Tea at Trianon: Marie-Antoinette's Lost Couch

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, November 12, 2024

Marie-Antoinette's Lost Couch

The fact that they even mention the cake myth in the following article is regrettable. And I know of no portrait that shows the Queen reclining on a couch. They must be referring to the Coppola film. From The San Francisco Standard:

“This piece of furniture has a very complicated history,” Williams said. Commissioned for Versailles in 1779, it was included in an inventory of furniture taken from the palace shared by Antoinette and her husband, King Louis XVI, a few months before their heads were chopped off in a public square in Paris by French revolutionaries.
“For the lavish furniture of the last tyrants of France,” read the report, “a general inventory will be made for the sale of the current items of furniture estimated to be worth less than a thousand livres.”
More than 17,000 objects were sold in lots to raise money for the state. Gilded clocks, tapestries, jewels, art, and Europe’s finest furniture were dispersed across the world.
Some of these objects were taken by Napoleon; others found their way to the homes of English and German aristocrats and American ambassadors. But Antoinette’s couch found its way, eventually, to San Francisco.
Likely moving from one rich estate to the next, the couch was first it was sawed in half and reupholstered several times before making its way to the historical museum at Lands End.
In what Williams called one of the museum’s most ambitious efforts and a longtime passion project for Martin Chapman, the now-retired curator in charge of European decorative arts and sculpture, the museum began the delicate work of restoring the couch in 2006. More than a dozen people were involved, from historians who traced the couch’s provenance to conservationists and chemists like Williams who worked to restore its trim through X-ray radiography. Replicas of the peonies, roses, pansies, daffodils, and cornflowers that line the white cushions were embroidered by a centennial French company specializing in haute couture.
Now, after 18 years of research and restoration, the piece is considered as close to its original form as possible — a couch truly fit for a queen.
Much of its history is unknown, including when it left France or whether Antoinette ever actually laid down on it. The museum purchased it at an auction in 1957, when an FAMSF employee recognized its significance and purchased it for the collection. (Read more.)