Tea at Trianon: The Beauty That Makes Men Build

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

Monday, November 2, 2026

The Beauty That Makes Men Build

From To the Ends of the Earth:

Only much later did I realize that what captivated me wasn’t simply feminine beauty. It was feminine beauty illuminated by virtue. And that realization eventually led me to a lovesick Florentine poet named Dante Alighieri, a young woman named Beatrice, and perhaps the greatest lesson ever written about why beauty has the extraordinary power to awaken the human heart.
Dante and I actually have a lot in common.
We’re both hopeless romantics.
The only difference is that he was a fourteenth-century Italian poet who gave the world one of the greatest works of literature ever written, and I’m a project coordinator from Georgia writing about my celebrity crushes on Substack. So he’s got me there.
If you’ve never read Dante, you’ve probably at least heard the name. Most people know him because of The Divine Comedy—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. They think it’s a story about Hell.
It isn’t.
It’s a story about love.
Or maybe more accurately, it’s a story about where love ultimately leads.
Long before Dante wrote about descending into Hell or climbing the mountain of Purgatory, there was a woman named Beatrice. According to tradition, Dante first saw her when they were both about nine years old. He encountered her only a handful of times throughout his life. They never courted. They never married. There was no grand romance worthy of Hollywood. If you pitched their story to a movie producer today, they’d probably reject it for “not enough chemistry.”
And yet, she became the great love of his life.
Not because she belonged to him, but because she changed him.
In La Vita Nuova (The New Life), Dante describes seeing Beatrice for the first time with words that almost sound excessive—until you’ve encountered someone who changes your life simply by existing. He writes, “At that instant, I say truly that the spirit of life, which dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that even the least pulses of my body shook.” (Read more.)