Tea at Trianon: Lee's New York and Paris Homes

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, April 9, 2024

Lee's New York and Paris Homes

From Elle Decor:

Unusual patterned fabrics applied en suite is another Radziwill signature; her favorite design is a lively chinoiserie cotton by Le Manach she first saw in the home of friend and fellow style arbiter Lulu de Waldner. Radziwill, who had her own interior-design firm in the 1970s, adopted the material for the walls and furniture of her library in Paris and her bedroom in New York. Indian art is also a leitmotif, the most splendid being oversize watercolors of fruit and flowers given to her by the present Duke of Beaufort. In the Manhattan entrance hall hang moody églomisé paintings of turbaned nobles and sloe-eyed ladies, their presence an echo of the well-publicized tour of India and Pakistan that Radziwill and her sister, Jacqueline Kennedy, took in 1962. “That trip made an enormous impression on me,” she says, recalling riding an elephant at the palace of the maharajah of Jaipur and being garlanded with necklaces of brilliant orange marigolds.
It was around this time that the former Caroline Lee Bouvier broke free of her chintz-slippered childhood and began forging a bolder path. In 1959, she married Stanislas Radziwill, a British real restate investor, and moved to a house near Buckingham Palace. “Stas loved beautiful objects, and I had a good eye,” she notes. “It was a good combination.” Soon she coaxed Renzo Mongiardino, then known primarily as a set designer, into her charmed world. “I think I got him at his very best,” Radziwill says, “before he started decorating for great art collectors like Stavros Niarchos and Baron Thyssen and making houses that looked like museums.” (Read more.)

radziwill designed the new york sitting rooms daybed which is covered in a vintage rubelli stripe also used for the walls and curtains