A drum, taken up by a young woman near the markets, and the sound of it carrying through the eastern districts; that's where most accounts start it, in 1789. Then roughly twenty kilometres to Versailles in the rain, thousands of women with the price of bread as the grievance. The king heard a delegation that evening. The following day he was in a carriage to Paris.
They'd have come in at the Cour de Marbre, which is a shock the first time — black and white paving, brick and stone, and much smaller than the engravings let you believe. You stand in it and the windows of the king's bedroom are right there above you, close enough to shout at.
Marguerite, the pamphlets that followed called them poissardes — the market-fishwives' word, out of poisson — and the printers couldn't settle on how to spell it; I've seen three versions in a single sheet. There was a whole comic genre in that voice before 1789, written mostly by men who never stood in a bread queue.