Tea at Trianon: On the Real 'Lord Merlin'

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, March 7, 2024

On the Real 'Lord Merlin'

From Nancy Mitford at House and Garden:

Faringdon is a real country house for all its elegance, not one of those pretty old-maidish town houses that sometimes occur in the English countryside, looking sweet but silly, and exhaling an atmosphere of afternoon tea. It is plain and grey and square and solid, and as much a part of the rolling Berkshire landscape before it as of the little old market town of Faringdon, to which it turns its back and which is hidden from view by the parish church and huge clumps of elm trees. Faringdon House has very little in the way of a flower garden, Lord Berners was not fond of flowers growing in beds, and considered that such things as herbaceous borders were more suitable to the half-timbered houses of Surrey stockbrokers than to a classical house, which should be surrounded by a plain expanse of lawn to enhance the perfection of its line. Indoors, his house, as we shall see, was always full of flowers but they were large brilliant tropical flowers in vases, not buttercups, the little children's dower.
A broad space of lawn runs from the house to the church-it is bordered by elm trees and, until it came down in a March gale, a big cedar stood there. Cedars are crashing all over England now. As the fashion for planting them only began in the 18th century and as their allotted span is a thousand years this seems rather inexplicable. Perhaps now that tea under the cedars, that daily sacrifice to them in fine weather, when footmen in striped waistcoats placed trays of glittering silver beneath their shade every afternoon, has become a thing of the past, they are sulkily dying of boredom. Anyhow, for a while, Faringdon smelled deliciously of burning cedarwood as a result. (Read more.)