A remark about crowds at Versailles defused a two-year diplomatic standoff
Coached by her husband's aunts, the teenage Marie Antoinette refused to speak to Madame du Barry, Louis XV's powerful mistress. The snub alarmed Vienna. On New Year's Day 1772, pressed by her mother, she finally addressed du Barry with a single remark about how busy the palace was that day. It was enough.
The quarrel mattered because the marriage was diplomacy. After decades of rivalry, Maria Theresa of Austria and Louis XV of France sealed their new alliance by matching her youngest daughter with the heir to the French throne. Du Barry had helped topple the Duke of Choiseul, the minister who arranged that match, so the young dauphine's coldness looked personal and political at once. Her mother and the Austrian ambassador, who secretly reported on her behaviour, kept pushing until she relented.
She had arrived underprepared. Born in Vienna on 2 November 1755, the 15th child of the empress, she spent her early years between the Hofburg and Schönbrunn, where at seven she met the six-year-old Mozart. At ten she still could not write properly in German, French or Italian. Music suited her better: under the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck she learned harp, harpsichord and flute, and she sang well. Before the wedding, France sent a tutor who found her bright but lazy, a dentist straightened her teeth, and a dancing master taught her the gliding Versailles walk.
Married by proxy in Vienna and in person at Versailles in May 1770, she became queen in 1774, aged 18. Her husband gave her the Petit Trianon, and rumours soon claimed she had coated its walls in gold and diamonds. Pamphleteers painted her as reckless with money, though she could be frugal and once skipped costly New Year presents for her children out of concern for the poor. During the Revolution critics nicknamed her Madame Deficit.
The monarchy fell in 1792. Tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal, she was convicted of treason and guillotined on 16 October 1793.
Source: Marie Antoinette
