Her feet crammed into high-heeled satin slippers, she was ready to go: blue eyes and Hapsburg lip, flat chest and pretty fair hair. She was redressed, head to toe, as a Frenchwoman: whalebone stays and paniers to hold up her skirts, silk stockings embroidered with gold, and then the court robe, with its train, its flounces and frills, its beading and trim, gemstones and lace. Now her new life was to begin, under a French name, Marie Antoinette. The child had traveled from Vienna in a golden coach drawn by eight white horses. A keen wind nipped between the Gobelins tapestries in which the pavilion was draped a steady rain began to fall and run through the pavilion’s roof. She was fourteen years old, and she cried while this happened. She arrived naked on an island in the Rhine, on May 7, 1770, in a pavilion especially built for the purpose, the Austrian princess Antonia was stripped of her clothes under the cold and curious gaze of a party of aristocrats.
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