Writing for her life

Marie Antoinette spent much of her reign engaged in a battle: first to cement her position as queen of France, and then to avoid the guillotine. Catriona Seth uses the queen's letters to trace her desperate bid for survival

- Catriona Seth

Make a callous remark M betraying your indifference to other people's suffering, and you might be accused of having a "Marie Antoinette moment". We've all heard of Marie Antoinette. She is the French queen who displayed her disdain for the plight of her hungry subjects by exclaiming the immortal phrase: "Let them eat cake!" She's also the French queen who - as every history lover knows-got her comeuppance by being sent to the guillotine.

And yet there's a problem with this portrayal: Marie Antoinette never invited the French people to eat cake. Anti-monarchists propagated the falsehood using an anecdote that had circulated long before her birth.

Anyone who wants to discover the queen behind the myth might instead consider the following: "Our situation is awful. When I am really sad, I take my little boy in my arms, I hug him with all my heart, and that consoles me." Marie Antoinette wrote scores of letters during her lifetime, many of which have been preserved. And, as the words above suggest, these letters tell a tragic story. They paint a picture of a woman engaged in a desperate battle for survival as her world fell apart. They help us locate the real Marie Antoinette.

Scurrilous rumours