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Refused mourning black, she wore the plain white that history kept. Hamilton lights her like the argument he is making.

The Republic had renamed her too: the file at the Revolutionary Tribunal said the Widow Capet, and the guards at the Conciergerie, more economically, said Prisoner 280. She had been ten months a widow, separated from her son, held in a cell with a screen the gendarmes could see over, and the trial in mid-October 1793 ran on the standard fuel of treason charges, some of them true, money and secrets to Austria among them. The prosecution's mistake was the extra one: the atrocity claim, extracted from her frightened eight-year-old son, that the newspapers wanted. She declined to answer it, and when a juror insisted, she stood and addressed the mothers in the gallery directly: nature refuses to answer such a charge made to a mother; I appeal to every one of them here. The room shifted so audibly that the session was suspended. It changed the weather, not the verdict. On the morning of 16 October her hair was cropped at the neck, her hands were bound, and she was taken out to the cart, an open tumbril where her husband had been allowed a closed carriage nine months before. She had asked for mourning black and been refused it as provocation, so she wore the plain white dress that has belonged to her ever since. The route to the scaffold ran an hour through crowds along the rue Saint-Honoré, and on that street the painter David, no friend to her, sketched her from a window as the cart passed: a few pencil strokes of a woman sitting bolt upright, aged 50 at 37, the most merciless portrait of the century made by its best portraitist in under a minute. At the scaffold she climbed the steps quickly, trod on the executioner's foot, and produced the century's most quoted apology: pardon me, monsieur, I did not do it on purpose. It was a courtier's reflex, and it has outlived every treaty she was accused over. The body went to the Madeleine cemetery under quicklime; the Restoration dug for it in 1815 and moved what it identified to Saint-Denis, among the kings. Hamilton, an Englishman, painted her within the year for a British public at war with the Republic: white and vertical between the bayonets, the priest with his book, the red-capped man at the cords, the crowd doing what painted crowds do. London wanted a martyr and got one; Paris had wanted a traitor and got one; the woman in white had asked, at the end, mostly for her children, and got quicklime.