Monday, July 28, 2025

Marie-Antoinette’s ‘Trianon Guitar'

 
 
Madame Clotilde of France, sister of Louis XVI

Madame Clotilde of France, later Queen of Sardinia

Armand playing a guitar
I could not find a painting of Marie-Antoinette playing the instrument now called the "Trianon Guitar." Probably because she gave it as a gift. There are two portraits of Madame Clotilde, sister of Louis XVI, playing a similar guitar. There is also a picture of Marie-Antoinette's adopted son Armand playing a guitar, but not the same one, since it looks smaller. From Artnet:

A lover of music who played several instruments and sang, Marie Antoinette regularly held carefree musical and theatrical performances in her bucolic Trianon retreat in France, just outside the Palace of Versailles, while the rest of the country was heaving towards bloody revolution. In this haven from palace pressures, including her Petit Trianon, a chateau given to her by her husband, King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette also offered instruments to friends and members of her inner circle.

What is believed to be one of them, a rare “en bâteau,” or boat-shaped guitar, made by Jacques-Philippe Michelot ca. 1775, will go on sale at the Aguttes auction house in Neuilly-sur-Seine on December 9. Kept in “remarkable condition,” the so-called “Trianon guitar”—decorated with ivory rosettes depicting the “Temple of Love” from the Trianon estate—was also “at the forefront” of French craftsmanship at the end of the 18th century, said Aguttes house expert Grégoire de Thoury, speaking to Artnet News.

Thoury researched the instrument’s provenance and relied on family documents, carefully kept over centuries, stating that the queen had given the guitar to her friend, the Marquise de La Rochelambert-Thévalles (1758–1835), who survived the French Revolution by fleeing to Switzerland. No official palace records exist for the personal gift.

About the same age as the queen, the marquise was a member of the queen’s inner entourage, praised for her musical talent and voice. The two women performed together, and the marquise’s parents were regulars in the king’s court. Her godfather was Louis de Bourbon, Dauphin of France.

The marquise’s family preserved the queen’s guitar in the ensuing centuries, and one of her descendants has put it up for auction. With French institutions reportedly interested in acquiring the instrument, according to the French daily Le Parisien, Thoury said its owner “would think it wonderful…if it became available to the whole world to see” in a museum. (Read more.)


From Tatler:

Aguttes writes that ‘although to date there is no document to formally certify that this guitar was the subject of a gift from Queen Marie Antoinette… Patrick Barbier, music historian, reports in his book Marie Antoinette and Music that Marie Antoinette used to buy many musical instruments’ and ‘gladly gave them’ as gifts. With this in mind, ‘considering the attested proximity of Queen Marie-Antoinette and the Marquise de La Rochelambert, it is therefore quite probable.’ Aguttes describes the instrument as a ‘rare so-called boat guitar’, with a rosewood body inlaid with mahogany and ‘adorned with ivory and ebony stringing’. It features a ‘spruce top with a beautiful tight grain’, plus ornate decoration of ‘openwork ivory rosettes representing two doves kissing on a temple of love.’ It originally had five strings but was reassembled with six strings around 1810.(Read more.)

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Can We Ever Know How Many People Were Killed in Rwanda?

 From It Can Always Get Worse:

While the incentives for perpetrators to be deceptive in interviews are obvious, the incentives for survivors are no less apparent, especially in the years after 1994 when such stories are being told in the context of Paul Kagame’s stiflingly despotic Rwandan government having made speech that deviates in any way from the official narrative a crime under the laws against “genocide ideology” that can carry a life sentence. People making, or wishing to keep open the possibility of, asylum claims to try to escape the Kagame regime likewise have incentives to shade their stories.

But make the heroic assumption that data gathered from survivors is not polluted by wilful deception: the frailty of human memory and finding a representative sample—even for a prefecture, let alone if results from one area are going to be generalised to a national estimate—mean the confidence in any resultant estimate should be low.

The authors highlight six sources of data:

  1. African Rights, an NGO founded in 1993, produced a report in September 1994, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, compiling “all available eyewitness accounts” and in its 1995 second edition reached previously inaccessible prefectures. Purporting to cover the whole country, it documented about 130,000 fatalities.

  2. Human Rights Watch released, Leave None to Tell the Story, in 1999, again mostly from oral accounts: of Rwandans on all sides, diplomats, and United Nations officials. HRW’s intention was overtly activist—to “educate” and “bolster public support” for the trials of the accused genocidaires—but it ostensibly also gathered data from the whole of Rwanda. It documented about 40,500 fatalities.

