The Last Queen of France

By J. L. Dean

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette’s favourite portraitist, speaks of their last portrait.

Roses were her flower. She was right to insist on them for the portrait. They matched her in complexion, in grace and in the appearance of simplicity. It is how I like to remember her. Already her popularity was fading. The Queen of France; forever a foreign princess. She understood and, child that she was, responded by playing straight into their hands. She looks out from the canvas, her expression sardonic, holding her flower, a ribbon between flesh and thorn. Yet it is what I see in her eyes that stills. Did she know? Was it really such a short step from the libelles to the mob and their sharp-tongued Madame? What little attention we paid at the time. Yet ten little years was all it took for a mistreated people to rise in support of new manipulators.

Should I have taken more care? The dress I had her wear; it was not her shift, as the scandal-mongers screamed, but something in the new style of dress that followed her own shape instead of pressing her into another’s ideal. Yet a dress is as significant as the woman who wears it. We were foolish to try for freedom there.

It was not my last portrait of her; a queen is forever portrayed, theirs is a cruel and curious immortality. Yet it was my last glimpse of my friend, Marie, the last Queen of France.

234 words