Tea at Trianon: A Fairytale House on Dartmoor

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, April 10, 2024

A Fairytale House on Dartmoor

From House and Garden:

The softness of the gardens is a foil to the weight of the house, its granite walls pierced by stone mullioned windows, its roof peaked with gables and dotted with high, square chimneys. It has elements of Tudor and Gothic style – the result of an early-20th-century makeover of a 17th-century building. Not only was the house aggrandised with the addition of attic rooms, a huge entrance hall and a first-floor chapel – all modesty thrown to the wind – the stables and barns were also developed, creating a group of buildings as picturesque as a period film set.

Push open the heavy, studded front door and the film-set feel intensifies as you enter a high staircase hall rising into the steep pitch of a beamed roof. Daylight drops from leaded windows onto a broad staircase with chunky carved oak banisters and vast oak finials. The floor is granite slabs, arched doorways are framed by granite and there is a granite fireplace, big enough to sit inside, beyond the foot of the stairs. It could be home to a prince in a fairy story, or the setting for an Agatha Christie mystery. (Read more.)