Chapters 4 and 5 Summary and Analysis

In the summer of 1769, the Austrian and French diplomats began to work on the elaborate contracts that would accompany the marriage of Antoinette and Louis. The betrothed had never met one another, although they had exchanged portraits. Louis, Erickson writes, was "overweight, uncouth, badly dressed and painfully self conscious," at this point in his life and deemed by many to be of a dull intelligence (p. 43). He had become the "dauphin," the title given to the heir to the French throne, after the death of his father and older brother. He showed little interest in marriage or in much of anything beyond his favorite pastime of hunting. Antoinette was "dismayed" at the appearance of the young dauphin, Erickson writes, having already seen her older sisters married off to unattractive and boorish nobles.

Negotiating with the French on behalf of...