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The woman in the plain white dress is Marie-Antoinette. Her eyes are up and away from the men crowding her. She had asked to wear mourning black for her husband, and black was refused as a provocation.

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 a widow for 9 months, separated from her son, and held in a cell with a screen the gendarmes could see over. The trial opened on 14 October 1793 on charges of treason, some of them true: money and secrets sent to Austria. The prosecution's real mistake was the extra charge, the one the newspapers wanted: that she had sexually abused her own son. The statement came from the frightened 8-year-old himself. She refused to answer it. When a juror pressed her, she stood and spoke to the mothers in the gallery: 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 cut off at the neck and her hands were tied. They took her out to an open cart. Her husband had ridden to his own scaffold in a closed carriage. 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 took an hour, through crowds along the rue Saint-Honoré. The painter David watched from a window on that street and sketched her as the cart went by. He was no friend to her. A few pencil strokes: a woman sitting bolt upright, 37 years old and drawn to look 50. At the scaffold she climbed the steps quickly, stepped on the executioner's foot, and made 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 into the Madeleine cemetery under quicklime. In 1815 the restored monarchy dug for it and moved what it identified to Saint-Denis, among the kings. Hamilton was English, and he painted her within the year for a British public at war with the Republic. She stands white and straight-backed between the bayonets, the priest with his book on one side, the man in the red cap at her wrists on the other. London wanted a martyr and got one. Her last letter, written hours before the cart, was mostly about her children. The canvas hangs now in the museum of the French Revolution at Vizille, near Grenoble.