qotd, French knitting edition

"[Marie Antoinette] was thwarted as well when she asked to be given the needlework she had begun in the Temple; once again, she expressed her eagerness to finish making a pair of stockings for her son. Although Madame Elisabeth and Madame Royale packed up the materials and sent them to the Conciergerie, the officers refused to give them to the Queen, on the grounds that she might hurt herself with the needles. Desperate for something to do in her barren cell, and perhaps anxious to provide her son with clothing of a nonrepublican provenance, Marie Antoinette resorted to picking threads out of the faded, torn tapestry that hung on the wall over her bed. Using a pair of toothpicks, she 'knitted' these threads into a pair of garters which she begged the prison concierge to send to the Temple. The gift never reached Louis Charles, who died under mysterious circumstances in prison..."

-- From Caroline Weber's Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, which is a fascinating (in an academic way) book about a fascinating woman.

Comments

[Anna]

Knitting with toothpicks? That's desperation!