Tea at Trianon: Letter from Marie-Antoinette at the Vatican

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, August 12, 2018

Letter from Marie-Antoinette at the Vatican

A letter conserved in the Vatican archives is from Marie-Antoinette to one of her brothers-in-law. It is appears to be a letter of shared condolences, perhaps on the occasion of the death of one of Marie-Antoinette's children, either the first Dauphin or Baby Madame Sophie. I am thinking it might be one of the Italian brothers-in-law, such as the Prince of Piedmont, the future King Charles Emmanuel IV of Sardinia, who was married to Clothilde of France. They were a loving couple but they had ongoing sorrows, including childlessness. Charles Emmanuel was also the brother of the Comtesse de Provence and the Comtesse d'Artois, as well as being close friends with his cousin Henry Benedict Stuart, Cardinal Duke of York. After his wife's death, the King abdicated and became a Jesuit lay-brother in Rome, which is probably how the letter came to the Vatican.