Eddie, Shackleton’s youngest child, ever sitting me down and telling me about his father. Indeed, he hardly knew him, being only 10 years old when Ernest died of a heart attack on January 5, 1922, during the Shackleton-Rowett Quest expedition.

I learned the story by asking about the Hurley photographs on the walls. They were sometimes confusing for a child: “Why was it dark when it was not night?” and “Why did all the men have beards?” I was particularly intrigued by one photograph showing Endurance in the ice, reduced to a skeleton, and the sled dogs sitting around her. I would ask, “What happened to the dogs?” The grownups would never give me a straight answer, and it was not until years later that I was deemed old enough to know the truth, that as on most expeditions of the era, the men killed and ate the dogs when food ran short.
It was not only children who were sometimes confused by a Hurley image. I remember one visitor spending ages contemplating a view of rocky, snow-covered peaks, brooding over a magnificent glacier tumbling into a large fjord, full of huge blocks of floating ice. Eventually, our visitor announced triumphantly, “I know where that is! It is Lulworth Cove!” Hereafter, it was known as Lulworth Cove in the family. In fact, it was South Georgia.

Hurley’s cine film South, originally released in 1919 as In the Grip of the Polar Pack-Ice, was also of significance for me, since it was the first time I saw my grandfather moving and smiling. The film shows astonishing images of the death of the Endurance. Hurley set cameras around her and showed her masts crashing down. (Read more.)