Tea at Trianon: Memories of Ella

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 15, 2017

Memories of Ella

Grand Duchess Elizaveta Feodorovna, wife of Sergei Alexandrovich. To quote:

I have an unforgettable vision of the sister of the Tsarina, wife of the Grand Duke Sergius: Elizaveta Feodorovna, nee Princess Elisabeth of Hessen-Darmstadt. It was at the christening of the heir to the throne, at which I was present. After standing continuously for some time in the church I began to feel rather faint, as I always did, and one of my dear uncles took me into another part of the building, where I could sit down and recover a little. As we were going back to the chapel the Grand Duchess came towards us, in Russian dress with magnificent emerald ornaments. In that dress, and in the setting which surrounded her, at that moment she seemed, in the radiance of her beauty, like some ikon, some old Byzantine saint which had come to life! How often I have seen this picture in my mind’s eye, how vividly it came back to me when I head the news of her martyr’s death in the shaft of the mine at [Alapayevsk].

Crown Princess Cecilie of Prussia, Memoirs