Marie-Therese, Child of Terror: The Fate of Marie Antoinette's Daughter

by Susan Nagel

  Before Maria Antonia could be presented to the French court as their future Queen, the young Archduchess had to undergo certain preparations including painful teeth straightening and an intensive course in French court customs. On April 19, 1770, Maria Antonia was married by proxy to Louis-Auguste of France. She was fourteen years old; the future Louis XVI, fifteen. The couple had never met, and both had reservations about the marriage. Maria Antonia was anxious about leaving her home forever. Louis-Auguste, convinced by courtiers and tutors that the Austrian were to be mistrusted, was far from happy about the exogamous union. Despite the bride’s misgivings, she wrote to her new King informing him that the wedding by proxy had taken place, ‘yesterday according to every ecclesiastical ceremony required’. She assured him that she would but ‘occupy all my life to your care and to what pleases you to merit your confidence and goodness … to submit to your wishes’, and, revealing a certain persuasive charm that she would become famous for, addressing His Majesty as ‘my very dear grandfather’, the new Dauphine added, ‘I know that my age and my inexperience might require your indulgence.’

  On the eve of her departure, Maria Antonia received a present from her mother: a gold, enamel and amber watch and chain that had belonged to the Empress herself. The following day, Saturday, April 21, Maria Antonia, sobbing uncontrollably, embraced her mother for the last time, said her goodbyes to the Austrian courtiers and left the Hofburg Palace, the place she would always recall as idyllic. She carried with her a list of instructions from her mother that included guidelines on French diet, religion, and acceptable reading material. The Empress bid her daughter farewell, announcing to all within earshot that she was sending France ‘an angel’.

  The fifty-seven-carriage cortege that departed Vienna splendidly befitted the occasion. The teenage bride’s entourage rode in carriages upholstered in vivid-colored velvets, embroidered with crests and symbols. Maria Antonia’s own carriage, sent especially by the King of France, had been designed to show off her beauty to the world. The berlin’s panels were made of brilliant glass that shimmered like diamonds encasing the Dauphine as the new crown jewel of France, each panel set by finely wrought white, yellow and rose-colored gold that wrapped vine-like around the windows. The roof of the coach, a solid-gold encasement with bouquets of flowers, again in tri-colored gold, was so delicately crafted that the flowers actually swayed in the breeze as the procession headed west.

  In an attempt to elicit favorable public relations around the Empire, the Austrian court had set out a travel itinerary for the new bride, which took her around Western Europe, allowing its subjects to behold the young beauty, lavish tribute upon her, and feel optimistic about their reigning family. From Melk to Ulm to Freiberg, Maria Antonia traveled for up to ten hours a day as enthusiastic throngs of people waved her on. Finally, after meandering through a week of pomp and celebration, she reached the Rhine near the town of Kehl, the final stop before she left the borders of her homeland.

  Maria Antonia was to meet her new family on an island in the middle of the Rhine, signifying neutral ground – the same island where Maria Josepha of Saxony had been handed over to the French to become Dauphine some twenty-three years earlier. A group of citizens from nearby Strasbourg had erected a wooden pavilion decorated with tapestries in which to receive their new Dauphine. Oddly, one of the tapestries hurriedly nailed to a wall depicted a scene from the story of Jason and Medea, recalling the monstrous mother who kills her own children. The writer Goethe, a young man studying law in Strasbourg at the time, had visited the site a few days prior to the Dauphine’s arrival, and, in his memoir, commented on the horrific inappropriateness of the imagery.

  Maria Antonia arrived on the island in the afternoon of May 7, beneath gathering storm clouds. She was deposited inside the pavilion by her Austrian courtiers, who were then asked to leave. The French, insisting on a clean break from the past for this daughter of the Holy Roman Empire, demanded that the Dauphine proceed to France accompanied only by Prince Starhemberg, former ambassador to France and special assistant to Chancellor Kaunitz. Even her pet was banished: the fourteen-year-old was forced to leave her pug dog, Mops, with the Austrian delegation.

  Although her magnificent trousseau had been crafted in France, it too was deemed to be ‘Austrian’. She was stripped and her clothes thrown to waiting female attendants, who squabbled over them. Maria Antonia was then symbolically transformed into the future Queen of France. Completely re-attired in a second set of French-made, French-styled clothing, she was led to the next room in the pavilion, where she was received by various members of the French nobility. No longer Maria Antonia, Archduchess of the Holy Roman Empire, she was now Marie Antoinette, Dauphine of France.

  According to the French courtiers who were present at the official remise, Maria Antonia committed a serious faux pas the moment she was presented to her French entourage. Tradition demanded that the person of the King and, by extension, his family, were absolutely sacred and therefore the body of the Dauphine was not to be touched by anyone. Overcome with emotion and desiring to make a fine first impression, Maria Antonia reached out and hugged the particularly severe Comtesse de Noailles, who had been appointed the Dauphine’s Lady of Honor. The Countess, stunned at the young girl’s impulsiveness and informality, cringed and remained rigid. Maria Antonia was immediately judged ill-prepared to serve as Queen.

  The ceremony completed, the French procession made its way westward through the provinces. The bride, greeted with cheers and showers of flower petals, remained deeply anxious about meeting her new husband and seeing her new home, the incomparable Palace of Versailles.

  The entourage arrived at the palace, west of Paris, on May 16. Six thousand people, dressed in their finest couture, assembled for a wedding celebration of heart-stopping splendor in the Opera House at Versailles, which had been built for the occasion. The young bride was lovely, declared the throngs of people. The aging Louis XV, who liked his women young and whose own mistress, Madame du Barry, was only two years older than his new granddaughter-in-law, was confident that the Dauphin would be extremely attracted to this ‘delectable’ Princess and that the dynasty would be preserved. To everyone’s surprise, however, when the bridal bed was examined the next morning, it became clear that the couple had not consummated their marriage.

