Tea at Trianon: Exploring the Conciergerie

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 14, 2017

Exploring the Conciergerie

From Better Homes and Gardens:

On a typically graceful Parisian avenue, by the banks of the River Seine, is a building with the darkest of histories. A structure linked to the torture and deaths of thousands of people, the Conciergerie seems out of place surrounded by the grandeur of Notre Dame Cathedral and Sainte-Chappelle. This area of downtown Paris swarms with tourists at all times of year thanks to its proximity not only to Notre Dame but the Louvre Museum, the Pantheon and the Pompidou Centre. The Conciergerie has an altogether different appeal. Morbid fascination lures tourists into its below ground chambers where the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, was imprisoned as she waited to be executed. (Read more.)