The Fatal Friendship Author:Stanley Loomis Marie Antoninette, Count Fersen, and the Flight to Varennes. — "The friendship began on a winter evening in 1774 at an Opera Ball in Paris when a lighthearted princess approached a youth of surpassing physical beauty. It ended for one of them at the scaffold in the Place de la Revolution in the most famous death scene in French history, and for t... more »he other at the hands of an infuriated mob in a Stockholm square."« less