Through life’s trials and tribulations, many people and events have vastly affected my life and my composure. Marie Antoinette has had an interesting influence on me since my peak interest in her ever controversial life story. Although she is from a completely different time, and a completely different person than I, much of her strong-natured composure through her many life experiences and journeys has vastly taught and touched me.
Through the past year or so, I have gained a fascination with the last Queen of France, so much so I could even say its borderline obsessive. This fascination has led me to gain a wide knowledge and understanding of one of the most misunderstood Queens in the world’s history. Reading about her life and how she came to France at such a young age, presumed to live a fairy tale life, only to be sorely disappointed, has captivated my eager-to-learn mind. She was a young, naïve girl, who had life’s finest things thrown at her all at once, and taken away from her just as quickly. Through reading how she got from one end of the spectrum to the other, I have accumulated a great understanding of her troublesome and heartbreaking experiences and journeys. Yet, to my greatest surprise, she was not like the public had presented her. Behind that naïve face, she was a strong-willed woman, just as her Austrian Empress mother was. Learning of her journeys from Dauphine to Queen of France to total ruin and death and her experiences in the courts of Versailles and the Temple, in which she was imprisoned in before her death, have influenced how I think of myself and go through my day to day life. Though much of France, and the rest of the world, came to despise her, I have come to admire her. She had almost everything taken from her, her pride, her family, and in the end, her life, yet she never let any of that bring neither her hope nor her head down. She was courageous and fought against her discrimination until her bitter end, which most people don’t seem to understand. This is the very thing that has inspired me to keep going for what I want, no matter what people are to tell me.
Marie Antoinette and I may not be anything alike, but through reading her history I have realized that both she and I do share a common quality: we are both the youngest in our families. Being the youngest has its pluses and minuses; in her case, becoming Queen in an elegant, fairy tale setting before she’s twenty, then being beheaded before she was forty; in my case coming out the sanest yet still being compared to the mistakes made by my eldest siblings. Though these are vastly different situations, the cores have the same tone. Taking this vague similarity, I looked more closely at her strong-natured composure, and how she handled her trials and tribulations of becoming the most hated Queen of France and losing almost everything she had, and took something from them. She was ridiculed by her people, her friends, and even her family towards the end, yet through it all she kept her chin-up, and hopes high, letting nothing and no one bring down her dignity. Taking all of this in, I began to realize that, at the end of the day, I am my own worst enemy while also being my best hero. No one can bring me down but myself, and no one can believe in me or stand up for me better than myself. She has shown me that even in the toughest of situations, even when I seem to have let everyone else down, never to let myself down.
Though she has not turned my life from upside down to right side up, Marie Antoinette has impacted how I view myself, accomplish my goals, and get through life’s day to day situations. She has shown me the importance of holding my head high and staying hopeful, even through times of trial and error. Fight for what I want, and strive for the highest goal, up until I take my last breathes. No one could have made that more clear to me than Marie Antoinette.
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