On the sixteenth of October 1793, in Paris, the woman the crowd had once hailed as queen walked toward a scaffold. She had been a prisoner for months, stripped of her name, her family, her title. As she climbed the steps, she stumbled against the executioner. She turned and said, “Forgive me, sir, I did not do it on purpose.

” Minutes later the blade fell, and the people roared, “Long live the Republic. ” It had taken her thirty-seven years to arrive at this moment, and almost none of them had prepared her for it. She was born Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna von Habsburg-Lothringen on the second of November 1755, in Vienna. Her father was Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor, her mother the Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia.

She was the fifteenth of sixteen children, and from the start she was her father’s favorite. He spoiled her openly, indulging her every whim. She grew up playing in the palace gardens with her brothers and sisters, surrounded by affection and attention. What she did not grow up with was discipline.

She hid from her tutors, refused her lessons, and never learned to speak languages properly or to play an instrument. Her mother was stricter with her children, insisting on daily hygiene, controlled eating, and physical exercise, but even Maria Theresa could not make her youngest daughter study. The girl simply had no interest. She was pretty, graceful, capricious, cheerful, and intelligent, but lazy.

She had pale skin, large blue eyes, fair hair, a long neck, a broad forehead, and a small mouth with the slightly thick lower lip that marked the Habsburgs. Her teeth were so badly aligned that she had to wear wires in her mouth to correct them. In August 1765 her father died. Maria Antonia was nine years old.

The loss devastated her, and her mother wore mourning for him for the rest of her life. When the princess turned twelve, the news arrived that she had been chosen to marry the Dauphin of France. She was furious with her mother, because her sister Maria Christina had been allowed to choose her own husband, but she had not. Maria Theresa, anxious to make her daughter fit for the French court, threw tutors at her.

It did little good. Her masters were shocked that a girl of her rank, at twelve years old, could barely write and knew almost no history or literature. They agreed she was bright but hopelessly lazy. On the seventeenth of April 1770, Maria Antonia renounced her rights to her parents’ thrones.

Days later she set out for France. On the seventh of May, at the border, she was stripped of her Austrian clothes and dressed in French fashion. She said goodbye to her ladies in tears, and she begged to keep her little pug dog. The request was refused.

Once across the frontier, she tried to find comfort in the arms of the French ladies who received her, but they were cold and distant and she was left to cry alone. On the fourteenth of May she met the Dauphin for the first time, in a forest near Versailles. Louis showed no interest in her at all. He was tall, shortsighted, plain, clumsy, polite, and painfully shy.

Two days later, on the sixteenth of May, the wedding took place at Versailles. She was fourteen; he was fifteen. The wedding night was a complete failure. Nothing happened.

Louis was reluctant to consummate the marriage, and though his young wife sought physical closeness with him, he would not come near her. She wrote to her mother for advice, and Maria Theresa sent counsel, but none of it persuaded Louis to approach his wife. Her first months at the French court were not entirely bad. She did not get along with the Dauphin’s sisters, nor with Madame du Barry, the mistress of King Louis XV.

But her father-in-law, the old king, took a liking to her. The court itself was a strange place for her. She was not used to such a liberal way of life, but she adapted quickly. She did not shine, though; the true star of the court was Madame du Barry, and everything seemed to revolve around her.

Night after night Maria Antonia waited for her husband to appear in her bedchamber. He never came. Bored with her marriage, she began to seek out the nightly entertainments of Versailles, the endless parties and games the court offered. In 1774 Louis XV died.

Maria Antonia and her husband were crowned King and Queen of France. He became Louis XVI. The people celebrated with great joy, full of hope for the new monarchs. Louis was a good, simple man, but not very intelligent, and incapable of confronting the problems of his kingdom.

Disillusionment came fast. His wife did nothing to help. She took no part in governing, preferring to spend her time with her circle of friends and their diversions. She began spending enormous sums of money on luxuries: dresses, jewels, fine porcelain.

She gambled at cards for huge stakes. She became a fashion icon of her era; ladies and queens of other royal houses copied her style of dressing and her extravagant hairstyles. Rumors soon spread. People said the queen had many lovers, both men and women.

