Article: SCENTED PALACE; Marie Antoinette was the style queen of her time and here, in an exclusive extract from a new book, we reveal her beauty secrets...

Byline: ELISABETH DE FEYDEAU

FROM the day of her coronation as the Queen of France, at 19, Marie Antoinette was hailed as a great beauty.

Like today's celebrity magazines, articles about her in the Journal des Dames were pored over in a bid to imitate her style.

Her tastes in fashion and beauty changed from one moment to the next. One day, for instance, in the summer of 1775, she presented herself before her husband, Louis XVI, in a dress that, he exclaimed, was 'the colour of fleas'.

The colour puce (the French word for flea) immediately became all the rage in Paris. Fabric-dyers created a variety of shades: old and young flea, and ...

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