Caroline Weber

Marie Antoinette has always stood as an icon of supreme style, but surprisingly none of her biographers have paid sustained attention to her clothes. Here, 18th-century specialist Weber shows how Marie Antoinette developed her reputation for fashionable excess, and explains through lively, illuminating new research the political controversies that her clothing provoked. Weber surveys Marie Antoinette's "Revolution in Dress," covering each phase of...

The big hair, lacy cuffs, the platform shoes… Yes, Louis XIV was over the top, and nobody outshone The Sun King. He may have been pint-sized, but Louis had a huge appetite for sex, food, and bling. Welcome to the Secret Life of Louis XIV.

We all remember her four famous words, "Let them eat cake," however, Marie Antoinette did not actually say these words, but her image as the Queen of Wretched Excess has endured. Welcome to the Secret Life of Marie Antoinette.

Thirty-two essays—many never before published—of life in Paris from writers who were drawn by the city's charms to take up residence there.
In thirty-two personal essays, more than half of which are published here for the first time, authors describe how they were seduced by Paris—and then began to see things differently. They came to write, to cook, to find love, to study, to raise children, to escape, or to live the...