Off With Her Head!

Though yesterday was spent with my romantic sensibilities, my bedtime story for the past month has been on the more tragic side.

I actually started reading Marie Antoinette: The Journey (by Antonia Fraser) in France. After my last visit to Versailles, I watched the Sophia Copolla film with Kirsten Dunst as the child princess and became interested in what the real history was there. I thought, "I should read this book in French" and so bought it that way, but I quickly realized that was a massively over ambitious choice for my French reading level and put in a box for later.

Fast forward several months to a trip to my sister's local library. All of the books on my reading list were not in stock and while I placed an order for them I still had nothing to read at this second. Remembering my Marie Antoinette biography tucked in the "two be sent" boxes in our old apartment, I perused the European history isle for such a book. It was in, in hardback.

So I started my nightly romp with Maria Antonia, Duchess of Austria, Princess of France. (I quickly understood why it was so hard to grasp in French. Historical non fiction isn't the best starter reading in a second language!) Just like Versailles, Marie Antoinette's young life was so deeply enchanting. Furthermore, having visited so many of the places mentioned I was literally transported to her place in time. For several weeks I imagined myself in the delicate silk slippers of the Queen.

Then, just as Valentine's drew near (coincidentally) my reading led me to the not-so-glamorous part of her life: the end. It was a train wreck, really, to read about the horror's that the French Nationalists played out in order to overthrow their monarchy. In my head I retraced my trips to Versailles and the Louvre and various places around Paris and saw them washed with the blood of the aristocracy. Heads of lovely coiffed women danced on pikes near my favorite landmarks. I shuddered, wondering with gruesome curiosity how I would have looked so differently at my enchanted city knowing how much blood had been spilt.

I guess that was the fate of Europe in general, wasn't it? Blood, pillaging and overthrowing? Funny how we see what we wish to see, and not so much those past transgressions of the past. Revisionist's History, as written by Lonely Planet.

Now, though, I can't help but wish I had finished this book in Paris, so I could have visited and re-visited the landmarks of Marie Antoinette's days as well as her tomb. I suppose that's for my next trip "home".

Tonight I won't start the next book on my list (Catcher in the Rye - don't laugh, I haven't read it!) but instead dream one last dream with my players in the French court.

...And work on my unbecoming double chin. All these nights of reading in bed are making me saggy.