Tea at Trianon: Robe en Fourreau

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, June 18, 2013

Robe en Fourreau

A lady wearing a sheath dress and a cadogan wig. To quote:

Cadogan. - The cadogan (see also plate 180) was a man's wig with a single queue tied with a narrow ribbon and forming a bulge at its end. Women borrowed the cadogan from men and wore it whether simple or, as here, double.

On this fashion Bachaumont recounted an amusing anecdote: "Lately the King, on coming back from the hunt, put on a chignon in the manner of women, and went thus to the Queen's apartments. Her Majesty was taken very much in laughter and she asked him what was the meaning of this masquerade, if he had come back from a carnival. -Do you find it ugly? said her august spouse. It is a fashion that I want to bring out, I have never before instituted any. -Oh! Sire, watch yourself here, it is frightful, replied Her Majesty. -Nevertheless, Madame, replied the Monarch, the men must have some manner of dressing their hair to distinguish their sex: you have taken from us the plume, the hat, the cadenette,* the queue: today, it is the cadogan that remains to us, and that I find very ugly on women ..." The Queen heard what he wanted to say and having nothing nearer to her heart than the pleasure of the King, gave an order that everyone take them off on the spot and return to the chignon.

"Thus it appears that this fashion adopted with a fury in Paris, and very ridiculous indeed, will fall by means of the pleasantry of the King."

BACHAUMONT, Secret Memoirs, March 18, 1783