Explore "Marie Antoinette" by Hilaire Belloc on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
THE presence of the Du Barry at the Court of Versailles, the fact that this presence preceded the Austrian child's arrival, that it was first publicly admitted at the first public appearance of the Dauphiness, and that the four years of her tutelage were overshadowed by the new Royal Mistress was the initial and irretrievable disaster of Marie Antoinette's life. It moulded her view of the nation and of the family with whom she had now to mingle; it deeply affected the populace she was to attempt to rule; it cloistered, warped and distracted her vision of France at a moment in adolescence when vision is most acute and the judgment formed upon it most permanent. All the Queen's tragedy is furnished by the early spell of this insignificant and licentious woman.
With her advent was introduced for the first time into the Court that insolent and calculated disregard for rule in gesture and vocabulary wherein which the rich will often secretly relax their ordered lives, but which, when it appears publicly amidst their daily furniture, is as shocking as nakedness or as blood.