Tea at Trianon: Queen Victoria Visits Petit Trianon

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, June 6, 2013

Queen Victoria Visits Petit Trianon

From tiny-librarian:

This small painting by Karl Girardet is the first sketch for a watercolour commissioned by Queen Victoria in 1855 and which is still in the British royal collections. It commemorates the visit of the Queen and Prince Albert, accompanied by the imperial couple, to Trianon on Tuesday 21 August 1855 during the British sovereign’s stay in Paris.

The two sovereigns can be clearly identified in an open carriage stopped in front of the house of Marie-Antoinette, while the Emperor and the Prince Consort are on horseback on either side of it. The escort is made up by Cent-Gardes and postilions of the Emperor’s Household in full dress uniform. Under the gallery linking the Queen’s House to the Billiards House is the band of the Guides of the Imperial Guard who played during the lunch taken by the two couples. (Read more.)