Tea at Trianon: The Most Beloved Swan

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

Friday, August 8, 2025

The Most Beloved Swan

Wearing her wedding dress by Mabel McIlvain Downs. She married her first husband Stanley Mortimer in 1940

From Tatler:

Barbara 'Babe' Cushing was born on 5 July 1915 in Boston, Massachusetts, to wealthy prominent parents (her father was a brain surgeon and professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Yale universities). Along with her two elder sisters Minnie and Betsey, she was part of 'the fabulous Cushing sisters', with the three famed for marrying powerful, wealthy men. While her sisters married Vincent Astor and James Roosevelt, Babe picked William S. Paley, the chief executive of television network, CBS.
Together, they became two power players on the New York social scene, throwing some of the most elaborate and famous parties of the 1960s. Babe's best friend was author Truman Capote, who was known for 'collecting' society beauties, dubbing them his Swans. Their fall out was prompted by his betrayal disclosing their secrets (under false but obvious identities) in an article for Esquire. (Read more.)

From Tatler:

In 1940 Babe married Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr., a chiseled, dimpled Harvard-graduate-cum-advertising-exec. Mortimer was a sportsman and a classic denizen of the East Coast elite. His father was a stockbroker and an amateur tennis champion. He made adverts in the burgeoning consumerist cauldron of 1940s New York and was an avid tennis player, golfer and member of the jockey club. The couple had two children: Stanley Grafton Mortimer and Amanda Jay Mortimer – both of whom carved their own paths through the new-commerce and old-monied elite of New York. In 1946, the couple divorced and Babe remarried shortly thereafter, vowing herself to William S. Paley, the man with whom she would spend the rest of her life. (Read more.)

Babe Paley wearing a blue and black dress from TrainaNorell 1946