Most historians agree that her only lover was the Count Fersen, though whether their affair was a passionate physical romance or a simple flirtation is not known. She was also rumored to have relationships with her two close friends, the Princesse de Lamballe and the Duchesse de Polignac. That was never proven. What is certain is that the two women had a very intimate relationship with the queen, obtained numerous favors from her, and exchanged many letters full of affection.

In 1777, seven years after the wedding, the marriage was finally consummated. On the nineteenth of December 1778, their first child was born: Marie Thérèse, known as Madame Royale. She was not a son, but the monarchs were delighted anyway. In 1780 the queen received word that her mother, the Archduchess Maria Theresa, had died.

On the twenty-second of October 1781, a son was born, the Dauphin Louis Joseph. His arrival brought great joy, but rumor soon claimed the boy was not the king’s son but Count Fersen’s. On the twenty-seventh of March 1785, their third child, Louis Charles, was born; he would become Dauphin after his brother’s death. On the ninth of July 1786, their fourth and last child, Sophie, arrived.

She died a few months after birth. As she became a mother, the queen set aside the court parties and turned toward her family, even drawing closer to her husband. She performed charitable works with her children, so they could see how the poorest people lived. She spent long periods in the countryside with them, far from everything.

This brought her harsh criticism; the people believed she was merely escaping her duties. Near Versailles she had a little real-scale village built, with houses and a mill, where she held small parties and liked to dress up as a peasant woman. The public took this as mockery of her subjects. Her life began to go badly in 1785, with the affair of a very expensive necklace of 647 diamonds.

The Cardinal de Rohan had supposedly ordered it at the queen’s request. The jeweler demanded payment from the queen, but she refused, saying she had never ordered it. Feeling insulted by the cardinal’s actions and lies, she had him arrested. The truth was that the Countess de La Motte and her husband had deceived the cardinal into ordering the necklace.

The jewel came into the countess’s hands, and she and her husband took it apart and sold it piece by piece. Then the couple fled. The queen openly blamed the cardinal, which brought her fierce criticism and more hatred. Years later Napoleon himself said that this necklace was the spark that set off the French Revolution.

Day by day the people hated the French monarchs more, and the queen above all. They nicknamed her Madame Déficit. Lies about her spread to every corner of France, feeding a hatred that grew constantly. The most famous myth was that when someone told the queen the people had no bread to eat, she replied, “Let them eat cake.

” It is proven she never said this. The phrase actually came from Marie Thérèse of Austria, the wife of Louis XIV, who had said long before, if they have no bread, give them brioche. In 1787 Louis Stanislas, the king’s brother and the future Louis XVIII, presented the Assembly of Notables with papers claiming that the queen’s children were not her husband’s. Wounded by such lies, the queen withdrew from public life.

On the fourth of May 1789, the Estates-General opened. Several of those present attacked the queen viciously. A month later the Dauphin Louis Joseph died. The monarchs held a discreet, simple funeral to avoid expense.

With the death of her son and the criticism all around her, the queen seemed lost. On the fourteenth of July 1789, new rumors swept the streets: the queen wanted to blow up the parliament with bombs, she would bring Austrian troops to occupy Paris, she had been seen trampling the French flag. On the fifth of October 1789, a crowd of women marched to Versailles demanding bread for the people. They came looking for the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s boy, meaning the king, the queen, and the Dauphin.

The next day a group forced their way into the palace armed with knives and picks, killing everyone in their path. The royal family had to flee in haste, escorted to Paris by the Marquis de Lafayette. In Paris the monarchs desperately sought help from other royal houses. They contacted Charles IV of Spain, who turned a deaf ear.

They asked the queen’s brother, Emperor Joseph II; he intended to save his sister but died before he could help. They turned to her other brother, the new Emperor Leopold II, and he, too, ignored them. As the days passed, the queen grew more desperate. She asked Lafayette for help, but he was not sincere; he told her to divorce the king or be caught with her supposed lover Count Fersen, so her husband would repudiate her for infidelity.