  3. IBUKA (“REMEMBER”), a Tutsi advocacy group formed in late 1995, undertook the “Kibuye Dictionary Project” from 1996 to 1999 that tried to identify all the victims in that prefecture and the circumstances of their deaths. Over 25,500 fatalities were listed.

  4. The Ministry of Higher Education, Scientific Research, and Culture—a Cabinet Ministry of the Rwandan government—gathered data, in collaboration with other ministries, from November 1995 to January 1996 in a project called, “The Commission for the Memorial of the Genocide and Massacre in Rwanda”. The nationwide survey recorded approximately 755,500 fatalities.

  5. The Ministry of Youth, Culture, and Sport was deputised—for reasons best-known to the Rwandan government—to identify and excavate mass-graves. Other ministries helped, including Defence. Forensic evidence was gathered and the country-wide project was completed the same year it was initiated: 1995. Nearly 823,500 fatalities were reported.

  6. The Ministry of Local Administration and Department of Information and Social Affairs began, in 2000, an effort to count and name the victims of the 1994 killings, with the goal of discovering the most impacted zones for the purposes of deciding on aid allocations. Survivors and neighbours of the dead—or, in practice, missing—were interviewed and the 2002 report, “The Counting of Genocide Victims”, estimated nearly 940,000 fatalities. (Read more.)

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The Most Controversial Religious Artwork of All Time

Personally, I never saw anything controversial about it. From ArtNet News:

Made by Bernini, arguably the greatest artist of the Baroque era, between 1647 and 1652 the sculpture depicts Saint Teresa of Àvila, also known as Teresa de Jesús (1515–1582), a Spanish Carmelite nun, who was canonized in 1622, merely 25 years before the sculpture’s creation.

Born to an aristocratic Spanish family, Saint Teresa was a religious reformer who founded the Discalced Carmelites order. She experienced mystic visions, which she described in penetrating detail in her influential vernacular writings, most famously in her autobiography The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus.  

The sculpture was commissioned by Venetian Cardinal Federico Cornaro (1579–1653), who had chosen the church, which was home to an order of Discalced Carmelites, for his burial chapel, making Saint Teresa a fitting subject matter. (Read more.)

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Sunday, July 27, 2025

La Maison de Frédéric

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An English country house in France. From House and Garden:

‘I always say that it’s an English country house in France,’ says Utah-based Kyong Millar when describing La Maison de Frédéric, her charming holiday home in the south of France. If the English influence seems unexpected for a couple from Salt Lake City, Kyong – founder of clothing boutique Koo De Ker – explains that years before buying their holiday home near Uzès, she and husband Donnie almost moved to the UK. In preparation, many trips were made to the Cotswolds, taking design notes from National Trust houses and poring over issues of House & Garden.

Their transatlantic move fell through, but the couple had already fallen in love with Europe, and Kyong in particular had discovered an affinity with traditional English decorating. She references those early lessons in room layout, arranging objects and layering patterns as being pivotal to her vision for La Maison de Frédéric.

Kyong and Donnie had holidayed in the south of France for a decade before their 2020 ‘now or never’ purchase. They loved the slow lifestyle, but the houses they rented always felt lacking in design or functionality, so the couple often mooted buying a place of their own. The fairytale villages of the Luberon didn’t appeal. ‘We wanted to learn to speak French in a working town where people actually live,’ says Kyong. Uzès, 40 kilometres west of Avignon, felt like such a community, and so it became the central point of their search. (Read more.)

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Ensuring the Israeli Hostages in Gaza Are Not Forgotten

 From It Can Always Get Worse:

Last night, JNF UK organised a screening of the new documentary, Home: Omer Shem Tov Speaks, at a north London synagogue. Omer was abducted by HAMAS during the 7 October 2023 pogrom, and finally released after 505 days, on 22 February 2025. After the film, there was a question-and-answer with Omer and the director, Yoram Zak.

Omer, days short of his twenty-first birthday, was at the Nova music festival when he was kidnapped along with his sister, Maya Regev, and his younger brother, Itay. A young man they had met at the concert had driven some to safety then drove back for Omer and his siblings, but their car was stopped by HAMAS. The driver was subsequently murdered in captivity. Both Itay and Maya were shot, and Omer was severely beaten, then forced to the ground in front of a truck; he was sure the terrorists were going to kill him by driving it over his head. Thankfully, that did not happen, and Omer’s siblings were released during the first ceasefire in November 2023. The tortures of HAMAS’s “doctors” left Maya with injuries that multiple surgeries have tried to correct.

