by Suzanne Weyn
And then one day, a young man comes to the door. I’m at the top of the stairs, and I hear him talking to Celeste at the front door.
I know his voice instantly.
In the next moment, I’m thundering down the stairs. “Henri!” I cry joyfully, hurtling into his arms. We stumble backward onto the porch, kissing, ecstatic to be reunited.
“How did you find me?” I ask between passionate kisses.
“I contacted Madame Tussaud when they released me from prison,” Henri explains.
Concerned, I look into his face. He’s thinner and appears older than he should for nineteen. Wrapping my arms around him, I rest my cheek on his chest, listening to his heartbeat. “Everything’s all right now,” I say. “Nothing can ever part us again.”
And nothing ever does.
Obviously, this is a work of fiction, but I’ve tried my best to stay true to the main events of the French Revolution. The place where I’ve taken the greatest liberty is in the age of Marie-Thérèse. For most of her sixteenth and seventeenth years, she sat in one of several jails, completely alone toward the end. So, in the interest of a better story, one that didn’t read like a textbook on the French Revolution, I’ve made her character older than she actually was at the start of the Revolution.
Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte was the only member of her immediate family to survive the Revolution and really was released from the Temple prison at midnight on her seventeenth birthday in 1795. Frances II of Austria wrote to the French Minister of the Interior requesting that Ernestine de Lambriquet accompany the princess to Austria. He was told that the girl had gone into hiding and couldn’t be found. We know now that Ernestine was hiding with a family named Mackau from the date of the invasion of Tuileries Palace in 1792.
It is still unknown whether Ernestine did, in fact, leave Paris with the princess that night. Madame de Soucy was said to have been traveling with her teenaged son, but she never had a son, leading some to speculate that Ernestine left disguised as a boy.
We know that Ernestine de Lambriquet was a girl who looked very much like the princess and who was the daughter of a palace chambermaid. In 1788, Louis XVI established a substantial allowance for Ernestine (12,000 livres). It was rumored that Ernestine might also have been another child of Louis XVI from the maid Philippine de Lambriquet. Throughout the years there has been a lot of conjecture as to whether Princess Marie-Thérèse changed places with Ernestine at the time of her release. Later portraits suggest differences in the princesses’ noses, which those who believe she was really Ernestine often point to as proof. Those who don’t believe it claim that Ernestine went to London and lived an ordinary, peaceful life. This novel embraces the idea that Ernestine de Lambriquet spent the rest of her life acting as Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte. Almost immediately upon her marriage to the duc d’Angoulême people noted that she seemed different in manner and appearance from Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte. We know Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte was involved in various unsuccessful attempts to retake the throne. Rumors of the Dark Countess refer to a veiled woman named Sophie Botta who arrived in Hildburghausen, Germany, in 1807, with a male companion. The two seldom went out, and when they did, the woman was always veiled. People began referring to her as the Dark Countess.
Upon her death in 1837, the Dark Countess was quickly buried, but objects known to have belonged to the Bourbons and bearing the royal fleur-de-lis symbol were discovered among her possessions. The body was exhumed in October of 2013 for DNA testing in order to determine whether the woman buried there was indeed Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte de Bourbon. The body was reburied but without comment on what that testing might — or might not — have revealed. As of this writing (March 2014), the German government has once again exhumed the body for further testing to discover once and for all, through genetic testing, if this was Marie-Thérèse. (For an Internet search of this subject, try The Dark Countess, The Dailymail.co.uk, and Telegraph.co.uk) One also must question why DNA analysis is not done on the person bearing the title of Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte who is buried in the Bourbon burial crypt in Slovenia.
Other poetic license taken is in the details of Anna Marie Grosholtz, later to become known as Madame Tussaud, and of Rose de Beauharnais, who would later be Empress Joséphine Bonaparte.
Here’s what is true. Joséphine Bonaparte (then called Rose de Beauharnais) was a beautiful Creole woman from Martinique who was imprisoned by the French revolutionaries because of her first marriage to the aristocrat Alexandre de Beauharnais. While in prison, she met Madame Tussaud (then named Anna Marie Grosholtz), who had been jailed by the Revolutionary Guard because she gave waxwork lessons to Princess Élisabeth, the sister of Louis XVI, the king of France, at Versailles. Since she had access to the royal family, she was accused of spying for them.
Also true is that Anna Marie Grosholtz was a student of famed waxworker Dr. Philippe Curtius — whom she called Uncle Philippe. She was released from prison, thanks to the influential friends of Dr. Curtius, just days before her execution date (her head had already been shaven) on the condition that she use her skills in waxwork to make death masks for the revolutionaries. Reluctantly, she made masks from the severed heads of Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, Robespierre, and Marat, among many others. (The last two happened later during the Reign of Terror.) However, unlike in this novel, Madame Tussaud didn’t leave for England with her new husband until 1802.
I’ve moved up the time frame in the case of Rose and Napoléon Bonaparte, as well. Rose de Beauharnais was released from jail five days after the beheading of Robespierre in July 1794, which is why I had her go back to jail at that time. In reality, Rose didn’t become involved with Napoléon until 1795. Up until then, she was known as Rose, but he insisted on calling her Joséphine, which she used from then on. (Josèphe was part of her name.) She married Napoléon in 1796 and became the first Empress of France in 1804. She was popular for her kindness, especially to orphans. They later divorced, mainly because Napoléon wanted a male heir, which Joséphine failed to produce.
Henri is the only main character in this novel who is wholly fictional, though he’s based on the many impoverished young men and women who existed in Paris at the time. His story is based on true accounts of the lives of farmers at the time.
The character of Brigitte is also my creation, but there was, in fact, an exhibit in Paris in those years known as The Belle Zulima, in which a woman renowned for her beauty pretended to be a two-hundred-year-old corpse untouched by any decay and lay on display in a glass case.
Suzanne Weyn is the acclaimed author of Dr. Frankenstein’s Daughters, Invisible World, Empty, Distant Waves, and Reincarnation, as well as The Bar Code Tattoo, The Bar Code Rebellion, and The Bar Code Prophecy. She lives in the middle of horse country in New York State, and can be found online at www.suzanneweynbooks.com.
ALSO BY SUZANNE WEYN
Reincarnation
Distant Waves: A Novel of the Titanic
Empty
Invisible World
Dr. Frankenstein’s Daughters
The Bar Code Tattoo
The Bar Code Rebellion
The Bar Code Prophecy
Copyright © 2014 by Suzanne Weyn
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First edition, September 2014
Cover art © 2014 by Jonathan Barkat
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e-ISBN 978-0-545-63363-5
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