Bertin was absent from France during the September Massacres, which resulted in her being placed in the list of émigrés. She managed to have herself removed from the list and returned to France in December 1792 to attend to her business. During this stay, popular legend says she destroyed her account books in order to spare the queen from having her bills used against her during her trial. However, this does not appear to be true: all the bills of the queen prior to August 1792 were already in the possession of the government through Henry, liquidator of the civil estate, and there was at that point not yet a trial planned against Marie Antoinette. It would therefore have been pointless for Bertin to destroy her account books for that reason, and the bills of Marie Antoinette were in fact inherited by her heirs, who would demand payment of them until 1830.