Tea at Trianon: Mourning

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, January 12, 2019

Mourning

From Francine Mathews:

Victorian women were obliged to go into mourning when a close family member died--and as life expectancy in the nineteenth century was dubious at best, grief and its trappings were a constant. Children died. Parents and spouses died. Mourning was expected for monarchs, as well--as though the Royals were members of one's extended family.

Queen Victoria is the most famous of mourners, of course, having adopted black at Prince Albert's death and refusing to remove it for the remaining forty years of her life. But when Victoria passed in 1901, the entire nation went into mourning. Her daughter-in-law Princess Alix, about to become Queen Alexandra, was thus in something of a bind. She had to wear exclusively black for at least six months. But as the consort of King Edward VII, she also had to look absolutely stunning. (Read more.)