Tea at Trianon: Marie-Antoinette's Farewell to Her Father

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, February 9, 2014

Marie-Antoinette's Farewell to Her Father

The Emperor Francis Stephen bade a moving farewell to his nine-year-old daughter Antonia before his final fatal illness. From Nobility:

The Emperor Francis, who was on his way to Innsbruck for the celebration of the marriage between Archduke Leopold—the future Leopold II—and the Infanta Maria Luisa, had gone to Schoenbrunn to embrace his children. But when he was a little way from the castle, on the same road now followed by the Dauphine, he had, perhaps, some presentiment of his coming death and stopped his coach.

“Go back for the Archduchess Antonia; I must see her again.”

He had gazed at her with indescribable tenderness, and for the rest of her life Marie Antoinette was never to forget that look. (Read more.)