Who could live without a good mistress or two? Certainly not the kings of France. Whereas you might remember Queen Marie-Antoinette, I’d bet some serious livres you couldn’t name another queen of France. That’s because, for all intents and purposes, Marie-Antoinette was a really, really bad French queen. And not just because she lost her crown and then her head.

So why did everyone hate Marie-Antoinette? “Let them eat cake,” is the most famous thing Marie-Antoinette never said. But the quote is certainly believable; it embodies a lot of a frivolous young girl who was nicknamed “Madame Deficit,” for the amount of money she spent on outlandishly improper gowns, ridiculously expensive jewels, and losing at card games.

(To give you a hint at how much money Marie-Antoinette spent: she once graciously declined to purchase matching set of necklace and earrings so that the navy could instead build a new battleship.)

But the expense is only one reason everyone hated her.

Marie-Antoinette may be remembered as the height of French royalty, sophisticated and mannered, but to the French court she was anything but. She was bored by court, ignored important courtiers, and had new and offensive gowns made (from materials so sheer they were banned in France) and extravegantly lavish hair styles done (poofs almost three feet high with sprays of feathers). Her disposition began to soften, as well as her spending habits, once she became a mother. But the damage was already done because now she was offending the court in a different way.

Once she became a mother and tired of the overbearing of the court, Marie-Antoinette retired to Petit Trianon, a model farming village/recreated hamlet on the grounds of Versailles. There, she and her select group of friends playacted as peasants.

They wore chemise-a-la-reins, simple white dresses made out of the gauzy material muslin; the sheer nature of the dress was considered inherently sexual, and the material was not French. Marie-Antionette was not supporting her own country in her spending habits. Not to mention the court disliked not constantly having access to their queen and they wondered what she might be plotting with those friends of hers.

There were also other scandals—Count Axel von Fersen, the Swedish diplomat, was a rumored paramour. In fact, her second son was born exactly nine months after Fersen’s departure. The Diamond Necklace Affair was another black mark, even though it was public opinion that accused her of defrauding jewelers and not any actual evidence. Mounting tensions between within the court, about the court, and between France and other countries all somehow painted Marie-Antionette as the cause of it all; she was still spending extravagantly.

Why was this so personally offended to the court? Surely men had affairs, surely it was the king, who ran the government, who was at fault for this. What about the mistresses, who were gifted with jewels worth millions of livres? Because queens were not supposed to act like this. Marie Leszczyńska, Louis XVI’s grandmother, was famous for being quiet, pious, and reserved…while her husband had twelve illegitamate children with over eight different women.

In short: mistresses were allowed, even expected, to act out. Queens were not.

And many mistresses were nothing short of political powerhouses! The chief mistress was granted the title maîtresse-en-titre (literally, “official mistress”) and apartments in Versailles. A king would usually grant a maîtresse-en-titre titles, jewels, and land, if they didn’t have it already. They were patrons of the arts, arrangers of dynastic marriages, stoppers and starters of wars—-so in the next post, we’ll take a look at a few.