Versailles by Kathryn Davis

Kathryn Davis' Versailles is a history of a person (Marie Antoinette) but also a place, mostly told from Marie Antionette's first-person perspective:

"After Léonard took off the curling papers, he frizzed my hair with a hot iron, combed it out with nettle juice, powdered it with bean flour, then mounted a ladder in order to affix the horsehair cushion that would form the armature for the final hairdo.

Cypresses and black marigolds and wheat sheaves and fruit-filled cornucopias—a hairdo reminding everyone that while they mourned the loss of one king, they also looked forward to the bounty the next would bring. Or how about the Inoculation hairdo, commemorating the Princes's victory over smallpox? One day Léonard made me Minerva. One day he made me an English garden with lawns, hills, and streams. One day he made me the world.

Really, you could put anything on your head .. so long as it didn't (excuse me) snap your neck. 

Léonard used long steel pins to hold the cushion in place and combed my own hair up over it. Then he matted everything down with pomade, creating a kind of moist hive under which fleas and lice bred, and soon enough there wasn't a fashionable lady alive who wasn't using a long thin stick identical to the one Léonard made for me, complete with a little ivory claw, to scratch away at her scalp like mad."  

There are also dramatic interludes structured like one acts with chatty lap dogs and ladies-in-waiting; appearances by Bread, personified; discussions of how the grounds are planted; and servants doomed to die from pox. It's like the marvelous eccentric aunt of Danielle Dutton's gemlike and glittery Margaret the First.