The cruel recklessness that intoxicates France between the Regency and the Estates General carries with it, among other things, a temporary obfuscation when it comes to images. As Madame Geoffrin told someone who was tiring her with a never-ending story: “Success in France requires large knives and brief stories.” Large knives held at the ready, brief stories told. And everyone could then move on. But images avenge themselves on those who do not see them. The life of Marie Antoinette is increasingly suffocated by symbols, while those around her notice them less and less.

For the handover, a wooden pavilion—the pavillon de remise—had been erected on an island in the middle of the Rhine. Maria Antonietta, as she was called as a child, became Marie Antoinette, now and for evermore. The handover took place on the frontier line, which divided the pavilion and a large table at the center of the main hall. She entered the pavilion on the Austrian side. In the last room before the frontier she was slowly undressed before the attendants who had accompanied her from Vienna. Not even a ribbon or a hairpin could remain in contact with her body. Naked, she was offered clothes made on her new French soil, a silk chemise, stockings from Lyon, slippers made by the shoemaker to the French court. Her brief, domestic, carefree past had to be forgotten. France was taking her as guest and hostage. The soft contact of the clothes brought to her from Versailles was the embrace of the new god. That pavilion was, for Marie Antoinette, like a ghotul, ephemeral, no place for games, the house of cruel initiation, where the transition through ritual death was marked by the many eyes that watched her and would continue watching her up until her clinical death. That gesture of sacrificial undressing entrusted her totally to the land that was clothing her with her fate. Etiquette is the last power to preserve abandoned symbols. Etiquette ensures that symbols, even when they aren’t perceived as such, can continue to act, even if a certain sarcasm is added to them. Here a Psyche is innocently entrusting herself to an Eros that is all too tangible in those silks, in that lace. The god to whom she was initiated had a form that was too precise and blasé, he no longer lived in a nurturing and protective cloud, he could no longer retreat into the invisible. It would be easy, one day, to strip him naked in just the same way. When she was imprisoned at the Conciergerie, Marie Antoinette was left with fifteen fine linen chemises trimmed with lace, a satin cloak, two dressing gowns, five bodices, and twenty-two cambric handkerchiefs. Presented as evidence at her trial were locks of hair, skeins of silk, a small mirror, a portrait of a woman, a piece of linen with an embroidery of a red heart pierced by an arrow. For the French, Marie Antoinette would bring the ceremony at Strasbourg to an end as simple Widow Capet, dressed in white piqué, sketched grudgingly by David on the tumbrel that takes her to the scaffold. At the end of the long ceremony in the pavillon de remise, once she had crossed the imperceptible frontier at the center of the table, Marie Antoinette hid her head for a moment, sobbing in the arms of the Comtesse de Noailles, her new lady-in-waiting.