Tea at Trianon: Daphne du Maurier's Cornish Cottage

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

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Daphne du Maurier's Cornish Cottage

The cottage was a haven for the writer amid the storms of life.

The cottage was originally built as a coach house and stables for the nearby waterfront Italianate mansion, Point Neptune. By the time she arrived at Readymoney in 1942 with her three children, du Maurier had already written Rebecca and Frenchman's Creek. But according to her biographer Margaret Forster, she arrived under something of a cloud. She had been staying with friends in a grand house in Hertfordshire while her husband, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Browning, was away busy setting up Britain's first airborne division. Unfortunately, according to Forster, Du Maurier, was caught in an embrace with her hostess's husband. Du Maurier, then 34, wrote to a friend that "after many probings and thinkings" she was moving to Cornwall, where her mother and sisters were living and which had inspired her famous works, to "sort myself out". (Read entire article.)

Stephanie A. Mann said...: I loved Daphne du Maurier's novels when I was growing up: Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, The King's General, Jamaica Inn . . .; August 18, 2011 at 8:40:00 AM EDT