She never said it, and the man who did was writing about someone else

Marie Antoinette, at a window in 1789, being told that the people have no bread. It is the tidiest possible image of a monarchy that had stopped paying attention, which is exactly why it has survived so well. What it does not have is a source. No memoir places the words in her mouth, no pamphlet from the years when Paris was printing everything unkind that could be printed about her, no letter, no police report. The revolutionary press had every reason to publish that sentence and never did.

The earliest appearance we can follow is not about her at all. Rousseau, recalling his time in the country, mentions a great princess who was told the peasants had no bread and replied that they should eat brioche. He offers it as a piece of hearsay about aristocratic thoughtlessness in general — the princess is unnamed, and the passage was written when Marie Antoinette was nine years old and living in Vienna.

The sentence spent the eighteenth century as a portable insult, attached to whichever duchess a writer had in mind. French journalists of the 1840s were still complaining that it kept changing owners — a sure sign it had none. Marie Antoinette acquired it decades after her death, when she had become less a person than a shorthand, and the line and the shorthand fitted each other perfectly. By the time it reached English school books the hedging was gone, and it arrived as something she had simply said.

This is the ordinary way a quotation goes wrong. Nobody forges it. It is repeated by people who assume that somebody, somewhere, has checked.

Whether any real princess said anything of the kind to Rousseau, or whether he was passing on a story that was already old when he heard it. If you can put a date on it earlier than 1765, we would be delighted to be corrected.