After being displayed to a euphoric Gazan crowd, Omer was initially kept with Itay in an above-ground apartment. Once Itay was released, Omer was taken into the tunnels, and placed in a tiny cage with no light—where the darkness was so total there were “no shadows”, as he puts it. (The film is in Hebrew with English subtitles.) Omer immediately had an asthma attack. HAMAS eventually found him an inhaler. The attempts of Omer’s parents to get his inhaler to him through the Red Cross went nowhere as the “humanitarian” organisations have not been allowed access to the Israeli hostages, and have not made it a major part of their public advocacy to try to change this situation.

In the documentary, Zak recreates the image of this confinement such that Omer seems to be telling his story from within the underground cell. Given a torch with enough battery for two or three hours per day, Omer tried to save this meagre light for mealtimes. Initially, Omer was given two pittas per day and some salty water. This was steadily reduced down to half a pitta, and then he was on one biscuit per day and some salty water. He made efforts to protract the process: waiting two or three hours before having half the biscuit, then again for the other half.

To pass the time, Omer tried to sleep as much as possible. A lot of his conscious time was spent talking to God. Omer was not really praying for release: he explains a realisation that people approach Hashem with requests, but nobody every asks how He is, so Omer chose to start that way, and then offered thanks for being alive, for the food he did have. If Omer did get to asks, it was for strength and guidance, and for his family.

After fifty days, Omer was moved to a slightly bigger cell, with some light and orange walls, again recreated in the film. Omer was allowed to shower for the first time. The dirt on his body was so thick by then it could be scraped off. He was given something like an actual meal and devoured it. The HAMAS terrorists stood by insulting him as a “Jewish pig”. Understandably, he was not bothered at that stage: he had become “very skinny”, his bones visible. An interrogation had been planned for the next day but never took place because the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had appeared above the tunnel and this distracted his captors. (Read more.)

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The Maryland Project

 From author and historian Justine Brown.

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Saturday, July 26, 2025

"Charming and Engaging"


 A review of My Queen, My Love from royal historian Theodore Harvey at Royal World:

Most Americans are probably not aware that the US state of Maryland was originally named after Queen Henrietta Maria (1609-1669), daughter of King Henri IV of France (1553-1610) and wife of the ill-fated King Charles I of England (1600-1649). Readers seeking an introduction to this unjustly neglected historical figure would do well to immerse themselves in this charming and engaging book by Elena Maria Vidal, who appropriately enough lives in Maryland.

"My Queen, My Love," which covers the title character's life from her childhood in France through the births of her own children in the 1630s on the eve of the English Civil War, is a historical novel, so includes fictionalized dialogue, but is firmly based on historical research like any biography. Its style vividly brings the complex and colourful world of the 17th century to life, from Italy [homeland of her mother Marie de Medici (1573-1642)] to France to England. The central importance of religion is evident from the outset. Daughter of the pragmatic convert Henri IV, the devoutly Catholic Henrietta Maria finds herself in an impossible situation as wife of the staunch Anglican Charles I in what is by then a predominantly and fervently Protestant country, with even the King's own high church Anglicanism increasingly deemed too "catholic" by some. While the author clearly shares Henrietta Maria's devout Roman Catholicism, it is to Vidal's credit that the sincerity of King Charles who believes that his Church of England is truly Catholic is depicted in a well-rounded manner. I particularly appreciated the writer's evident love of liturgical beauty as reflected in lavish descriptions of Catholic ceremonies including sacred music. Henrietta Maria's enjoyment of the secular arts, so scandalous to the dour Puritans especially her own participation in Masques, is a consistent theme as well.

Anglicans like me who revere Charles as a Martyr, aware of his and his wife's fervent loyalty to each other during the terrible trials of the Civil War which (after the time period covered by this book) would end in his execution and her widowhood, are accustomed to thinking of their marriage as an ideal devoted Christian one, as indeed it later became. However it must be admitted that this was not always the case. While vaguely aware that King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria had had difficulties in the early years of their marriage, I had not thought much about the details until I read this book. One sensitive issue is that in order to gain French approval for their 1625 marriage Charles had had to make various promises, particularly those related to the Queen's Catholicism, that once back in England he finds himself unable to keep. It particularly galls her, understandably, that money from her dowry ended up being used to fund a war with her native France! While Vidal's Henrietta Maria never falters in her ultimately heroic love for Charles, the reader can also see without dismissing his point of view how Charles might have felt frustrated at times. (Read more.)


