Thus she arrived in Versailles at the age of 14 solely armed with her immense personal charm, her peerless porcelain skin, her winsomely informal manner and a prettiness marred only by that faintly pendulous, disdainful Hapsburg mouth.
''You know perfectly well that you have neither.'' Nor your talents nor your brilliance,'' the empress wrote her daughter in a typically demeaning tone when she was the 25-year-old Queen of France. She was also a callous, manipulative woman who inflicted permanent psychic damage on her tomboyish, high-spirited youngest daughter by totally neglecting her education and displaying clear preference for her brainier older sisters. Looked on as ''the wonder of Europe'' for the zeal and decisiveness with which she promoted her country's power, Maria Theresa was the kind of rugged woman who, at all seasons, gave birth to her children in front of an open window while signing papers of state. Marie Antoinette was the 15th of 16 children born to Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, and a more overbearing supermom would be hard to find. With greater psychological acumen than any of numerous earlier biographers, Fraser traces the queen's central traits of character - her intense need for affection, intimacy and approval - to her tortured relationship with an awesomely powerful mother. More often than not, this romanticized view of Marie Antoinette remains convincing.
(''Give them all croissants!'' she might well have decreed, rather than the canard ''Let them eat cake!'') Fraser's lavishly benevolent new rendering of the queen, in fact, is not unlike our image of Princess Diana: a paragon of virtue and fashion, a family-loving girl, exceptionally devoted to her children, who is victimized by an uncommunicative husband and a heartless court and whose attempts to maintain privacy in the face of royal protocol have disastrous results. The first thing Marie Antoinette's newest biographer, Antonia Fraser, would have you know is that the long-maligned Queen of France was a model of compassion, the kind of altruistic sovereign who jumps out of her carriage to come to the aid of an injured peasant and conveys him home in her own coach.
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