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Speaking of Madam Antoinette, I just learned an interesting thing about the whole "Let them eat cake" story.
This historian was arguing that "cake" did not mean pastry as we think of it, but what was colloquially referred to as cake back then, which was the clumpy black shit that poor people cleaned out of chimneys. (This is where we get the phase about something being "really caked on" a surface.) So it wasn't in fact a case of a clueless aristocrat who had no idea what it's like to be without money, as people tend to interpret the story today, but rather a cruel and uncaring aristocrat who thought the poor's suffering deserved a good pun.
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