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

including the Comtesse de Boigne thought it tasteless for the Duchesse, a niece of Marie-
Antoinette, to dress as a beheaded Queen in the home of another, more recent, victim of the same
fate. 132 The Bourbons, however, took famously little account of recent history. The following
year brought another revolution which saw the Duchesse driven into exile. Here too she followed
in the footsteps of Mary Stuart, taking ship with her family for Scotland. The implications were
spelled out in the portrait of her by an unknown artist, now in the Bordeaux museum of fine arts
[fig: 31]. Dressed in a highland bonnet and a present-ancient, sixteenth-century style dress in
Legitimist white satin, the Duchesse looks her last on France. On the stool beside her are papers
dated 1561, the year of François II’s death and his widow Mary’s return to Scotland. The
identification with the past has translated easily from fancy dress to iconography, from evening
party to party propaganda.
Figure 31 The Duchesse de Berry sailing into exile, unknown artist
Caroline de Berry’s fall from power deprived many artists and writers of a patron. Both
Victor Hugo and Langlois, for whom she had intervened personally to obtain a permanent
teaching post in Rouen, had benefited from her support, although Hugo had already broken with
her by 1830. In the longer term the consequences of the July Revolution in the reign of Louis-
Philippe were to prove beneficial for French antiquarianism, setting it on the course that would
take it, by the mid-century, in a decisively different direction from the British. For much of the
132
Nicoullaud, Mémoirs de la Comtesse de Boigne, 3, p.244.
142