Tea at Trianon: Badminton House

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

Monday, December 2, 2019

Badminton House

An interview with the Duchess of Beaufort. From Vogue:

The house has 20 bedrooms and bathrooms, and it takes us almost two hours to go around all of them, Georgia fluffing bedcovers, stocking the bathrooms, and moving armfuls of 1960s original Penguin paperbacks from one floor to another because “I love having a pile of interesting books on the bedside tables.” (As the granddaughter of writers Anthony Powell and Lady Violet Pakenham, she has broad literary interests.) The bedrooms veer from exotic grandeur to traditional English charm. “You might think everything here is exactly as it always was,” says Georgia as we head into the Fuchsia Room, with its fluted double columns, pink posy-print chintz, and oak-paneled bathroom, “but things are subtly being redone, in keeping with the aesthetic. Why would I tear down 18th-century wallpaper? I like the idea that I am adding a new layer to centuries of layers.” Decorator Nicky Haslam, a guest at their wedding party—a “glam rave” in the ballroom—admires Georgia’s restraint, saying, “The decor is magical. It needs a bit of freshening up, but not too much. Georgia’s a classicist. She won’t go in and rip it up and put in spiky chairs.” (Read more.)

More HERE.