text: Having been a fan of Antonia Fraser for many years, I highly anticipated her biography of Queen Marie-Antoinette, but have been very disappointed in that she often chooses the sensational over the factual. She depicts Marie-Antoinette's mother Empress Maria Theresa as heartless and calculating for sending her daughter to France at age 14 to get married, but arranged marriages were the norm; the empress was not doing anything out of the ordinary. What startled me most is that Fraser not only insists on Antoinette having an affair with Count Axel von Fersen, of which there is little concrete evidence, but goes onto maintain that Axel used condoms to keep the queen from getting pregnant. It seems to me that Marie-Antoinette loved children so much; she came from a family of sixteen where children were valued and her more liberal sister Caroline went on to have eleven children or more. She was also a devout Catholic and using such devices were unthinkable, unless one was a prostitute or dealing with prostitutes. In this case Fraser is applying the morals of some British aristocratic ladies to a queen of France. If Marie-Antoinette had been caught in adultery, it would have been considered treason; she would have been sent to a convent and had her children taken away from her. With all of her enemies at Court, that was not a risk she would have taken, if she had been so inclined. On a smaller scale, Fraser makes ridiculous assertions about Marie-Antoinette dyeing her hair - in all the pictures that I have seen of her, her hair looks grey from either powder or premature age; I have never read any first hand accounts of her dyeing it. Not that that is a big deal; but it makes me wonder where Lady Fraser's life ends and where Marie-Antoinette's life begins. I found it offensive that at the end Fraser interprets Marie-Antoinette's death as some kind of sacrifice for the cause of democracy, when she believed in monarchy and wanted her little son to be king. Especially, since Marie-Antoinette's murder was followed not by democracy but by dictatorships and Napoleon crowning himslf emperor. Sadly, there is a lacuna of decent biographies of the queen in the English language. One can only hope that the works of Bertieres, Chalon, and Delorme will soon be translated and published in English. Fraser's book does have some interesting details (aside from those which flow from her imagination) and it is much more sympathetic to the queen than Lever's travesty
  