Sparkling Marie Antoinette: Irreverent Rider of Donkeys

[© 2026 Kip Mistral All Rights Reserved. Sketch of Young Marie Antoinette by Gabriel de Saint Aubin]

Artist Gabriel de Saint-Aubin captured her better than history ever did. In his quicksilver sketch, Marie Antoinette sits astride but turned in the saddle, glancing back over her shoulder as if the moment itself had surprised her. The lines tremble with movement. She is only five feet tall, her elegant little mount perhaps a Spanish jennet, yet unmistakably all horse: collected, light, and entirely attuned to her hand, ready to leap forward at her smallest whim.

It has always seemed to me that Marie Antoinette, born Archduchess of Austria and at age 14 married to Louis Auguste, Dauphin of France who would become King Louis XVI, is one of the misunderstood personalities of all time. To demonstrate, I’d like to write a little about her equestrian life which at one point in the young Dauphine’s world, became something of a story which should be remembered.

Teenage Marie Antoinette’s gracefulness was so notable that British politician, writer and historian Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, was so deeply impressed upon seeing her that he wrote “She…shot through the room like an aerial being, all brightness and grace and without seeming to touch earth.”

When she arrived in France, she had undoubtedly ridden before since her mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, was an excellent horsewoman. Because Marie Antoinette’s new husband Louis Auguste loved to hunt, she wanted to ride to spend more time with him. But her mother forbade Marie Antoinette this diversion, saying: “Riding spoils the complexion, and in the end your waistline will suffer from it and begin to show more noticeably. Furthermore, if you are riding like a man, dressed as a man, as I suspect you are, I have to tell you that I find it dangerous as well as bad for bearing children — and that is what you have been called upon to do; that will be the measure of your success.”

Maria Theresa, ordering Marie Antoinette to not ride horses until she was thirty years of age, created such opposition that Louis compromised by allowing Marie Antoinette and her ladies-in-waiting to ride donkeys, which were “safer.” It can be imagined how happy all the ladies concerned would have been.

Could it been to have made a point that Marie Antoinette fell off her “safe” donkey during a ride in the forest with her retinue? Was she “pushing the envelope” when several times a week she staged donkey-riding processions for the public? Could it be to make another point that she staged donkey races at the serious horse races, and managed to fall off again in a heated race against her brother-in-law, screaming with laughter and heels to the sky? Is it a coincidence that she was tempted to have an écuyer smuggle a horse into the forest so she could switch from her donkey back to a horse again?

These were small victories, but entirely her own — triumph of wit over absurdity.

But such episodes, which to modern eyes seems charming and harmless, caused murmurs at court. To ride astride was already a statement, even though it was not without precedent. Saint-Aubin’s sketch confirms that the Dauphine often chose that seat — practical, balanced, and frankly more secure for fast movement. Many of Louis XV’s favorite huntresses rode the same way. The King himself admired spirited horsewomen, and those who joined the royal hunts were expected to match the pace and courage of the men. Yet when the same freedom appeared in the Austrian Archduchess sent to secure an alliance, it was read less as vitality than as defiance. What she meant as natural ease was interpreted as impropriety. Thus the first small misunderstandings began — the kind that would, in time, grow into legend.

This is because in Marie Antoinette’s case, every gesture was magnified through the lens of protocol. An Archduchess of Austria and the Dauphine of France — soon to be its Queen — simply could not behave like any other young woman. Every gesture was political; every pleasure, a statement. That she preferred to ride astride, as Saint-Aubin shows her doing, was not merely a matter of comfort or balance. It was a quiet declaration of autonomy from a woman whose very body had become a matter of state.

In time, the Dauphine’s enthusiasm was given its proper channel. Once her right to ride was formally established, she turned that impetuous energy into discipline. No longer a secret escapade, riding became a fixture of her daily life. She called upon the finest écuyers of the royal stables — men trained in the long tradition of the School of Versailles — to refine her seat and manage her stable. Far from resisting instruction, she absorbed it eagerly. What had begun as a forbidden pleasure evolved into an art, and the young woman once mocked for her antics became a figure of unmistakable elegance on horseback.

Yet it is hard not to feel that she was born too soon. In another age, her confidence, vitality, and instinct for movement would have been applauded rather than censured. Modern royals ride, compete, and command stables of their own without scandal; independence is no longer mistaken for impropriety.

Marie Antoinette’s small rebellions — her laughter on the ground after a tumble from her safe donkey, her insistence on a real horse, her delight in learning from the finest écuyers of France — were the gestures of a woman reaching toward a freedom that her time could not yet allow. History misunderstood her, but, as Saint Aubin shows us, the horse did not.