Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun is a daughter of the lower-middle classes who uses her skills as a portrait painter to hustle her way into the royal court of Versailles. She has an affair with the left-leaning, impoverished Count Alexis de Ligne, a handsome aristocrat who makes his living as a toy-boy for wealthy older women, to get a commission to paint the naive young Queen Marie Antoinette.