The Critic Magazine

Let them eat filberts

● DIAMONDS WEREN’T THE DEATH of Marie Antoinette, but they did help make her execution inevitable. The Austrian-born queen’s passion for gems, allied to her foreignness, made her a figure of special resentment during the French Revolution — royal extravagance did not sit well with a populace undergoing a succession of failed harvests and soaring food prices.

The queen, however, was entirely innocent in the incident that malignly and irrevocably linked her to expensive jewellery. In 1772,

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