Tea at Trianon: A Romantic Wiltshire Farmhouse

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, August 21, 2025

A Romantic Wiltshire Farmhouse

Image may contain Architecture Building Housing Bench Furniture Plant House Cottage and Manor

Image may contain Architecture Building Dining Room Dining Table Furniture Indoors Room Table Chair Lamp and Desk

From House and Garden:

Thirty years on and both house and garden have matured beautifully. The roses the couple planted clamber in pretty profusion up the front of the house and over the summerhouse, the reclaimed panelling in the library looks as though it has been there forever and one of their children’s bedrooms has become an attic den for a visiting grandchild.
Though the renovation of the house was tough going, the original layout of the 17th-century farmhouse, with its overlaid Georgian façade of honey-coloured Bath stone, remains undisturbed. Two rooms on either side of a central hall and the same above, topped by smaller attic bedrooms – along with extensions at the back and to one side, dating respectively from the 1950s and the 1980s – had already swelled the building from one room to two rooms deep, allowing for another couple of first-floor bedrooms and three bathrooms. Kevin and Susie’s only structural alteration was to knock three rooms into one to create a kitchen stretching along the rear with a dining room at one end, connected by double doors to the sitting room. (Read more.)

Image may contain Home Decor Lamp Couch Furniture Art Painting Cushion Person Architecture Building and Indoors