12.9 Marie Antoinette, the Luckiest Princess

Her Half of History

There is so much written about Marie Antoinette, much of it contradictory, that I just could not squeeze her story down into a single episode, not even with liberal use of the backspace button. So this is the first of three episodes on a woman who many hoped would be the last queen of France. In this episode:

• she is born in Vienna, though we don't know much about her childhood
• she wins (or loses) the dice roll the determines who marries who between Versailles and Vienna
• a hasty education focuses more on her appearance than her knowledge
• the court of Versailles is dominated by petty social interactions
• and her husband, bless him, has problems of his own.

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