Tea at Trianon: The Tuileries: The Eye of the Storm

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, May 3, 2009

The Tuileries: The Eye of the Storm

Catherine Delors continues her series of posts on the history of the Tuileries Palace, describing what life was like for the royal family when they were under house arrest during the Revolution.

There Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were surrounded by a small Court of faithful followers, a pale shadow of the spendors of Versailles. Her closest friend, Madame de Polignac, had already fled France. Now the Queen, deprived of the pleasures and privacy of her beloved Trianon, occupied her days with politics, needlework and knitting, and a daily game of billiards after dinner. The King and Queen never forgot the circumstances of their arrival in their new palace, nor the dangers of its location in the heart of Paris. They were now at the mercy of any riot.