Tea at Trianon: The Paris Home of Pierre Bergé

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

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

The Paris Home of Pierre Bergé

From Sotheby's:

Sometimes in life you come across exceptional people. Pierre Bergé was one of these. On receiving our book he wanted to meet us. He had come to Tangier to see one of our projects and was impressed. A connoisseur of Morocco who had known the country very well for so many years, he found our interpretation – the link with the past and the subtle hint of Italy that went well with the exoticism of the place – to be remarkable. Some time afterwards he called and asked us to meet up again in Paris. He wanted to show us a house he had owned for a few years and had never lived in. We were partly flattered, partly a little anxious. A cultivated Frenchman, renowned for his entrepreneurial skills and his taste, reserved and rigorous, was calling on two “young” Italians to rethink his house in Paris. He wished to transform the piano nobile, left temporarily abandoned, which he had bought because he did not want to hear footsteps above his head. There was no need for bedrooms because they were already on the ground floor, where he lived. He wanted a place just for the pleasure of walking through it, stopping to leaf through one of the books in the magnificent library, or simply to have fun with us in creating a particular space, different from the kind people expect to find at such an address. (Read more.)