Let Them Eat Brioche

by Matthew Sitman

Maria Konnikova offers an explanation for why misquotations come into being – and then persist:

Have you noticed how incorrect quotes often just sound right—sometimes, more right than actual quotations? There's a reason for that. Our brains really like fluency, or the experience of cognitive ease (as opposed to cognitive strain) in taking in and retrieving information. The more fluent the experience of reading a quote—or the easier it is to grasp, the smoother it sounds, the more readily it comes to mind—the less likely we are to question the actual quotation. Those right-sounding misquotes are just taking that tendency to the next step: cleaning up, so to speak, quotations so that they are more mellifluous, more all-around quotable, easier to store and recall at a later point. We might not even be misquoting on purpose, but once we do, the result tends to be catchier than the original.

And according to Konnikova's account, Marie Antoinette and Mark Twain both have been ill-served by such tendencies:

Marie Antoinette's "let them eat cake" would be one of the most famous lines in history were it not for the fact that she never actually said it. The line comes instead from Book 6 of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, written several years before Marie Antoinette ever came to Versailles—and its speaker is never actually named but rather referred to as a "great princess." (Oh, and it's not cake; it's brioche.)

And poor Mark Twain. He seems to have said everything there is to say in the world. Several of my favorite lines turn out to be purely apocryphal, like "I would rather go to bed with Lillian Russell stark naked than with Ulysses S. Grant in full military regalia" and "Giving up smoking is easy. I've done it hundreds of times." Several other bon mots are actually not original to Twain, but rather quoted by him (Twain, to his credit, always gave the source; his listeners and readers paid less careful attention.) "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics," for instance, was, according to Twain, an invention of Benjamin Disraeli's, and "Wagner's music is better than it sounds" originated with Edgar Wilson Nye. Twain was a witty man, but, alas, he didn't say it all.