Tea at Trianon: Vestments from the Queen's Mantle

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, April 15, 2012

Vestments from the Queen's Mantle

Here are vestments made from a mantle that belonged to Marie-Antoinette. (Via Vive la Reine.) To quote:

France is a country where every village has a history and where all these stories have been the history of France. La Ferriere-aux-Ponds, small town of Orne in the Netherlands-Norman has, also, many accounts of this history that range from basement of his castle, built after the conquest of Normandy by William the Conqueror (part of which was excavated ten years ago), to the remains of its iron mine exploited industrially from the beginning of this century and closed in 1970.
Among all these traces ancestral one, though very little known so far and discrete dimension to its competitors archaeological, historical value and has an especially sentimental like no other: it is a mantle of Court of Queen Marie Antoinette of France that has been transformed, in the early nineteenth century, in liturgical vestments. These ornaments, classified as "Historic Monuments" in 1990 because of their rarity and beauty, were given to the parish of La Ferriere in 1859 after having been repeatedly worn by priests attached to the memory of the martyrdom of the Queen.
Recently, these ornaments were exposed twice to the public in 1982 at La Ferriere in 1993 and the castle of Chambord. On this occasion, it was found that, on the one hand, they required a restoration and, secondly, they undoubtedly deserve to be exposed continuously under all inside the church La Ferriere rather than remain locked and unknown in the chasuble of the sacristy. (Read more.)