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A Straight Dope Classic from Cecil's storehouse of human knowledge
24-Oct-1986
Dear Cecil:
Did the French queen, Marie Antoinette, ever actually utter the phrase, "Let them eat
cake"? I have a friend who claims that Crazy Marie actually said something in French
that, in phonetic spelling, merely sounded like "Let them eat cake." Is the line
in a class with Humphrey Bogart's "Play it again, Sam"--i.e., bogus? --Willie
H., Chicago
Dear Willie:
I have a dream that someday one of these alleged facts of history is actually going to pan
out. However, today is not the day. While Marie Antoinette was certainly enough of a
bubblehead to have said the phrase in question, there is no evidence that she actually did
so, and in any case she did not originate it. The peasants-have-no-bread story was in
common currency at least since the 1760s as an illustration of the decadence of the
aristocracy. The political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentions it in his
Confessions in connection with an incident that occurred in 1740. (He stole wine while
working as a tutor in Lyons and then had problems trying to scrounge up something to eat
along with it.) He concludes thusly: "Finally I remembered the way out suggested by a
great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: 'Well, let them eat cake.'"
Now, J.-J. may have been embroidering this yarn with a line he had really heard many years
later. But even so, at the time he was writing--early 1766--Marie Antoinette was only ten
years old and still four years away from her marriage to the future Louis XVI. Writer
Alphonse Karr in 1843 claimed that the line originated with a certain Duchess of Tuscany
in 1760 or earlier, and that it was attributed to Marie Antoinette in 1789 by radical
agitators who were trying to turn the populace against her.
As for your friend's suggestion, I suppose it's possible that one day, while under the
influence of powerful hallucinogens, Marie said Le theme est quete ("The theme is
quest"), and was overheard by an English-speaking tourist--thus giving rise, as your
friend suggests, to the "Let them eat cake" legend. But frankly I doubt it.
LET THEM EAT POT SCRAPINGS
Dear Cecil:
Thank you for so nobly coming to the defense of the much-maligned Marie Antoinette, just
as you did a few years ago with the equally vilified Catherine the Great. And now, as Paul
Harvey would say, here's the rest of the story ...
At the time that whoever-she-was uttered the infamous quotation "let them eat
cake," the word "cake" did not refer to the familiar dessert item that the
modern-day French call le gateau. The operative term was brioche, a flour-and-water paste
that was "caked" onto the interiors of the ovens and baking pans of the
professional boulangers of the era. (The modern equivalent is the oil-and-flour mixture
applied to non-Teflon cake pans.) At the end of the day, the baker would scrape the
leavings from his pans and ovens and set them outside the door for the benefit of beggars
and scavengers. Thus, the lady in question was simply giving practical, if somewhat
flippant, advice to her poor subjects: If one cannot afford the bourgeois bread, he can
avail himself of the poor man's "cake."
However, by the time Marie Antoinette ascended the throne, brioche had acquired
its current meaning--a fancy pastry item which, like le gateau, was priced far beyond the
means of any but the wealthiest classes. The anti-Marie propagandists were well aware that
their compatriots, most of whom were uneducated in either history or semantics, would
swallow the story whole, so to speak, and not get the joke. Bon appetit! --N.D.G., Chicago
Dear N.:
That's very interesting, N., but wrong. Brioche is a sort of crusty bun, typically
containing milk, flour, eggs, sugar, butter, and whatnot. It's considered a delicacy, and
as far as I can determine (which is pretty far) has been since the Middle Ages. According
to one cooking historian, brioche originally contained brie cheese, whence the name.
Nicolas Bonnefons, writing in Delices de la campagne in 1679, gives a recipe for
brioche that calls for butter and soft cheese, plus a glaze containing beaten eggs and (if
desired) honey. Sounds pretty tasty, and in any case certainly not something bakers would
line pots with.
--CECIL ADAMS
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