Marie Antoinette, comfort clothes, & imperfect parents
“Let them eat cake.”
That’s the infamous quote most people think of when the name Marie Antoinette comes up. Catchy and quotable, meme-able even. Never mind the fact that she never actually said it*.
A historically reviled character—for reasons justified and unjustified, many of which she brought upon herself, no small amount of which were projected upon her—the Marie Antoinette of history books is the poster child for frivolity, excess, woefully out of touch aristocracy, and tone-deaf privilege. In 2021’s social media maelstrom, she would be cancelled, full stop. As it was, she was cancelled by 18th century standards—“cancellation” in those days, involved fewer self-righteous Twitter flames and an actual, sharpened guillotine.
Like much of history (and not entirely unlike some of cancel culture), the story that history tells gets reductive and one-dimensional for the sake of simplicity and textbook character count. If you only have one or two paragraphs to talk about Marie Antoinette, well, of course you’re going to focus on the “Queen of France” part and the French revolution part and the part where her head was efficiently separated from the rest of her body. Makes sense why those details are the highlights, I suppose.
Still, as the great American songwriter Joe Henry once wrote, “No one you can name is just that one thing they have shown.” I believe that’s a stream that flows both directions—as a relief to watching the impossibly curated lives of Instagram influencers, as well as a warning to us when we judge those whose public failings or terribleness (or worse) might cause us to issue swift summary judgments.
I think that’s one of the things I loved most about Sophia Coppola’s beautiful and divisive** 2006 film: the humanization. Coppola said, “I didn’t set out on a campaign to correct the misperceptions about Marie Antoinette; I just wanted to tell the story from her point of view.”
I took that mission statement and tried to write a song with it.
The evening of October 5 1789, thousands of Parisians, armed with sickles and pikes and guns, arrived at Versailles to protest the job economy and price of bread. I’m no Man of the Tools, but I don’t know of any use for pikes besides the placement of severed heads. That would for sure be the top answer on Family Feud. So, on that October evening, as Versailles was being stormed and violence threatened, what would Marie Antoinette The Parent say to her child? Coming at that moment from her point of view, as a parent to her children, was the seed of the song.
But let’s back up to before the beginning of the end, to the life that led her to that night. Who was Marie Antoinette?
A Hapsburg princess, she was sold off like a political pawn in dynastic chess by her ambitious mother, the empress of Austria. Married at 14 in an arranged marriage to, basically, another child. Kids near that age might still play house, not actually get married, much less inherit the heavy crown of France.
To acknowledge the historical critiques (and the essence of the “cake” quote), she was very much pro-royal, anti-democracy and more than a little oblivious to what was happening outside her immediate sphere. Obliviousness is not a particularly charming trait, especially for a leader (though we see it plenty), but, it’s no capital crime. She became a scapegoat for what was wrong with a system built upon royalty. Like Sofia Coppola said, I’m not trying to be an apologist, but who hasn’t, here and there, been completely absorbed by their own little sphere?
On the other end, she demonstrated compassion—taking in an orphan and seeing to his education, tending to a peasant gored by a stag. Madame Campan, the First Lady of the bedchamber wrote, “(Marie) was so happy at doing good and hated to miss any opportunity of doing so.”
She was rumored to have been promiscuous. She was definitely outgoing and flirtatious. But it was Swedish military attaché Axel Fersen who held her heart, showed her how love can change everything for someone. He was later responsible for helping the royal family escape once and could’ve done so a second time if Louis hadn’t harbored understandable hangups about owing gratitude to his wife’s lover.
She was a grieving mother, having lost a 7 year-old son to tuberculosis. Those who experience loss in such a way tend to have a tenderness to them that can’t be feigned, only learned in sad and lonely nights. Compassion and empathy can be by-products of tragedy, and, by many accounts, were exactly that for Marie Antoinette.
To add to her complicated duality, while she lived in excess, she longed for the simplicity of her youth (another sentiment I think many of us can find in ourselves). Heaven knows many of us fill the emptiness inside with a variety of things that—even as we do them, whether it’s shopping or drinking or promiscuity or whatever—we know full well will not actually do much (if anything) long-term to remedy the emptiness.
Still, she longed for simplicity.
Enter the muslin dress.
Her favorite place, where she felt closest to that simplicity of her youth and escaped the press of duty, was puttering in the garden surrounding the Petit Trianon, a chateau (she’s the queen of France! it’s an actual chateau! just bigger and queen-ier) on the grounds of Versailles that her husband gifted her when he took the throne. She would wear a simple muslin dress and feel the most herself of any time in her life.
So what did she do? She had her royal portrait painted in the muslin dress. This drew widespread criticism (and showed that you truly can’t please anyone) as some critiqued “the gauzy cotton is too common for a queen” or “she looks like she’s wearing a boat sail for a dress” while others said “she’s taking the piss out of the commoners and mocking us all” and still others said, “it’s immodest and indecent and looks like she’s just wearing her UNDERDRESS.” When, really, it was just the way she felt most at home in this world***.
So back to that fateful October, where and when my song “Muslin Dress” takes place. Early in the morning on October 6, rebels rushed her bedroom, killing two guards. She fled to the king’s chamber and, temporarily, the mob was subdued. What would she say to her daughter, Marie Therese?
It wasn’t long before the mob overwhelmed the guards again. Nearly 10,000 angry French citizens took the royal family to trial with —did I call it or did I call it? — the guards heads on pikes.
Louis was killed. Marie (whom they called Widow Capet) was moved to “death’s antechamber” while awaiting her trial. The trial itself was an exhausting two-day, 32-hour marathon. She responded, alternately, with eloquence and fire, dignity and venom. But ultimately she lost, something I’m sure she’d known was inevitable before ever stepping foot in the courtroom.
