The Last Morning of a Queen: 16 October 1793
At four in the morning, in a damp cell of the Conciergerie, a forty-year-old woman with white hair began the last hours of her life. By nightfall the crowds at the Place de la Révolution would have what they came for.
The trial had opened on 14 October 1793 before the Revolutionary Tribunal, two days of accusation against the woman once known as Queen of France. It ran through 16 October, when the verdict came: guilty of high treason. There was no delay built into the sentence. Execution was set for that same day.
Marie Antoinette had already spent months at the Conciergerie, the grim antechamber to the guillotine on the Île de la Cité, moved there after her husband Louis XVI had been executed in January of that same year. She had once been Maria Antonia, born at the Hofburg in Vienna on 2 November 1755, daughter of Empress Maria Theresa, married at fourteen to the Dauphin of France, and queen consort at eighteen when Louis inherited the throne in May 1774. None of that mattered now. In the tribunal's eyes she was simply the accused, and by 16 October, she was condemned.
In her cell, in the last hours before dawn, she wrote what would become known as her final letter, addressed to her sister-in-law, Madame Élisabeth. She had little time and less privacy. Guards were posted. The formalities of a state execution moved forward regardless of the hour.
Her hair, once elaborately dressed in the fashions she had helped define at Versailles, was cut short, as was customary for those going to the guillotine. She was made to wear a plain white dress. Her hands were bound behind her back, a further indignity compared to the more ceremonial death her husband had been afforded.
Unlike Louis XVI, who had ridden to his execution in a closed carriage, Marie Antoinette was placed in an open cart. She was driven through the streets of Paris toward the Place de la Révolution, past crowds who had gathered to watch the woman they called Madame Déficit make her final journey through the city she had once ruled as queen.
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