Later, when the new regime denounced any display of wealth, those identical dresses became the height of fashion. When in residence at Petit Trianon, the queen ditched her jewel-encrusted silk gowns and wore simple cotton shepherdess dresses-a practice for which she was severely criticized. As she was unfamiliar with the workings of actual farms, the “live” stock that dotted the yard were, in fact, papier-mâché stock. (Obviously, the definition of petit is subjective here. . . .) It was one of Marie Antoinette’s favorite getaways, and she loved to take close friends and family for holidays here and play the role of a peasant girl. Along the edge of the Versailles Estate sits a little house called Petit Trianon. The queen in the castle longed for a simple country life. So we can all set down the cake and file this one away as Fake News. She spent her time of imprisonment knitting and distributing clothing to the destitute of Paris. She made a regular practice of giving away her shoes and stockings to the needy. Legend has it that, upon hearing of the peasants’ complaints about having no bread, the queen quipped, “If they have no bread, then let them eat cake.” In fact, Marie Antoinette herself often directed stores of flour and grain from the royal kitchen to be distributed to the poor. She never said that thing we all think she said. The child within it has been summarily painted out.
Particularly painful to any parent is a royal family portrait featuring Marie Antoinette and her children standing next to an empty crib. Thus, she was allowed no public statement of mourning and was unable to attend her own child’s funeral. Because France still clung to the idea that their king was not only royal but divine, the ruling family could not be publicly associated with death. Wealth and nobility provided no immunity from the tragedy of infant mortality, and the queen would see the tragic death of two of her children during the course of her reign. She was not allowed to mourn her children. #3 She was forbidden to mourn her children From that day forward, she was forbidden to wear black or yellow-the colors of her family crest. Before crossing into France en route to meet her first boyfriend/husband, she was ordered to descend from the carriage, strip off her clothing, destroy it, and dress herself in the colors of the Bourbon household. Young Maria had to divest herself of her heritage in a much more literal way, too. While it’s a common practice even today for a woman to take on her husband’s surname, they’re not often asked to abandon the language and spelling of their homeland. Her name at birth was Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna. She was stripped of her Austrian identity. #2 She was stripped of her Austrian identity
and years . . .) before the marriage would be consummated. Theirs was, of course, a political arrangement, and it would be years (and years . . . She was barely fourteen, and Louis-Auguste fifteen, when the two were joined together in a ceremony with an intimate gathering of five thousand of their closest friends. Marie Antoinette was a child bride married to a child groom. While researching to bring Marie Antoinette to life in my novel The Seamstress, I came across bits and pieces of her biography that allowed for a more sympathetic portrayal than she usually enjoys. RELATED: Top 10 Fairies from Fairy Tales and Literature – A Guest Post by Elizabeth Hopkinson But long before Marie Antoinette fell victim to the blade of la guillotine, she lived as the victim of a press who fed the people’s hatred with stories that ran the gamut from unflattering to slanderous vulgarity. The rebels’ cry of “Off with her head!” put the final stamp on her public persona. History has painted France’s last prerevolutionary queen with a cruel brush, leaving a lasting impression of a haughty, selfish, and vain woman who had little regard for the epidemic of poverty that plagued her country. 10 Things You Didn’t Know about the Real Marie Antoinette
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