Tea at Trianon: The Princesse de Lamballe in Mourning

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, September 17, 2024

The Princesse de Lamballe in Mourning

Widows in past times wore black; after a designated length of time they could wear purple and eventually gray. Marie-Thérèse Louise de Savoie-Carignan was married in 1767 at age seventeen to the Prince de Lamballe, son of the Duc de Penthièvre, cousin of the King of France. The Prince died of venereal disease after a year of marriage; the bride was still a teenager. Intelligent as well as cultured, the Princesse busied herself with works of charity. She became the Grande Maitresse of all the French masonic ladies' lodges, for she saw freemasonry as a tool for creating a better world, as did many of her contemporaries. Many aristocrats embraced freemasonry in spite of the fact that the Church had banned it for Catholics. (More about that, HERE.)

After Louis XVI became King in 1774, his wife Marie-Antoinette befriended the Princesse de Lamballe. In the new 2023 miniseries, as in the 2006 film, the Princesse de Lamballe is shown to be dark-haired. In reality she was a delicate blonde beauty from the north of Italy, her mother being German. Marie-Antoinette made Madame de Lamballe, known for her virtue and kindness, the Superintendent of her household, which was controversial at the time since there were other courtiers who felt the position was due to them. The two women became good friends. The liberal politics of the Princesse were one of the reasons, according to scholar Bernard Fay, that King Louis XVI encouraged his wife towards the Polignacs, and away from Lamballe and her Orleanist salon.