Tag: Versailles

I’ve never made my way to Versailles but I know I will before the curtains close on my life because it is simply one of those places that has ignited my imagination since I’ve known about it.

I’ve skirted the presence of Queen Marie Antoinette—touching her porcelain patterns at Bernardaud in Limoges, seeing her writing table in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; and enjoying the scent with which she infused Versailles in Cire Trudon’s candle created for her—but I’ve never walked through the rooms captured so luxuriously in films like Sofiia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and books like Sena Jeter Naslund’s Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette.

In Naslund’s story the young Queen’s world is painted with a lush and lively brush. I’ve always admired this author’s commitment to historical research, which makes her novels ring so true. I marveled that I was standing over such a storied piece of furniture at the NGA—so close I could have touched it but I dared not. It had such a presence that I felt if I listened intently enough, I could hear the scratching of Marie Antoinette’s pen as she wrote letters to her mother. This young Queen had entered the jaded world of Versailles as an innocent, but by the time her husband’s grandfather, Louis XV, lay dying, she had identified a few arch-rivals. And so the intrigue within the walls of that storied palace would play out during her reign.