Tea at Trianon: Antique Lace

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, April 16, 2016

Antique Lace

From Victoria:

Such motherly sentimentality lies at the heart of these keepsakes, whose creation initially was women’s work. Lace making, which has been traced to the sixteenth century, was a cottage industry, and the first pieces were designed to dress up the costly costumes of the European nobility. Each country produced its own handmade designs until the nineteenth century, when machine-made lace was manufactured for the middle-class market. Today, lace from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although perhaps not the most collectible, is the most available. Choices include Battenburg, a highly textured variety with fanciful flowers; Normandy, a patchwork of different types of French lace; needle lace, whose diaphanous design is formed from hundreds, even thousands of small stitches; crochet lace; Alençon, the so-called “Queen of Lace,” from France, that resembles snowflakes; and net, the whisper-fine lace that serves as a background for all manner of embroidered decoration. (Read more.)