She refused flatly. She would not abandon her husband or her family. Fersen himself devised a plan to get the royal family out of Paris. At ten o’clock on the night of the twentieth of June 1791, the royal family stole out of the Tuileries Palace with Fersen.

The escape began badly. The carriage chosen was far too luxurious, because the king refused to ride in a simpler one. And too many people were inside: the royal family, the governess of the princes, the queen’s hairdresser, two maids, and two servants. They carried trunks stuffed with dresses and jewels.

The next morning, the palace realized the family was gone. Some thought they had been kidnapped, until a note written by the king himself appeared explaining why he had fled. At Bondy, Fersen separated from the royal family and took a different road, not before an emotional farewell with the queen. On the journey the family stopped twice: once for a quiet snack, and once because a wheel of the carriage broke.

Those delays made them late for the rendezvous with the troops who were to escort them beyond French borders. The soldiers, seeing that the royal family did not arrive, assumed the king had changed his mind and left. As the carriage continued, guards stopped it. One of them lit a candle inside, for darkness was falling, and by that faint light he made out the faces of the king and queen.

But instead of denouncing them, he let them go on. The carriage arrived in the night at Varennes, a small town fifty kilometers from the French border. The guard who had recognized them alerted the highest official in the town. He received the royal family into his house, and his wife offered them bread and cheese.

The family was passing themselves off as travelers, but their host doubted their story and called a local man who had once served at Versailles. He recognized the couple at once. Louis, tired of hiding, declared in that very room, in front of them all, that he was the King of France. The family was taken back to the Tuileries.

Hatred of the monarchs swelled. After about a year of confinement, they were moved to the Temple fortress, imprisoned in wretched conditions. Many French nobles were imprisoned too, even sentenced to death. One of them was the Princesse de Lamballe, the queen’s close friend.

She was brutally murdered, her head stuck on a pike and paraded past the windows of the queen’s prison. On the twenty-first of September 1792, France was declared a Republic. On the twenty-sixth of December, the French king was sentenced to death. On the twenty-first of January, Louis XVI was guillotined.

Before dying he declared himself innocent of everything they accused him of. The queen received the news with great bitterness. She grieved, but she still had hope in her son, believing that one day he would reign. The queen herself had become a serious problem; the authorities did not know what to do with her.

On the thirteenth of July 1793, they separated her from her children. She fought with nails and teeth to keep them, but she could not. On the first of August she was transferred to the Conciergerie prison, registered as prisoner number 280. They say that as she entered, she struck her head on a beam, cutting a gash that would not stop bleeding.

A guard asked if she was hurt. She answered, “No. Nothing can hurt me anymore. ”

On the fourteenth of August 1793, her trial began.

Numerous pieces of evidence of doubtful origin and validity were presented. Her own son, the Dauphin Louis Charles, testified against his mother and against his aunt Élisabeth of France, claiming she had incited him to sexual games. The queen appealed to the mothers in the crowd for support. Many historians believe the boy’s words were completely false, that he lied out of torture and fear of the guards.

Throughout the trial the queen declared herself innocent of everything. She said the only true thing in all the accusations was that she had been the wife of Louis XVI. She blamed her dead husband for the bad government and the crisis of the French people. It did her no good.

She was condemned to death. On the sixteenth of October 1793, she was escorted to the scaffold, where the guillotine waited. As she walked, the crowd insulted and jeered her. She stumbled against the executioner and apologized.

Then the blade fell, and the crowd shouted, “Long live the Republic. ” She was buried in the Madeleine cemetery, her head placed between her legs. In 1815 her remains were moved to the Basilica of Saint-Denis, beside her husband. She had been a capricious and spendthrift woman, because that was how she had been raised.

She was clearly not suited to govern, preferring parties and friends. But she was not the monster her legend made her. She and the king were never truly aware of what was happening to the French people, because they lived apart from it all, poorly informed of the poverty across the country. If they had been told the truth of their people’s suffering, perhaps both monarchs would have tried to set things right.

They never had the chance.