She was decapitated to cheers and buried in a common grave. I like to think she was buried in her muslin dress, but I suspect she wasn’t allowed to pick her outfit.
She died at 37. THIRTY SEVEN. By thirty-seven, I hadn’t done even a full day’s worth of good parenting. I was a mess. Still am.
When we had our first child, I wrote a song of absolute, unconditional parental love (“I’m On Your Side”). And that song is true.
But “Muslin Dress” is the song I wrote next, after having our first daughter and having parented a bit more and having uncovered the endless stream of my parental shortcomings, relieved to have found a parent to embody how historically imperfect I felt. In its imperfection, “Muslin Dress” is just as true as “I’m On Your Side.” I’m more like Marie Antoinette than, say, Atticus Finch or Tami Taylor or the Weasleys, or whoever the beacons of incredible parenting are. I’ve got my flaws, by the score. And, still, I love my kids. Fiercely. With all I have.
So back to the question:
What would Marie Antoinette tell her kids as they stormed Versailles? Or when, at last, she knew she could have just one more conversation? Would it even be good advice? Heaven knows my brain isn’t always at its best when life-threatening stress is short-circuiting it.
My mind turned to one of my favorite books, Cormac McCarthy’s brilliant The Road. A stark and bleak book, no doubt, but one that somehow filled me with hope, in the way that the father—amid the worst imaginable circumstances, not unlike Marie Antoinette watching her very life crumble before her—tried nobly and desperately to keep hope alive in his son. What does he say to his son? Some of my favorite conversations between the two of them are the father trying to be reassuring while feeling all the fear himself. Parenting is like that.
For instance:
(As the trees were falling in the nearby forest): It’s okay. All the trees in the world are going to fall sooner or later. But not on us.
-How do you know?
- I just know.
Insulating, irrational confidence. And then sometimes we get this amazing honesty, where the father shows the cracks and we see that the son is not nearly as shielded as the father might have hoped:
-You don’t believe me.
- I don’t know.
-Do you think I lie to you?
-No.
-But you think I might lie to you about dying.
-Yes.
-Okay. I might. But we’re not dying.
-Okay.
So, with the father from The Road in mind and my own flailing and flawed parenting at heart, my Marie Antoinette takes young Marie Therese in her arms and tries to ease her daughter’s mind with a story, the story of Marie Therese’s dramatic birth. It’s nostalgic and sentimental. It’s something I do with my own kids, recounting the day they were born, that never ceases to magnetize their attention.
“Tear out the windows! I can’t breathe” were the first words you heard, Marie Therese. In the next room, where you were born, you can still see where the axes raked the floor.
And, in case the worst happens—but you think I might lie to you about dying—she dispenses some odds and ends of advice, not having thought through it as much as she may have liked, but knowing she owes it to her child:
Don’t be scared: we’ve got no sins to confess.
Find a true love and a muslin dress.
Don’t give the dogs the time of day, but be polite and be on your way.
Do your hair and let them hiss. (Take care of yourself and ignore the haters? Pretty good advice.)
There’ll be better and worse days than this. (Really? Worse than the day the mobs came for the heads of my parents? Look, parents will say anything—”but you think I might lie to you about dying”—sometimes. Like I said, one of the reasons writing a song about Marie Antoinette as a parent was so magnetic to me was because she clearly and publicly and historically was NOT perfect and might actually have bad advice in there with the good advice.)
Don’t answer dumb questions.
Find dear, close friends, who love you at your worst but for your best. (If i have to pick one line in the song, this is my favorite, a summation of true friendship and a bona fide key to life—how to spot and how to be a true friend lies greatly in our ability to seek out the best in others and offer grace to their…uh…less-best.)
Find a true, true love and a muslin dress.
The whole song, with The Madison Arm**** as the band and Sarah Sample on harmony vocals, can be heard HERE.
FOOTNOTES
*While not as pop culture-ready as “let them eat cake” (again: she never said it), why is Marie Antoinette not remembered for:
“Tribulation first makes one realize what one is,” the queen wrote in August 1791, (Ah, but this doesn’t fit the narrative of the one-dimensional, spoiled rich girl.)
Or
“I am terrified of being bored,” the 21-year-old queen confessed in October 1777 to her trusted adviser, Austrian ambassador Comte Florimond Mercy d’Argenteau. If this doesn’t capture the anxieties of 20-somethings attached to their iPhones in 2021, nothing does.
Or
“Nature refuses to answer such a charge brought against a mother,” she replied when prosecutors in her case absurdly accused her of having sexual relations with her own son. “I appeal in this matter to all the mothers present in court.” That’s where I got the line, “don’t answer dumb questions.” Sometimes the best answer is no answer. That’s wisdom.
Or
Accused of getting her proverbial fingers in the king’s foreign policy, she retorted: “To advise a course of action and to have it carried out are very different things.”
Or
Just before her execution, the executioner cut off her hair and bound her hands behind her. A priest counseled courage. “Courage?” Marie Antoinette shot back. “The moment when my ills are going to end is not the moment when courage is going to fail me.”
**Coppola’s film was booed at Cannes Film Festival and, even now, has a mere 57% on RottenTomatoes, just a couple percentage points below that legendary film The Rugrats Movie.
***Not unlike a lot of people and their go-to sweatpants during the pandemic.
****Scott Wiley on bass & electric mandoguitar, Pat Campbell on drums and percussion, Ryan Tanner on electric guitar, Brian Hardy on piano and Hammond B3 organ, Ryan Shengren King on synths, and me on vocals, an acoustic guitar that literally exploded after we finished the song, and a bit of piano.
