Tea at Trianon: The Secrets of Elegance

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, September 15, 2026

The Secrets of Elegance

One must subscribe to read the entire article but what is available is quite interesting. From The Habsburg Way:

It is a common error among the ambitious, or the self-conscious, to confuse elegance for luxury.
To assume that what looks expensive must look good, and conclude therefore that in order to look good, we must spend extravagantly. On the other hand, there are those who are fearful of their own status, and exaggerate roughness through language or clothing to signal that they are ‘one of the people’.
We all know tackiness or scruffiness when we see it, but how can we avoid both and actually embody elegance?
For the answer, we must turn to one of the most popular writers of 19th century France, who achieved the rare feat of being highly conservative, highly eccentric and highly charismatic all at once. In 1830, Honoré de Balzac indeed began his Treatise On Elegant Living to both lampoon the tackiness of post-revolutionary France’s new elites, while also reflecting on why they were getting this so wrong.
So, here is how to stop trying to look elegant, and start being elegant, from the father of ‘elegantology’ itself…(Read more.)