Tea at Trianon: Death of Queen Maria Carolina

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, October 23, 2012

Death of Queen Maria Carolina

The passing of Marie-Antoinette's favorite sister.

In her affliction, she wrote to her daughter, the Duchess of Genevois, afterwards Queen of Sardinia:

Nothing on earth moves me any more; my fate was settled and decided the day that I was chased like a play-actress and thrust out of Sicily…. My life is ended in this world…. I am no longer interesting except to a few old women who never stir out of their own doors, but who come to see the last of the great Maria Theresa’s children. The Prater is in its lovely green and full of flowers; but nothings seems beautiful to me any longer.
A few days later—the old Queen died of a sudden attack of apoplexy in the little chateau of Hetzendorf, beside Schönbrunn, where her great-grandson, the former King of Rome, was living. Marie Caroline had been a woman whose faults and whose qualities were alike extraordinary. Napoleon, who once used such violent and insulting language respecting her, ended by citing her as a model worth imitating in his correspondence with King Joseph. “That woman,” he wrote to his brother, “knew how to think and act like a queen, while preserving her rights and her dignity….” (Read entire post.)