Secrets Of Marie Antoinette

Letters between Marie Antoinette and her mother, the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, document life at the French court and Marie's personal concerns

The untold story of Marie-Antoinette's perfumer, Jean-Louis Fargeon. Montpellier, 1748: Jean-Louis Fargeon is born into a family of perfumers and soon becomes apprentice to his father's modest perfumery. But he dreams of the glittering court of Versailles and of becoming perfumer to the young queen, Marie Antoinette. His ambition carried him to Paris where his boutique became one of the most elegant and well-patronised in France. Concocting sumptuous perfumes and pomades for most of the French nobility, Fargeon eventually caught the attention of the queen. After meeting Marie Antoinette in the Trianon Palace, he began creating lavish bespoke scents that perfectly reflected her moods and personality. He served as her personal and exclusive perfumer for fourteen years until 1789 when the darkness of Revolution swept across France, its wrath aimed at the extravagance of a now hated queen. Fargeon, a lifelong supporter of the Republican cause but a purveyor to the court, was in a dangerous position. Yet he remained fiercely loyal to Marie Antoinette, beyond her desperate flight to Varennes, her execution and even through his own imprisonment and trial...

Delve deeper into the world of the BBC hit drama series Versailles, and discover the real Marie-Antoinette in this ground-breaking study of her secret love affair with the Swedish diplomat Count Axel von Fersen. For the first time an historian has compiled all the known letters between Swedish count Axel von Fersen and Marie-Antoinette, including six letters never before published. With unprecedented access to French and Swedish archives, Evelyn Farr has proven beyond doubt one of history's greatest romances. Axel von Fersen was Queen Marie-Antoinette's lover and loyal counsellor who gave her political advice from 1785 to the fall of the French monarchy at the time of the French Revolution. He organized the Royal Family's escape from Paris in 1791. Evelyn Farr's revelatory work on the subject also goes some way to proving that Count Fersen was in fact the biological father of Marie Antoinette's two younger children. Farr unveils the logistics and practicalities behind the romance; the use of code and invisible ink, the role of intermediaries, secret seals, double envelopes, codenames and the location of Fersen's clandestine lodgings at Versailles. I Love You Madly is a meticulously researched and enjoyable study of a forbidden love at a time of revolution. The letters portray a rebellious and independent queen who risked everything and broke all the rules to love the man who succeeded in conquering her heart.

The closing years of the French monarchy could scarcely have found a more faithful chronicler, or one better fitted for the task both by training and situation, than Madame Campan. Introduced into the Court of Louis XV as a young girl, she became one of the household of Marie Antoinette immediately after that Princess came from Austria to wed the Dauphin. She followed the fortunes of her royal mistress with unswerving devotion until the prison gates separated them. The reader will find here a series of vivid pen pictures of a stirring time. Louis XV and Louis XVI live again for us, surrounded by their Courts. But the chief interest attaches to the Queen, who laid down her life to expiate the crime of monarchy.

MARIE ANTOINETTE Secrets from the Grave - A Novel Deadly secrets and fatal decisions, Marie Antoinette thought she took her secrets to the grave. She was wrong. Was Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, executed during the French Revolution for her worst crime or was there another that would have shaken the very foundations of the monarchy if it had become known? What was it? Colourful characters that filled Marie's life spill from the novel's pages. The royal perfumer, candle-maker, hairdresser, fashion stylist, painter, jeweller and even her pastry maker were all part of an extravagant, indulgent lifestyle. Go with her from Austria to the stunning royal estate of Versailles with the fairy-tale Trianon. Continue on to the filthy degradation of the prisons of revolutionary Paris and the faded glory of the Tuileries Palace, and share the lives, hopes and fears of real prisoners awaiting death in the feared Conciergerie. In the shadow of the guillotine stand other actors in this drama, Madame Tussaud maker of death masks, Charlotte Corday the Angel of Death, Marat, Robespierre and more. The gruesome tricoteuses knit as the heads drop and Sanson operates his Lady Guillotine. Discover the disgust of the stinking, overflowing graveyards and burial quarry which have now become part of the catacombs of Paris.

Imagine that, on the night before she is to die under the blade of the guillotine, Marie Antoinette leaves behind in her prison cell a diary telling the story of her life—from her privileged childhood as Austrian Archduchess to her years as glamorous mistress of Versailles to the heartbreak of imprisonment and humiliation during the French Revolution. Carolly Erickson takes the reader deep into the psyche of France's doomed queen: her love affair with handsome Swedish diplomat Count Axel Fersen, who risked his life to save her; her fears on the terrifying night the Parisian mob broke into her palace bedroom intent on murdering her and her family; her harrowing attempted flight from France in disguise; her recapture and the grim months of harsh captivity; her agony when her beloved husband was guillotined and her young son was torn from her arms, never to be seen again. Erickson brilliantly captures the queen's voice, her hopes, her dreads, and her suffering. We follow, mesmerized, as she reveals every detail of her remarkable, eventful life—from her teenage years when she began keeping a diary to her final days when she awaited her own bloody appointment with the guillotine.