Talk:Marie Antoinette#rfc 389C8EB

"Despite her attempts to remain out of the public eye, Marie Antoinette was falsely accused in the libelles of having an affair with Lafayette, whom she loathed, and, as was published in Le Godmiché Royal ("The Royal Dildo"), of having a sexual relationship with the English baroness Lady Sophie Farrell of Bournemouth, a well-known lesbian of the time."

This paragraph was curious to me, as a "well-known lesbian of the time" is a figure I'd find interesting. However, looking up her names, along with variations like "Lady Sophie Farrell," "Sophie of Bournemouth," and the like, returned a multitude of results... None of which provided a source, and all of which seemed to be drawing directly from this Wikipedia article.

Luckily, Le Godmiché Royal is available online, and I'm a native French speaker. So I went and read it... And it does not mention a Lady Sophie Farrell, of Bournemouth or anywhere else, at any point. In classic roman à clef fashion, the two characters of the play are Junon (meant to be Marie Antoinette) and Hebe (meant to be one of her confidantes). Comments on the text suggest that Hebe must have been either the Duchess of Polignac or the Princesse de Lamballe, two women close to Marie Antoinette who were slandered as having lesbian relationships with her.

It's possible that someone, at some point, interpreted Hebe in the text of The Royal Dildo as being Lady Sophie Farrell, but if so, the article should cite this secondary source which provides this interpretation, as opposed to the text, which does not present evidence of its claim. Furthermore, I can find no trace of Lady Sophie Farrell, "well-known lesbian of the time," existing at all. Both Polignac and Lamballe were, by all evidence, straight women targeted by a slander campaign.

Either someone has to be able to do what I couldn't and find the historical Lady Farrell and her connection to Mari -Antoinette, and add those to the page, or the article needs to be corrected. 109.223.9.174 (talk) 22:10, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

:that and Bournemouth not being a place of any significance until a number of decades after Antoinette's death.©Geni (talk) 21:45, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

[https://www.invitinghistory.com/2021/07/the-mistaken-portraits-of-sophie-helene.html This site says its actualy a pastel portrait of the child of Louise Hyacinthe de Montesquiou and Anne-François V] not Marie Sophie Hélène Béatrix.©Geni (talk) 22:43, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

File:Louise Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun - Marie-Antoinette dit « à la Rose » - Google Art Project.jpg The portrait to the left could definitely serve as a better infobox image. It's a lot more high-res than the current one, and the current one is also just based off of another, full portrait. It also follows MOS:LEADIMAGE as it is a more famed portrait used in encyclopedic ways. I understand that the current one faces the text, which follows MOS, but it literally appears to be if you took a regular portrait and cropped out the face. I want to also point out that other royals of Marie-Antoinette's generation also have full upper-body portraits in the lead like her mother Maria Theresa and her siblings. See I'm not sure if I'm being too nitpicky; it just seems like the one I am proposing is just more in alignment with the standards and not to mention highly aesthetically pleasing. Rexophile (talk) 02:41, 16 May 2025 (UTC)