Tea at Trianon: The Embassy of Tipu Sultan at Versailles

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, September 7, 2020

The Embassy of Tipu Sultan at Versailles

From Scroll.in:

Another established protocol was broken when Tipu’s gifts of cotton muslin robes and pearl and diamond jewellery were never exhibited because they were taken to be far below what was expected (by the contemporaneous European mind dwelling on abstract imagined notions of oriental luxury). There had been an expectation of gifts “worth millions” and it was feared that the reality will encourage “innumerable jokes in the foreign journals, particularly in the English press”. As importantly, no formal report was released elucidating the details of the king’s audience to the ambassadors and their negotiations. The embassy was, in the end, sent off with some of the artisans Tipu had requested, a few of whom would later help build the reputed Tipu’s tiger.
Elaborate portraits of the first two ambassadors were painted, however, thanks to Marie Antoinette’s portraitist, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842). Of them, the first still exists. She later reminisced, “In 1788, ambassadors were sent to Paris by Emperor Tippoo-Saëb. I saw these Indians at the Opera, and they seemed to me so extraordinarily picturesque that I wanted to paint their portraits. Having communicated my desire to their interpreter, I knew that they would never consent to be painted if the request did not come from the King, hence, I obtained this favour from His Majesty.” While the ambassadors were sailing back to Mysore, without the Franco-Mysorean alliance that Tipu had so desperately hoped for, their portraits were chosen to be exhibited at the prestigious 1789 Salon of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. (Read more.)