Queen of France: A Biography of Marie Antoinette

She was Marie Antoinette, a lovely Austrian princess. She was fourteen when she first met her fifteen-year-old husband, the Dauphin of France. He was a shy, heavy young man, overshadowed by his grandfather, Louis XV.

The girl had many problems to cope with at the French court, among them her husband’s lack of interest, the King’s spinster daughters (almost her only companions at first) and Madame du Barry, the King’s favorite. Yet she soon won everyone’s heart and had all Paris at her charming feet.

But as time went by, not only the court but the country as a whole and Marie Antoinette’s mother (Maria Theresa of Austria, four hundred leagues away, and constantly advising her daughter by mail) were alarmed by the fantastic parties, wild extravagances, and excessive pleasures of the Dauphin’s bride.

Then, Louis XV died, and the courtiers coming to salute the new nineteen-year-old king found him and his queen on their knees weeping bitterly, “Oh, God,” they cried, embracing each other, “protect us; we are too young to reign.”

André Castelot, a distinguished French scholar and historian, has in this book written one of the most brilliant of recent biographies, which makes Marie Antoinette, from her arrival in France, to the day she rode to her death in a cart, amazingly alive for the reader. We are carried from the intimate chambers of the young queen, through the incredible splendor and shocking discomfort of life at Court, to the awesome sounds of the rising mob, the last desperate flights, and the ultimate imprisonment and execution.

The author has had a mass of documents at his disposal while writing this book, many of them newly discovered in Viennese and Parisian archives, and never before presented to the public.