Time to ban the Act of Settlement

An Anglican bishop is calling for a ban to the Act of Settlement which forbids a future Bristish monarch from marrying a Roman Catholic according to a law passed in 1701. Catholics are still barred from the succession as well. Share

Vive le Roi!

Among monarchists in France, all is in readiness for January 21, as can be seen from this video. Share

Death of Napoleon on Saint Helena in 1821

Here is an article about the death of Napoleon from Lew Rockwell.com. They now think he died of cancer and not of arsenic poisoning as was once thought.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=RDG3EDXOUVSBLQFIQMFSFGGAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/news/2007/01/17/nbony17.xml

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Bring back the Latin Mass

Here is another great article from the archives of the NOR advocating the universal return to the Latin Mass. How long, O Lord? Share

The Fersen Legend, Part 2

Authors such as Simone Bertiere, Philippe Delorme, and Nesta Webster make it clear that although Marie-Antoinette might have been in love with Count Axel von Fersen at some point, there is no proof of what may have been in the depths her heart. Certainly, there is no evidence of an extramarital affair, and to over speculate on the queen's personal feelings is to violate the sanctuary of the human heart. Whatever her sentiments, they did not interfere with her duties as wife, mother, and queen. Adultery for a queen of France was high treason and if any of her many enemies at court discovered such a situation, had it existed, Louis XVI would have been forced to take her children away from her and banish her to a convent. Even the most basic knowledge of her temperament suggests that she was devoted to her children and would never have risked being separated from them. Those who claim that Louis XVI “knew” about his wife’s “affair” with Fersen, but looked the other way, are ignoring the moral scruples and religious principles of the roi tres chretien. He would never have permitted the mother of his children to carry on with another man, as the Giraults de Coursacs make clear in their writings.

The myth of Axel von Fersen as the Marie-Antoinette’s lover evolved after the deaths of both the count and the queen. Although, according to Fersen’s biographer Kermina, the count himself carelessly sewed the seeds of the legend when once upon hearing an opera favored by the queen he sighed, “Ah, those memories….” In 1822 an Irishman named O’Meara published Napoleon in Exile in which he repeated gossip that had been rampant at Bonaparte’s court, about Fersen and the queen, which were attributed to the queen’s maid Madame Campan. The rumor was proved to be false by British historian John Wilson Croker, who in October 1822 wrote in the Quarterly Review that Madame Campan had not been present at court when certain allegations were said to have occurred. Madame Campan herself refuted any such stories in her Memoirs when she said of Marie-Antoinette:

I who for fifteen years saw her attached to her august consort and her children, kind to her servitors, unfortunately too polite, too simple, too much on an equality with the people of the Court, I cannot bear to see her character reviled. I wish I had a hundred mouths, I wish I had wings and could inspire the same confidence in the truth which is so readily accorded to lies.

Other writers allege that Madame Campan fabricated this statement in order to return to the good graces of Marie-Antoinette’s daughter, who was annoyed with her for having taught Napoleon’s sisters at her finishing school. But then, if Madame Campan was a liar, of what value would her testimony be at all? But people more easily believe stories of scandals than they do stories of virtue....

For many years following, most historians and biographers, including Carlyle, the Goncourts, Imbert de Saint-Amand, de la Rocheterie, Bimbinet, Lenotre and de Nolhac did not take the Fersen story seriously and ignored it. When the letters of the queen and Count Fersen were published by his great nephew Baron de Klinckostrom in the late nineteenth century, they proved the nature of the queen and Fersen’s relationship to be principally a diplomatic one. According to Nesta Webster in Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette during the Revolution the letters were “written in a very difficult cipher to which a particular edition of Paul and Virginie provided the key….In certain of the letters, mainly those from the queen to Fersen, passages have been erased and are indicated by rows of dots in the printed text.” The Baron himself wrote that “the Fersen family has retained the greatest veneration for those holy and august martyrs, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, and there is nothing among the papers remaining from the Comte de Fersen’s which can cast a shadow on the conduct of the Queen.” (see Webster) The erasures of Fersen were most likely sensitive diplomatic issues, not declarations of love, as some romantics have claimed. They concealed allusions to the queen’s disagreements with her brothers-in-law Artois and Provence, or references to the Duc d’Orleans and other revolutionaries, or even mentions of spies or persons whose families would have been compromised had the letters fallen into the wrong hands.

