A miniature portrait of Marie-Antoinette by Anne Vallayer-Coster, one of the queen’s favorite artists and who received several important portrait commissions from the royal family. This miniature is housed at the Walters Art Museum, in Maryland.
Most Reverend Monsignor Director of this Academy, Gentlemen Academicians:
A simple listing of the titles with which she was known during her short life as Marie Antoinette of Habsburg, and later Marie Antoinette of Bourbon, brings to memory the series of extraordinary and unforeseen events that together make up the fabric of the most interesting female existences of the eighteenth century.
In its first phase, the life of this princess unfolds as happily and brightly as a golden dream, uniting in the same person all the glory of power, all the brilliance of fortune, and all the charm of a radiant youth. Suddenly, however, that long chain of fortunes is cut short by a ghastly typhoon that causes the wreck of the monarchy, the desecration of altars, and the collapse of a nobility which, for many centuries, had been writing with its sword the brightest pages in the history of France.
