Marie Antoinette Quotes

When everyone else is losing their heads, it is important to keep yours.

I never really thought about how when I look at the moon, it's the same moon as Shakespeare and Marie Antoinette and George Washington and Cleopatra looked at.

There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.

In times of crisis, it is of the utmost importance that one does not lose her head. Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette. Her last words were,"Pardon me sir. I did not mean to do it,"to a man whose foot she stepped on before she was executed by the guillotine

I have seen all, I have heard all, I have forgotten all." - Marie Antoinette

I was a queen, and you took away my crown; a wife, and you killed my husband; a mother, and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long.

Dreams weigh nothing. - Marie Antoinette

Let them eat cake.

This woman is Pocahontas. She is Athena and Hera. Lying in this messy, unmade bed, eyes closed, this is Juliet Capulet. Blanche DuBois. Scarlett O'Hara. With ministrations of lipstick and eyeliner I give birth to Ophelia. To Marie Antoinette. Over the next trip of the larger hand around the face of the bedside clock, I give form to Lucrezia Borgia. Taking shape at my fingertips, my touches of foundation and blush, here is Jocasta. Lying here, Lady Windermere. Opening her eyes, Cleopatra. Given flesh, a smile, swinging her sculpted legs off one side of the bed, this is Helen of Troy. Yawning and stretching, here is every beautiful woman across history.

Courage! I have shown it for years; think you I shall lose it at the moment when my sufferings are to end?

But how will I eat cake if my head is over there, and my hands are over here?

Lightly, caressingly, Marie Antoinette picked up the crown as a gift. She was still too young to know that life never gives anything for nothing, and that a price is always exacted for what fate bestows. She did not think she would have to pay a price. She simply accepted the rights of her royal position and performed no duties in exchange. She wanted to combine two things which are, in actual human experience, incompatible; she wanted to reign and at the same time to enjoy.

When I first saw the sand, I thought it was beautiful. Like maybe it'd be fun to just roll around in and make sand angels. Now I know the truth, that sand is actually the love child of proud parents Marie Antoinette and Joseph Stalin.

I am terrified of being bored.

To say my day was not going well, would be like saying the French Revolution had been a bit troublesome for Marie Antoinette.

It was like the first time I visited Versailles. There was an eerieness, like I'd been there before. I don't know if I was Louis XIV or Marie Antoinette or a lowly groundskeeper, but I lived there.

Pardonnez-moi, monsieur. Je ne l’ai pas fait exprès

I have never treasured any woman the way I treasure you now, this moment. You are all I think of, all I want.

Here is everything I know about France: Madeline and Amelie and Moulin Rouge. The Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, although I have no idea what the function of either actually is. Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, and a lot of kings named Louis. I'm not sure what they did either, but I think it has something to do with the French Revolution, which has something to do with Bastille Day. The art museum is called the Louvre and it's shaped like a pyramid and the Mona Lisa lives there along with that statue of the women missing her arms. And there are cafes and bistros or whatever they call them on every street corner. And mimes. The food is supposed to be good, and the people drink a lot of wine and smoke a lot of cigarettes. I've heard they don't like Americans, and they don't like white sneakers.

Lightly, caressingly, Marie Antoinette picked up the crown as a gift. She was still too young to know that life never gives anything for nothing, and that a price is always exacted for what fate bestows. She did not think she would have to pay a price.

Ingrid shrugged...like Marie Antoinette hearing about the starving peasants.

If Larry David were living in 18th century France and heard the peasants had no bread, his response "Let them eat cake" would have made people laugh. But when Marie Antoinette said it, they chopped off her head.

As the Dauphine stepped out of her carriage on to the ceremonial carpet that had been laid down, it was the Duc de Choiseul who was given the privilege of the first salute. Presented with the Duc by Prince Starhemberg, Marie Antoinette exclaimed: 'I shall never forget that you are responsible for my happiness!

The places that once knew [Marie Antoinette] now know her forever.

