Save Marie-Antoinette

Save Marie-Antoinette

Was Marie-Antoinette a luxury-mad butterfly flitting from ball to costume ball? Or was she a misunderstood queen who suffered a loveless marriage and became a prisoner of court etiquette at Versailles? Historians now believe the answer was the latter and point to her private retreats at Versailles as proof.

Here, in the northwest part of the royal park, Marie-Antoinette created a tiny universe of her own: her comparatively dainty mansion called Petit Trianon and its adjacent "farm," the still magnificently lovely Hameau ("hamlet").

In a life that took her from royal cradle to throne of France to guillotine, her happiest days were spent at Trianon. For here she could live a life in the "simplest" possible way; here the queen could enter a salon and the game of cards would not stop; here women wore simple gowns of muslin without a single jewel.

Toinette only wanted to be "Queen of Trianon," not queen of France. And considering the horrible, chamber-pot-pungent, gossip-infested corridors of Versailles, you can almost understand why.

Toinette's Taste

From the first, Maria-Antonia (her actual name) was ostracized as an outsider, "l'Autrichienne," -- the Austrian. Shamed by her initial failure to deliver a royal heir, she grew to hate overcrowded Versailles and soon escaped to Petit Trianon, built from 1763-68 by Jacques-Ange Gabriel for Madame de Pompadour.

After becoming queen in 1774, Toinette refashioned the interior, banishing the gilt trip of Rococo. Instead, sober Neoclassical boiseries, distinguished Riesener bureaus, and walls painted in that most dramatic of new shades -- off-white -- revealed a sea change in taste. Today her spirit is still present, thanks in part to collectors who have saved her bibelots -- including the ivory clock fashioned for her by Louis XVI himself -- and furniture; her initials still can be seen on the wrought-iron railings of the staircase.

"The Simple Life"

Beyond Petit Trianon lay the queen's storybook Hameau, a mock-Norman village inspired by the peasant-luxe daydreams caught by Boucher on canvas and by Rousseau in literature, a place for her to enjoy "the simple life."

With its water mill, genuine lake (Grand Lac), thatched-roof houses built in daub-and-wattle style, pigeon loft, and vegetable plots, this make-believe farm village was run by Monsieur Valy-Busard, a farmer, and his wife, who often helped the queen -- outfitted as a Dresden shepherdess with a Sèvres porcelain crook -- tend her flock of perfumed sheep.

It was here at Trianon that a page sent by Monsieur de Saint-Priest found Marie-Antoinette on October 5, 1789, to tell her that Paris was marching on an already half-deserted Versailles.

-Robert I. C. Fisher