Many travelers will find Matera. Far fewer will find Ferrandina. And I might never have found it myself, if not for an obscure reference to some ancient illuminated choir books kept in the town’s Mother Church. I had no idea what else was waiting behind the church walls.

I had found mention of these remarkable manuscripts, but I couldn’t find a single photograph of them. My curiosity was thoroughly piqued.

After months of correspondence with the Diocese of Matera and the local parish priest, I finally arranged a visit with my guide, Silvio. We had been granted the extraordinary privilege of viewing and photographing these centuries-old sacred texts.

What I hadn’t anticipated was discovering something else entirely. Hidden behind layers of plaster, centuries-old sacred frescoes had only recently emerged into the light. Some still bore the scars of whatever had happened to them in the intervening centuries. And they were beautiful!

Restoration work had uncovered more than a single painting. Behind the choir stalls was a gathering of saints from different centuries. Saint Bridget, depicted as a pilgrim carrying a staff and shell, appeared alongside Saint Leonard, whose image seems to belong to an earlier painted layer. Nearby, Saint Anthony Abbot and Saint John the Baptist survive as remarkable 16th-century frescoes. There was even a crowned female saint, her identity still unknown.

Not perfect, certainly. In fact, someone, at some point in the church’s history, had shown remarkably little regard for the painted saints. Holes made to accommodate the wooden supports of the choir had pierced the frescoes, some almost directly through the middle of the saints’ faces.

I couldn’t help wondering why. Was it simply the practical consequence of renovating an old church? Or had these once-treasured images fallen out of fashion?

The Mother Church has a complicated history of its own. Official accounts date its founding to 1491, but records suggest that an earlier church existed in this community long before. Some historians believe traces of an even older, Byzantine-style structure may survive within its walls. Remarkably, the rediscovered frescoes may offer clues to the dimensions and orientation of that earlier building. Perhaps these painted saints preserve evidence of a church that has itself been partially lost to time.

The church itself is magnificent, with soaring arches, elaborate ornamentation, and gilded details. Perhaps the older paintings, with their quieter beauty, no longer suited the grandeur of the surroundings. I don’t know.

But I find their artistry extraordinary. And there is something strangely moving about those damaged faces emerging once more from the walls, their eyes still looking out at us after centuries in darkness.

Beneath them, an intricate floor of blue-and-white patterned tiles offers another unexpected delight, with beautiful geometric designs and what appears to be a heraldic emblem.

I had traveled to Ferrandina in search of ancient books. Instead, I found myself standing before sacred art that had only recently reentered the world. And it left me with a question I haven’t quite been able to shake:

How many other faces are still watching us from behind the plastered walls of Italy’s ancient churches? How much beauty, devotion, and history has been covered over, forgotten, or simply hidden from view?

I share these images in the hope that they bring a little wonder to your day.

And perhaps, the next time you step inside an ancient church, you’ll find yourself looking a little more closely at its walls…wondering who might still be looking back?

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. From Branches to Roots | Rami alle Radici, where curiosity opens doors to the art, history, faith, and forgotten places of southern Italy.

All photographs are original works by J. Benevento and remain the exclusive intellectual property of the photographer. Images of the historic illuminated choir books are published with the express consent of the Diocese of Matera. No photographs may be reproduced, distributed, or used without prior written permission.

The Hidden Frescoes of Ferrandina was originally published in Teatime History on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A quick question.

When Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote the words “Let them eat brioche” into his autobiographical manuscript, where was Marie Antoinette?

At Versailles, looking down on her hungry subjects?

No. She was still a child at the Austrian court, about ten years old. Her marriage to the future king of France lay ahead of her.

One of history’s most notorious remarks — “Let them eat cake” — was already in Rousseau’s manuscript before the woman associated with it had even arrived in France.

Whose remark was it, then?

An Unnamed Princess in Rousseau’s Manuscript

The sentence appears in Book VI of Rousseau’s Confessions:

“At last I recalled the last resort of a great princess who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: ‘Let them eat brioche.’”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, Book VI. Translated here from the French.

The context is a considerable distance from a starving crowd.

The young Rousseau had been helping himself to bottles of wine from the household where he worked. Unfortunately, he could never drink without eating. He needed some bread.

The difficulty was his dignity.

Could a gentleman, elegantly dressed and wearing a sword, really walk into a baker’s shop to buy a piece of bread? Asking a servant to fetch it would risk exposing his private drinking arrangements.

Then he remembered the princess.

No bread? Buy brioche.

He went to a pastry shop instead. Even then, he admitted, he might wander past thirty shops before finding the courage to enter one.

Rousseau was not using the anecdote to denounce a princess’s cruelty. He was borrowing its absurd logic to solve his own rather smaller problem. A line that later became a symbol of class indifference appears here as a young drinker’s awkward expedient.

And the original food was not cake. It was brioche: a rich bread made with butter and eggs. In English, the phrase became famous as “Let them eat cake”.

Imagine an elaborate birthday cake, and the proposed solution seems more extravagant still.

But correcting the menu does not authenticate the speaker. Whether the food is cake or brioche, Rousseau did not attribute the remark to Marie Antoinette.

A Timetable That Refuses to Cooperate

Rousseau wrote the first six books of the Confessions broadly between 1765 and 1767. Marie Antoinette was born in November 1755.

