Flaunting, Extravagant Queen

Author’s Note

Few people maintain an attitude of impartiality towards Marie Antoinette. At the time of her death she was compared with Messalina and Agrippina. Later, on the return of the Monarchy, she became the ‘martyred Queen’, and was spoken of almost as a saint. Neither extreme is, of course, the true picture.

When I set out to find this, at first it seemed to me that there emerged from my research a not very intelligent woman, concerned chiefly with glorifying her own dainty charms in which she delighted, careless, light-hearted, pleasure-loving, almost stupid in her failure to see the looming shadow of revolution, yet generous and good-hearted – a very ordinary human being.

But the fascination of Marie Antoinette is the sudden emergence of the brave and noble woman who took the place of the frivolous one almost overnight. It is difficult to believe that the butterfly of the Trianon is the same woman who endured so stoically her sufferings in the Temple and the Conciergerie, whose thoughts were mainly for her husband and children, and who was in such deep mental and physical agony as she rode so bravely and so royally in her tumbril to the Place de la Révolution.

It has been an absorbing pleasure to try to understand this woman of dual personality, and I have been greatly helped in this by the following:M. Guizot. The History of France.G. Lenôtre. Translated by H. Noel Williams. Paris in the Revolution.Thomas Carlyle. The French Revolution.Iain D. B. Pilkington. Queen of the Trianon.Stefan Zweig. Marie Antoinette.Louis Adolphe Thiers. Translated, with notes, by Frederick Shoberl. The History of the French Revolution.Catherine Charlotte, Lady Jackson. Old Paris, Its Courts and Literary Salons.Hilaire Belloc. Marie Antoinette.J. B. Morton. The Dauphin.Nesta H. Webster. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette Before the Revolution.Frédéric Barbey. A Friend of Marie Antoinette.Nesta H. Webster. The French Revolution.

JP.