Tea at Trianon: Princess Tatiana von Metternich

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

Saturday, July 25, 2015

Princess Tatiana von Metternich

From The Telegraph:

Princess Tatiana Von Metternich, who died at Schloss Johannisberg, her home in Germany, on July 26, [2006] aged 91, was the widow of Prince Paul Alfons, last Prince von Metternich-Winneburg; she was one of the most beautiful women of her day, highly cultivated and well known in international society.

Living in Berlin, Bohemia and later on the Rhine during the Second World War, she witnessed the effect of Nazism on Germany, was close to those involved in the unsuccessful plot to kill Hitler in 1944, and was forced to make a 600-kilometre trek across Germany to escape the Russian advance. This she described in her memoirs, Tatiana - Five Passports in a Shifting Europe, and the story of those times was later re-told in the memorable Berlin Diaries 1940-1945 by her sister, Princess Marie Wassiltchikov.

She was born Princess Tatiana Wassiltchikov in St Petersburg on January 1 1915, the second daughter of Prince Illarion Wassiltchikov, a member of the Russian Imperial Parliament, and his wife, Princess Lydia Wiazemsky.

Her childhood was overshadowed by the deaths of many of her parents' friends and relations, victims of the Revolution. She owed her departure from Russia to King George V, who sent a British warship to rescue his aunt, the Dowager Empress of Russia, from the Crimea. The Empress refused to leave unless those who wished to escape accompanied her, and the British fleet obliged by sending as many ships as possible.

Before sailing, the young Tatiana waited with other Russian children and their English nannies at Alubka, the grand folly of the Vorontzovs near Yalta, and sat patiently on a stone lion on the terrace. (The lion was still there when she returned with a group from Serenissima in 1982.)

Thus, in April 1919, the Wassiltchikov family sailed in Princess Ena. All the children took with them were one toy and a few books, some of them lesson books. In due course they arrived in France, and Tatiana's early years were spent as a peripatetic refugee in France, Germany and Lithuania.

When she was 10 she went with her sister Missie (from whom she was inseparable) to the French Lycée of St Germain-en-Laye, on the outskirts of Paris, but money was short and they were quite often kept out of school due to unpaid school fees. Amongst their friends was Prince Felix Youssoupoff, murderer of Rasputin, of whom their mother rather disapproved.

The outbreak of the Second World War found Tatiana in Germany with Missie. In January 1940 the two sisters moved to Berlin in search of work, finding the city surprisingly normal, despite the nightly blackouts and food rationing. Within days Tatiana had been employed by the Auswärtiges Amt (German Foreign Ministry) because she spoke good French. (Read more.)

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