Versailles: Icing on this queen's cake

Versailles, France — IT isn't easy to feel sorry for Marie Antoinette when you are standing in the French Garden at Versailles, where the flowers were changed every night to fend off royal boredom. It isn't easy even if you know she ascended, unready, to the French throne at 18, was a tender mother, bore her well-known fate on the guillotine with dignity and probably never said, "Let them eat cake."

In the last few weeks, with spring in the air, I visited Versailles, about a 40-minute train ride from Paris, to better understand the infamous young queen who created a flush, deliriously decadent, delicately rococo world of her own at the Petit Trianon, the Versailles estate given to her by her husband, King Louis XVI. There, she blithely gambled, danced, dabbled in horticulture, churned butter in monogrammed porcelain vats, ordered two new pairs of shoes a week and built a private theater for her amateur theatricals while France slid into poverty and despair.

In July, the Petit Trianon and its surrounding pleasure pavilions, farms, cottages and recently renovated gardens are to open as an ensemble, for about $10 a ticket. If Marie Antoinette's ghost remains wakeful, it is most likely to be found here.

In the more than two centuries that have elapsed since Marie Antoinette's execution, opinions about her have varied widely. Her contemporary Germaine de Stael bristled at the injustice of the queen's trial, and 19th century French biographers Edmond and Jules Goncourt found reasons to defend her.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in his autobiography that the whole French Revolution could have been avoided by locking the queen in a convent. In a widely read 1932 biography "Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman," author Stefan Zweig accused the queen of gross heedlessness, "which made her, for nearly two decades, sacrifice the essential to the unimportant, duty to pleasure, the grave to the gay, France to Versailles and the real world to the world of her fantasies."

In 2001, Antonia Fraser's judiciously sympathetic "Marie Antoinette: The Journey" revived debate about the queen's character and inspired director Sofia Coppola ("The Virgin Suicides" and "Lost in Translation") to make a movie about her life, which is to be released this fall.

Coppola, who, like Marie Antoinette, was born to wealth, privilege and the limelight, said she could understand the young queen's plight, launched into a tornado of great events when girls her age nowadays are just graduating from high school. Recently, Coppola told Paris Vogue that there are lots of Marie Antoinettes in Beverly Hills.