Tea at Trianon: The Infanta Margarita

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

Friday, June 29, 2007

The Infanta Margarita

Painted throughout her childhood by the great Velazquez, the Infanta Margarita was the inspiration for Oscar Wilde's short story. At the age of fifteen she was given in marriage to her uncle, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold, a notoriously ugly but kind man. (The way the Habsburgs married their close relatives was not quite as bad as the ancient Egyptians, but almost.) She had six children and died at age twenty-two. Leopold was Marie-Antoinette's great-grandfather, by another wife. Share

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: It was fortunate that she escaped the notorious Hapsburg chin. Thank God for the Bourbon blood infused into that line.

de Brantigny; June 29, 2007 at 2:38:00 PM EDT
elena maria vidal said...: I think also what saved Marie-Antoinette was the fact that her father was from the House of Lorraine- she inherited his good looks and light-hearted disposition.; June 29, 2007 at 2:50:00 PM EDT