King Ludwig II of Bavaria spent his life building Neuschwanstein Castle. She had never visited that castle, but she had gone to another palace he built, Linderhof. The vampire Giovanni had even played a piece from The Phantom of the Opera, and she had been so moved that she burst into tears.
The advantage of being a girl was that she could cry, as long as she was not like "Moaning Myrtle." After crying, she felt much better. Jane Austen had once written in one of her novels that if a woman happened to possess some talent—say, an intelligent mind—then she had best hide her intelligence away. People liked those with humor, but as for those with wisdom, the answer was no.
Yet women had one "talent" they could display to their hearts' content. Whether in myth or poetry, people spared no effort in praising women's beauty.
Natural looks were important, of course, but they still needed later refinement. Like diamonds, raw ore freshly mined was not especially beautiful. Only after careful design by a jeweler could it become a work of art.
The Holy Roman Empire was founded on agriculture, with wheat as its main crop. The Habsburg dynasty's women were educated to manage households. Marie Antoinette could even milk cows herself and work the fields at Petit Trianon. She could not play the piano, nor did she dress fashionably, and Madame du Barry and her companions mocked her for it.
The marriage alliance between Louis XVI and the Austrian princess was meant to deal with the increasingly powerful Kingdom of Prussia. The ancient Greek philosopher Thucydides had once said that Athens's growing strength, and the fear this inspired in Sparta, made the Peloponnesian War inevitable. A newly rising great power would inevitably challenge the existing ones. Neither France