I was a queen, and you took away my crown; a wife, and you killed my husband; a mother, and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long. —MARIE ANTOINETTE

It lies in humanity's infinite capacity for self-deception where some perceived (and in this case long-desired) advantage is at stake

Like her marriage, Marie Antoinette’s death was a political decision.

She glanced across to where Tilly and her brand new husband were posing for photographs, Tilly fluttering a fan coquettishly in front of her face. 'Unfortunately I didn't realise there was a French Revolutionary theme.' 'The Marie-Antoinette thing?' said Dexter. 'Well at least we know there'll be cake.

The one broken window that permanently wouldn't roll up had destroyed her perfectly curled blond prom-hair, and by the time we got to the gym she looked like Marie Antoinette with bedhead.

No one really does know how to have fun here at all. It is all etiquette.

Our lives are just spectacles. We are like dolls, in a sense, to be observed and played with - often with cruel and deceitful intentions - in an unreal world.

Il n'est pas nécessaire de vivre. Il est nécessaire de naviguer.

Adieu, dear heart, nothing but death can make me cease to love you.

The real work of destruction had been done long before by satire, libel and rumour; Marie Antoinette had become dehumanized. The actual assault by a body of people inspiring each other with their bloodthirsty frenzy was the culmination of the process, not the start of it.

I never really thought about how when I look at the moon it’s the same moon Shakespeare and Marie Antoinette and George Washington and Cleopatra looked at. Not to mention all those zillions of people I’ve never heard of. All those Homo sapiens and Neanderthals looked at the very same moon as me. It waxed and waned in their sky, too.

To say that my day was not going well, would be like saying the French Revolution had been a bit troublesome for Marie Antoinette.

There must be no repercussions to this,” says Marie Antoinette. Her quiet voice slides through the room like the whisper of a steel blade.

AAAAAANNND LOOK OVER here,” Hannah said. “Another dead person. What a shock.

Ce n'est seulement le cou — elle veut briser le coeur.

Not one of the European rulers would put himself about in the attempt to save Marie Antoinette, so that Mercy scornfully declared: “They would not have tried to save her even if they had with their own eyes seen her mounting the steps to the guillotine.

My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long.

I felt a tightening in my chest, a sharp spike of intense sadness-almost like nostalgia, except it was for a life I never had.

A frequent charge made against “Antoinette” was that she was bathed in the blood of the French people; the truth of it was, of course, exactly the other way round.

Kings who become prisoners are not far from death.

Looking without passion is always a good plan where history is concerned. But is it really possible with regard to the career and character of Marie Antoinette?

Property has ever been a fluid concept--just ask the wife of the Wall Street speculator who writes her party invitations on Marie Antoinette's escritoire.

Dariya and I used to play French Revolution when we were little. We'd take turns being Marie Antoinette. Our grandmamma caught us once and had us whipped for revolutionary sentiments. We were six years old at the time and had no idea even what revolutionary sentiments were.

Edith stared at the ceiling, contemplating the oddness of life. Here she was with this man, whom she hardly knew when she really thought about it, asleep, naked, beside her. She pondered that central truth, which must have struck many brides from Marie Antoinette to Wallis Simpson, that whatever the political, social or financial advantages of a great marriage, there comes a moment when everyone leaves the room and you are left alone with a stranger who has the legal right to copulate with you. She was not at all sure that she had fully negotiated this simple fact until then.

She told them simply and directly that the meadow was a place of peace and beauty, where indeed if one came to it in a quiet manner, the animals would not be disturbed; for there are lovely birds, and squirrels and field mice, and sometimes deer.

Andrea had brought kifli: crescent-shaped rolls first baked by Hungarians to commemorate the Turks’ defeat in Vienna, and later introduced by Marie Antoinette in Paris, where they became known as croissants.

A collective insanity seemed to have seized the nation and turned them into something worse than beasts. The princess de Lamballe, Marie Antoinette's intimate friend, was literally torn to pieces; her head, breasts, and pudenda were paraded on pikes before the windows of the Temple, where the royal family was imprisoned, while a man boasted drunkenly at a cafe that he had eaten the princess' heart, which he probably had.

The truth is that, in times of turmoil, people look for a scapegoat to sacrifice. Marie Antoinette just happened to be the French Revolution's favorite It girl. To be fair, Marie Antoinette lived in a world which she was expected to obey her husband as if he were God,, to spill forth children as if she were Eve--- and then accept that aristocrats ate cake while peasants had no bread. After all, it was divine will and all that.

I turn away from the smell of death, pressing my lavender scented handkerchief as tight as I can against my nose.

The woman who had been born in an imperial palace, and then, as Queen of France, had had hundreds of rooms in her dwelling house, was now imprisoned in a tiny basement cell, its walls streaming with damp, and its grated window half occluded.

In the Blue Room, Cora Cash was trying to concentrate on her book. Cora found most novels hard to sympathise with -- all those plain governesses -- but this one had much to recommend it. The heroine was 'handsome, clever, and rich', rather like Cora herself. Cora knew she was handsome -- wasn't she always referred to in the papers as 'the divine Miss Cash'? She was clever -- she could speak three languages and could handle calculus. And as to rich, well, she was undoubtedly that. Emma Woodhouse was not rich in the way that she, Cora Cash, was rich. Emma Woodhouse did not lie on a lit à la polonaise once owned by Madame du Barry in a room which was, but for the lingering smell of paint, an exact replica of Marie Antoinette's bedchamber at le petit Trianon. Emma Woodhouse went to dances at the Assembly Rooms, not fancy dress spectaculars in specially built ballrooms. But Emma Woodhouse was motherless which meant, thought Cora, that she was handsome, clever, rich and free.

First things first: Marie Antoinette never said, 'Let them eat cake.' Those words were attributed to an earlier French Queen, Marie-Therese, the wife of the Sun King Louis XIV. By 1767---a year in which Marie Antoinette was still an innocent German-speaking twelve-year-old in Austria....

I falter in the doorway, swept with memories of my reckless behavior last time I saw him. I sipped wine from a bottle. I kissed him. And as my pulse flutters with excitement, I know I would do it again, given the chance.

The desire to ascend in the social scale does not make itself felt until the intellect awakens. Up to the tenth, and often up to the fifteenth year, almost every child belonging to a well-to-do family envies its proletarian schoolmates, to whom so many things are permissible which for the “respectable” are placed under taboo.

What is bred in the bone will come out in the flesh.

And my dreams felt as real as a memory

The pretty landlady was desolate. She would have taken D'Artagnan not only as her husband, but as her God, he was so handsome and had so fierce a mustache.

living in the palace of Versailles must have felt like being imprisoned in a constantly turning kaleidoscope.

Marie Antoinette allegedly advised the starving masses that if they ran out of bread, they should just eat cake instead.

Uh," said Alec. "Can you fly a hot-air balloon?" "Of course! Magnus declared. "Did I ever tell you about the time I stole a hot-air balloon to rescue the queen of France?" Alec grinned as if Magnus was making a joke. Magnus smiled back. Marie Antoinette had actually been quite a handful. "It's just," Alec said thoughtfully, "I've never even seen you drive a car." He stood to admire the balloon, which was glamoured to be invisible. As far as the mundanes around them were concerned, Alec solemnly gazed at the open air. "I can drive. I can also fly, and pilot, and otherwise direct any vehicle you like. I'm hardly going to crash the balloon into a chimney," Magnus protested. "Uh-huh," said Alec, frowning. "You seem lost in thought," Magnus remarked. "Are you considering how glamorous and romantic your boyfriend is?" "I'm considering," said Alec, "how to protect you if we crash the balloon into a chimney.

But this first installation was by no means the last. Every year the Queen had some new fancy for beautifying her miniature kingdom with more highly artificial and more “natural” additions and alterations.

