Anyone who follows me here knows that an addiction to large, gorgeous coffee table books is alive and well, and I have a new favorite…
View More Presidential Residences in FranceTag: House of Bourbon
Kings draped in ermine and queens declaring, “Let them eat cake!” The royal characters populating the House of Bourbon never disappoint in the drama department!
The number of angles I feel fascination for the House of Bourbon monarchs is endless so you can expect an ample number of posts here on The Diary of an Improvateur that feature these larger-than-life figures of the past. Several diary entries I’ve already posted include Ancienne Manufacture Royale patterns still being produced by Bernardaud, the lauded porcelain manufacturer in Limoges, France. In one of these, Dining with History, I begin my homage to these one of these royals, Marie Antoinette, with the question, “How is it that someone who lived so long ago can feel so present to so many people and in so many ways?”
We can thank filmmakers, of course, and we also have a handful of novelists responsible for our continued fascination, such as Sena Jeter Naslund, who wrote Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette. Then there are manufacturers like Bernardaud, which keep pieces of her daily routine alive in the porcelain tabletop items they produce. I cover other subjects relating to these monarchs in other posts filed under this tag.
The Hotel de la Marine Restored
In his foreword to The French Royal Wardrobe: The Hotel de la Marine Restored, Philippe Bélaval, the President of the Centre des Monuments Nationaux, illustrates how painstaking…
View More The Hotel de la Marine RestoredAn Invitation to Vaux-le-Vicomte
In 1641, the 26-year old parliamentarian Nicolas Fouquet, who was then the Master of Requests at the Parlement of Paris, acquired the viscounty of Vaux…
View More An Invitation to Vaux-le-VicomteThe Tapestry of History
In just a few hours, the modern ideal of a fairy tale wedding will take place at Windsor Castle. A trip I took to the…
View More The Tapestry of HistoryThe Fabric of Design
In their introduction to The Decoration of Houses, Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr., write, “In the middle ages, when warfare and brigandage shaped the…
View More The Fabric of DesignExploring Frankfurt with Goethe
I am returning to Frankfurt am Main next week to attend Heimtextil for the second time, an experience I truly enjoyed last year for the…
View More Exploring Frankfurt with GoetheMadame Récamier and the Art of Reclining
Jeanne-Françoise Julie Adélaïde Bernard, known after her marriage as Juliette Récamier, was born on December 4, 1777—240 years ago yesterday. Had she lived during modern…
View More Madame Récamier and the Art of RecliningMy Porcelain Bucket List
When I am planning literary design adventures, I look for experiences that give me the feeling of transcendence—encounters during which I am conscious of having…
View More My Porcelain Bucket ListA Backward Glance on rue de Varenne
The narrow sidewalks push their black iron batons up out of the ground to protect the buildings hemming them; the rain turns the cobblestones to…
View More A Backward Glance on rue de VarenneArchitecture with Heart in Bordeaux
In the preface to the book Grand Bordeaux Châteaux: Inside the Fine Wine Estates of France, Philippe Chaix describes discovering Bordeaux as a bewitching act: on…
View More Architecture with Heart in Bordeaux