Tea at Trianon: Understanding True Elegance

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, October 13, 2026

Understanding True Elegance

From Letters from the Old World:

While aesthetics are of great importance, the weight that gives them meaning comes from something much deeper than appearances. Elegance is not limited to clothing, although that is frequently the first impression a woman makes, and thus why the career woman reads as “aspirational” upon a cursory glance. True elegance, however, comes from a rightly-ordered life. This is why Girlbossing at the expense of home and children can never achieve the depth of elegance intrinsic to motherhood; mothers have earned a level of dignity and refinement through great personal sacrifice: their bodies, their focus, their nights, their mornings, their days and years.
All of the difficulty, all of the messiness, give the beauty of it a dimension that cannot be replicated by, “My boss was mean to me at work” or “I stayed an extra two hours at the office before coming home to cry and drink wine with my cat.” Underneath one life is a sense of vibrant fecundity, while underneath the other is the hollow realization that everything you have in the world is going to die with you. The deliberate uglification of motherhood has served to corrupt and subvert our understanding of these roots. It’s time our aesthetic perceptions better reflected the truth. (Read more.)