Three shoes held in public collections tell the story of Marie Antoinette’s fate: her pink slipper, covered in sequins and pearls during her splendour as Queen of France, her supposed shoe from the Tuileries, which bears witness to her fall, and the one she is said to have worn at her execution on 16 October 1793.
The queen’s shoe, snatched from the hands of one of the invaders on 10 August 1792 by M. d’Ennecey de Champuis, who was defending the Tuileries castle as a grenadier of the Filles-Saint-Thomas, becomes the scenario for the heroic rescue of a shoe by hand-to-hand combat. Royal memorabilia flooded into collections in the early 20th century. Thirty of the Marie-Antoinette memorabilia in the Carnavalet collections are toiletries, textiles, fans, jewellery, games that belonged to her, and locks of hair.
