THE SOCIETY THE TEEN-AGED QUEEN ENCOUNTERED APPEARS IN AN ART THAT WAS LIGHT, DECORATIVE AND OFTEN LICENTIOUS, WITHOUT DEEPER MEANING
That ambiance facilitated her obliviousness.
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La Balançoire ("The Swing") by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1767-1768 / zoom
An elderly gentleman (husband?) pushes the swing of a flirtatious young woman as an enraptured suitor admires her legs and cupids hug.
- Courtiers pretended to honor her, as when the hostile brother of the king (the future Louis XVIII) gave a fête in which 50 cavaliers on superb white or black horses engaged in mock combat in her honor.
-- Madame Campan, p.110
- She did not need the trappings of etiquette to buttress her status: On hierarchical details of coiffures she said, "Arrangez tout cela comme vous l'entendrez : mais ne croyez pas qu'une reine, née archiduchesse d'Autriche, y apporte l'intérêt et l'attention qu'y donnait une princesse polonaise,* devenue reine de France."
-- Madame Campan, p.372
*Marie Leczinska, queen under Louis XV, had insisted on etiquette to buttress her inferior origins: her father was a dethroned king of Poland, a country under foreign powers' sway.
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That was a reason for the monarchy's end
"Without her Parisiens would probably have kept their love for the King [after the flight to Varennes, below]. They liked the plump man who was not at all mean, and who in his portliness had an air that was kindly and paternal, very much to the liking of the crowd. [...] The market women called him bon papa; that was how the people saw him."
-- Michelet, p.77 (slightly adapted)
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