Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette was the last queen of France before the Revolution swept the monarchy away, and her chart holds both the beauty and the tragedy of that arc. Born an archduchess of Austria, youngest daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa, she carried a Scorpio Sun, the sign of death and rebirth, the Eagle whose whole avatar keeps dying and being reborn: a fitting light for a woman whose life became a study in transformation and, finally, in facing the end without flinching. That Sun sits in the sixth house of duty, service and open enemies, and enemies she had in abundance, blamed for the nation's deficit and pilloried in the libelles that shredded her name. Her Moon in Libra is a beautiful, Venusian moon, tuned to harmony, elegance and the arts, and it rests in the fifth house of pleasure, romance and children; her fortunes at court lifted only once she began having children, and her love of beauty and lavish style became both her signature and her undoing. Gemini rising gave her the light, changeable, sociable mask of the court. Married to Louis-Auguste at fourteen, queen at eighteen, she met the guillotine in 1793 with a Scorpio's grim composure. Beauty, duty and rebirth, played out on history's harshest stage.