Tea at Trianon: The King’s Menagerie: The Sun King’s Animal Kingdom 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 13, 2021

The King’s Menagerie: The Sun King’s Animal Kingdom at Versailles

From France Today:

From the Palace of Versailles, King Louis XIV commanded not only the kingdom of France but also the kingdom of animals. In the world-famous gardens, he created an extraordinary menagerie of beasts, a living, breathing allegory for the Sun King’s power over all he surveyed.

Many noble French households collected exotic animals in order to impress their visitors: Charlemagne and Louis IX both kept elephants at court; while the Duke of Anjou not only owned an elephant, but lions, camels, and monkeys. Some kept their collection of beasts frighteningly close to home – Francis I slept with a snow leopard at the foot of his bed. (Read more.)

How the English fell in love with Versailles. From Country Life:

English visitors also admired Versailles for the opportunities it provided to watch the royal family dine in public and attend Mass in the royal chapel (Fig 7). Also in 1749, a naval officer called Augustus Hervey, despite having recently been fighting France, wrote in his diary that he derived ‘uninterrupted pleasure’ from watching the royal family’s dinner, following the royal hunt, going to supper with French friends, and admiring the fireworks at ‘that pile of magnificence and grandeur’, Versailles (Fig 5). He ‘received such an idea of the grandeur of the French court that I had a very pitiful opinion of our own at Saint James’s, nor have I ever altered my opinion, though later so much in it and so long of it’. (Read more.)