Tea at Trianon: Before and After

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, December 10, 2017

Before and After

An amazing transformation by Virginia at Chartreuse and Company! To quote:

None-the-less, I whined at her, “Can’t you convince them to at least paint those walls? And the light fixtures? PLEASE let me replace them with my own.”

Margaret felt my pain, but the clients were firm: they would remove their things, but they would not do any work or change any fixtures. So there we were. We visited the house, with tape measure and graph paper in hand, walked through every room, got a sense of the house and what it could be. And it’s a GREAT house! The homeowner designed it himself in the late 70s, with an open floor plan, huge fire places, tons of closets, and had it set in a perfectly private and secluded, 12-acre lot. While I would paint the exterior brick and trim, extend the front porch, and replace the metal posts with wooden ones, the house is well built, and enjoys wooded views from every window. (Read more.)