On 19 July 1746 she gave birth to a daughter at Versailles. Three days later she would be dead. The heir to the French throne had to be dragged away from her bed.
A queen stood in the rain and held up her five-year-old son to a crowd of three hundred thousand people. "This is my son," she said, "who joins in the same sentiments as me." Within three years, she was dead. Within two more, so was he.
She was seventeen years old when Paris gave itself over to loving her. Twenty years later the same city sent her to the guillotine. On the eighth of June 1773 she stood on the balcony of the Tuileries and wept, and she had no reason yet to know the difference between the two things.