Marie Antoinette & Friends...
Possibly the most wrongly reported life and death of a monarch's
consort in history. Marie was not in love with luxury and never said
'Let them eat cake' - this was uttered by another queen twenty years before
Marie's birth.
Marie and her husband were interecepted fleeing France and retruned
to a Paris prison.
Marie waited months after the execution of her husband for her
own beheading.
Her close female friends suffered worse fates.
Marie was 37 when she was beheaded.
OFF WITH HER HEAD: Early in the morning on October 16, 1793
Marie Antoinette's was
given sheets of paper to write a will or final letter. Marie
Antoinette jotted affectionate lines to her
sister-in-law, Elisabeth, asking her to pass on her love and tender
thoughts to her children and her
friends Axel Fersen and Garbielle de Polignac. A deputy took
the letter from her and then cut her hair
and tied her hands behind her back. She was loaded into an
open cart and driven slowly through the
streets of Paris, enduring sneering taunts from hostile onlookers.
Finally, after the three hours trip, she was helped off the cart
and led to the platform where the guillotine was constructed.
She mounted the steps with her head held high.
Marie Antoinette, former Queen
consort of Louis XVI, was executed by guillotine in Paris
Square
October 16, 1793. The whole of Paris attended, from the
unkempt and starving proletariat to the nobles dressed in
velvet finery.
She was 37. As she ascended the platform to the guillotine,
she accidentally stepped on the
executioner's foot. Her last words were "I am sorry, Monsieur.
It was not intentional."
The only time she trembled was in the moment before the blade removed
her head.
Madame Elisabeth, the woman she wrote her last letter to, also
suffered a violent death. She was charged and sentenced to death
(With no witnesses, no trial, no
evidence). She was stripped, decapitated and thrown naked
into a mass burial grave.
Marie's friend that suffered the worst fate was Marie Therese Louise
de Savoie Carignan,
the Princess deLamballe. The Princess de Lamballe, a sensitive
woman who swooned at the slightest mention ofviolence, was a very close
friend to the queen. The delicate woman was imprisoned at the outbreak
ofthe Revolution. Her young life came to an end at the hands of an enraged
mob of guards . After being dragged from her cell she was repeatedly stripped,
beaten, raped, mutilated, and tortured.
The mob then cut her head off andsevered her limbs, placing the
parts on stakes around the city.
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