It has become pretty easy to distinguish fact and fiction when it comes to Marie-Antoinette as the 'dust settled' due to the fact that many of her closest confidantes survived the revolution. A lot of her correspondence with her mother Empress Maria Theresa survives, as does correspondence between the Austrian Count Mercy who was one of the Queen's chief advisors and a virtual spy for her mother Maria Theresa at Versailles.

We also have several retrospective accounts - the memoirs of the Comte de Provence, late King Louis XVIII, those of Madam Campan, lady-in-waiting (though these can be seen as slightly tainted by the fact that at the time of their writing Campan had fallen out of favour with the Bourbon Restoration for her services to Napoleon's France), as well as the writings of the Baronne d'Oberkirch, the Marquise de La Tour du Pin and the Marquise de Tourzel, last royal governess to the children of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.

Successive modern biographers have attempted to make it clear that while Marie-Antoinette did spend a great deal of money, particularly in the early stages of her time at Versailles, she was not considered very lavish in her expenditure when compared to other members of the French royal family, such as her sister-in-law Madame Élisabeth, her brother-in-law's wife the Comtesse de Provence and her husband's aunts who were known as Mesdames Tantes.

She also moved away from lavish court clothing rather early in her reign, much of which was provided by the couturier Rose Bertin, and moved towards simple white muslin garments adorned with a straw hat. She relaxed her clothing etiquette rules to the point where some members of the French court were scandalised, and gave this white summer dresses to friends as tokens of esteem (Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire received one such dress).

As for her 'lesbianism', I can almost certainly assure you that it was untrue. Allegations of sexual impropriety were used from the beginning until the end in attempts to defame the Queen, but were not exactly new in the court of Versailles. Louis XV's daughter Princesse Adelaide had had pamphlets printed about potential father-daughter incest many years previous, in a similar vein but with more intensity libelles depicting Marie-Antoinette in sexual liaison particularly with her husband's handsome brother the Comte d'Artois and her closest ladies the Princesse de Lamballe and the Duchesse de Polignac were published frequently. These served two purposes - they painted the Queen as indulgent and immoral, and the King as a weakling and cuckold who could even satisfy his own wife sexually.

One source of these rumours was probably her favouring of the Petit Trianon, a much smaller house on the grounds of Versailles that Marie-Antoinette took to using very frequently to escape the rigidity of the main palace and its total lack of privacy. The fact that the Queen desired some privacy, and often took it alongside her closest ladies, her children and even some male friends in her circle led to many people both outside the court and within it hypothesising that something immoral was occurring if she would not admit those who, traditionally, had the rights to be admitted to the Queen. In truth, the Trianon was nothing more than a quiet and simplistic country retreat as influenced by the writings of Rousseau.