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Baltimore’s Stunning Case Study in Government Waste

From Direct Line News:

Baltimore City’s failed website redesign isn’t just a digital misfire—it’s a poster child for government dysfunction, waste, and cronyism. After three years, three vendors, and nearly $4 million spent, the city still doesn’t have a functional BaltimoreCity.gov. But what it does have is a paper trail of political favoritism, poor oversight, and squandered taxpayer funds.

This project, intended to modernize the City’s website to be more user-friendly and compliant with accessibility standards, has instead spiraled into an embarrassing money pit. As detailed by The Baltimore Brew’s Mark Reutter in a July 17 exposé, the total cost is now pegged at $3.9 million—with no live website to show for it. Worse, the design currently in development is reportedly already outdated. Reutter’s reporting is based on city procurement documents, vendor contracts, and internal communications, which paint a picture of ballooning budgets and nonexistent results. Then came a Fox Baltimore investigation that added a troubling layer of political entanglements to the mess.

As Fox Baltimore reported on July 17, Baltimore’s IT department invited six companies to bid on the website redesign in 2021. Only two submitted proposals. One bid $300,000. The other—Fearless Solutions—came in at $1.2 million, four times higher. The city awarded the contract to the more expensive bidder. Fearless Solutions is owned by Delalai Dzirasa, a donor to Mayor Brandon Scott’s campaign and the husband of Baltimore’s then-Deputy Mayor, Dr. Letitia Dzirasa.

Mayor Scott defended the award: “This is a professional service contract. They went out and talked to multiple contractors and decided to go with Fearless.” What he failed to mention: this project never underwent a full competitive bid process. The city used a selective procurement approach, bypassing the broader competition that is usually required for projects of this scale.

The original contract was valued at $1.078 million. But five months in, Fearless asked for an additional $887,000. Then, seven months later, the city approved another $250,000, bringing the total payout to Fearless to over $2.2 million. Yet despite all that, there is still no functioning website. Inspector General Isabel Mercedes Cumming stated flatly: “There is no website at this time. In fact, the company we hired stopped working for the city a year ago yesterday.” (Read more.)

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Those Who Hate Boys

 From Becoming Noble:

Terrible solutions are proposed. No matter how much traditional masculinity is undermined, powerful voices continue to insist that the real problem is that it hasn’t been destroyed altogether. ‘Only then will boys be happy.’ My thesis for this series is that there is a need to defend true masculinity on its own terms, not on the implicit terms of progressives who either don’t understand it or actively hate it.

Take, for example, this debate at the Oxford Union on traditional masculinity. The opening argument of the opposition - who are supposed to be defending traditional masculinity - starts with asserting the need for a ‘contemporary and inclusive’ masculinity which is accessible to anyone ‘of any race, sexuality, or other identity’.

The best defence that this speaker can mount on this anaemic foundation is an argument that masculinity is useful for activism and community building like the ‘Movember Foundation’. After this slightly pathetic case she goes back to conceding “being forced to conform to a set of expectations is uncomfortable and even dangerous. We should allow people to access the gender expressions that make them feel like their truest self.” (Read more.)

 

Society will get the worst behavior it tolerates. From Culturcidal:

Although the shine is definitely off the halo these days, for a brief period of time, Rudi Giuliani had enough respect put on his name that he was considered a FRONT RUNNER for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008. At first glance, this seems ludicrous. After all, Giuliani is a moderate Republican who is best known for being the Mayor of New York City. Why were conservatives so in love with this guy?

Some of it had to do with him doing a good job during 9/11, but the thing he was most famous for was cleaning up NYC. The city was a crime-ridden hellscape before Giuliani took over, but “America’s mayor” had a plan to deal with it.

He embraced something called “Broken Windows” policing. The general idea behind it is that when small crimes are unaddressed, large crimes soon follow. You let people smash windows, put up graffiti, and jump the turnstiles at the subway, and people assume no one cares, and they can get away with more.

Under Giuliani, the NYC Police Department got very aggressive, very visible, and cracked down on these “small” crimes. As a result, not only did it improve the look and image of NYC, but the crime rate also plunged. How much? Quite a bit, actually.... (Read more.)


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