Tea at Trianon: Restoration of the Château de Gudanes

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

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Restoration of the Château de Gudanes

From Vogue:

To be the keepers of a grand French château is a thing of dreams, though few will truly live it, and even fewer have the vision and wherewithal to toil to make this dream a reality. Enter Karina and Craig Waters, an Australian couple who in 2013 purchased what amounted to an eighteenth-century neoclassical ruin—albeit a Class 1 Historical Monument ruin—in the village of Château-Verdun in the South of France. The property, Château de Gudanes, had once belonged to Louis Gaspard de Sales, the Marquis de Gudanes, who commissioned Ange-Jacques Gabriel (the Parisian architect behind Versailles’s Petit Trianon and Place de la Concorde) to create the palatial home. And though it survived the French Revolution, it eventually fell into disrepair. “When we first visited the Château back in 2011, we could only gain access to some of the front rooms. The roof, walls, and floors had fallen in and the water damage had prevented entry into most of the rooms. Green mold covered the walls like wallpaper and stinging knee-high weeds carpeted stone floors,” recalls Karina. “Following the ‘consolidation phase’ after which we could safely explore the rooms, people returned to the Château. Not just from the local villages, but from around the world.” (Read more.)