Marie Antoinette created a world of beauty. Hers was a rarefied vision unrivalled by subsequent royal patronage: ‘improvements in the greatest style of magnificence’, said a member of the Duke of Dorset’s staff at the British Embassy. It was realised with unparalleled flair at immense expense — ‘All the news from Paris is that… your finances are in disarray and weighed down with debt,’ her mother admonished her in a letter of September 1776 — and it cost her both her throne and her life.

The French Queen lived in a period in which princely patronage aimed to impress. ‘The Paris way of living is extremely magnificent,’ the Earl of Hertford wrote to Horace Walpole in November 1763. Crowning all was Versailles, the most splendid palace in Europe, of which an English visitor in the 1680s co

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