The Library › Reel I · The Scissor Queen
Did the Princesse de Lamballe faint at the sight of a lobster?
VERDICTTRUE
So her contemporaries reported. Her 1908 biographer, B. C. Hardy, records that lobsters and violets set off her fainting fits, and that she once fainted in a Dutch picture gallery before a realistic painting of a fishwife with a basket of lobsters. Madame de Genlis called the fits pure affectation. Lauzun added shrimps, which Hardy dismisses as the lobster story grown in the telling.
The receipts
- The Princesse de Lamballe: A Biography, B. C. Hardy (1908), Internet Archive
The comedy version
The untold story of Marie Antoinette, inventor of scissoring.
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