Tea at Trianon: Marie-Antoinette at Fontainebleau

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, April 24, 2026

Marie-Antoinette at Fontainebleau

From Sortir à Paris:

The château de Fontainebleau has just lived a timeless week-end. On 18 and 19 April 2026, the courtyards and gardens of this jewel of Seine-et-Marne hosted a historical re-enactment dedicated to Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI, 240 years after their last stay at this royal residence. Under a generously sunlit sky, young and old stepped back into the refined, playful atmosphere of the 18th century. And the magic worked.
From the moment the gates opened, the tone was set. In the ballroom, reached via the oval courtyard and the King’s Staircase, the theatrical scene « Le dernier séjour » plunged us into the heart of autumn 1786, just a few weeks before the Revolution would sweep everything away. Marie-Antoinette, on the eve of her 31st birthday, still scarred by the affaire du collier scandal, sought in her newly redecorated apartments a sumptuous, private refuge far from the rumors of Versailles. A roughly fifteen-minute scene—short but striking—that immediately sets an atmosphere of fragile grace.
Further on, in the Chapel of the Trinity, the scene “Behind the Scenes of the Royal Stays” laid bare the impressive logistics that underpinned every royal movement. The intendant of the Garde-Meuble, Thierry de Ville d'Avray, and Mr. Papillon de La Ferté, intendant of the Menus Plaisirs, revealed the quiet gears of a colossal machinery, without which none of these splendors would have been possible. (Read more.)