The duchesse de Polignac was one of Marie Antoinette’s closest friends and favorites, who shared in the queen’s unpopularity due to the favors she received from queen and her presence in the queen’s private inner circle. After the fall of the Bastille, she and her family fled France because it was believed that their extreme unpopularity with the public put their lives in danger.

One of her friends wrote [of her final months]: “She did not stop crying. For six months, a deep sadness, great sufferings without certain causes weakened her each day more.” A last blow hit her when they were forced to announce to her this horrible news: on October, 16th, 1793, Marie-Antoinette had been beheaded in Paris. This was the true beginning of Madame de Polignac’s agony. She could not survive the queen, and she herself died on December, 9th, 1793, one month and a half, precisely, after her friend.

A witness told of her death: “Her last sigh was but her last breath, and to tell this in one word, her death was as sweet as she herself had been. She was buried in Vienna and they wrote on her tomb her name only, followed by this mention: ‘Dead from suffering’ on December 9th, 1793.”

—Historia magazine, June 1977; translation from ‘Madame de Polignac and the Politics of Calumny’ on The Catholic Writer’s Guild