Marie Antionette, the lovely, extravagant, too fashionable, and much-maligned victim of the French Revolution, mounted the scaffold to her death on October 16, 1793, with the distinguished bearing of the princess she was. Though whether that bearing was courage and strength or hauteur and arrogance depended on who is telling the story.
Either way, most accounts agree that the Austrian princess and French queen’s last words were, “Pardon me, sir, I did not mean to do it.” She wasn’t, however, talking about all her profligate spending (the porcelain cups in the shape of breasts, the little cottage where she and her friends liked to dress up as shepherdesses, all those Versailles parties) or what the frenzied revolutionaries felt was her evil influence on her weak and by-then-9-months-dead husband, Louis XVI.
She was apologizing to the executioner, whose foot she’d just trod on.
Source:
McRobbie, Linda Rodriguez. “Famous Last Words.” Princesses Behaving Badly: Real Stories From History-- Without the Fairy-Tale Endings. MJF Books, 2013. 282. Print.
Further Reading:
When under stress people fall back on the way they were trained.