The most famous line in gastronomic history, 'Let them eat cake', turns out to have been an eighteenth-century cliche. According to Antonia Fraser, the French accused every foreign queen of saying it, beginning in 1670 with the wife of Louis XIV, Marie Theresa.

With a good education and a solid childhood, Marie-Antoinette might have become one of the most admired women in Europe. As it was, the empress paid no attention to her youngest daughter until an accident of nuptial politics made the girl a candidate to marry the French dauphin.

Marie-Antoinette was born in 1755, the youngest daughter of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and Emperor Francis I. She was intelligent and artistic but devoid of the ambition or calculation required to survive in the fetid atmosphere of the French court. In many ways, her character was not unlike that of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Amanda Foreman Quotes