Tea at Trianon: Versailles Restores Royal Bedroom to Its 1789 Splendor

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

Saturday, April 18, 2026

Versailles Restores Royal Bedroom to Its 1789 Splendor

An ornate bedroom in Versailles with rococo furnishings, including a bed with a canopy

Louis XIV was the great-grandfather of Louis XV, not his father. From ArtNet:

The 2,300-room Palace of Versailles just outside of Paris receives a seemingly constant stream of repairs. Just last year, for instance, an American-French coalition launched a restoration inside the state apartment of Sun King Louis XIV. Elsewhere, experts have been restoring one bedroom within the King’s Private Apartments, which Louis XV built and Louis XVI used, since the 1980s. Now, that project has finally come to an end. Crews just placed the very last details replicating precisely what this princely bedroom looked like on October 6, 1789—the very day that the French royal family made its final departure from Versailles.
[...]
This particular bedroom was built in 1728. French architect Jacques V Gabriel and his son Ange-Jacques Gabriel, who both served France’s royal family, designed the space together. Antwerp-born sculptor, cabinetmaker, and ornamentalist Jacques Verberckt, meanwhile, provided structural decorations such as the space’s impossibly delicate Rocaille embellishments, just as he did for other parts of Versailles—like, the Queen’s Room in 1730. (Read more.)