Fools Rush In Fools rush in Where angels fear to tread And so i come to you my love My heart above my head Though i see The danger there If there's a chance for me Then i don't care Fools rush in Where wise men never go But wise men never fall in love So how are they to know When we met I felt my life begin So open up your heart and let This fool rush in Fools rush in Where wise men never go But wise men never fall in love So how are they to know When we met I felt my life begin So open up your heart and let This fool rush in Just open up your heart and let This fool rush in Let open up your heart and let This fool rush in

This morning's pastry poses challenges. To assemble the tiny mosaic disks of chocolate flake and candied ginger, Avis must execute a number of discrete, ritualistic steps: scraping the chocolate with a fine grater, rolling the dough cylinder in large-grain sanding sugar, and assembling the ingredients atop each hand-cut disk of dough in a pointillist collage. Her husband wavers near the counter, watching. "They're like something Marie Antoinette would wear around her neck. When she still had one." "I thought she was more interested in cake," Avis says, she tilts her narrow shoulders, veers around him to stack dishes in the sink.

Indeed, in most countries today overeating has become a far worse problem than famine. In the eighteenth century Marie Antoinette allegedly advised the starving masses that if they ran out of bread, they should just eat cake instead. Today, the poor are following this advice to the letter. Whereas the rich residents of Beverly Hills eat lettuce salad and steamed tofu with quinoa, in the slums and ghettos the poor gorge on Twinkie cakes, Cheetos, hamburgers and pizza

Our minds are vulnerable to myths, falsehoods and fictions not merely because we are dumb or stupid, but because we are frail, flawed and easily afraid. Advocating fearless rationality—an end to myth-making and myth-believing—is not just about being smart. It is a matter of privilege. If you don’t lack for food and water, for physical security or a police department that comes when you call, you might not feel the need to turn to myths, rationalizations and rituals. You may have no need for fellow members of your tribe to come to your assistance when you are sick, because there are doctors and hospitals who will do a better job. If you think of yourself as a citizen of the world because borders are illusions and people everywhere are the same, you probably haven’t lived through the kind of persecution that makes you desperate for the protection of your fellow tribesmen. It’s fine to hold secular, cosmopolitan views. But when rationalists look down on people who crave the hollow panaceas of tribe and nation, it’s like Marie Antoinette asking why peasants who lack bread don’t satisfy themselves with cake. They fail to grasp what life is like for most people on the planet.

Motherhood had been metamorphosing Marie Antoinette into a more grounded and responsible woman. Her pregnancies had necessitated several months' absence from her usual round of gay amusements and she discovered that it was more fun to spend time with her children than it had been to play faro deep into the wee hours of the morning. But her reputation as a frivolous, extravagant ninny and the marital issues in the royal bed had already demonized her in the eyes of the people at all levels of society.

Rouge, also, had a peculiar function as caste-mark. It was applied with a heavy hand and in a circular pattern. It was worn most lavishly on the day of a woman’s debut, when she was obliged to simulate the flush of the contrived orgasm bestowed by royal favour.

Lightly, caressingly, Marie Antoinette picked up the crown as a gift. She was still too young to know that life never gives anything for nothing, and that a price is always exacted for what fate bestows. She did not think she would have to pay a price. She simply accepted the rights of her royal position and performed no duties in exchange. She wanted to combine two things which are, in actual human experience, incompatible; she wanted to reign and at the same time to enjoy. Her desire was that all should fulfill her wishes as Queen while she gave free rein to every caprice; she wanted the power of the ruler and the freedom of the woman, wanted, in fact, to have it both ways, wanted her new position to redouble without drawback the intensity of her young and passionate life.

We dug the asparagus, and tonight Aunt Charlotte cooked it for me herself with butter and melted cheese. I ate a whole plateful and drank half the brown jug of sweet milk. Then I had two slices of the thick coarse-grain bread that Aunt and the nuns make fresh every day.

She did what is the most dangerous thing anyone can do in politics; she discoursed without having the most remote acquaintance with the subject; she amateurishly thrust her fingers into every pie, interfering in matters of the utmost moment; she used her overwhelming influence with the King exclusively on behalf of her favorites.

