The story opens with little "Antonchen," just eleven, romping with her new puppy in the park at Schonbrunn, the Hapsburg palace outside Vienna. Within minutes she is summoned by her mother, Maria Theresa, and told she is to be the bride of Louis, the Dauphin of France. Childhood for the gay, headstrong little girl is thus summarily ended.

Three years of concentrated preparation follow, then a thoroughly bewildered child of fourteen bids good-by to all she loves and sets out for the French border accompanied by her governess, her confessor and a cavalcade of 400 picked soldiers. Here the Bourbon family meets her and she is face to face with the "handsome young prince" her mother had described.

Through the ensuing years the beautiful, reckless young Queen and her dull husband, caught at the vortex of a national cyclone that has grown in strength across the centuries, watch disaster as it approaches. The heady glitter of Versailles makes way for the horrors of Revolution for which Marie Antoinette and Louis both in a measure are to blame, yet are helpless to check.

This is the story of a woman to whom majesty came too late but who by her childlike grasping for happiness at any cost has fired the imagination and inspired the (sometimes reluctant) admiration of readers for generations.

From the dust jacket