In 1907 a certain Monsieur Lucien Maury published in Revue Bleue what he claimed to be a fragment of a love letter of the queen to Fersen, which includes the words: “Farewell, the most loved and loving of men. I embrace you with my whole heart….” The letter had no signature, was not in the queen’s handwriting, only in the cipher she used, jotted down by Fersen in cipher. There is no proof it was from the queen but could have been from one of the many ladies with whom Fersen dallied over the years.

In the 1930’s Alma Soderhjelm published the letters of Count Fersen to his sister Sophie, hoping to prove from those letters that the Count and the queen had had a love affair. It is upon Soderhjelm’s book that most of the modern romances about Marie-Antoinette are based. Now in the spring of 1790, Fersen was having a passionate affair with an Italian lady named Eleonore Sullivan, who had been the mistress of several aristocrats, including Marie-Antoinette’s brother Joseph II. She was married to an Irishman but as of 1790 was the mistress of a Scotsman named Quintin Crawford. She was kept by Monsieur Crawford in an elegant house in Paris, where she had a maid named Josephine, and a hideaway for Fersen in the attic. Later authors would fantasize that when Fersen mentioned “Josephine” in his letters, it was really a code name for Marie-Antoinette, which ignores the fact that Fersen gave “Josephine” menial instructions about a stove; he was more than likely referring to Mrs. Sullivan’s maid and the cold room in the attic.

Likewise, the woman Fersen writes ardently about to his sister at this time, who is honored by Sophie’s attentions, is most likely Mrs. Sullivan, whom he refers to as “El” or “elle.” Some try to make the queen the subject of his ecstatic passages, but why would the queen of France, in the midst of so many political intrigues, threatened by death, have wanted to ingratiate herself to Fersen’s sister? "Elle” (capitalized), however, is what Fersen uses when referring reverently to the queen, la Reine, whom he usually mentions in conjunction with the King. Baron Klinckowstrom quotes Fersen’s letter to his father in Feb 1791, in which he writes of his service to Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette: “I am attached to the King and the Queen and I owe it to them for the kindness they showed me when they were able, and I should be vile and ungrateful if I deserted them now that they can do nothing for me….”

As the Duchesse de FitzJames, a great-niece of Fersen, is quoted by Webster from a 1893 French periodical La Vie Contemporaine:

I desire first of all to do away with the lying legend, based on a calumny, which distorted the relations between Marie-Antoinette and Fersen, relations consisting in absolute devotion, in complete abnegation on one side, and on the other in friendship, profound, trusting and grateful. People have wished to degrade to the vulgarities of a love novel, facts which were otherwise terrible, sentiments which were otherwise lofty.

(To be continued….) Share

Book Review: Advice to a Young Wife from an old Mistress

'This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.' (Gen2:23) In this way the man...manifests for the first time joy and even exaltation, for which he had no reason before, owing to the lack of a being like himself. Joy in the other human being, in the second 'self,' dominates in the words spoken by the man...on seeing the woman....All that helps to establish the full meaning of original unity. the words are few, but each one is of great weight.

--Pope John Paul II, Original Unity of Man and Woman

Michael Drury’s Advice to a Young Wife from an old Mistress (Random House, 1993) is not a Catholic book, and yet it reads with more modesty and restraint than many books on the theology of the body. It speaks of the beauty of what married love should be, told by someone from the outside looking in the window. “Michael Drury” is the pen name for the author, who edited the musings of an anonymous “old mistress.” According to the Mistress:

I have said that I am old-fashioned, and it gratifies my late Victorian up-bringing to think that it is so. It also, I admit, amuses my late twentieth century sense of comic justice. I find it funny that I, who for almost thirty years was mistress to an eminent man and no little scandal, should now be the outraged and proper one, upholder of the old order. Funny and yet sad, for what shocks me is the dehumanization of love by young and wholly legal wives who chop and nail down and reduce that powerful force to a technique no different from driving a car or mastering the methods of good grooming. I am appalled by their consumer approach, their concern with management, their ineffectuality as women - - sexless, competitive, anxiety-ridden. (p.11)

She views modern “sex education” with distaste. In my opinion, her comments are some of the best descriptions I have come across of what is wrong, on a natural level, with violating the modesty of young people in such a manner.

