Tea at Trianon: Inside Edith Wharton’s House

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, January 7, 2025

Inside Edith Wharton’s House

From Apollo Magazine:

Undine Spragg has bad taste. In the ‘Looey’ suite she insists her parents rent at the fictional Hotel Stentorian, ‘wainscotting of highly varnished mahogany’ is only the first strike. Walls hung with ‘salmon-pink damask’ suggest rococo pretensions that ‘oval portraits of Marie Antoinette and the Princess de Lamballe’ ensure we don’t miss. Crowning these indignities is a ‘gilt table with a top of Mexican onyx’ surmounted by – the horror! – a ‘palm in a gilt basket tied with a pink bow’. Can the merciless arriviste of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913) buy the taste she wasn’t born into? The answer turns out to be no – but Undine triumphs anyway.

Though her own rooms were inherited, Wharton knew all too well the trauma of childhood decor. She was born into that most storied of clubs, Old New York, but even her family’s patinaed cash could not ensure good taste. Photographs of the brownstone on West 23rd Street where a young Edith Newbold Jones lived teem with roses and carnations cresting over every surface – walls to curtains, fauteuil to settee. Gilt moulding, reflected in heaps of glassware and in the swags of a crystal chandelier, would have bathed the room in ersatz lustre. (Read more.)