Note 20 — Chapter V · The Cobbler Simon

Marie Antoinette died upon the scaffold as bravely as the King had done. Her trial was a mock one, for her execution had been decided upon before she was tried. She was never liked by the French people, and all sorts of charges had been made against her, many of them untrue. She had inherited her ideas of royalty and absolution from her mother, Maria Theresa of Austria, and never showed any interest in the lower classes. Her biographer in the Encyclopædia Britannica says: “In the Marie Antoinette who suffered on the guillotine we pity, not the pleasure-loving Queen; not the widow who had kept her husband against his will in the wrong course; not the woman who throughout her married life did not scruple to show her contempt for her slow and heavy but good-natured and loving King, but the little princess, sacrificed to state policy and cast uneducated and without a helper into the frivolous court of France, not to be loved but to be suspected by all around her and eventually to be hated by the whole people of France.”