Tea at Trianon: Madame de Tourzel

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

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Madame de Tourzel

Madame de Tourzel was a devout lady chosen by Marie-Antoinette to be governess of her children after Madame de Polignac had to flee from the Revolution in July of 1789. There are many people who wonder why the queen and her children did not also try to escape at that time. It is because Marie-Antoinette would not desert her husband. "I will die at his feet!" she exclaimed. (see Rocheterie's Histoire de Marie-Antoinette, vol ii) Louis XVI, of course, would not abandon his people. Early in the crisis the king and queen made the decision that they would not be parted from their children, but would keep them close at hand, not knowing what was going to transpire next in the tidal wave of events. So Marie-Antoinette chose as governess as trustworthy and reliable a person as she could find. "I entrusted my children to friendship," she remarked. "I entrust them now to virtue."

The queen wrote detailed and explicit directions about the care of her two surviving children for Madame de Tourzel, whose youngest daughter Pauline was a teenager. Pauline became a close friend of young Madame Royale. Both mother and daughter were close to the rambunctious Louis-Charles and were devoted to the saintly Madame Elisabeth.

Madame de Tourzel was with the royal family on the October night in 1789 when Versailles was stormed. It is she who reported in her Memoirs how the queen's bed was slashed by the mob. The governess and her daughter accompanied the royal family to Paris and shared their house arrest at the Tuileries. She recorded how one of the first actions of the queen at the Tuileries was to build a staircase joining her room with the king's, so that the family could get to each other when the mob attacked again, which it did in June and in August of 1792. Madame de Tourzel was with the royal family when they tried to escape in 1791 and shared the long ordeal of the re-capture. When Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette and their family were imprisoned in the Temple, Madame de Tourzel and Pauline were not permitted to join them but were placed in one of the prisons in Paris. Somehow, they escaped the September Massacres, in which the queen's friend Madame de Lamballe was torn to pieces.

Madame de Tourzel lived to see the Restoration in 1814 and in 1830 Charles X made her a Duchess. She and Pauline were united with Madame Royale, whom Pauline served as lady-in-waiting. Share