Tea at Trianon: Travelers in Vienna

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, February 8, 2022

Travelers in Vienna

Franz Josef's desk at the Hofburg

Imperial Library at the Hofburg

Gardens of Schönbrunn

From The New York Social Diary:

Our private visits to several of Vienna’s memorable palaces over the next few days began with a tour of the Hofburg Imperial Palace, the sprawling 59-acre complex in central Vienna. The seat of the Hapsburg Dynasty until 1918, it was the birthplace of Marie Antoinette and site of her proxy marriage to Louis XVI with her older brother Archduke Ferdinand standing in for the Dauphin.

A central feature of the Hofburg today is a museum dedicated to a later prominent Hapsburg, Empress Elizabeth the wife of Franz Joseph. An early devotee of physical fitness, nicknamed Sissi, she was a legendary beauty, beloved, and universally mourned after her 1898 assassination. (Read more.)