"Let them eat cake!" Marie Antoinette was reported to have said that when asked about the starvation of the peasants, but that is a lie. She is recorded by Rousseau to have said, "Let them eat brioche," when she was 13 when asked about the peasants' inability to attain bread. The sentence was also attributed to a number of other young princesses, and is suspected to have been a lie propagated by Rousseau himself.

She did write this, according to a few online sources, however: "It is quite certain that in seeing the people who treat us so well despite their own misfortune, we are more obliged than ever to work hard for their happiness. The King seems to understand this truth."

That being said, I couldn't find any record of actual primary sourced material for that, so it could be more lies on her account, as is bound to occur.

Nevertheless, Marie Antoinette and Louis XIV exploited the masses and they lived life in a luxurious city of their own, and then came the French Revolution, and then their heads were chopped off at guillotine. Louis XIV was 77 and Marie was 38. So it goes.

The images below offer an account of the apartments at Versailles, as well as the hall of mirrors. Versailles housed members of the French government, particularly those in the royal family, and Versailles itself contained a population of over 60,000 people at the time of the revolution in 1789.

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