As a teenage girl, Margot was taken to Martinique by a lover, who is said to have abandoned her there; somehow, she got herself back to France, became an actress, then manager of a string of provincial theaters. From her base in Versailles, she became a close friend of Marie Antoinette, but when the Bastille fell, she was on the road to Paris to become a good revolutionary; then, in turn, a counterrevolutionary. A steely chancer with a penchant for men many years her junior, she married at sixty-nine, and lived to be ninety.

Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self-…, loc. 1086