These show Marie Antoinette not as an absolute monarch in all her regalia but as a fresh-faced woman in a loose white chemise, with soft flowing hair, a flower and a straw hat. The public reacted to what she considered to be a pose of simplicity and spontaneity with inevitable distaste, seeing it as a mark of her licentiousness. What the queen thought charmingly untraditional, the public took to be her usual disregard for the order of things. What the queen thought natural, the public thought unnatural.In many ways the life of Marie Antoinette backfired from the moment her unconsummated marriage was spun into an effect of her promiscuity, and when the final turning point came it was the result of a similarly bizarre twist of logic.In 1784, a prostitute called Nicole Le Guay was paid by the impoverished aristocrat Jeanne de la Motte to impersonate the queen and pass a message to the Cardinal de Rohan, who would meet her in the Grove of Venus in the gardens of Versailles.Dressed in the queen’s trademark white muslin, Nicole Le Guay approached the cardinal, handed him a rose and murmured “you know what this means,” before sliding back into the shadows.

“This is maddening! This is ridiculous!” muttered the shivering girl as she tried to conceal her breasts.Marie Antoinette chose for herself the part of chaste pastoral heroine, spending more and more time at Trianon, her retreat in the palace grounds, where she indulged the fashion for simplicity and, to general ridicule, kept her own cows, chickens and sheep.How little idea she had of the character she was seen to be in the outside world is evident in two portraits of her painted by her friend, Elisabeth Vig?Lebrun. There is hardly a genre in which she has not played a leading role. Her life began as a royal romance and ended as a tragedy; in the intervening years there was a great deal of farce, particularly on the occasions she was left standing freezing and naked in her bedroom while her underwear, which was meant to be put on her by the woman with the highest social status, was passed along the pecking order as women of more and more importance entered the room. An important contribution to this culture of defamation was the deluge of underground pornography known as libelles, in which the Queen was presented as a debauchee whose sexual liaisons included even her female friends.When the monarchy collapsed like a house of cards in 1789 it was not because the nation had been fired up by the works of Rousseau, but because they had been reading the libelles, whose tales of royal buggery, incest, adultery and promiscuity became a metaphor for the diseased body of the state.Jean-Charles-Pierre Lenoir, lieutenant general of the Paris police, believed that the mud-slinging caused by the libellous publications “caused great harm to domestic tranquillity, to the public spirit, and to submissiveness”.The most curious aspect of Marie Antoinette is not the speed with which she became the image of all that was wrong with France, but how various her different images are. Louis XVI, historians now believe, suffered either from ignorance or phimosis – an overtight foreskin – but the evidence for the former is the most compelling. Following a heart-to-heart with Marie Antoinette’s concerned brother, Louis at last understood what he was doing wrong. “He introduces the member,” reported Joseph II, “stays there without moving for perhaps two minutes, withdraws without ejaculation and says goodnight.” Within two months the royal period was late.Marie Antoinette was a devoted and exemplary mother.

“A son would have belonged to the state,” she told her new baby girl, “but you shall be mine.” She went on to bear three more children, two of them sons, but by the time her firstborn finally appeared in 1778, she was seen by the public not as a delighted new parent but as an unrepentant whore.Beyond palace walls, rumour had it that the queen was promiscuous and the king was impotent, and no matter that no evidence for her promiscuity existed – the one love affair she probably did have, with the dashing Swedish soldier Axel Ferson, went entirely unnoticed – the idea that it was the Queen’s sexual excess rather than the king’s sexual ignorance which had prevented an earlier pregnancy was implanted in the minds of the public.It seems that anything said of Marie Antoinette would be believed, and the years of slander were gradually eroding the attachment of the people to the monarchy. To her utter humiliation, Marie Antoinette’s marriage remained unconsummated for seven years. Because everything, from her menstrual cycle to what she had for breakfast, was a topic of concern in Versailles, no one seemed able to speak of anything else. Was the queen trying hard enough to satisfy the king? What was it about her that could reduce an absolute ruler to this mockery of a man?Antonia Fraser suggests in Marie Antoinette: The Journey that it was the increasing sense of her own pointlessness during these years that drew the queen into the vortex of card playing, diamond buying, hair-dressing and tittle-tattle for which she became notorious. “I put on my rouge and wash my face in front of her whole world,” she wrote to her mother.Her undoubted acting skills would stand her in good stead not only as a means of surviving Versailles but later, too, when her role changed dramatically, and she faced crowds of a different sort. In October 1789, when the palace was mobbed, the guards massacred, and a gathering in the courtyard demanded to see her, Marie Antoinette came to the balcony in her nightgown and stood alone and in silence for 10 minutes while muskets pointed at her face She then bowed her head and returned inside. To the very end, she was a actress in a round-the-clock show.What beauty she possessed, her mother informed her “was frankly not very great”.

Marie Antoinette was to get by on her good nature alone, but this, so the Empress became weary of telling her, was clearly not enough to please her husband. The next morning her sheets were examined for signs of consummation. For the next 20 years, from the moment the curtains were drawn back on her bed to the moment she was handed back into it, there was never a point in the Queen’s day during which she was not surrounded by a crowd of courtiers surveying her every move. It was a magnificent and mesmerising performance, that inspired cries of “God Save the Queen”. Her body and identity, she was soon to realise, were the property of others.Marie Antoinette met the dauphin on 14 May, 1770 and married him on 16 May.