Tea at Trianon: Queen of Troubadours

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

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Queen of Troubadours

Eleanor of Aquitaine in England.

Little do we know about the personality of the queen whose wooden funerary effigy lies under the main dome in the Abbey of Fontevrault. Eleanor of Aquitaine died in 1204, though the exact place where she passed from the world is not known for sure: according to some chroniclers, she ended her life in Poitiers; according to others, she was taken to Fontevrault “where she put on the garb of a nun before closing her eyes”. Her hands are holding a book, most probably a prayer book, the Holy Bible – or, why not, a courtly romance… The granddaughter of William IX of Aquitaine – the first known troubadour –, Eleanor, was born in 1122 or 1124, somewhere in the far south of Aquitaine, probably in Bordeaux or Belin, where she spent her early childhood before moving to Poitiers after 1130. “Charming”, “welcoming” and “lively”, as Geoffroi de Vigeois described her, she exercised an unquestionable influence in the development and popularisation of the new courtly sensibility in France. Highly intelligent and well-educated – she probably knew Latin, Eleanor was the great patron of the two dominant poetic movements of the time: the courtly love tradition, conveyed in the songs of the troubadours, and the historical Matter of Britain, best represented in Chrétien de Troyes’ roman courtois. (Read entire article.)