Understanding the severe face inside the mold requires looking at the conditions of her confinement. During her Conciergerie prison final days, Marie Antoinette was designated merely as "Prisoner No. 280." The Revolutionary Tribunal stripped her of every luxury. Her cell was damp, semi-subterranean, and patrolled day and night by armed gendarmes separated from her cot by a thin, tattered screen.
She was denied basic privacy, fresh water, and adequate light. By the time her trial concluded at 4:30 AM on October 16, after twenty continuous hours of interrogation, she could barely stand. She returned to her cell, changed into a simple white piqué morning dress, and cut her own hair with blunt shears so the guillotine blade would have an unobstructed fall. Executioner Sanson bound her hands behind her back with coarse twine, cutting into her wrists.
Her ride in an open manure cart to the Place de la Révolution lasted more than an hour. Jeering mobs spat curses along the Rue Saint-Honoré. Jacques-Louis David sat outside an upper-floor window and scratched out his pen-and-ink drawing, the last portrait of the French queen made in life. His hurried sketch matches the plaster cast with shocking fidelity: the shorn hair, the sunken sockets, the upturned nose, and that defiantly extended Habsburg jaw.
