This exhibition will be busy. You’ll shuffle behind fellow pilgrims. But it’ll be worthwhile. It’s a tour de force that tells the story of Marie Antoinette’s 17 years on the throne with detail, focus and flair. There are 34 items here that she owned personally – opulent, carefree objects that resonate with impending disaster.
These precious items need protecting from light, and in the first room curator Sarah Grant cleverly runs with this, evoking the candlelit ambience of a Versailles ball by hanging silver baubles from the ceiling and covering the walls with smoked mirrors. Here we have a taste of Marie Antoinette’s wardrobe – its annual budget peaking at £1.6 million in today’s money – the dazzling brocaded silver silk number with wide panniers and tiny bodice, the flowing domino (a hooded silk cape) for a masked ball, the sumptuous striped candy-pink dress for a busy day at the fake dairy.
Hers no longer exist, looted during the revolution. But there are two pieces of charismatic embroidered fabric here that are believed to have belonged to her, as well as a black lace collarette and two pairs of her shoes, UK size four, dainty and low-heeled, effective for the ‘Versailles glide’. She used to acquire about four new pairs a week.
We are told she steered court fashion from the rococo towards a more austere, classical style. ‘Let us not forget,’ writes Manolo Blahnik in his introduction, ‘she was a Habsburg and had their innate taste of simplicity.’ Ah, the simple taste. Just the finest craftsmanship with one’s name all over it. She was fond of her monogram ‘MA’. When she first arrived at court from Vienna, aged 14, she was greeted with a firework display picking out her initials in the sky, set to music. ‘Almost every one of the 94 items in her travelling toilette case, from her eyebath to her bedwarmer, bears a beautifully delineated monogram,’ purrs the catalogue. Apparently this was a ‘highly successful form of early modern branding’ – but I can think of more successful personal brands than Madame Déficit’s.
And here, coruscating blithely, are the very diamonds that caused 1785’s ‘affair of the necklace’. At the heart of this complicated scandal was a swindler called the Comtesse de la Motte, who had duped a cardinal into buying the jewels supposedly on Marie Antoinette’s behalf. (The queen was later cleared of any involvement.) The Comtesse had then sold them on London’s Bond St, where they were soon remade into a necklace for the Duchess of Sutherland. (Accepted in lieu of inheritance tax in 2022, it is now here in the V&A’s permanent collection.) De la Motte was marked with a branding iron and sentenced to life. ‘But for a large number of French people,’ writes jewellery expert Vincent Meylan in the excellent catalogue, ‘the real culprit was their queen. Diamonds would become one of the political symbols of the revolution.’
The final relics are very powerful. Her chemise. Her prayer book. A lock of her hair, and her son’s
While the clock ticked down, Marie Antoinette constantly commissioned artisans to redecorate, improve and re-model her apartments, particularly, we learn, the partitions, doors, staircases and passages – a ‘desperate search for privacy’. The many refinements included a gown made of cloth exactly the colour of the king’s eyes, as well as a muted shade called merde d’oie (goose-turd green). Her 1781 pearls-and-cornflower Sèvres service is here for inspection, fresh and chic. So inward-looking was her world, she even commissioned le cabinet des glaces mouvantes, a room in which the windows could become mirrors.
When in 1789 the revolutionary deputies of the Estates General came to call, insisting on touring the Queen’s private Petit Trianon, they were bewildered by its simplicity. They asked to see every single room, hoping to discover the one full of diamonds and twisted columns of sapphires and rubies. They can’t have known what to make of her play-gardening tools, which are on display here, on loan from Versailles – her dainty hoe that never culled a weed, her scythe designed for mincing about with on-stage. No wonder she was such a hit with Horace Walpole.
Under semi house arrest at the Tuileries, she wore Pierrots and sombre English redingotes, or riding habits, in purple, chestnut and black. Trying to win favour with the rebels – in the only way she knew how – she purchased ‘large quantities’ of national ribbon in red, white and blue, with which to trim her and her family’s clothing, and cockades to pin on, too.
Visitors are offered, at this point, a sniff of the ancien régime: iris, musk and body odour; the honeysuckle and English rose of the Trianon; and finally, the mildew, cold stone and sewage of her cell at the Conciergerie, mingled with some juniper she had asked the jailer’s maid to burn.
The final relics are very powerful. Her chemise. Her prayer book – open on her final note, written at 4.30 a.m. on the morning of her execution. A lock of her hair, and her son’s. A genuine guillotine: ugly, warped wood and narrow, dull blade. One wanders, shellshocked, into the disco beat of the final rooms about her fashion legacy. Her own words, however, end this magnificent exhibition: ‘We have dreamed a pleasant dream, and that is all.’
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