Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI. Nigel Tisdall traces her footsteps Antoinette, the style-setting icon ..
. If the world knows anything about Marie Antoinette, it's that she was happy for the peasants to eat cake. From next weekend, though, when a ravishingly costumed film inspired by her riches-to-rags life opens in cinemas across the UK, we are all going guillotine in the stormy heat of the French Revolution.
Directed by Sofia Coppola, the movie Marie Antoinette is a light, enjoyable feast of 18th-century excess featuring gorgeous ch teaux, regal hunting scenes, lavish masked balls, outrageous cakes by the recreated by Manolo Blahnik. But what of the real Marie Antoinette? to marry a hunting-obsessed Dauphin who was seemingly impotent, gauche and oblivious to life beyond the royal estates?
turns out, I started my quest at the wrong end. Paris, I imagined, our heroine's story. While the Conci rgerie where the queen was looking suitably grim, the cells where she awaited death are today filled with naff dummies recreating nothing much.
There is some justification for this, though, for after the queen's execution a young sculptor, Marie Grosholz, made a wax model of Marie Antoinette's head. She later became known as Madame Tussaud.
The Place de la Concorde, where the guillotine did its grisly work, is now a furious whirl of traffic, but we can still follow the route the tumbrels took with the bodies, passing through streets, such as shops.
The queen was initially buried in the Madeleine cemetery, the Chapelle Expiatoire. The nearby Boulevard Haussmann may be a mass of shoppers and office-workers, but hidden away in place Louis XVI is an enormous, eerie and sobering memorial to 133 Parisians who marriage, 600 Swiss Guards murdered when the mob attacked the Tuileries Palace, and more than 500 victims of the guillotine.
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