Tea at Trianon: The Incredible Collection of Édouard and Jacqueline de Ribes

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, November 23, 2019

The Incredible Collection of Édouard and Jacqueline de Ribes

From Architectural Digest:

Fashion designer, arts patron, and writer Jacqueline de Ribes—hailed as the “last queen of Paris”—has the star power, but Édouard de Ribes, her banker husband, had the goods. “A lot of journalists are focusing on the comtesse because she was so beautiful and so iconic, but the collection was created over six generations by a family that became rich and grew richer,” said Mario Tavella, the chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and the president–director general of Sotheby’s France, which is offering part one of La Collection Ribes on December 11 and 12. (Part two will be sold in spring 2020.) Descendant of a royal finance official who was ennobled in 1816, Édouard de Ribes, who died in 2013, was the sixth count of the line and the inheritor of not only a family fortune but also a vast, treasure-packed 1860s hôtel particulier in Paris, which his widow, now 90, still uses. Museum-quality pieces, many of them acquired by his great-grandfather in the 19th century, go on the block this month; part of the proceeds will go to the de Ribeses’ favorite charities. (Read more.)