Tea at Trianon: La Belle Époque of France

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

Friday, May 22, 2020

La Belle Époque of France

From The BBC:

Jacques Henri Lartigue, born in 1894 in Courbevoie, was given a camera as a boy by his father at the dawn of the 20th Century. He began taking photographs of his life, including snapshots of his parents; his bedroom; his nanny Dudu throwing a ball up into the air; his brother jumping off a boat. A new book by Louise Baring explores Lartigue's privileged childhood and early career against the backdrop of France's La Belle Époque, an era of political, commercial and creative optimism....He photographed the social parade in the Bois de Boulogne, a large park on the outskirts of Paris, where the fashions of the upper echelons of society were displayed. Other subjects included a woman in furs attracting a covetous glance from a male passer-by; the gleaming lines of a racing car; winter sports in Switzerland; and summers on the beaches of Étretat and Trouville, where, he wrote: 'Nothing hinders my eyes from roaming, drifting endlessly....' (Read more.)