Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

ecame a popular sight for picturesque tourists including Keats and Scott himself. At some point
it acquired the name Fingal’s Cave, after the hero of Ossian, and entered not only guide book
literature but music in 1832 when Mendelssohn renamed his overture of 1830 the ‘Hebridean’.
Similarly, in the Louvre Salon of 1845, a picture by François-Alexandre Pernot of the waterfall
at Inversnaid was accompanied by a detailed catalogue note explaining that Rob-Roy’s cavern
was beneath the cascade and referring readers for more details to ‘Waverley et Rob Roy par sir
Walter Scott’. 126 Fiction and fact were here as interdependent as in the introduction to Ivanhoe,
the novel had become the authenticating text for the accuracy of the picture. In France the most
spectacular instance of ‘lived antiquarianism’ was the case of the Duchesse de Berry, whose
Quadrille de Marie Stuart took place at the Tuileries on 2 March 1829. Scott was possibly a
direct influence, having told part of Mary Queen of Scots’s history in the The Abbot in 1820. He
was certainly an indirect influence as the chief inspiration for the French historical fiction which
began to emerge in the 1820s. Alexandre Dumas père’s first play, Henri III et sa Cour was also
published in 1829. 127
Marie-Caroline de Bourbon-Sicile, Duchesse de Berry (1798-1869) was the mother of the
heir to the French throne, the Comte de Chambord, known as ‘l’enfant du miracle’ because his
birth, after the assassination of his father the Duc de Berry in 1820, had assured the male
succession in the Bourbon line. She was a figure therefore of both social and political
significance, a cultivated woman, a collector, a patron of the arts and glamorous, a leader of
fashion. 128 Fashion in the 1820s and ’30s was also responding to the passion for the past,
drawing ‘the thinnest line’ between modern dress and historical costume. 129 It was what Harriet
Granville described to her sister Lady Carlisle as ‘the present ancient style of dress’. 130 French
fashion in particular was dominated in the 1820s by ‘le gothique corsage à la Marie Stuart’. 131
126 Quoted in Wright, ‘Scott’s Historical Novels and French Historical Painting’, p.286.
127 Charlotte Gere cites Scott as an influence (personal communication) but Jacqueline du Pasquier, ‘La Duchessee
de Berry, arbitre de la mode et reine du style troubadour’, in Kremers, Marie Caroline de Berry, pp. 124-137, p.128
is no doubt right to suggest that Dumas’s play was the immediate inspiration.
128 My account is drawn from Kremers, Marie Caroline de Berry and Entre Cour et Jardin: Marie-Caroline,
Duchesse de Berry.
129 Charlotte Gere, personal communication.
130 Letters of Harriet Countess Granville 1819-1845, edited by the Hon F Leverson Gower, 2 vols, London, 1894,
p.204.
131 du Pasquier, ‘La Duchessee de Berry, arbitre de la mode et reine du style troubadour’ in Kremers et al, Marie-
Caroline de Berry, pp.124-137, p.135.
140