Tea at Trianon: If I Could Go Anywhere...

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

Wednesday, June 2, 2021

If I Could Go Anywhere...

From The Conversation:

Along a dusty path on the outskirts of the Château de Versailles lies my favourite destination: Queen Marie-Antoinette’s private bedroom and boudoir in the Petit Trianon (small trianon). Built for King Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour in 1768, it was gifted to the new queen of France by Lous XVI and refurbished after 1774.

It was already an extremely beautiful cuboid design by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, the height of neo-classical French taste. Its reconfiguration and that of the surrounding grounds by the queen saw it embody a raft of new ideas concerning everything from the education of children to what women should wear.

The bedroom and boudoir were rooms in which the queen retreated from the formality and etiquette of the main palace of Versailles to spend time with women friends. She assembled aristocrats such as the Princesse de Lamballe as well as famed portrait painter Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. (Read more.)