You’ve read the book. You’ve seen the movie. Now visit the exhibition! Marie Antoinette is back!

Actually, this is more than an exhibition; it’s an event. The Grand Palais is staying open until 10 p.m. five nights a week to accommodate the expected crowds; showing free feature films and documentaries about the queen and the royal family, including Sophia Coppola’s rock-star version of the queen’s life starring Kirsten Dunst; holding conferences and readings; and stocking its gift shop with Marie Antoinette-themed products. Ladurée, famed for making the best macarons in Paris, has added a touch of anise to its rose-flavored cookie in the ex-queen’s honor and packaged it in a special box.

For those who are out of the Marie Antoinette revisionist loop, here is a quick summary of the current thinking about the doomed queen (as set down in Antonia Fraser’s biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey, published in 2001, which was used as the basis for Coppola’s film and is pretty much followed in this show): She was a silly young girl raised in the court of the Holy Roman Empire in Austria by a strict mother and indulgent father. When she was married off to the future King Louis XVI of France with great pomp and circumstance in 1770, she was only 14 years old. Still a child, she was thrown into the incredibly lavish, artificial, regimented world of the court at Versailles.

While sometimes given to great excesses in the realms of fashion, interior decoration and sweets, she also had a taste for nature and the simpler things in life, exemplified by the Petit Trianon, the miniature farm she created for herself on the grounds of Versailles. It was seven years before her marriage was consummated because of her bumbling young husband’s ignorance of the mechanics of sex, and when motherhood finally came, it had something of a sobering influence (although, as Fraser points out, the queen was a teetotaler; contrary to what Coppola’s film would have you believe, she didn’t constantly guzzle Champagne).

Viciously and unfairly castigated by anonymous pamphleteers for her lavish tastes and supposedly outsized libido and lesbian affairs, she learned to hold her heavily bewigged head high in the face of calumny. Her noblest moment came with the Revolution, when she endured humiliation, imprisonment, the execution of the husband she had come to love and respect, and the loss of her beloved little boy, who was taken away from her while she was imprisoned in the Temple. She went to her own death by guillotine with great dignity. And, by the way, she never said, “Let them eat cake” (“brioche” in the French version).

The exhibition walks visitors through the “tragedy in three acts” of the queen’s life. Act I: her childhood in Austria. Act II: her tenure as the dauphine of France, from 1770 to ’74. Act III: her reign as queen of France, right up until her sad end in 1793 on the scaffolding in today’s Place de la Concorde.

In keeping with this theatrical conceit, the exhibition has been provided with wonderful monumental stage sets by opera director Robert Carsen, with ambiance provided by period music and recorded birdsong. The final room, plunged into darkness, begins with a smashed mirror, a shocking sight in this setting and an effective evocation of the violence of the Revolution. The room gradually narrows, finally focusing on the last exhibit: Jean-Louis David’s stark sketch, made from life, of a prematurely aged, broken woman, her hair cropped off, sitting ramrod straight in a simple shift with downcast eyes, her hands tied behind her, on her way to the guillotine.

It’s a far cry from the lavishness of the first rooms of the exhibition in which the visitor is immersed in the queen’s world, with paintings, sculptures, documents, furnishings, objects, personal belongings and more.

The childhood of the frivolous young girl is represented mostly by stiff court paintings of her family. In one, by Martin van Meytens the Younger, she looks like a highly unnatural miniature-adult doll as she dances with her brothers. The paintings by her artistic sister, Archduchess Marie Christine, pack much more informal charm, showing the family in an intimate setting, with the emperor sitting at a table reading, his head wrapped in a turban, and children playing at his feet. In a painting by Bernardo Bellotto, one of Marie Antoinette's childhood homes, the Schönbrunn Palace, looks as magnificent as (and very similar to) Versailles.

After the wedding and coronation, the portraits of the queen multiply. The public was clamoring to see what its new queen looked like, and Marie Antoinette was never satisfied with her likeness, so there are many to look at, ranging from Marie Antoinette regal in incredibly opulent gowns with fantastic headdresses to Marie Antoinette boyish in her riding habit. Some portraits slim down her heavy cheeks, a family trait, while other emphasize them and her big blue eyes.

In one monumental full-length picture of her in sumptuous court dress, Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, the court painter, has given her an unflatteringly red nose, cheeks and chin, a discordant note in this official portrait. If you are wondering why the cradle is empty in another painting by Vigée-Le Brun, a propagandizing effort to show what a good mother the queen was after the Affair of the Diamond Necklace (a replica of the necklace is also on show), it’s because the baby who should have been in it, Sophie, later died and was painted out of the picture. In a later, unfinished portrait, by Alexander Kucharsky, painted after the family had been forced by the revolutionaries to leave Versailles and live in Paris, the softness seems to have gone out of her face, replaced by a forthright look and a strong presence.

The last, darkened room documents the fall of the mighty, with the simple furniture from the family's new life as prisoners in the Temple a stark contrast to the ornate objets d’art and furnishings in the previous rooms.

Some of the more touching exhibits, which bring this mythic figure down to the level of an ordinary human, include the couple’s marriage contract, with a big inkblot next to the bride’s name; her first letter to her mother from France, also spotted with inkblots; the last letter she ever wrote, to her husband’s sister, Elisabeth; a white muslin shift she wore while imprisoned in the Temple; and Kucharsky’s portrait of her as a sad widow.

After all the glorious color and opulence that has gone before, David’s final portrait of this glamorous woman, destroyed yet dignified, is all the more shocking for its simple, rough lines.

Heidi Ellison

© 2008 Paris Update

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