Tea at Trianon: The Habsburg Dynasty: Pharaohs on the Hudson

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

Sunday, January 29, 2017

The Habsburg Dynasty: Pharaohs on the Hudson

From Just on Travel:

The Habsburg Dynasty had a tradition that was a bit like that of the Pharaohs: After the death of a Habsburg the heart and viscera were removed from the body according to strict ceremony. The sovereign bodies were then embalmed and entombed in the nearby Imperial Crypt. The viscera were laid to rest in St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and the hearts in the so-called “Heart Crypt” in the Augustinian Church. The Augustinian Church was one of the important stations in the life of every member of the House of Habsburg. It is here where they were baptized and where they married – and to where they would forever after consign their hearts. 54 Habsburgian hearts are forever safeguarded in silver urns here in the Augustinian Church. (Read more.)