Tea at Trianon: The Churching of the Duchesse de Berry

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

Thursday, April 25, 2013

The Churching of the Duchesse de Berry

Marie-Caroline of Naples, the Duchesse de Berry, celebrates her churching ceremony in what looks like either the private chapel or parish church, perhaps at Rosny, her country estate. She is holding the infant Duc de Bordeaux, born after the violent death of the Duc de Berry in 1820. The baby's nurse is kneeling in red behind her. It was a tradition for Catholic mothers to formally return to church forty days after giving birth, carrying the child, led by a priest with his stole. This was in imitation of the purification of the Virgin, when the Child Jesus was presented in the Temple, forty days after His birth. (Via Louis XX.)

Share