#facts taken from the you're wrong about episode on marie antoinette

[escapekissed]

@alnaari [ LIFT ] stepping stones

They say that Marie Antoinette said ‘Let Them Eat Cake’---but that wasn’t true. Marie Antoinette was certainly most everything we think of when we photograph starlets in velvet gowns with their hair in white curls ten feet high---she was rich, and fashionable, and by all accounts beautiful; and by even a layman’s standards, incredibly unlucky for a royal all the same: drowned in scandal and bad press that would make even the most inscrutable papparazi of today blush with distaste. (If you drew Taylor Swift on a phallus-centaur-type ostrich-horse and called her a lesbian in the same brazen, foaming breath, you would probably be canceled by at least some faction of twitter. You would at the very least start a hashtag.)

Was she out of touch? You tell Aerith. She owned a whole villa in Versaille’s backyard that was meant to always smell of fresh-baked bread, which meant she paid someone to bake fresh baked bread there, all day, everyday. Marie Antoinette liked to show all her friends that she had real chickens that laid real eggs---and thus, she paid someone, before each visit, to wipe down the eggs.

Did Marie Antoinette care about poor people? Experts say that Marie Antoinette ran into numerous orphans on her travels, laying hungry and desolate in the streets. She would feed them, clothe them, and pay to send them off to be well-educated. So, at the very least, she cared about poor people when they were right in front of her face, staring down her carriage like the barrel of a gun to shoot them out of the gutter, chicken ass-first right into high society.

Aerith supposes that’s sort of how she started out with Nadia. (She can practically smell the yeast rising now. Thinking of it now, idly, she supposes baking bread all day isn’t a bad gig, though it would get rather boring.)

Nadia saw something special in Aerith’s sweat-and-dirt encrusted face and grimy nails. The dusty pink dress, the hard-calloused fingers. Nadia had been looking for someone in particular----a tarot reader, and although Aerith did not entirely fit the bill and had only done amateur readings herself, she was perfectly happy to lie to make her way into the Countess’s castle, for a roof over her head, and a garden---a real garden---where she could plant to her heart’s content.

Nadia had given Aerith all she had ever wanted. She seemed to find Aerith’s peculiarities, her quirks, her sly people-pleasing tricks that sometimes bordered on teasing and sometimes bordered on bitter----all very charming and quaint. The countess treated Aerith like a Princess. And beyond all those traits that Aerith had shown nearly all her supposed ‘betters’---and the Countess was more a supposed ‘better’ than anyone, wasn’t she, so Aerith did put on quite the show---Aerith had no idea how to be treated well and kindly. Especially over a lie, though Nadia had become quite fond of her tarot readings, and took them to heart, much to Aerith’s deepening guilt and dismay.

Nadia offers Aerith her hand to step over a puddle in the gardens. The storm looming on the horizon overhead seems to speak of what Aerith remembers of the tensions in the streets. Aerith herself had been quite vocally anti-royal, before she met The Countess. Now her old friends sell papers for pennies, in which Aerith’s huge head swims in diamonds, covered in expensive furs and suspicious lipstick kisses.

They put the Princess de Labelle’s head on a spike outside dear old Marie’s window to taunt her during her period of house arrest. Another insult to pile on to the numerous triggering allegations against her, the death of her supposed lesbian lover----it was her fault, according to the revolutionaries who made sure she saw it. Aerith supposes, at least, in her final moments, Marie knew she did have some part to play in it at all, however briefly. Out of touch though she might have been, always playing defensive as she tailored her image and her household and her hair as best she was able, given the circumstances... her last words were an apology to her executioner.

“Sorry,” Aerith says aloud, when she realizes she has not yet taken The Countess’s hand. “I didn’t mean to...” She trails off. “Make you wait.”