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 to honor her.
-- Madame Campan, p.110
- She did not need the trappings of etiquette to buttress her status: On hierarchical details of coiffures she said, "Fix all that as you want to: but don't think that a queen, born an archduchess of Austria, will give it the support and interest of a Polish princess,* become queen of France."
-- Madame Campan, p.372
*Marie Leczinska, queen under Louis XV, was the daughter of a dethroned king of Poland, a country under foreign powers' sway. She had been chosen by a powerful courtier and his mistress who felt that her inferior origin would allow them to control her. She remained in the background, while insisting on etiquette to buttress her lack of status.
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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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