Tea at Trianon: A Poet in Prison

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

Monday, October 5, 2015

A Poet in Prison

From The Boston Globe:

The subject of this painting, the poet Jean-Antoine Roucher (1745-94), is in prison, awaiting execution. Pity him. The son of a tailor, he became a poet, of the mortal, mostly forgotten variety.

Although he had written an epithalamium to the marriage of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette (it was pungently titled “France and Austria at Hymen’s Temple”), he was in fact a friend of the Revolution, and an enlightened disciple of Voltaire and Rousseau.

The Revolution appeared not to care. Roucher was arrested on trumped-up conspiracy charges, and after a long spell in the comfortable-looking cell pictured here, he was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal on the morning of July 25, 1794, and then separated from his head that afternoon, along with 27 others.

From this cell, which he shared for a time with the man who painted him, Hubert Robert, Roucher wrote long letters to his family, and especially to his daughter; they were later published as “The Consolations of My Captivity.”

In this way, he did what fathers do — unburdened himself of his own dismay and confusion by seeking to divest himself of the tatty threads of his education under the guise of paternal instruction. Advocating decency and philosophical measure in a time of upheaval and barbaric violence, he cautioned against pernicious influences, such as the exaggerated feelings in Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” (Read more.)