| Rarely has a monarch experienced as steep a downfall—or as long an afterlife—as Marie Antoinette, who slept on straw the night before her beheading, but still managed to dress impeccably for the guillotine. Tomorrow marks the anniversary of her execution, an event touched upon by Judith Thurman in a 2006 piece for the magazine. (En route to the blade, the former queen, wearing a white petticoat and bonnet, accidentally stepped on her executioner’s toe; some of her final words were an apology.) Born a dynastic spare to Austria’s royal family, Marie Antoinette never won over the French—who viewed her, Thurman writes, as “an insidious foreign agent” even as they copied her wardrobe. She dramatically overspent her clothing budget ($3.6 million annually, in adjusted terms), and her commitment to fleeing the Revolution in style led to her capture and bloody end. Still, her charitable instincts could be impressive, and the footnotes of her life remain surprising. (On the question of smallpox, she was what we might now call “pro-vax.”) Her most famous anti-poverty proposal— “Let them eat cake”—was a calumny, but the association appears unshakeable. “Few tyrants have aroused more visceral hatred,” Thurman observes, than “an ordinary woman whose life is infinitely more complex than she was.” | 
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