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Updated: June 23, 2025
With all these charms, a soul yearning to attach itself, a heart easily moved, but yet earnest in desire to fix itself; a pensive and intelligent smile, with nothing of vacuity in it, nothing of preference or mere acquaintanceship in it, because it felt itself worthy of friendships. Such was Marie-Antoinette as a woman.
Twenty-two years his senior, she was the daughter of a German harpist named Henner, in favour at the Court of Louis XVI., whom Marie-Antoinette had married to Mademoiselle Quelpee-Laborde, one of her own ladies-in-waiting.
The misfortunes of his father King Louis XVI., and of Marie-Antoinette, are sufficiently well known throughout Europe to render the repetition of them tedious; but the evil fate of the son has been less voluminously recorded by historians, and it is, therefore, necessary to repeat the story at some length to render the following narratives of claims to royalty thoroughly intelligible.
No gloomy forecast seems to have passed through the minds of that august family, which had formerly seen Marie-Antoinette leave Vienna to sit at Paris upon a fatal throne. Yet all the efforts of both the emperors tended to suggest constant analogies. Napoleon's contract was copied from the act which united the destinies of Louis XVI. and Marie-Antoinette.
Drinking-cups of gold and ivory, chiseled by Benvenuto Cellini; cabinets of buhl and porcelain, bearing the cipher of Austrain Marie-Antoinette, amid devices of rosebuds and true-lovers' knots, birds and butterflies, cupidons and shepherdesses, goddesses, courtiers, cottagers, and milkmaids; statuettes of Parian marble and biscuit china; gilded baskets of hothouse flowers; fantastical caskets of Indian filigree-work; fragile tea-cups of turquoise china, adorned by medallion miniatures of Louis the Great and Louis the Well-beloved, Louise de la Valliere, Athenais de Montespan, and Marie Jeanne Gomard de Vaubernier: cabinet pictures and gilded mirrors, shimmering satin and diaphanous lace; all that gold can buy or art devise had been gathered together for the beautification of this quiet chamber in which my lady sat listening to the mourning of the shrill March wind, and the flapping of the ivy leaves against the casements, and looking into the red chasms in the burning coals.
She was a living anachronism for many years before her death, with her high-heeled, gold-buttoned, scarlet-coloured shoes, her Marie-Antoinette coiffure raised high above her head and interlaced with ribbons, her elaborately gorgeous dress, her intricate array of ornaments, and her long, jet-black, official-looking cane.
Laure Antoinette Hinner was born at Versailles on May 24th, 1777; she was the daughter of a German harpist who had been summoned from Wetzlar to the Court of France, and her mother was Louise Guelpee de Laborde, lady-in-waiting to Marie-Antoinette.
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