South Bend, August 3, 1980
[After her graduation from the University of Notre Dame, our daughter Christine got married at the beginning of August. Her husband had graduated from Notre Dame the year before. As a student at the Law School of the University of St. Louis, he was pursuing his professional career as lawyer.]
A Sense of Conventional Decorum
American society has in many ways a sense of conventional decorum. This holds especially true to weddings for which many British customs have been acquired. It applies to the stylized form of the invitation to a wedding, the way to dress, the rehearsal dinner on the evening before the wedding and the reception following the wedding ceremony. It is also clearly defined what the parents of the bride and the parents of the groom have to do. Young people whom one usually sees in T-shirts are formally dressed up. The bridesmaids, usually friends of the bride, wear harmoniously blended dresses. The young gentlemen who stand by the groom as groomsmen wear tuxedos. For a week a wedding follows specified rules. Through the marriage of our daughter, we have suddenly become a part of a large American family. Only when your own children marry into an American family, the adaptation to American society is complete.
[Beginning of August], 1980
[After the wedding my wife and I had to recuperate. On our way to a vacation on Myrtle Beach at the Atlantic coast in South Carolina, we stopped in Asheville, North Carolina, to visit the house where Thomas Wolfe (1900 - 38) was born. That gave us the opportunity to also see the castle-like Biltmore House and Estate west of Asheville.]
Also America Has Its Castles
The most perfect replica of a French chateau stands in Asheville, North Carolina. Biltmore House was built by George W. Vanderbilt from 1890 - 95. The Loire chateaux Chambord and Blois served as models. Situated at the foot of the Great Smoky Mountains and Mount Pisgah, Biltmore House offers a stunningly beautiful view. The interior of Biltmore House is furnished with exquisite taste in a late medieval and Renaissance style. Dutch tapestries decorate the walls and valuable Dürer engravings are hanging in the alcoves. An artist craftsman from Vienna carved the wood paneling. The baroque fresco ceiling from an Italian palace has been so skillfully mounted in the library that the transatlantic transplantation could be forgotten.
Biltmore House is more than a curiosity. It is an expression of an American art form toward the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, which was predominantly following European models. Biltmore House is a castle in the wilderness, which surprises by its design and splendor. Looking inward, it produces a perfect illusion of a European ambience. But looking outward, it stands in an empty space, only surrounded by nature and a day’s ride on horseback away from the next Cherokee Indian Reservation.
[By the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries several dozens of such castle like estates were built in the United States. Most of them are now accessible to the general public as museums. Their eclectic-historical style was primarily developed by Richard Morris Hunt (1828-95), who had also designed Biltmore House and Estate.]