In “Abundance,” the remise affords the occasion for the child bride to indulge in Barbara-Cartland-issue reveries about the “pleasant rosebuds” on her young chest, and about the masculine allure of her groom-to-be. Hundreds of books have been written about the doomed queen - from Stefan Zweig’s famous biography of the early 1930’s and Antonia Fraser’s superb recent “Marie Antoinette: The Journey” to the new novel “Abundance” by Sena Jeter Naslund (the author of “Ahab’s Wife”). But in two decades, the ceremonial toilette would be remaindered, as the country stripped their adopted queen of her finery again, and led her to the guillotine in a white shift, to pay the ultimate price for her failure to correctly gauge What Not to Wear in revolutionary France. For the rest of Marie Antoinette’s life, getting dressed would never be the private affair it had been before her extreme makeover - noblewomen would watch her put on her clothes in the morning and take them off at night, and squabble over the privilege of handing the queen her underthings. “All eyes will be fixed on you.” This event augured what was to come at the French court at Versailles.
“You must absolutely lend yourself to what the court is accustomed to doing,” she wrote in a note to her daughter. The traumatic wardrobe change was a diplomatic formality - a tradition known in royal circles as la remise - which the girl’s redoubtable mother, Maria Theresa (the Empress of Austria, Queen of Hungary and an ancien régime role model for 20th-century stage mothers), had not just sanctioned, but hailed. In “Queen of Fashion,” her suspenseful, remarkably well-documented and surprisingly humanizing account of the role style played in Marie Antoinette’s fate and legacy, Caroline Weber, who teaches at Barnard College and is an expert on the Terror, adds texture, shimmer and depth to an icon most of us thought we knew already.
With that dress, she took on a new identity and a new name: Marie Antoinette, dauphine of France. Relinquishing her nationality with her clothes, she donned a “gleaming ceremonial gown made from cloth-of-gold” which transformed her into a human embodiment of the French monarchy. It sounds like a situation that calls for an Amber Alert: what it actually is, though, is the factual record of what happened when Archduchess Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna of the Austrian Hapsburgs was handed over to the Bourbon court in 1770 to become the bride of the dauphin, Louis Auguste, the future King Louis XVI of France. The girl’s only comfort, a pug dog named Mops, is taken from her, and as strange eyes assess her nudity with frank stares, she breaks down in tears. It could be a tabloid cover story: A 14-year-old girl is wrenched from her mother’s home and transported across state lines, stripped bare and paraded before a crowd of jaded adults.
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