La Reine

She was the epitome of everything a queen ought to be.  Of course,  a queen of France is another, thornier, matter--but in general her training as an archduchess stood her in good stead:  Protocol she could handle, and, being born a princess, she was not a snob.  From her fabulous dragoness of a mother, she inherited a first-rate musical talent and a type of physical beauty much admired in her time; and from her father, it's said, she inherited artistic talent and a ready wit.  The clue to her downfall (to the decapitation of her husband and herself, and the murder of her children) is probably to be found in the fact that she did not get the Americans--and  that the Americans particularly, in turn, did not like her, and blamed her, and her "extravagance" for everything that was wrong with the ancien régime. Thomas Jefferson, for example, who was there, in Paris, as the American ambassador to France through 1789, said so.  Her "extravagance" was not so much Trianon, and her creation of a whole little representative world, even when French queens were not supposed to have representative worlds of their own (though it was that), as it was--way back--when she joined the cabal that forced Louis to dismiss the finance minister Turgot, which nobody ever forgot or forgave, and which was, in fact, the principal cause (along with the fearsome expenditures of the American war) of the eventual bankruptcy and collapse of the government.  The other thing that people could not, or would not forget about Marie Antoinette's association with that same cabal (which consisted mostly of her brothers-in-law and their wives--a natural enough association, you would think), was the betting on horse races and the gambling for high stakes that being a member of that "smart set" entailed.  A decade later, when the toy domaine of Little Trianon was affording its mistress privacy, entertainment, fresh milk and eggs, and justification of her domestic managerial skills, all people could talk about, or think about, still, were her meddling in the firing of finance ministers and the debts she had run up, gambling and betting on horses. She wasn't a stupid person, or insensitive, or unkind, but she failed to grasp--or grasp soon enough--the fatal consequences of being thought "extravagant," as she was judged to be by her own méchants sujets and by the Americans.

One is reminded of a couple of interesting things in this regard:  how (1), virtually unanimously, the French people, even today, believe that Louis XVI was guilty of treason and therefore deserved to be executed; and how (2) Louis himself, utterly persuaded of his own innocence (at least, of treason), right up to his very last days, was asking himself and his closest advisors, "Where did the money go?  Why did we give so much to the Americans?"