Tea at Trianon: La Duchesse de Berry Dedicates Her Daughter to the Blessed Virgin

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

Monday, February 5, 2024

La Duchesse de Berry Dedicates Her Daughter to the Blessed Virgin

From the Versailles collection. Please do click on the picture here and at the original link to see a fuller and more detailed version of the picture. Caroline, the Duchesse de Berry, is shown kneeling in widow's weeds after the assassination of her husband the Duc de Berry on February 13, 1820. She is offering her year old daughter Louise d'Artois to be consecrated by the priest to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Meanwhile, Caroline is pregnant with the future Henri, Duc de Bordeaux. Behind her kneels Marie-Thérèse Charlotte of France, the daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Behind the ladies kneels Louis XVIII, the Comte d'Artois (the future Charles X and grandfather of the little princess). The husband of Marie-Thérèse, Louis-Antoine, Duc d'Angoulême, stands beside his father Artois, hands clasped in prayer. Below is a picture of Louise d'Artois, Duchess of Parma, as a married woman with her own children. She was known to be very devout all of her life.