Tea at Trianon: Tobolsk: Museum of the Imperial Family

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

Thursday, December 29, 2016

Tobolsk: Museum of the Imperial Family

From Royal Russia News:

The Tobolsk Historical and Architectural Museum-Reserve have announced that the Museum of the Imperial Family will open in Tobolsk in August 2017. The date marks the 100th anniversary of the arrival of Russia’s last emperor Nicholas II and his family in Tobolsk.

In 1996, the former Study of Emperor Nicholas II was opened as a museum. The new museum will offer visitors additional rooms, and exhibits based on the life of Nicholas II and his family during their stay and held under house arrest for 8 months between August 1917 to April 1918.

The museum which is housed in the former residence of the Governor of Siberia, is currently undergoing restoration and construction work. The restored memorial rooms will be recreated from surviving documents, and photographs. According to the museum director Svetlana Sidorova, the museum is dedicated to "preserving the authenticity of the building’s façade, and the historical ambience of the interiors". Visitors to the museum will get a sense of how the imperial family lived during their captivity in Siberia. Sidorov noted that restorers “had spent a great deal of time and effort to remove all the original elements and to refurbish them, and not substitute any of them for modern elements.” (Read more.)