Tea at Trianon: Le Château de Pauline de Tourzel

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 18, 2023

Le Château de Pauline de Tourzel

Pauline de Tourzel, playing the guitar, with her sister Henriette

Pauline's mother, Madame de Tourzel

Pauline de Tourzel, Comtesse de Béarn was the close friend of Marie-Thérèse Charlotte de France, called Madame Royale, the daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Her mother, Madame de Tourzel, replaced Madame de Polignac as Governess of the Children of France in July 1789 and remained with the Royal Family until August 1792 when they were forcibly separated by being placed in different prisons. After the Revolution, Madame de Tourzel and Pauline were among the first to see Madame Royale upon her release from prison and visited with her before she was sent to her mother's family in Austria in a prisoner exchange. During the Restoration, Pauline, then the Comtesse de Béarn, served Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, then Duchesse d'Angoulême until the Revolution of 1830, as told in the novel Madame Royale.

Here is an article in French about the château de La Rochebeaucourt belonging to Pauline and her husband. It seems it was destroyed during World War II. Below are some pictures: