Tea at Trianon: Unopened Love Letters

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

Thursday, November 16, 2023

Unopened Love Letters

From History First:

“I could spend the night writing to you. I would not find space to sign. I am your forever faithful wife. Good night, my dear friend. It is midnight. I think it is time for me to rest.”

These words of 32-year-old Marie Dubosc were written to her husband, Louis Chambrelan, the first lieutenant of the French warship Galetée in 1758, during the Seven Years’ War. He never received the letter, which is one of over 100 sent to the crew and now read for the first time after they were discovered by a historian in Britain’s National Archives.

Galatée, a frigate of 200 tons, was escorting troop ships from Bordeaux to Quebec when it was captured by the British ship Essex in the Bay of Biscay on April 8, 1758, and sent to Portsmouth. Marie and Louis, who had a young daughter, would not meet again. Marie died the following year in Le Havre, before her husband’s release. In 1761, safely back in France, he remarried.

The journey of the letters to storage in Kew, southwest London, was circuitous. After they were penned, the French postal administration attempted to deliver them to Galatée, sending them to multiple ports in France where they always arrived too late. Once the ship was reported captured, the letters were sent to England, where they were handed to the Admiralty and apparently forgotten.

“It’s agonising how close they got,” said Professor Renaud Morieux, from Cambridge University’s history faculty and Pembroke College, who discovered the box of 104 letters. He believes officials opened two letters to see if they contained anything of military value and intended to check others before sending them on to the prisoners. “In my opinion they were waiting for an opportunity to open more, but they didn’t take the time or just forgot.” (Read more.)