Well, it always gets a bit murky and hard to judge when talking about such old history... every single one of Marie Antoinette's contemporaries had an agenda. From what I understand, the accusations of her having lesbian (or incestuous, for that matter) relationships were basically slander by her enemies; I don't think there was ever any actual evidence of any of it.<br/><br/>I found this really interesting blurb about her:<br/><br/><div class="quoteheader"><div class="topslice_quote">Quote</div></div><blockquote class="bbc_standard_quote"><em>- You mentioned that she possibly had a secret lover. How likely is this to be true?</em><br/><br/>I would say the likeliness is 50/50, though all historians will argue about whether it happened or how likely it was to happen. As it stands, we have no concrete evidence that Marie Antoinette ever had another lover besides her husband, the King. If she did have a second lover at some point, the likely candidate would have been Count Fersen.<br/><br/>A bit of background on the reason some historians, including myself, believe that she never had another lover or only this one: Marie Antoinette was brought up in a rigid court in Austria and was therefore educated very little about sexual relations. In this period, according to Catholicism, it was a sin for a woman especially to enjoy sex. Sex was supposed to be a religious event which was to be done soberly and with reverence to God. Obviously this was seldom the case when it came to royal and aristocratic sexual relations, but Marie Antoinette was heavily censored from such knowledge as a royal princess. As such, she viewed sex as a necessary duty, but was extremely prudish toward sex and sexual women in general. This sexual coldness was not helped by the fact that her future husband was extremely shy, himself. Remember, she got to Versailles when she was only 14, and was married at 15 and expected to consummate the marriage immediately. For almost a decade into their marriage, the two never consummated their relationship physically, and this was an absolute disaster which almost wrecker her life politically. Though the couple did overcome their shyness and differences and had several children together, you can see why Marie would not have viewed sex as something pleasurable.<br/><br/>Now, on to Count Fersen. Many men were rumored to be the Queen's lover, but he is the only one we have circumstantial evidence for it actually having been true. Fersen, himself, wrote a very detailed diary in which he describes his relationship with a woman he uses a pseudonym for. It is rather obvious that he was referring to the Queen, and it is completely possible that they were lovers, as he was her close companion for much of her life. Fersen may have been lying in his diary for a variety of reasons, but I don't personally think it's likely. We also have a written document referencing the affair from Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, who was a friend of hers. (Although they couldn't visit each other often, they wrote many letters over the years). In this document, she notes that the day in question was the anniversary of when Marie and Fersen had become lovers. Having researched Georgiana almost as much as Marie, I can confidently say that Georgiana was not the type to spread false gossip, so her statement was either true or she was at least convinced that it was.<br/><br/>Was the society tolerant of these matters regarding their queen?<br/><br/>The society was not only tolerant of it, if done in a "respectful" way, but high society actually looked down on the King if he didn't have a sufficiently prestigious mistress. The mistress of the King had an official title and position in French society; she was supposed to be a mix of social director and style dictator. The fact that Marie Antoinette's husband didn't have a mistress was a constant annoyance to the French aristocracy. It got to the point that Louis irritably told his advisers that it would never happen and to stop asking him about it.<br/><br/>Most French royal and aristocratic men were expected to have a mistress, if not several, and most of them did. If you were a woman, that was a different story. It was tolerated once the wife had produced a legitimate son or two to carry on the husband's name. Once that happened, liaisons were very common for aristocratic women. For Marie Antoinette, things were different due to the many years it took her to finally conceive a child for France. Because of this issue, it was assumed that any child Marie Antoinette had must be a bastard, and several men were constantly accused of being her children's' fathers. As it stood, Louis was very good friends with Fersen, himself, and believed all of his children to be his own, which must have meant that he continued successful sexual relations with his wife for their entire marriage. If Fersen and the Queen were lovers, contraceptives (early condoms) were known at the time and Fersen wrote descriptions of how they were used in his diary as well.</blockquote><div class="quotefooter"><div class="botslice_quote"></div></div><br/>I absolutely agree though that the French court, and, really, anything French in that time period is absolutely fascinating! Thank you for the movie suggestion, I haven't seen<em>Les Adieux à la reine</em>but I need to check it out! I loved The Favorite, although I never took it to be a serious historical account (in fact, I didn't even know it was supposed to be based on true people when I first saw it, heh.)