“Courage! I have shown it for years; think you I shall lose it at the moment when my sufferings are to end?”
— Marie Antoinette
Spoken on October 16, 1793, morning of her execution at the Place de la Révolution in Paris, to a priest offering last rites.
At fourteen they stripped my Austrian clothes at the Rhine and dressed me in French ones. Twenty-three years they mocked me, blamed me for a nation's debt. Took my husband, then my son. On October 16, 1793, I walked to the blade with bound hands. When I stepped on the executioner's foot, I apologized. Composure is not the absence of fear. It is choosing who you are when everything has been taken.