Le parece maravilloso verse envuelta por la ardiente muchedumbre, dejarse amar por ese desconocido pueblo; en adelante sigue disfrutando de este amor de veinte millones de criaturas como de un derecho propio, sin sospechar que el derecho impone también deberes y que el amor mas puro acaba por fatigarse si no se siente correspondido.

were uproariously demanding relief from their intolerable miseries — in this Potemkin sideshow there prevailed a preposterous and mendacious comfort.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. Let them eat croissants.

François-Marie Arouet Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), I,

Reading, he claims, would broaden my experience of the world. The ideas to be found in serious books would deepen my thinking about every choice I make.

for all he himself wanted was repose, repose, repose.

She did not want to dominate, but, on the other hand, she would not allow herself to be dominated or even influenced by others.

And he had just a moment to realize what was happening before the rusted old handrail dropped down and separated his head cleanly from his body.

What was wrong with a good German stride?

Persistently trying to hoodwink one another, the Emperor, the kings, the princes, and the revolutionaries created an atmosphere of general distrust (like that which poisons the world today); and, in the end, though they had not directly purposed anything of the kind, they involved twenty-five million men in the cataract or a war which lasted for twenty-five years.

O femeie este cu atît mai nobilă și mai cinstită cu cît urmează, liberă, sentimentul ei sincer, îndelung încercat – și o regină este cu atît mai regală, cu cît se poartă cît mai omenește.

Just as Charles Darwin explains that species are not immutable, and that they possess a past, a present and a future, changing and evolving, so Marx and Engels explain that a given social system is not something eternally fixed. That is the illusion of every epoch. Every social system believes that it represents the only possible form of existence for human beings, that its institutions, its religion, its morality are the last word that can be spoken. That is what the cannibals, the Egyptian priests, Marie Antoinette and Tsar Nicolas all fervently believed. And that is what the bourgeoisie and its apologists today wish to demonstrate when they assure us, without the slightest basis, that the so-called system of "free enterprise" is the only possible system - just when it is beginning to sink.

she was never to be allowed to exchange a word with him; and that she was forbidden to pay him a visit even when he was ailing. He was quarantined from her as if she had been suffering from the plague. She was actually forbidden to converse with Simon the shoemaker, the boy’s tutor, from whom she might have gleaned a little information about her son. His seclusion from her was to be unconditional and absolute.

Nineteenth-century liberalism had assumed that man was a rational being who operated naturally according to his own best interests, so that in the end, what was reasonable would prevail. On this principle liberals defended extension of the suffrage toward the goal of one man, one vote. But a rise in literacy and in the right to vote, as the event proved, did nothing to increase common sense in politics. The mob that is moved by waving the bloody shirt, that decides elections in response to slogans—Free Silver, Hang the Kaiser, Two Cars in Every Garage—is not exhibiting any greater political sense than Marie Antoinette, who said, “Let them eat cake,” or Caligula, who made his horse a consul. The common man proved no wiser than the decadent aristocrat. He has not shown in public affairs the innate wisdom which democracy presumed he possessed.

I know where they are.' 'Where?' 'Why should I tell you?' 'Because, if I don't have a suitcase, I can't go to Paris tomorrow, and then you're stuck with me for all of Spring Break instead of having a nine-day sister-free bonanza.' 'Good point.

… the countryside and the village are symbols of stability and security, of order. Yet they are also, as I have noted, liminal spaces, at a very narrow remove from the atavistic Wild. Arcadia is not the realm even of Giorgione and of Claude, with its cracked pillars and thunderbolts, its lurking banditti; still less is it Poussin’s sun-dappled and regularised realm of order, where, although the lamb may be destined for the altar and the spit, all things proceed with charm and gravity and studied gesture; least of all is it the degenerate and prettified Arcady of Fragonard and Watteau, filled with simpering courtier-Corydons, pallid Olympians, and fat-arsed putti. (It is only family piety that prevents me from taking a poker to an inherited coffee service in gilt porcelain with bastardised, deutero-Fragonard scenes painted on the sides of every damned thing. Cue Wallace Greenslade: ‘… “Round the Horne”, with Marie Antoinette as the dairymaid and Kenneth Williams as the manager of the camp-site….’) No: Arcadia is the very margin of the liminal space between the safe tilth and the threatening Wild, in which Pan lurks, shaggy and goatish, and Death proclaims, from ambush, et in Arcadia ego. Arcadia is not the Wide World nor the Riverbank, but the Wild Wood. And in that wood are worse than stoats and weasels, and the true Pan is no Francis of Assisi figure, sheltering infant otters. The Wild that borders and penetrates Arcady is red in tooth and claw.

