Tea at Trianon: On the Balcony of the Tuileries

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, March 3, 2013

On the Balcony of the Tuileries

The Royal family of France are assembled on the balcony of the Tuileries as Louis XVIII receives his victorious nephew the Duke of Angoulême after the Battle of Trocadero in 1823. Next to the King stands his brother Artois, soon to become Charles X. The Duchess of Angoulême is in green holding the infant Duke de Bordeaux, whose sister Louis d'Artois is next to her with the stout governess Madame de Gontaut. The blonde looking back over her shoulder is Caroline of Naples, Duchess of Berry and the mother of the two small children. In seven years the entire family would be dead or in exile.

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