向晩意不適，驅車登古原，
夕陽無限好，只是近黃昏。
Going up to the Lo You Height
(translated by our friend, Charles)
I felt sorrow toward the evening,
I drove up to the ancient highland,
The evening sun is so beautiful ,
But it is approaching the night fall.
A good friend of ours emailed us talking about how he was excited and stirred while visiting Xi’an (西安), during which he saw a poem (see above) of poet, 李啇隱 (of 1,300 years ago), engraved in the stone. He wrote,
“當我登上樂游原時，想起一千三百年前名詩人李啇隱，帶著「向晚意不適」的心情，在這裡兩手背後躊𨀉而行，我心中覺得我們是那麼接近，心情的喜悅與感觸不可言喻”
No need to translate as it is the same as what Lin Yu-Tang said in his “Art of reading” essay in The Importance of Living, (Charles read all books in English and Chinese by Lin Yu-Tang; I only read his English books.)
“Scholars seemed to have lived in different ages, separated by centuries, and yet their modes of thinking and feeling were so akin that their coming together across the pages of a book was like a person finding his own image.”
My friend wrote, “説不定我們會碰頭呢！” (We may meet one day!), I wrote, “but, you have met.”
It was the same stir in me when I saw “Oeil-de-Boeuf” in Versailles Palace September of 2014. After marveling at the splendor and majesty of Grande Galerie (or called Galerie des Glaces because of its grand mirrors), we turned around the corner; Oeil-de-Boeuf immediately came into view.
One will come across “Oeil-de-Boeuf” hundreds of times reading Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution. Oeil-de-Boeuf is no longer just the name of a room, it is a symbol.
The fateful day was October 5 of 1789. Women in the market place were protesting the high price and shortage of bread; they quickly became a rioting mob, tens of thousands, gathering all the weapons they could lay their hands, marching to Versailles; as one historian said “the female insurrectionary force resembles the English Naval one.”
They broke through the guards, killing two of them, chasing Queen Marie Antoinette through Oeil de Boeuf to King’s bed chamber. The photo (above) shows the small back door, through which she ran to the Oeil de Boeuf. Next day they were forced to move to Paris, never returned.
The chasing at Oeil de Boeuf is as important an event as the storming of Bastille (7/14/1789) although less well known. These events marked the turning points for violence in the unpredictable and uncontrollable revolution process.
While in Oeil de Boeuf, seeing the “bull eye” window, Janice and I quickly realized where we were; we thus fired up our imagination, seeing how the queen ran for her life; hearing the clamorous shouting of the mob; the scene was just like evening TV news to us. Marie Antoinette (the most unfairly vilified woman in history) was not just the portrait hanging in her bed chamber; she was real; history came alive.
You may be interested in reading what Thomas Carlyle wrote about the chasing in Oeil de Boeuf in his The French Revolution, written in 1837, forty some years after the event.
Trembling maids of Honour, . . . hastily wrap the Queen; not in robes of state. She flies for her life, across the Oeil de Boeuf; against the main door of which too Insurrection batters. She is in the King’s Apartment, in the King’s arms; she clasps her children amid a faithful few. The Imperial-hearted bursts into mother’s tears. “O my friends, save me and my children!” The battering of Insurrectionary axes clangs audible across the Oeil-de-Boeuf. What an hour!
The following paragraph is three years after the revolution began,
Three short years ago there was still Versailles and an Oeil-de-Boeuf: now there is that watched Circuit of the Temple, girt with drag-on-eyed Municipals, where, as in its final limbo, Royalty lies extinct. In the year 1789, Constituent Deputy Barrere ‘wept’ in his Break-of-Day Newspaper, at sign of a reconciled King Louis; and now in 1792, Convention Deputy Barrere, perfectly tearless, may be considering whether the reconciled King Louis shall be guillotined or not.
This paragraph described the mood in Versailles in 1787 in the early days of the revolution.
What a France, through these winter months of the year 1787! The very Oeil-de-Boeuf is doleful, uncertain; with a general feeling, among the Suppressed, that it were better to be in Turkey . . . in the Trianon little-heaven, her majesty, one evening, takes Besenval’s [The last Commander of the Swiss Guards of France] arms; asks his candid opinion. The intrepid Besenval’s—having, as he hopes, nothing of the syncophant in him, plainly signifies that, with a Parlement in rebellion, and an Oeil-de-Boeuf in suppression, the King’s Crown is in danger; whereupon, singular to say, her Majesty, as if hurt, changed the subject.
The following is the happier days in Oeil-de-Boeuf in 1783,
On the 3rd of November 1783, the Oeil-de-Boeuf rejoices in its new Controller-General. . . . Great, in any case, is the felicity of the Oeil-de-Boeuf. Stinginess has fled from these royal abides: suppression ceases; . . . .
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