Marie Antoinette's Darkest Days

Marie Antoinette’s Darkest Days recreates in compelling detail the short but intensely agonizing period of the ex-queen’s incarceration in the Conciergerie, including attempts to rescue her and the absurd show trial that led to her execution. Will Bashor traces the final days of the prisoner registered only as Widow Capet, No. 280, a time that was a cruel mixture of grandeur, humiliation, and terror. Marie Antoinette’s reign amidst the splendors of the court of Versailles is a familiar story, but her final imprisonment in a fetid, dank dungeon is a little-known coda to a once-charmed life. Her seventy-six days in this terrifying prison can only be described as the darkest and most horrific of the fallen queen’s life, vividly recaptured in this richly researched history.