November 02
Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna von Habsburg-Lothringen
's Birthday
Kirsten Dunst
as Marie Antoinnete |
Maria Antonia
Josepha Johanna von Habsburg-Lothringen was born an Archduchess of
Austria. When she came to
France in a gilded carriage to marry the Dauphin , she was a spoiled, vivacious,
thirteen-year-old girl urrounded
by
a three-hundred-forty Hapsburg courtiers and servants. When she left France
and life twenty years later, she was a white-haired, half-blind woman
dragged to the guillotine in the back of a manure cart.
Marie Antoinette was married at fifteen to the fourteen-year-old fat,
and impotent, Dauphin (the latter problem was
surgically corrected seven years late).
Their wedding took place on May 16, 1770, in the palace of Versailles,
after which was the ritual bedding. It was assumed that
consummation of the marriage would take place on the wedding night which
couldn't happen.
The lack of consummation would plague
the reputation of both the Dauphin and Dauphine for seven years.
Marie Antoinette was noted for her childlike disregard of anything that
did not touch her life personally or give her pleasure. Artifice was
here drug and never was artifice more dramatically demonstrated
than in the creation of her famous
Petit Hameau
(The Little Hamlet), a pastoral
recreation of French farm life; a life-size, living peasant doll farm,
comprised of eight miniature peasant farmhouses, with thatched roofs,
farmyards, and perfumed dung-heaps.
Marie Antoinette has been portrayed in more than 30 films films
including memorable performances by Norma Shearer (her favorite role) in
Marie Antoinette (1938), Lise Delamare in Jean
Renoir's La Marseillaise (1938),Nancy
Guild
in Orson Welles's Black Magic
(1949), Lana Marconi in Royal Affairs in Versailles
(1957), Nikki Fritz in The Exotic Time Machine (1997), Joely
Richardson in The Affair of the Necklace (2001), and Kirsten
Dunst in Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006). A success in
France. but not in the US, Coppola's film provided the greatest insights
into the self-absorbed adolescent queen.
Marie had a passion for elaborate deserts, a passion that Sophia Coppola
referenced so visually in Marie Antoinette which we suggest
watching today as we celebrate the queen's
birthday with the regal Gateau Marie Antoinette. |
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