Let Us Eat Cake!

''Let them Eat Cake,'', a famous quote attributed to Marie Antoinette the young and frivolous Queen of France. Actually, this arrogant riposte  to the poverty of the French people was in fact attributed to Marie-Thérèse, wife of Louis XIV one hundred years previously. While historians are reconsidering Marie Antoinette's life and attitudes towards I've always found her fascinating. You see, she’s on my list of  the big 3 of my favourite historical figures and when I tell you the names of the other two on the list there’s more than just a wee connection, the other two are Mary Queen of Scots and Anne Boleyn. Young, queens, made regrettable decisions and ultimately lost their heads! 

Lockdown seems to be going to my head, I found old photos of us on a visit to Versailles in 1989 and decided that if I could’ve chosen somewhere to celebrate my birthday 2021 it would've been in Versailles with Marie Antoinette! 

So this is heading towards a sketchbook page! Marie Antonia of Austria was born in 1755 in Vienna (another beautiful city that I loved visiting!) and arrived in France as the bride of the Dauphin in 1755, at the ripe old age of 14! Having been gobsmacked on arriving at the palace of Versailles myself. I can certainly imagine how this perhaps original ''It girl'', must have felt. Overwhelming, glorious, glittery and over the top ..... who can blame her for ''losing her head'', it would’ve taken a saint to resist the temptations of jewels, clothes, shoes .... Marie Antoinette was 14, a teenager. 

To be fair, she was doing what she was brought up for; representation ..... power dressing ! Dress to impress, I don’t think that the shakers and makers in her world would have been impressed at someone wearing sackcloth and ashes and in fact her expenditure on clothing and shoes was less than that of her brother in law, the Compte d'Artois who ordered 365 pairs of shoes in one year. (Versailles was so dirty and full of excrement that shoes got so soiled, they had to be thrown away.) 

In the words of the Mark Knopfler song about Romeo and Juliet .... ''it was just that the time was wrong!''. We could of course discuss ad infinitum the point of having a monarchy and the cost ..... and poverty among the masses, it wouldn’t change what happened ...... just as ripping down statues cannot change the past. There is a danger in deleting the past, the lessons learned are forgotten, leaving them open to being repeated. 

So let us eat cake!