| Summary: | Marie Leszczyńska never took part in the government affairs and always stood away from the power which remained in the hands of her husband and the cardinal of Fleury. She didn’t have the opportunity to become a queen regent and to assert her position at the Court. The role for which she was chosen was to give an heir to the dynasty. Her reign seems to confirm the decline of the queen’s position within the absolutist system, which relegates her to the domestic sphere. Thanks to the testimonies in the Memoirs of the duke of Luynes, whose wife was acquainted with the queen, we can analyze the evolution of the distribution in her apartments in Versailles, Fontainebleau, Compiègne and also Choisy. When she first came to the Court, more than forty years after the death of the previous queen, Marie Leszczyńska had to regain a place of her own. Some alterations in the royal apartments were done before her arrival and others all along her reign. Gradually her apartments were arranged in a more comfortable way. At the end of her life, she even could enjoy a more private existence in her “cabinets”. To a certain extent, she took advantage of liberties that no other queen had had before. We would like to analyze these architectural evolutions in relation to the etiquette, by paying attention to the context in which they occurred, and the role played by Marie Leszczyńska herself in this process.
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