Abstract: The history of the text of the Mémoires sur la vie privée de Marie-Antoinette, reine de France et de Navarre, shows an impossible conciliation between various times in Mme Campan’s life : Mesdames’ reader, the Queen’s first chambermaid, the schoolmistress during the Empire. Unpublished documents cast light on the genesis of the memoirs and their author’s withdrawals which cannot be isolated from the political context of a possible publication. A culture of gratitude enabled her to fight oblivion.
