Marie Antoinette’s enduring reputation for decadent extravagance is not entirely unearned. Even if she never actually dismissed reports of widespread bread shortages with the infamous line, “Let them eat cake,” her lavish lifestyle nevertheless flew smack in the face of the abject poverty and hunger that surrounded her. The puffed and powdered queen blithely ignored the misery, immersing herself instead in a cycle of elaborate ceremony, obsessive spending, and absurd fashion.
            “The queen is a pretty woman,” her brother, the Austrian emperor Joseph II, wrote during a visit to France in 1777, “but she is empty-headed, unable as yet to find her advantage, and wastes her days running from dissipation to dissipation, some of which are perfectly allowable but nonetheless dangerous because they prevent her from having the thoughts she needs so badly.”
            Maybe it was the big hair. Piles and piles of it. The enormous coiffures the queen so fancied—hours spent in their construction, reaching several feet high, and elaborately decorated with fruits, feathers, jewels, and figurines— seemed to sum up her entire vacuous existence. The head that carried this frivolous mass would eventually be lopped off amid the screeches of revolutionary madness, but it was the degrading existence Marie Antoinette was forced to endure just prior to her public execution that offered the starkest contrast to her former life as France’s over-pampered queen.
            Whereas she once amused herself amid the glitter and luxury of Versailles with hundreds of fawning nobles eagerly competing to attend to her every whim, she was now held in a blackened prison cell that dripped with moisture and was kept frigid in the absence of a fireplace. The rich gowns and adornments were all gone, replaced by a single frayed black dress. Deprived of her children, or even the comfort of a single candle at night, the former queen—now known as prisoner number 280—suffered illness and severe anxiety all alone on a narrow, filthy cot.
            She was taken from her cell to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal, which was an utter travesty. Absurd accusations of murder, treason, and even incest with her own son were hurled at “the Austrian Bitch,” as she was called, without any consideration for the truth. It was here, however, that the once flighty and spoiled queen proved her mettle. She addressed the court with dignity and honor, seeming to transcend the deadly spectacle that engulfed her.
            “One saw sadness in the faces of the honest spectators,” an eyewitness of the trial recorded, “and madness in the eyes of the crowd of men and women placed in the room by design—madness which, more than once, gave way to emotions of pity and admiration. The accusers and judges did not succeed in hiding their anger, or the involuntary confusion they felt at the Queen’s noble firmness.”
            The preordained verdict was death—the same fate her husband Louis XVI had met nine months earlier.1 The ex-queen was brought back to her miserable cell to await the guillotine. On the appointed day, October 16, 1793, she sent farewells to her children and in her prayer book wrote, “My God have pity on me! My eyes have no more tears to shed for you, my poor children. Adieu. Adieu!”
            She then had to prepare herself for the execution scheduled for midday. When she was queen, Marie Antoinette always had a giddy coterie on hand as she picked out the day’s wardrobe and took her luxurious bath behind a screen for modesty. Now there was only one woman assigned to her. Bleeding heavily, she asked the maid to stand in front of her while she undressed and changed her soiled undergarments. “The [guard] came up to us at once,” the woman recalled, “and, standing by the headrest, watched her change. She put her fichu up to cover her shoulders, and with great sweetness said to the young man, ‘In the name of decency, monsieur, let me change my linen in private.’” The guard, claiming he had orders to watch the prisoner’s every movement, refused to look away, so the former queen was forced to take off her stained petticoat with as much modesty as she could manage and stuff it into a chink in the wall.
            Soon it was time to go. The executioner, who happened to be the son of the man who had beheaded Louis XVI, came in to tie up her hands and cut off her hair. She had hoped that she would be carried to the execution site in a coach, as her husband had been, but saw when she left the prison that a cart awaited her—a cart used to carry common criminals to their deaths. Feeling her bowels loosen, the former queen of France had to request that her hands be unbound so she could relieve herself against the prison wall.
            Riding backwards on the cart to the Place de la Revolution, she stoically endured the jeers of the inflamed crowds that lined the route. It was a festive occasion all around. In the square where the guillotine stood, people were selling fruits and wine to the excited onlookers who closed in around the scaffold to watch “the Widow Capet” lose her head.
            In the middle of this horrific circus, Marie Antoinette—looking old well beyond her years, with her white hair shorn—remained calm and dignified. Accidentally stepping on the executioner’s foot as she ascended the scaffold, she apologized gently. “Pardon, monsieur. I did not mean to do it.” She was then tied down on the beheading machine and the wooden collar was snapped around her neck. In an instant the head was severed and held aloft for all to see. The crowd roared its approval.