The last four years of Marie Antoinette's life were spent in captivity as a prisoner of the French Revolution, a world away from the glittering life she had known at the court of Versailles. In her prison she was subjected to daily humiliations and a concerted campaign to undermine her health. Her husband, the King, Louis XVI, was taken from her and guillotined. Then they came for her son. Yet throughout her ordeal she impressed even her brutaIised jailers by her virtue and the strength and dignity of her character. In this book Robert Connolly evokes a sense of what it must have been like to be in the shoes of the much maligned Marie Antoinette. In eighteen poems placed throughout the text, he portrays her thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, anguish, despair and, finally, her dignified acceptance of her own inevitable fate.

Author Biography

Robert Connolly was born in Dublin City, Ireland, and spent his childhood and teenage years in County Laois, about eighty kilometres south-west of Dublin. Thereafter, due to unfavourable circumstances, he became a wanderer, taking whatever type of work was available, but he always had a close affinity with nature and the land. Robert studied many subjects on his travels, one being psychology, which gave him an insight into deep thought and that has been his guiding light through life. He also studied modern languages, French and German. However, the author was cultivating the art of poetry composition through the difficult years and has accumulated a collection of poems, but hasn't yet attempted to have them published. Robert supposes that he could be looked upon as something of an unknown quantity. At the moment he is working on a second novel.