I am opposed to sex education as such. It so fatuously confuses vocabulary with vocation. We are not minds or bodies or sex urges or case histories any more than we are mechanisms for breathing or digesting: we are persons…. By all means, let us have the biological facts, but not as if they were the whole truth, and not, in heaven’s name, in classrooms and groups….Sex education inevitably becomes sex theory, how one “should” feel, react, think, care….A knowledge of averages and generalities creates an anxiety to prove oneself….Nothing could be more puritanical and proscriptive. No wonder modern marriage is afflicted with inward weeping. (pp.76-77)

The point is made that too often married people think that matrimony affords them the liberty to say whatever they want to their spouse.

Have a care for the loose talk inside your head. It reflects in a hundred subtle ways: tone of voice, a glance, a gesture, the things you choose to laugh at, the quickness or slowness of response. All this in turn governs the quality and amount of love you will allow, and thus the kind you get. (p. 32)

(I think Saint John of the Cross said something similar: “Bridle your tongue and your thoughts very much, direct your affection habitually toward God, and your spirit will be divinely enkindled.”)

The Mistress encourages wives to keep an aura of mystery, to avoid self-pity like the plague, and to cultivate talents and interests, in order to maintain the dynamism, the give-and-take of the relationship.

The only people worth loving are those who are determined to find life good whether you love them or not. The bubble belief that dumping one’s happiness on another enhances affection is merely shirking. Emerson said that God offers to every mind the option between truth and repose, but not both. The same choice has to be made between love and laziness.

In the nature of things, we meet and marry long before we are full-scale identities, but that is no excuse for staying incomplete. We love most those who make us fulfill whatever greatness lies in us, not those who induce us to resign it. Remember how it was at first, how you went around pouring out; and refill your reservoir from the same springs as before you met, for that is what brought love to your door. (pp. 52-53)

How vital it is for a marriage to keep a sense of adventure, spontaneity and fun, amid the monotony that often becomes part of building a life and a home.

Spontaneity coexists with a love affair, but marriage does not have to be a rigidly planned economy. A young widow struggling to make ends meet said to me, ‘I’m glad for all the reckless things we did. If we had waited until we could afford them, now it would be too late.’

….Love endures not in a perpetual day, but in the reality of having seen and touched and known, an alchemy that changes forever one’s relationship to time. Love will never hold back the dark, but it is so blazing a truth that it compensates for transcience. Married lovers would do well to remember that….

Part of falling in love is the heady blend of familiarity and strangeness. Here is someone at once so like you that you have come home, and yet so different he opens a thousand windows on the universe. Love needs both aspects to endure….” (pp.42-43)

Some of the final comments about love are really beautiful.

Intellectual bankruptcy is no more attractive than any other kind of poverty. Intelligence is necessary for oneself first, and after that for love to come alive in. Any man who is drawn solely to surfaces and youthful charm is eventually not going to be enough of a man for the woman you shall have become, if you grow at all. It is just that simple. Love is vastly more than sex and family life, a social unit, an economic cog.…Love is a wealth…where mind, body, and spirit meet and dissolve, to gather again in new dimensions and forms. (p107)

Spousal love is meant to reflect the love of Christ for His Church. Man and woman are destined to find Heaven together, even as they journey towards the New Jerusalem. Love as sacrifice and sacrament is an integral part of the Christian life, and this book so eloquently expresses so many sublime truths while dealing with practicalities. I found it to be an inspiring tool for the ascent.

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Schonbrunn

Marie-Antoinette's childhood home. (I borrowed the picture from Triumphant Baroque.) Share

Blessed Charles of Austria and Empress Zita

Here is an article from a few years ago about Blessed Emperor Karl von Habsburg and his empress, Zita of Bourbon-Parma, another union of the Bourbon and Habsburg families, just like Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Share

Emperor Franz Joseph

Here is an article from Triumphant Baroque about Emperor Franz Joseph, the "longsuffering." The Emperor of Austria-Hungary, he lost his beloved wife Empress Elizabeth to assassination and his only son to suicide. He was a great, great grand-nephew of Marie-Antoinette. Share