Tea at Trianon: The Real Jane Avril

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, July 27, 2022

The Real Jane Avril

The star of the Moulin Rouge, immortalized by Toulouse-Lautrec. From Messy Nessy Chic:

Born Jeanne-Louise Beaudon, Avril’s mother was a prostitute and she believed her father to be an Italian marquis who had abandoned them when she was only 2 years old. She was spirited off to a countryside convent by her grandparents in order to escape her mother’s dire influence. As fate would have it, her mother returned her to Paris in 1877 to a life of child prostitution. Jeanne attempted numerous escapes from her mother’s control and eventually at the age of 14, was given refuge at the forbidding Salpêtrière Asylum, a mental institution for women in Paris.
Within the sanctuary of the Salpêtrière Asylum, Jeanne was diagnosed with a neurotic condition, regarded at the time as a ‘female hysteria’. This was a physical affliction which produced sudden and erratic twitching and thrashing movements of her limbs. There was little understanding of such conditions at the time, far less any known ‘cures’. Fatefully, the institution, perhaps to satisfy the voyeuristic afflictions of its patrons’ fascination with abnormal human conditions, regularly held open day events for governors, staff and patients, known as Le Bal des Folles (‘The Ball of the Mad’). Jeanne soon discovered that dancing was not only therapeutic and aided her condition, but that she was able to move in ways like no other dancer could. Belgian born Parisian architect, author and critic Frantz Jourdain later described her as ‘this exquisite creature, nervous and neurotic, a captivating flower of artistic corruption and sickly grace”. (Read more.)

More HERE. And Zsa Zsa Gabor Gabor played Jane Avril in the 1952 film, HERE.