Marie Antoinette

Every few years the public becomes enamored with the story of Marie Antoinette (1755-93), the Austrian royal sent at the age of fourteen to France to marry the young prince who reigned as Louis XVI, and her time has come again. Hilaire Belloc's entertaining biography--an overlooked gem, according to a recent Amazon review--is sympathetic yet fair to the red-headed, intelligent, and arduous queen who lost her head to a guillotine. Her chance friendships failed not in mere disappointments but in ruin; her lapses of judgment betrayed her not to stumbling but to an abyss, writes Belloc, the prolific French-British author of many works of history, biography, and books for children.