PART 2

Just Deserts?

0. ON being informed that the peasants had no bread to eat, Marie Antoinette, the French queen, purportedly responded, `Then let them eat cake.’The story 9. be considered apocryphal at best. Indeed, 10. exists convincing evidence that the exact same quote had been attributed 11. several other French princesses long before Marie Antoinette’s time. Nevertheless, the version of the story featuring Marie Antoinette, and thus highlighting her supposed 12. of sympathy for her subjects’ plight, clearly 13. a chord in the common imagination and continues to stain the young queen’s reputation to 14. day.
Marie Antoinette was certainly a lavish spender who was fatally – some might say criminally – ignorant of the realities of her subjects’ lives. However, it’s difficult not to feel at least a 15. sympathy for the young woman who was delivered to a foreign husband at the age of fifteen, lost her son when he was just seven and had to flee her home on three separate occasions, a murderous mob literally 16. her heels, before she was finally sent to the guillotine to be executed in public.