Come the revolution, however, mesmerism was reconceived once more. From its beginnings many had seen it as an aristocratic fad: Mesmer (by this stage long gone to Germany and Switzerland) had made a fortune from the nobility, charged the huge fee of 100 livres for admission to his Society of Universal Harmony, and even been offered a pension for life by Marie-Antoinette.

More politically, Medusa has become shorthand for a particular brand of strong female agency perceived as aggressive or ‘unladylike’. Marie Antoinette was depicted with snake-like hair in French seventeenth-century cartoons, while in the early twentieth century, anti-suffragette postcards likened the protesters to the monster. During the 2016 American election campaign, the image of Hillary Clinton’s snake-bedecked, raging head being cut off by her Republican rival Donald Trump – compared to Perseus – appeared on unofficial merchandise. Similarly, another strong female leader, German chancellor Angela Merkel, has found herself depicted as a Gorgon. These portrayals reinforce a millennia-old message from men to women: keep your mouth shut or we’ll shut it for you.

Tutto a te mi guida - Totul ma duce spre tine - cuvinte mai adevarate ca oricand, in acele zile cand Maria Antoaneta se afla la un pas de moarte. Fersen stia ca inima ei a batut pentru dansul pana in ultima clipa. Cu cele cinci cuvinte - ultim salut de despartire in pragul vesniciei, dar si juramant al dragostei statornice in curgerea vremelniciei pamantene - s-a incheiat aceasta incomparabila tragedie in umbra ghilotinei.

Most people read Homer in those stupid eighteenth-century translations,” Gautier said calmly. “They make him sound like Marie-Antoinette nibbling biscuits in the Tuileries. But if you read him in Greek you can see he’s a monster, his people are monsters. The whole thing is like a dinner party for barbarians. They eat with their fingers. They put mud in their hair when they are upset. They spend half the time painting themselves.

Noținea de „revoluție” e amplă: ea cuprinde culmile cele mai înalte ale idealismului și brutalități abjecte. Ea își schimbă culorile, după oameni și împrejurări, coborînd de la spirit pînă la violență. Ca în orice revoluție, și în cea franceză, se disting două tipuri: revoluționarii din idealism și cei din resentiment. Primii vreau să ridice masele spre dînșii, cultura și libertatea lor. Ceilalți, cărora le-a mers multă vreme rău, sunt plini de răzbunare față de foștii lor stăpîni.

The first movie star I met was Norma Shearer. I was eight years old at the time and going to school with Irving Thalberg Jr. His father, the longtime production chief at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, devoted a large part of his creative life to making Norma a star, and he succeeded splendidly. Unfortunately, Thalberg had died suddenly in 1936, and his wife's career had begun to slowly deflate. Just like kids everywhere else, Hollywood kids had playdates at each other's houses, and one day I went to the Thalberg house in Santa Monica, where Irving Sr. had died eighteen months before. Norma was in bed, where, I was given to understand, she spent quite a bit of time so that on those occasions when she worked or went out in public she would look as rested as possible. She was making Marie Antoinette at the time, and to see her in the flesh was overwhelming. She very kindly autographed a picture for me, which I still have: "To Cadet Wagner, with my very best wishes. Norma Shearer." Years later I would be with her and Martin Arrouge, her second husband, at Sun Valley. No matter who the nominal hostess was, Norma was always the queen, and no matter what time the party was to begin, Norma was always late, because she would sit for hours—hours!—to do her makeup, then make the grand entrance. She was always and forever the star. She had to be that way, really, because she became a star by force of will—hers and Thalberg's. Better-looking on the screen than in life, Norma Shearer was certainly not a beauty on the level of Paulette Goddard, who didn't need makeup, didn't need anything. Paulette could simply toss her hair and walk out the front door, and strong men grew weak in the knees. Norma found the perfect husband in Martin. He was a lovely man, a really fine athlete—Martin was a superb skier—and totally devoted to her. In the circles they moved in, there were always backbiting comments when a woman married a younger man—" the stud ski instructor," that sort of thing. But Martin, who was twelve years younger than Norma and was indeed a ski instructor, never acknowledged any of that and was a thorough gentleman all his life. He had a superficial facial resemblance to Irving Thalberg, but Thalberg had a rheumatic heart and was a thin, nonathletic kind of man—intellectually vital, but physically weak. Martin was just the opposite—strong and virile, with a high energy level. Coming after years of being married to Thalberg and having to worry about his health, Martin must have been a delicious change for Norma.

