Marie Antoinette (19 page)

An eighteenth-century portrait of the portly King Louis XVI in his coronation robes.

Marie Antoinette and her children — Marie Thérèse Charlotte, Louis Joseph, and Louis Charles, who later became King Louis XVII — from a 1787 canvas by Mme. Vigée-LeBrun. Daughter Sophie Hélène died the summer before this portrait was completed. It is said that she had been posed inside the cradle but was painted out before the painting was officially displayed.

The steel will of Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, mother of Marie Antoinette, is unmistakable in this eighteenth-century portrait.

Madame du Barry, mistress of King Louis XV, archrival of Marie Antoinette, as captured by Mme. Vigée-LeBrun.

A woodcut of the grand-scale Palace of Versailles with its elaborate gardens. It was the official residence of the French monarchy from 1682 until 1790. Versailles is now a national monument.

A photograph of the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. Part of the wedding celebrations of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI took place in this great room.

The French ridiculed the extravagant royals with quirky cartoons such as this one of the Queen and her family, 1792.

A woodcut illustrating the infamous storming of the Bastille, when angry citizens mobbed the prison fortress demanding weapons for their fight in the French Revolution.

Taken from an original painting by Paul Delaroche, this nineteenth-century engraving, done by John Sartain, depicts a plain and somber Marie Antoinette being led from the court to her execution by guillotine.

Kathryn Lasky has always loved history. She says she has always been fascinated by the lives of young people who found themselves in extraordinary historical situations because of their parents. “Princesses and princes had a special fascination for me. They never asked to be born this way and yet so much was expected of them.” Marie Antoinette especially intrigued Lasky. “She was so pretty and she was in so many ways so powerless. There was such promise and it all ended in disaster. To me, Marie Antoinette personified all the best and the worst things about being a princess.”

Lasky did extensive research into the life of Marie Antoinette. She feels that it is important for readers to know that all of what she wrote is based on actual facts. All of the characters mentioned in the diary are real except for a few. Among those few are the riding master Herr Francke and the servant Hans. It is true that Marie Antoinette’s sister Elizabeth had been stricken with smallpox and scarred. However, it is not known if she wore a veil constantly, although many women who had suffered from this disease did. Madame du Barry was most definitely real, and Marie Antoinette refused to acknowledge her in any way. However, in real life Marie Antoinette spoke her first recorded words to Madame du Barry on January 1, 1772. For the purposes of the narrative of this fictional diary, Kathryn Lasky moved up the date one year.

Ms. Lasky first encountered Marie Antoinette in her junior-high French class, not in history. It was hearing her French teacher speak of
La Pauvre
, “the poor one,” that first kindled her interest. Her teacher, Madame Hendren, explained to Lasky’s seventh-grade class that people could be very rich in material things — indeed, like Marie Antoinette, have the most beautiful dresses and jewels and wonderful pets like darling dogs,
les chiens adorables
— but still be very poor in other ways. Madame Hendren explained that in spite of all these possessions, Marie Antoinette had no control and no power; that her life was never her own. That the life of this very pretty and very innocent girl ended in terrible tragedy seemed unimaginable, Lasky says. “Yet it must have been imaginable, for ever since, I have thought about the strange tragedy of Marie Antoinette.”

Ms. Lasky says she often thinks about writing a fantasy story of Marie Antoinette, which would tell about a young girl who defies history and refuses her mother’s commands to marry the Dauphin of France and instead runs away to America. “She would not be a princess or even a queen,” Kathryn Lasky says. “She would be maybe a farmer in New England and join the patriots in the American Revolutionary War.”