Marie Antoinette: Princess of Versailles, Austria - France, 1769
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Lasky did extensive research into the life of Marie Antoinette. She feels that it is important for readers to know that all of what she wrote is based on actual facts. All of the characters mentioned in the diary are real except for a few. Among those few are the riding master Herr Francke and the servant Hans. It is true that Marie Antoinette’s sister Elizabeth had been stricken with smallpox and scarred. However, it is not known if she wore a veil constantly, although many women who had suffered from this disease did. Madame du Barry was most definitely real, and Marie Antoinette refused to acknowledge her in any way. However, in real life Marie Antoinette spoke her first recorded words to Madame du Barry on January 1, 1772. For the purposes of the narrative of this fictional diary, Kathryn Lasky moved up the date one year.
Ms. Lasky first encountered Marie Antoinette in her junior-high French class, not in history. It was hearing her French teacher speak of La Pauvre, “the poor one,” that first kindled her interest. Her teacher, Madame Hendren, explained to Lasky’s seventh-grade class that people could be very rich in material things — indeed, like Marie Antoinette, have the most beautiful dresses and jewels and wonderful pets like darling dogs, les chiens adorables — but still be very poor in other ways. Madame Hendren explained that in spite of all these possessions, Marie Antoinette had no control and no power; that her life was never her own. That the life of this very pretty and very innocent girl ended in terrible tragedy seemed unimaginable, Lasky says. “Yet it must have been imaginable, for ever since, I have thought about the strange tragedy of Marie Antoinette.”
Ms. Lasky says she often thinks about writing a fantasy story of Marie Antoinette, which would tell about a young girl who defies history and refuses her mother’s commands to marry the Dauphin of France and instead runs away to America. “She would not be a princess or even a queen,” Kathryn Lasky says. “She would be maybe a farmer in New England and join the patriots in the American Revolutionary War.”
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to use the following:
Cover art by Mélanie Delon.
Filigree on front and back cover by albumkoretsky/Shutterstock.
Crown appearing on spine and throughout interiors, ibid.
Maria Antonia, Culver Pictures.
Marie Antoinette, SuperStock.
Louis XVI, ibid.
Marie Antoinette and her children, Culver Pictures.
Maria Theresa, North Wind Picture Archives.
Madame du Barry, SuperStock.
The Palace of Versailles and grounds, North Wind Picture Archives.
Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, SuperStock.
Cartoon of the royal family, Library of Congress.
Storming of the Bastille, North Wind Picture Archives.
Marie Antoinette condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal, Library of Congress.
While the Royal Diaries are based on real royal figures and actual historical events, some situations and people in this book are fictional, created by the author.
Copyright © 2000 by Kathryn Lasky Knight
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc.
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e-ISBN 978-0-545-31563-0
This edition first printing, December 2013
The display type was set in Aphrodite Text.
Book design by Natalie C. Sousa
This edition’s photo research by Amla Sanghvi
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