Tea at Trianon: Marie-Antoinette's Writing Desk

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, October 19, 2019

Marie-Antoinette's Writing Desk

From the collection of a Rothschild heir. According to CNN:

Born into a superabundance of riches, the modern-day Rothschilds' story is inevitably different. Lord Jacob Rothschild, heir to the family's English branch, says his collecting habit is driven by the desire to acquire the rare things that are "missing." Waddesdon Manor, the English Rothschilds' ancestral palace in rural Buckinghamshire, is a fortified castle overflowing with the type of Versailles-inspired, gilded extravagance that became known in the late 19th century as "le goût Rothschild" (or "the Rothschild taste"). Inside, the full, eclectic range of objects amassed by Jacob Rothschild's ancestors -- once unrivaled as the world's richest family, and today possessors of an unknown fortune -- become clear.

There is a writing desk made for Marie Antoinette, a gold bracelet bearing Queen Victoria's face (a gift from the Queen herself) and an assortment of 25,000 antiques and artworks, including a clockwork automaton showing an elephant hunting party and a painted screen depicting monkeys dressed in 18th-century gowns. (Read more.)