Hello and welcome to the second episode of our series on Marie Antoinette.

We left you at the end of the last episode with Marianne Twennett at the age of 18, about to become

Queen of France, as her husband Louis, still only a teenager, takes the throne. It's an immense

challenge in a troubled country where hatred of all things Austrian simmers beneath the surface,

and it won't need much to stare it up. And Marie Antoinette is Austrian. And that's not the only

challenge she faces. Mary Antoinette and Louis have been married for four years, and the marriage

is still not consummated. She's under massive pressure

to produce an air. It's seen as her job to make it happen, and her fault if it doesn't. But France

is still in love with Marie Antoinette, at least for now. For one, From Wondery and Gollhanger, I'm Peter Frankopern.

I'm Afwa Hush.

And this is Legacy, the show that tells the lives of the most extraordinary men and women ever to have lived, and asks if they have the reputation that they deserve.

This is Mary Antoinette, Episode 2, Queen of Scandal.

So Louis XVIth is crowned King of France on the 11th of June 1774, and much of the attention is on his beautiful young wife.

But she's so overwhelmed by the occasion, she ends up having a timeout. Can you imagine that after if you were being crowned, that you need to have a quiet moment on your own to take it all in? I'm quite impressed because these coronations sound

incredibly boring and very long-winded. So to be that focused and involved that you actually

get carried away with the emotion really shows that she's connecting on a emotional level with what's happening

here. She is very sensitive, right? She's a sensitive person. She tends to be quite impulsive.

When her carriage knocks down a five-year-old orphan, she takes the child into her care.

The biographer Antonia Fraser describes it all as sweet but desperately unreal. She did, even though

these are tokenistic gestures given her privilege and the poverty so many people were living in,

she did have that sense of empathy when she saw suffering up close. One of the issues is that

she rarely got close enough to see it. And I suppose it can be very cynical. I was going to say it's a

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