Tea at Trianon: The Affair of the Minuet

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, February 3, 2012

The Affair of the Minuet

From History and Other Thoughts:

Life at Versailles was rigidly regulated by complicated and stifling rules of etiquette, which prescribed what the nobility, based on their ranks and position, could and couldn't do. Marie Antoinette may have hated all these rules but the nobility, jealous of their privileges, were capable of making a huge fuss out of the most insignificant thing when they felt their "rights" where threatened or ignored. In his book, Domestic anecdotes of the French nation during the last thirty years, Isaac Disraeli shares one of these petty squabbles, which happened at a ball to celebrate the wedding of the dauphin Louis with the archduchess Marie Antoinette...(Read entire post.)

The North Coast said...: I always sympathized with poor Antoinette in her brushes with fabled absurd French court etiquette.

One famous business writer remarked that when your employees have time to get into "turf" battles at the office, and disputes over small slights such as this, they clearly don't have enough to do, and the tragic quarrels over trivial slights and breaches of etiquette, like this matter of the Minuet, are the sort of disputes that only really spoiled, pampered people with way too much idle time on their hands and no real job to do in life, could get involved in. Sad that these people had no struggle in life no more urgent than this in an era in which 85% of the population had to struggle to keep a decent set of clothes on its back and mostly failed at it.; February 3, 2012 at 5:40:00 PM EST
Gio said...: Thanks for linking to my post, I really appreciate it!; February 4, 2012 at 2:27:00 PM EST