Tea at Trianon: "There was none so haunted as Trianon..."

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

From Anna Gibson:

"Thérèse had lived in many places, but there was none so haunted as Trianon, or as vibrant with memory. Its haunting was a wistful and compelling call to linger, as if the murmuring poplars and cedars entreated one to stay forever. The soul seemed drawn into an enchanted realm where time itself dallied. She breathed in the scented air. No one would ever live there for long in peace; no one could ever again make it a dwelling place, for the person who had enlivened Trianon with her own spontaneous magic was gone from the world. Trianon was no longer a home, but a tangible dream of lost happiness." —Madame Royale by Elena Maria Vidal

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