Intimate and irresistible, this is the story of Marie Antoinette, one of the most notorious women in history, told in her own words…
On the night before she is to be executed, Marie Antoinette leaves in her prison cell a diary she has kept since the age of thirteen. A journal which she began as the young Austrian Archduchess Maria Antonia in order to confess her sins.
In her diary, the queen writes of her privileged childhood, her marriage to the heir to the French throne and the glamour and infidelity of her court after her husband ascends the throne as King Louis XVI. But she also writes of the terrifying night the Parisian mob breaks into her palace bedroom and her agony when her beloved husband is guillotined and her young son torn from her arms.
Erickson brilliantly captures the queen’s voice, her hopes, her fears, and her suffering. We follow, mesmerised, as she reveals every detail of her remarkable, eventful life, to her final days as she awaits her own bloody appointment with Madame Guillotine.
