Let them eat cake!

I just finished reading Antonia Fraser's biography of Marie Antoinette.  Of course, we all know what happened to her at the end.  According to Fraser, she never said, "let them eat cake" and was an amiable enough woman, not endowed with a great deal of intelligence or drive, really an ordinary woman -- who wanted to be a good mother, who tried to be a good wife, who liked pretty things and the theatre and music.  Her husband, King Louis XVI, was a bit of a buffoon -- not an evil man or a megalomaniac or a womanizer, like his predecessors.  But they are the ones who paid for the excesses of the monarchy.  At the end of the book, Fraser says that Marie Antoinette was a scapegoat -- she was a foreign princess (from Austria) and was hated by the populace and one of the revolutionaries said they had to have her head.   Yes, I guess so, but if she was a scapegoat, she was not alone.

When you see Versailles, you see the unbelievable indulgence of people who feel they have a divine right to money and power and beauty.  (One of you, you know who you are, pointed out that Versailles explains the French revolution.)  As a Anglophile friend of mine said, it puts Buckingham Palace to shame.  You can understand the rage of people who don't have bread and see other people who seem to have more than everything.  That's why it's dangerous to have these societies where there is such a discrepancy between the very rich and the very poor.  (And of course, it's wrong, in my opinion, for some people to have gold thread and pearls on their dresses when little kids are dying of hunger and drinking dirty water.)  Having read a bit about the French revolution, I see that the revolutionaries had many of the same goals as the Communists in Russia and they did articulate them quite clearly, too.  (I had always pictured them as rabid nuts before.)  But like so many of these violent upheavals, the revolutionaries lost control of their movement and then it started to feed on itself.  Robespierre, Danton, Saint-Just, Philippe Egalitie, all died at the guillotine during the Terror.  Anthony pointed out that once you remove the normal checks and balances and legal and political control from society, you're facing the possibility that anything can happen and anarchy can well prevail.  I guess it's fortunate that human nature appears to prefer some sort of order because it rears its head pretty quickly after a conflagration like the French Revolution.  In the case of France, six years after the Reign of Terror, Napoleon was in charge.

Well, in a week we will all be back in our own orderly lives, with almost no "unstructured" time.  I love unstructured time (although, human that I am, I attempt to structure it with lists!) -- long, lazy days walking Daisy or going to Aquafit classes, or having an impromptu meal in a nice restaurant, or sitting and reading a biography of Marie Antoinette all day, if that's what I like.  (That sort of describes my day yesterday.)

I'm going to try to make a French meal tomorrow for a couple of friends.  Here is my menu:

Entree (in France, that's the appetizer) -- lobster bisque
Plat Principal (the main course) -- sole meuniere, with roast potatoes and haricots verts
Fromage (cheese course) -- baked camembert
Dessert -- Clafoutis (which is like a cake with cherries, or in this case, blueberries, in it) and ice cream (French vanilla, of course)

I'm going to try to pair a different wine with each course.  If it doesn't turn out, we'll just bulk up on cheese and bread!  That's as French as anything.