Like, in Versailles (although the actress is gorgeous), Marie Therese is portrayed as this sort of aloof, sexy wronged woman and I just feel….we have so much potential for what Marie Therese could have been if writers had taken their inspiration from the actual woman more. She was a dumpy, sweet little thing, with a bit of a Hapsburg lip and a penchant for hot chocolate and getting up late. She utterly adored Louis, though he only ever reciprocated in platonic love and utter respect. Antonia Fraser suspects that it was on their wedding night that Marie Therese made Louis promise he would always end up in bed with her, every night, which Louis did, up until her death; even if he’d spent most of the night in Montespan’s bed, he was meticulous about going to Marie Therese’s bed at any silly hour to be there when she woke up. She was religious, of course, being Spanish, but she seems to have been fun, in a giggly schoolgirl sort of way. The French didn’t find her very fun, but I suspect she had a charm. I feel like her repressed upbringing meant she always clinged to Louis in the way one clings to a celebrity crush or even one’s first relationship, which makes it incredibly sad to me that Louis found that the relationship he had with her wasn’t a romantically or sexually fulfilling one. Like, for example, Marie Therese’s father, the King of Spain, had forbidden anyone to show Marie Therese even a miniature of Louis prior to their wedding, but someone in the retinue of the French ambassador managed to smuggle her one, and she clustered around it with her ladies, sighing over how handsome he was. Still, when Louise de la Valliere was making her final journey from Versailles to repent in a nunnery and went to ask for Marie Therese’s blessing, Marie Therese didn’t bite back in a bitter, heartbroken way. She lifted Louise from her knees and said ‘My dear, there is nothing to forgive.’ If that had been me, Queen or not, I would’ve slapped the woman who my husband had called mistress for so many years across the face, but Marie Therese, though she was often child-like, showed great clarity and wisdom in this one instance.
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