Around noon on October 16, 1793, Marie-Antoinette tripped and stepped on her executioner’s foot. She didn’t do it on purpose and apologizes to him. A shoe is missing from her foot but no matter, she won’t go any further.

His foot is a 36.5, the exquisite size of the mignon foot, object of seduction for the elite of the 18th century and fetishized by Restif de La Bretonne. In a society where women are educated and referred to the fragility of their constitution, their shoes are the opposite of Nancy Sinatra’s: you don’t walk in those shoes. We reveal their richness with the tip of the foot, auguring other equivocal treasures.

All red leather and ribbon, it is certainly very well made. The use of leather testifies to the desire for everyday use, because the grand habit – to appear at court – tolerated nothing other than silk shoes, often enriched with gold or silver threads, pearls or precious stones.

Its small heel placed at the back and no longer under the arch of the foot does not reach the altitudes that it was known to have before 1775. This so-called “Saint-Huberty” heel ironically materializes the destiny of two Antoinettes who go brutally have to put their feet on the ground.

Antoinette Clavel was born in 1756 in Strasbourg. Her musician father found her a delicious voice and a precocious talent – ??less common among children of the past than among those of our time – so much so that the reputation of the young girl grew and seduced the Mr. Croisille de Saint-Huberty who only distinguishes its particle. He marries the pretty singer who gets rid of this charlatan husband in 1781.

In a few years, she became the first subject at the Paris Opera, an adored star who even converted Louis XVI to lyrical tragedy. Marie-Antoinette flattered the singer who, like her, rained and shined on elegance, going so far as to baptize her name with a model of heeled shoe which the queen would only discard once.

The two women will fall from a height, one from the peak of her social ascension, the other on the foot of her executioner. In 1790, the singer left the Paris Opera and married the Comte d’Antraigues in Lausanne. Secretly, the now countess transmits messages to the royal family on behalf of her husband involved in the counter-revolution. The couple, probably in possession of secret documents, died tragically in London in 1812, stabbed by a valet.

While the devoted Antoinette strives to save the royal, the latter benefits with her family from comfortable treatment in the prison of the Temple. She brought in hairdressers, perfumers and shoemakers, while Le Grand Mogol, Rose Bertin’s boutique, delivered more modestly-made clothes than the Versailles finery. The last order, the day after the king’s death in January 1793, consisted of mourning outfits made by Rose, a shoemaker’s daughter who had become “minister of fashions”.

On August 2, 1793, the queen was taken to the Conciergerie. Her son was taken from her a few weeks earlier and entrusted to shoemaker Antoine Simon. The queen’s health is deteriorating. There remains from this period the testimony of his servant Rosalie Lamorlière, whose grief we read on the morning of October 16 when the widow Capet, “to go to death, [put on] her sloe shoes”. Those same “pretty sloe-black shoes, the heels of which, about two inches, were a la Saint-Huberty” and which Rosalie maintained with care by scraping with her knife the rust from the damp brick floor which clung to them.

The sloe, a solid fabric of wool mixed with silk and generally black in color, is difficult to confuse with leather. And Rosalie, a cobbler’s daughter, can’t be mistaken. It’s also unlikely that the queen changed her shoes along the way.

The charming shoe displayed and “called Marie-Antoinette” would therefore be only a relic, perhaps a shoe that really belonged to the queen, but not the one she lost on the scaffold. Regardless, the symbolism takes precedence and we remember that the Greek heroes always lose one of their sandals at the dawn of a fateful moment, just before reaching immortality.

At the end of her life, shoemakers and their children were everywhere around the Queen, like a curious omen of the imprint that Marie-Antoinette would leave on posterity. From reality to myth, the tragedy in which the singer Saint-Huberty excels is literally on the heels of the queen.

Quotations from Théodore GOSSELIN dit G. LENOTRE, The captivity and death of Marie-Antoinette; the Feuillants, the Temple, the Conciergerie, according to reports from eyewitnesses and unpublished documents. Nabu Press, 2011

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