Tea at Trianon: The Bourbon Crypt in Nova Gorica, Slovenia

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

The resting place of the last of the Bourbons is in the Franciscan Monastery of Konstanjevica in Nova Gorica in Slovenia. Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, the daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, is buried there, with her husband and cousin, the Duc d'Angouleme, as well as her uncle Charles X. Also in the crypt are the princess' nephew Henri V, his wife Marie-Thérèse de Modena, and his sister Louise d'Artois, the widowed Duchess of Parma. The exiled French royal family first came there in 1836 to escape the cholera epidemic which was sweeping Europe and stayed at the Coronini Palace in Nova Gorica, as is described in the novel Madame Royale. Seventeen days after their arrival, Charles X died of cholera on November 6, 1836. He was buried in the nearby monastery, where later a special crypt for the family was constructed. Share