of books, films, and other media. Politically engaged authors have deemed her the quintessential representative of class conflict, western aristocracy and absolutism. Some of her contemporaries, such as Thomas Jefferson, attributed to her the start of the French Revolution. In popular culture The phrase "Let them eat cake" is often attributed to Marie Antoinette, but there is no evidence that she ever uttered it, and it is now generally regarded as a journalistic cliché. This phrase originally appeared in Book VI of the first part of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiographical work Les Confessions, finished in 1767 and published in 1782: "Enfin Je me rappelai le pis-aller d'une grande Princesse à qui l'on disait que les paysans n'avaient pas de pain, et qui répondit: Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" ("Finally I recalled the stopgap solution of a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: 'Let them eat brioche). Rousseau ascribes these words to a "great princess", but the purported writing date precedes Marie Antoinette's arrival in France. Some think that he invented it altogether. In the United States, expressions of gratitude to France for its help in the American Revolution included naming a city Marietta, Ohio, in 1788. Her life has been the subject of many films, such as Marie Antoinette (1938) and Marie Antoinette (2006). In 2020, a silk shoe that belonged to her was sold in an auction in the Palace of Versailles for 43,750 euros ($51,780). In 2022, her story was dramatised by a Canal+ and BBC English-language television series. Children In addition to her biological children, Marie Antoinette adopted four children: "Armand" Francois-Michel Gagné, a poor orphan adopted in 1776; Jean Amilcar, a Senegalese slave boy given to the queen as a present by Chevalier de Boufflers in 1787, but whom she instead freed, baptized, adopted and placed in a pension; Ernestine Lambriquet, daughter of two servants at the palace, who was raised as the playmate of her daughter Marie-Thérèse and whom she adopted after the death of her mother in 1788; and finally "Zoe" Jeanne Louise Victoire, who was adopted in 1790 along with her two older sisters when her parents, an usher and his wife in service of the King, had died. Of these, only Armand, Ernestine, and Zoe actually lived with the royal family: Jean Amilcar, along with the elder siblings of Zoe and Armand who were also