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By Root 643 0

time I worked on Marie Antoinette, it was strange to find that I was immensely helped by hostile French reactions to the French Queen from intelligent, cultured, sensitive people. For example the chic and essentially benevolent French producer who shrugged her shoulders: ‘Ouf! She has certainly not helped the monarchy very much.’ This scapegoating inspired me: I wanted to avenge it. In New York, for example, I was able to harangue my publisher Nan Talese about the sheer misogyny of the treatment meted out to Marie Antoinette. (Of course dislike of Marie Antoinette was not limited to the French. My father gave me lunch at the House of Lords with his new friend Ann Widdecombe. She had loved The Gunpowder Plot as a recent Catholic convert, but snorted when I mentioned Marie Antoinette: ‘That dreadful woman!’)

Yet in general, proceeding round galleries, museums such as the Carnavalet, I was amazed at the total denigration of Marie Antoinette I heard from teachers with their flocks of children: ‘La reine méchante’ was about the best of them; ‘She was responsible for the whole Revolution,’ was quite commonly said. Because Marie Antoinette was after all Austrian, French people often added patriotically: ‘The King was not really to blame.’

At the same time the months I spent in France gave me an insight into how these people had lived under the ancien régime, just because of the arts-and-fashion world in which Natasha moved. She passed on to me an invitation from Karl Lagerfeld to lunch at his house, an hôtel particulier on the Left Bank. Karl Lagerfeld was, I realized, a highly cultured eighteenth-century aristocrat in a twentieth-century disguise. Every single one of the gorgeous rooms had pillars of books, no other word will do. Karl: ‘I sometimes knock them over in the middle of the night.’ At first I didn’t believe him, then I saw more pillars by his bed: actually a wonderful French bed which had belonged to the Comte d’Artois, brother of Louis XVI. At least there would have been some eighteenth-century action in the Artois bed, I reflected, since the dashing Comte, unlike poor Louis XVI, was a ladies’ man.

1 March 1998

Visit to Versailles. Our guide, President of Les Amis de Versailles, Vicomte Olivier de Rohan, had been introduced to us by our French friend Laure de Gramont. He was highly energetic, in his marvellously well-cut grey suit, his English included old-fashioned slang learned from his nanny like an aristocrat in a Nancy Mitford novel. ‘I will take you at once to what no one can see …’ Magic words. So we were taken to the Queen’s Theatre which fairly ravished the eye with its blue and gold, its celestial air. Harold deeply impressed but whether by the opportunities for performances here or just the beauty I wasn’t quite sure. I really felt a strange feeling standing on the stage where Marie Antoinette sang Rosina. I would have sung a note if I could sing a note. So I sang a note interiorly. Olivier took us everywhere with one sorcerer’s key. But what struck me most forcibly was the complete lack of security, let alone privacy, with which eighteenth-century royals loved. Their travails in the marriage bed took place virtually – not quite – where the public could gawp.

We retreated with relief to our rather scruffy apartment off the Champs Elysées, picked so Harold could walk to the Rondpoint Theatre where he was directing; there we ate pork pies bought from the supermarket next door. Far more fun to research and write about Marie Antoinette than to be Marie Antoinette.

A few years later, I was able to expand that statement: far more fun to make a film about Marie Antoinette than to be her. For Sofia Coppola took an option on the manuscript of Marie Antoinette, six months before British publication. It had been sent to her by my American publisher Nan Talese, a friend of her mother Eleanor Coppola who knew of Sofia’s obsession with the subject. She wrote me a gracious letter referring to her own upbringing as a young woman in a strong family, which had provided the original inspiration. It was all very exciting