In this lucid essay, the erudite French essayist analyzes the work of Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, one of the most brilliant and overlooked painters of the last decades of the pre-Revolutionary period in France. A masterful portraitist "capable of combining faithful likeness with impalpable idealization," Vigée Le Brun was the ally chosen by Marie Antoinette to offer a humane and dignified image of the mundus muliebris she represented, which supposedly corrupted the prestige and authority of monarchs by effeminating them. A fascinating account that recreates with magnificent precision the virulent awakening of a political, moral, and social misogyny that made Queen Marie Antoinette and her official portraitist its scapegoats.