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

Costume balls were wildly popular but the Duchesse’s Quadrille went yet further into that
territory between life and art that antiquarianism had opened up.
The Duchesse and her guests re-enacted a specific episode from Mary Stuart’s life, a visit
from her mother, Marie of Lorraine, Queen Mother of Scotland. The costumes were based on
historic sources found in the Bibliothèque Royale and the whole affair was recorded in a book of
lithographs by Eugène Lami, one of the artists who had visited Meyrick and who may therefore
have had some practice before he came to draw the armour worn by M le Comte de Rosambo in
the character of the Duc de Guise. The tragic Queen of Scots was ‘played’, there is no other word
for it, by the Duchesse herself [fig: 30] with Lady Stuart de Rothesay, wife of the British
ambassador, as her mother. (The Rothesays had already gothicised themselves in real life by
adding the ‘de’ to their name purely for romantic effect.)
Figure 30 The Duchesse de Berry as Mary Queen of Scots, by Eugène Lami
More than just an extravagant party, the Duchesse’s Quadrille had serious implications at
the time and was soon to acquire still more resonance. It was an exercise in inhabiting, reviving
rather than merely impersonating the past, and this was something that, under Charles X, the
Bourbons were determined to do. The King’s elaborately staged Gothic coronation at Rheims in
1825 was an attempt, like the Quadrille, to reconnect modern France with its past across the
fracture of the Revolution. The ball did not strike everyone as successful. Some in court circles,
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