Marie Antoinette Monologue

A Monologue for Marie Antoinette

Written for a young woman who is feeling lost

By Bird

Have you ever tried living alone, as an immigrant, in Versailles? The cavernous and cold mirrored walls...the dark stares from the other inhabitants….the constant whispers of familiar strangers. You never truly feel welcomed, and you never truly feel like you belong.

Or in the very least, that has been my experience. Maybe it is my accent. Maybe it is my blue eyes. Maybe it is because I know there is more to life than to be doted upon by maidservants who you know want nothing more than to pour that pot of broth over your head and walk out the door.

That is the thing with Versaille - everyone is forced to love you, but no one actually does. And it seems that whenever someone comes close, the system expels them from your life.

So you try to escape. You try to find a way to love yourself before they come to seperate your heart from your head, once again. But is it possible to love yourself when so many people adamantly hate you? Is there anywhere out of the way enough to truly hide? I don’t think so, and believe me, I’ve tried.

There is nowhere to be free from the expectations of life placed upon you, for even as you sit in your meadow, leagues from the palace, dressed in a simple white frock, a magazine is still telling the...telling YOUR people that you are ignoring their sufferings. That while lounging in perfumes and silks you are telling your advisors to “Let them eat cake”.

My entire existance, since I was a girl, has been solely to be an aid to France, but I don’t know how to help. I have tried to provide them with what I thought they were asking for. I have tried to interpret the nasty whispers that follow me through echoing corridors. But the more I try, it seems the more I fail. And the more I fail, the more slander smears my face and name. I am constantly scapegoated for trying to exercise my needs as a human being. As they try to live, so do I.

Rousseau claims “The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless,” and so I pretend I am living the life I dream of. A life of simplicities, filled with love and children and flowers and sheep and all of the things I cannot ever truly have. Not the way I wish for them.

What if I were still in Austria today? I could live and love and be loved and be free. I could be happy. But that is not the way life works.

Life traps you in a mirrored prison, sets people in the world who will only ever let your name roll off their tongues as if it dripped with poison, blames the entire country’s problems on the fact that you are miserable and looking for escape. I have only ever tried to please the French. I have done all of the things they have asked me to do, but the French are never happy. One can never truly know what they are asking for.