Tea at Trianon: Fire at the Hôtel Dieu

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there 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 a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall 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 which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, January 27, 2014

Fire at the Hôtel Dieu

Here is Hubert Robert's 1773 painting of the ruins of the great hospital in Paris after it was destroyed in a fire. (Via Anna Gibson.) The seventeen year old Marie-Antoinette wrote of it to her mother, saying:

… All the gazettes will be talking about the cruel fire at the Hôtel-Dieu; they have had to move the sick into the [cathedral of Notre Dame] and the Archbishop’s palace. There are usually five or six thousand sick in the hospital; in spite of the care that was taken, it was impossible to prevent a part of the building from burning…
… The Archbishop published a letter ordering a charity drive; I sent a thousand écus. I never mentioned it; I am being given embarrassing compliments, but they say it must be so as it gives a good example …