Tea at Trianon: Chateau du Grand-Luce

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, September 28, 2019

Chateau du Grand-Luce

From Forbes:

Originally, this 45,000 square foot mansion belonged to Baron Jacques Pineau de Viennay, a good friend of King Louis XV and his administrator of France’s eastern region, who spent four years constructing it starting in 1760 in then- cutting edge neoclassical style after doing a teardown of the medieval chateau on site. (Medieval walls on the 80 acre property are, however, still standing.) It’s regarded as one of the best examples of that architectural style in France and one of the rare bastions of aristocracy that survived the French Revolution intact. That was the result of the villagers’ fondness for the Baron’s daughter who harbored them in the estate’s outer buildings after a fire destroyed the village in 1781. (Read more.)