We do not know the date on which he wrote this particular sentence. “About ten” is therefore more defensible than a precise age. What matters is that she was a child, not the queen of France.

She married the French dauphin in 1770. To identify Rousseau’s unnamed princess with the French queen, we have to import a future identity into an earlier text.

The first part of the Confessions was published posthumously in 1782, more than fifteen years after much of its composition. Books VII to XII followed in 1789.

There is another chronological complication.

The episode in which Rousseau recalls the princess belongs to his younger days, when he was working as a tutor in Lyon — before Marie Antoinette was born.

That does not prove that the story was already circulating at the date of the remembered episode. Rousseau was writing decades afterwards. A memoir is not a contemporary transcript.

It does, however, leave us with a substantial evidential gap. Nothing in his account connects the unnamed princess to the woman later blamed for the remark.

A Joke in Search of a Royal

Who was Rousseau’s princess?

We do not know.

He might have had a particular woman in mind. He might have borrowed a circulating story. He might have reshaped it for his own purposes.

Similar anecdotes were attached to other royal women.

Marie-Thérèse, the wife of Louis XIV, was credited with suggesting that people without bread should eat pastry crust. The future Louis XVIII recalled this story while describing his escape from France.

The setting is oddly familiar. He and his companion had pâté and Bordeaux wine but had forgotten to bring bread. Eating the crust around the pâté reminded them of the old queen’s supposed advice to the poor.

Once again, this was not a recorded exchange with starving subjects. It was a royal traveller repeating a story about an earlier queen.

A related remark was attributed to Madame Victoire, a daughter of Louis XV. The protagonist changed; the plot remained remarkably stable. A sheltered court lady offered hungry people a substitute that revealed how little she understood their situation.

Europe did not have a monopoly on the joke.

The Chinese Book of Jin(晉書) records Emperor Hui(惠帝) responding to people dying of hunger with the question: “Why do they not eat meat porridge?(何不食肉糜)”

This does not establish a line of transmission from China to France. It shows how similar stories could expose the same distance between rulers and ruled.

Someone with food recommends a different food to someone with none.

The names change more readily than the joke.

The Name Appears in Print Half a Century Later

When did the story become Marie Antoinette’s?

A frequently cited date is March 1843, when the writer Alphonse Karr discussed it in his satirical periodical Les Guêpes — roughly half a century after the queen’s execution.

But saying that Karr first put the words into her mouth misses an important distinction.

He described a rumour that had supposedly been circulated to provoke indignation against her. He was reporting the attribution, not certifying the remark. He also pointed to an earlier version involving someone else.

In a 2002 study, folklorists Véronique Campion-Vincent and Christine Shojaei Kawan identified Karr’s passage as the earliest written connection between Marie Antoinette and the saying that they had found.

The earliest surviving reference located by researchers is not necessarily the moment a rumour began.

We cannot confidently declare that no one told the story during her lifetime. Nor should we casually assume that revolutionary propagandists made widespread use of it.

The researchers examined hostile pamphlets and sought evidence in the revolutionary press. They reported finding no attribution in the materials investigated. Historian Cécile Berly, quoted by the Lyon municipal library, likewise notes that the remark was not raised against the queen at her 1793 trial.

There was no shortage of accusations against her. The sentence now regarded as her most famous was conspicuously absent from the sources examined.

Its later circulation is easier to see.

In Erich Kästner’s 1931 children’s novel Pünktchen und Anton, the queen looks down on hungry people and proposes brioche. This was not historical testimony. It was a lesson about the ignorance of the rich.

As a way of joining a face to a sentence, however, it was effective.

A Remark That Fit Better Than the Evidence

Why Marie Antoinette?

In an NPR interview, biographer Antonia Fraser offered a straightforward explanation: the story confirmed people’s prejudices.

A foreign-born queen, supposedly extravagant and oblivious to ordinary life. The sentence fitted the character perfectly.

Her actual political decisions and responsibilities are separate questions. Correcting a false attribution does not require defending everything she did.

It requires distinguishing historical responsibility from a memorable line of dialogue.

The irony is that, in Rousseau’s book, the sentence solves a problem involving stolen wine and an embarrassed young man in search of something to eat.

Inside the memoir, it finds him a snack.

Outside it, it becomes a verdict on a queen.

We remember a recognisable face more easily than an unnamed princess. The quotation found an owner. The evidence never caught up.

References

• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Les Confessions [Confessions], Book VI. First published in 1782. French text available through ATHENA, University of Geneva.
• Campion-Vincent, Véronique, and Christine Shojaei Kawan. “Marie-Antoinette et son célèbre dire : deux scénographies et deux siècles de désordres, trois niveaux de communication et trois modes accusatoires”. Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 327 (2002).
• Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon. “La citation ‘Ils n’ont pas de pain, qu’ils mangent de la brioche !’ est-elle exacte ?”. Guichet du Savoir.
• Delon, Michel. “Les Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau”. Encyclopædia Universalis.
• “Sur la genèse conceptuelle des Confessions”. Genesis (2021).
• NPR. “The Misunderstood Marie Antoinette?” 18 September 2006.
• Jin shu (晉書) [Book of Jin], vol. 4, “Hui di ji” (惠帝紀) [“Annals of Emperor Hui”].

The Queen Who Supposedly Said “Let Them Eat Cake” Was About Ten was originally published in Teatime History on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.