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The life of Marie Antoinette is over but in some ways her story lives on....often almost fable.

"during the French Revolution, to begin with, idealism had the upper hand. The National Assembly, composed of nobles and bourgeois...wished to help the common people, to liberate the masses; but the liberated masses, when their forces had been unchained, speedily turned against the liberators. During the second phase...the radical elements, the spiteful revolutionists, gained the upper hand." (p 371)

"If two simple, light, inconspicuous carriages...had driven away, no one would have paid any attention to these ordinary vehicles....The royal family would have made its way to the frontier without attracting remark....But the greatest of all the mistakes was this. If the King and the Queen had to drive for four-and-twenty hours, even to get out of hell, they must drive comfortably." And Fersen built a huge chariot.

"In its exclusiveness and indifference, Versailles had cut itself off so completely from the real France that it was wholly unaware of the new currents of thought which were agitating the and....The new bourgeois had been taught by Jean Jacques Rousseau that they possessed rights...Those of their order who returned...after taking part in the American War of Independence brought tidings of a remarkable country...p 146

"pg 93 "Even though she squandered her energies upon trifles, her existence had its peculiar significance, in that it was a fitting expression of and an appropriate close to the eighteenth century."

"The best way of understanding the absurdity of her behaviour is to take a map of France and mark on it the narrow space in which she spent almost all the years of her reign....The area is so confined that upon a small-scaled map it shrinks to little more than a point. From Versailles to Trianon, to Marly, to Fontainebleau, to Saint-Cloud, and to Rambouillet, six places in all---separated...from...by...a few leagues

"Doubtless etiquette held sway at Schönbrunn, but it was not slavishly worshipped. In France, on the contrary, at a court full of affectation and grown old before its time, people no longer lived for life's sake but merely in order to show off....There was never a spontaneous gesture, and naturalness of any kind was an unpardonable offence against good taste." (p 35) Young MA bristled in this environment

During these seven years of impotence, the characters of the King and the Queen were warped, each in its own fashion---with political results which would be unintelligible had we no knowledge of the prime cause. The fate of this one marriage was intertwined with the fate of the world. (p. 24)