Tea at Trianon: Baths and Privies

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, December 18, 2012

Baths and Privies

In the great houses of England.

The numerous visitors to Moccas included:

The old Duke of Norfolk (in his old coach and four black horses) who always drank like a fish, and it was said that he used to make a compromise with his coachman, saying ‘John, you must be sober tonight, I shall be drunk,” or vice versa. Sometimes he slept at Moccas, but never brought a clean shirt with him and came down to breakfast next morning with a portwine spotted shirt, generally himself unwashed. The servants considered him a dear man, as he never wanted any water in his bedroom.

Lady Duff Gordon to her niece, Mrs. A.C.Master (unpubl.) 20.11.1872
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