Marie Antoinette’s Last Etiquette Lesson

The Comtesse de Noailles, nicknamed “Madame Etiquette,” bored Marie Antoinette very much by her particularity on minor points of conduct. One day, Marie Antoinette’s mocking spirit had its chance. She fell from her donkey and lay on the grass for a while, laughing. “Run as fast as you can,” she said to the nearest attendant as soon as she could speak, “and ask Madame Etiquette how the Queen of France ought to behave when she tumbles off her donkey.” – Santa Cruz Sentinel, 1910
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The last etiquette Marie Antoinette had to learn in France, was that which the courtly gentlemen, nobles of the old regime, rehearsed with her and the others sentenced to death —  the etiquette suitable for those condemned, in order that no one might by confused or awkward when the time came for their fates to be realized.

“At 15, Marie Antoinette was married. At 19 she was a Queen, a creature lovely to look upon. At 37 she died on the guillotine, one of the most pitiable as she was the most conspicuous among all the thousands upon thousands who lost their heads in the French Revolution. Born the daughter of Emperor Francis Ist of Austria and his ambitious and gifted consort, Marie Therese, she was reared, for a Princess of the blood, among exceedingly simple surroundings. Small wonder that the transition from what almost had been a cloistered life to the most brilliant, the most dissolute, the most extravagant court in Christendom should have proven disastrous for her. From the hour when she became the wife of the heir apparent to the French throne, the pathway of the girl-bride was beset with difficulties and pitfalls.

“She was under the exacting dominion of her imperious father-in-law, Louis XV; she was under the hostile eye of Louis’s shrewd and unscrupulous mistress, Madame du Barry. She was enmeshed in intrigues, envies, jealousies, feuds and plots. That she was frivolous and headstrong and wasteful; that she made enemies by her interference in public affairs; that she estranged those who should have been her friends and her devoted allies, these charges, not even her most sympathetic partisan among the chroniclers could deny. But when the Monarchy fell in bloodied ruins; when the ‘Time of the Terror’ came to Paris; when she was insulted, imprisoned, widowed by violence; when she barbarously was torn from her children, including that hapless boy who went down in history as the Lost Dauphin; when at her trial she so gallantly faced atrocious accusations affecting her moral character; when finally she was led forth bound like a dangerous malefactor to be done to death before a shrieking, exultant mob, then her courage, her faith and her noble bearing redeemed Marie Antoinette for all the grievous shortcomings of her youth.

“As a ruler she fell short, as a wife she had her faults, as a royal politician she was an abject failure. But as a mother, as a woman rising to sublime heights of fortitude in the face of a hideous doom, she stands forth for posterity, an heroic and noble figure. Her old secret foe, Madame du Barry, was born like a commoner and died like a craven of commoners. Being condemned to the knife, she went screaming and struggling to her fate— writhing in her bonds, begging for mercy with her last breath, practically crazed with fright. But in her death, at least, Marie Antoinette was regal and splendid.” — By Irvin S. Cobb, 1925

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia