She was born Maria Antonia, and grew up as an Austrian princess. She reigned as Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, the most precious ornament of the most glittering court in Europe. She died as the Widow Capet, reviled by the populace who once had thronged to acclaim her. 

In the Europe of the eighteenth century, the girl who was to be Marie Antoinette was born into a charmed existence. Daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa, she possessed every advantage of beauty and rank. When her mother arranged for her marriage to the future King Louis XVI of France, two great nations were allied and the young princess was raised to a dazzling position of prestige and power.

It was, however, a position Marie was ill equipped to occupy. Though trained to command, she had never learned to obey the dictates of responsibility. Sharing the rule of a nation, she knew nothing of its people. The fierce forces unleashed by the French Revolution transformed her heretofore sheltered life into a painful drama of awakening as the royal family was stripped of power, captured in attempted flight, imprisoned. It was only under the lengthening shadow of the guillotine, as husband and children were taken from her, that Marie Antoinette found the courage and humanity that were never hers as a ruler.

A portrait of a woman who was at once lovely and arrogant, captivating and shortsighted, pretty-and in the end noble. It is the compelling story of a life that began as a fairy tale and ended as a tragedy.

From the dust jacket