A woman stood in the kitchen with her, wearing an elaborate ball gown that looked like it came from the eighteenth century. “Mon dieu!” Rochelle exclaimed. The woman stared down her thin, imperious nose at Rochelle. Rochelle put on her best snarl, the one she used on bouncers who wouldn’t let her into clubs, or waitresses who took too long with her food. “Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?” she asked, a challenge in her voice. But the woman didn’t answer the question, didn’t tell Rochelle what she wanted. Instead, she pointed to the counter. Rochelle looked to see what the woman was pointing at — And just as she turned her head, the large knife sailed through the air, straight toward the softest part of her neck.

Perhaps the similarity between their position and her own created a disagreeable impression for her. There was also the fact that they were soured bluestockings who sought, through the number of theatrical entertainments they hosted, to delude themselves that they kept a salon, and there was a rivalry between them, which the considerable erosion of their fortunes in the course of their rather unruly lives, by obliging them to watch their purse strings and to rely on the charity of the actors they used, transformed into a sort of life struggle. And, again, the lady with the Marie-Antoinette coiffure, whenever she set eyes on Mme de Villeparisis, could not help being reminded of the fact that the Duchesse de Guermantes did not come to her own Friday receptions. She was consoled by the unfailing presence at these Fridays of hers of her dutiful relation, the Princesse de Poix, her own special Guermantes, who never went near Mme de Villeparisis, despite the fact that she was an intimate friend of the Duchesse. Nevertheless, from the mansion on the Quai Malaquais to the salons of the rue de Tournon, the rue de la Chaise, and the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a bond as strong as it was hateful united these three fallen divinities, and I would have been keen to learn, from the pages of some dictionary of society mythology, what amorous adventure, what

He was in love with France before he even reached Paris. Jefferson’s work in Europe offered him a new battlefield in the war for American union and national authority that he had begun in the Congress. His sojourn in France is often seen as a revolutionary swoon during which he fell too hard for the foes of monarchy, growing overly attached to—and unhealthily admiring of—the French Revolution and its excesses. Some of his most enduring radical quotations, usually considered on their own with less appreciation of the larger context of Jefferson’s decades-long political, diplomatic, and philosophical careers, date from this era. His relationship to France and to the French, however, should be seen for what it was: a political undertaking in which Jefferson put the interests of America first. He was determined to create a balance of global power in which France would help the United States resist commercial and possible military threats from the British.5 From the ancien régime of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette to the French Revolution to the Age of Napoleon, Jefferson viewed France in the context of how it could help America on the world stage.6 Much of Jefferson’s energy was spent striving to create international respect for the United States and to negotiate commercial treaties to build and expand American commerce and wealth. His mind wandered and roamed and soared, but in his main work—the advancement of America’s security and economic interests—he was focused and clear-headed. Countries earned respect by appearing strong and unified. Jefferson wanted America to be respected. He, therefore, took care to project strength and a sense of unity. The cause of national power required it, and he was as devoted to the marshaling of American power in Paris as he had been in Annapolis. E