In those days, to seem it was to be it, but Louis XVI’s court, powdered and reeking of Fargeon’s chemical experiments, seems to exist in a different time frame from that of the sober black-clad deputies who met in Versailles in the spring of 1789 to represent the Third Estate, the common people of France. By 1789, the King’s power to regulate his subjects’ style and taste was in the past, though the King had not noticed. … If anyone can dress up as a queen, anyone can, at a casual glance, seem a queen.

Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self-…, loc. 704