Love of family gave them courage love of France gave them nobility. The author succeeds brilliantly in describing how the once-vibrant Marie and the decent, despised, and irresolute Louis transformed themselves as the Revolution took its murderous course. Fersen, the queen's discreet, devoted Swedish lover, looms large. Mozart, Gluck, Jefferson, Paine, Franklin and numerous others cross her pages. Fraser draws upon a huge range of sources to present a dazzling cast. But, as Fraser demonstrates, Versailles demanded extravagance, and in politics Marie Antoinette was more pawn than player, pushed by wily Austrian diplomats and blocked by shrewd French ministers. She was regarded as extravagant ('Madame Deficit'), pro-Austrian, and childless for too long. Everybody criticized Marie, who was known both as l'Autrichienne (the Austrian woman) and l'autruche chienne (the ostrich bitch). While the pair wandered through their doomed lives, fury built up in bankrupt France, exploding in the ferocity of the Revolution. Louis was of only occasional help in the second he suffered from phimosis, an inhibiting physical condition. Marie Antoinette was of little use in the first endeavor she lacked political power. The marriage was intended to strengthen the Austrian-French alliance and produce sons to continue it. In 1770, Marie Antoinette, aged 14, wed the awkward 16-year-old who in 1774 became Louis XVI. The Barnes & Noble Review: Was she a sexual predator, political meddler, wastrel, and traitor? Or was she a scapegoat for a corrupt and bankrupt nation, who went with superb dignity to the guillotine, the victim of a vindictive judicial murder? The tragic life of Marie Antoinette, rich in conflicting detail, remains a biographer's challenge, and Antonia Fraser's richly human yet evenhanded account is a reader's delight.

Marie antoinette the journey