Tea at Trianon: Empress Titania

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, April 5, 2012

Empress Titania

I found a new site about Sisi. Here is one of her poems:

Titania shall not go where people walk
This world, where no one understands her,
Where hundred thousand gazers her beleaguer,
Whispering and prying, “Look, the fool, look there!”
Where jealousy and envy seek her out,
To distort her every action,
She returns homebound to those regions,
Where allied, kinder souls abide.

~ Elisabeth, Empress of Austria
(Source: wien-vienna.com)

May said...: Poor Sisi :( She was so beautiful.

I think she had a great deal in common with her niece, Elisabeth of Belgium; they were both free spirits, poetic and unconventional, but her niece had a happy marriage and a more cheerful, patient attitude to the trials of royalty.; April 5, 2012 at 2:36:00 PM EDT
julygirl said...: She had such a happy and freeing childhood that the restrictions of being in a royal household and under the thumb of a disapproving mother-in-law was too much to bear.; April 5, 2012 at 5:20:00 PM EDT