Tea at Trianon: Paris’s Most Anticipated New Garden

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, September 11, 2020

Paris’s Most Anticipated New Garden

From Architectural Digest:

With her design for Le Bristol, Lady Arabella looked “to get away from the usual hotel good taste, with the ubiquitous white-and-green themes,” she tells AD. To do that, she sought to bring a pastoral feeling to the space, combining formal elements like topiaries and hedges with those more typical of the gardens of a country cottage, like loose plantings and flowing grasses. Her aim, she says, “was a countryside feeling in the city.”

She kept the garden’s existing grand magnolias, but little else remains as it was. “From the beginning, I wanted to break up the courtyard with new shapes for planting beds, focal points, and a complete redesign of the treillage wall.” By doing so, she established a new geometry, both on the ground and vertically. (Read more.)