It feels like forever since I've written one of these - and so many good things that could have been said, so many books to be recommended! Ah well, here's a good place to come back to, because we can talk about anti-Antoinette literature. It was HARSH. Marie's upbringing was an interesting one. As we've pointed out before, Maria Theresa had A FEW children (after the first dozen, who keeps track?), and indifferently talented daughters tended to get lost in the mix. Marie's education was the left in the hands of some rather indulgent tutors, and her aversion to reading and study was marked by them from an early age. And the Parisian Court really wasn't the place to fix that particular problem. She played games mindlessly for hours and took her pleasures where she could. But she wasn't malicious about it, and when times started getting rough, she was every bit equal to them.

Ironically, it was precisely when she was growing into her role properly, looking beyond the gates of palace life and starting to work towards a bettering of the lot of the common people, that the pamphleteers really started having a go at her. She was the satanic lesbian orgy ringleader who was plotting constantly to hand France over to Austria (this last part, of course, was what Maria Theresa was hoping she would do, and which Marie Antoinette always precisely refused to countenance). Part of this was, of course, simple propagandistic opportunism - you can't openly challenge the king, but you can at least feel a little better writing smut rags about his wife. Partly it was wry speculation on the role that court favorites like Count Fernsen might actually have been playing during the long years when Louis was busy figuring out how to make sex not hurt. But the whole project quickly ran off the rails in a way that is usually reserved for 16th century Protestants writing about the Vatican. So, yeah, she probably deserves to be a bit miffed.

- Count Dolby von Luckner