But the age of chivalry is gone
Now I really am mad. Michelle Obama takes a vacation and for no apparent reason the most wronged Queen in history is once more dragged through the mud by the jeering peasants. http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/08/026945.php
Let’s get this straight the butchers who slandered and murdered Marie Antoinette are the originators of the Obama’s Class Warfare. The Obamas are not the Bourbons, they are Robespierreand Marat. The stupid peasants put the Obamas in charge because they hated those mean old rich Republicans. Now, like the seamstress murdered in Tale of Two Cities, the peasants have found out that once you start a class warfare there is only a matter of time before Marat and Robespierre put you in the guillotine. The Obamas are NOT Marie Antoinette, they are her murderers.
But I won’t even try to defend history’s most wronged Queen. A far greater defender than I could ever be has already done so:
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely 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 the morning star full of life and splendor and joy.
Oh, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen 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 that threatened her with insult.
But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
Edmund Burke – 1793
