If Marie Antoinette had not been guillotined she would have faded from history along with other Royals who are all forgotten.
But she was guillotined, and very publicly. And she he gave women the Marie Antoinette style that has come down through the centuries to fashion today.
The Victoria & Albert Museum staged an exhibition devoted to her with her dresses and shoes, and the story of her life and the very blade of the guillotine that took her life.
But what else was on show were scurrilous little books with drawings of her being penetrated in her boudoir by soldiers, with her genitalia exposed, and others showing her fingering the King.
In the lead up to the revolution it was all designed to make her more vulnerable to attack.
The book, now in the British Library, is entitled The Amorous Day, or the Last Pleasures of Marie Antoinette - A comedy in three acts, and portrays her as immoral while asserting dominance over a powerless king.
The aim was to bring her down, and finding any way into lowering her in the estimation of people was fair game. Beneath it, the main fear that brought down Marie Antoinette was the suspicion that she was a treacherous, foreign-born spy actively conspiring with Austria to destroy the French Revolution.
But guillotined she was, and here is her last entry
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