  It seems that neither the fifteen-year-old Dauphin nor his fourteen-year-old bride had been taught anything about sex and neither of them had the slightest idea of what to do when they climbed into the marriage bed. It did not help that the two were temperamental opposites. Marie Antoinette was charming, graceful and outgoing, though deficient in formal education; the young Dauphin was plodding, reserved, of a solitary nature, and bookish. In 1763, having already read David Hume’s History of England, the nine-year-old future Louis XVI was the only member of the royal family who was genuinely thrilled to meet the philosopher when he visited the French court (the rest of the royal family snubbed Hume). The Dauphin also enjoyed solving complicated geographical puzzles and creating intricate locks that took great ingenuity to pry open. He maintained a private smithy at Versailles where he would retreat to construct these devices. However, he expended most of his physical energy on hunting – going out almost every day, from early morning through a good deal of the afternoon. Gossip immediately spread among the thousands of courtiers at Versailles: the Dauphin preferred his smithy and the hunt to the company of his beautiful young wife.

  In contrast with his grandson, Louis XV was a gregarious presence at court. He had little interest in serious thought and believed that a man’s steady stream of mistresses was the true testament to his masculinity. He thought there was something very wrong with his grandson. Others said the same, and embarrassing pornographic cartoons began to appear, ridiculing the Dauphin’s masculinity. In one, he appeared as a locksmith unable to work the key, an obvious insult to his lack of prowess. One picture showed the future king riding a giant phallic ostrich (autruche – a pun on the wo
rd for Austria: autriche) while Marie Antoinette stroked it. The Dauphin was a tall man; but as the number of caricatures increased, his height in them diminished leaving for posterity an image of him as a small, portly, inept little fellow.

  The bride, so malleable, young, and desperate to fulfill her destiny, quickly became the ensnared pawn of rival factions at court, and of her own mother, the Empress. Week after week, month after month, Marie Antoinette received scolding letters from her mother who reminded her that her primary duty was to produce an heir to the throne.1 Maria Theresa also relentlessly nagged the Dauphine, stressing that she should serve the Austrian Empire, gain favor with the French King, find out as much information as she could and send that information back to Vienna. The great and powerful Empress of Austria, who fought dazzling political duels with the formidable Frederick II of Prussia, proved equally skillful at manipulating her own daughter; her letters to her frequently included comments such as ‘If you loved me, you would …’ and ‘You don’t listen to a word I say’. And when it came to exerting even further pressure on her daughter with regard to producing an heir the Empress wrote, ‘seeing you in this state [pregnant] … would be the only thing that would give me a reason to prolong my sad days.’ Later, Marie Antoinette would be accused of spying for Austria. These accusations – which could never be proved – were to a degree well founded because, owing to her complete naivety, Marie Antoinette unwittingly imparted information to her mother and brother who then used guile and trickery to obtain further intelligence from other sources.

  Mother and daughter would communicate through letters carried by a private courier who left Vienna at the beginning of each month. This trusted messenger would journey from Vienna to Austrian Belgium and arrive in Paris about ten days later. He would remain in Paris until the middle of the month and would return via the same route in reverse, arriving in Vienna around the 25th of each month, though in the case of a family crisis, the Empress would dispatch extra couriers.

  Such a system was essential to maintain a type of privacy. It was widely known that elaborate spy cabinets operated in every European court to digest and profit from potentially important and secret information. Among the most successful of the eighteenth-century nefarious Black Chambers – the teams of espionage who worked at deciphering and encrypting messages sent among the embassies – was the Austrian Geheime Kabinets-Kanzlei. Before any letter arrived at its intended location in Vienna, it would be sent to the Black Chamber at 7 a.m. for examination. Seals were melted, letters copied, and messages decoded. Language specialists, stenographers and cryptologists assisted in this treachery. The letters would then be resealed to perfection and delivered to the addressee by four in the afternoon, seemingly intact.

  Despite the fact that Marie Antoinette signed her letters ‘Your submissive daughter’, the Empress was not at all convinced that she would receive completely honest news, and she was equally confident that her somewhat frivolous daughter, inattentive to world events, could not possibly offer any substantive political information. Therefore the Empress placed two spies at the French court. One, the Abbé de Vermond, instructed Marie Antoinette on religious matters and listened to her most personal confessions; the other, Comte Mercy-Argenteau, served as the Austrian ambassador to France. On February 13, 1772, the Empress wrote to her daughter, ‘If you love me, you will listen to all of his [Mercy’s] advice without exception … follow, without hesitation and with confidence, everything he will tell you or demand of you’, even if it placed her in conflict with her own husband.

  These two spies, whose letters were included in the packets transported by the private courier, reported on every misstep, misdeed, and failure of the young Dauphine. The Empress would let her daughter know she had heard rumors, but would never reveal the true source of her information. Instead, she led her daughter to believe that the King of Prussia was behind the stories. The Empress’s implications had the desired effect: Marie Antoinette assumed that the Prussian had spies at the French court and often complained to her husband that the Prussians were slandering them. In the meantime, the Empress received the most personal and invasive information, including reports on where the Dauphine slept, how late she stayed up in the evening, the fact that she was horseback riding despite her mother’s directive not to do so (for fear that such activities might interfere with pregnancy), and even accounts of her monthly periods (which were termed ‘General Krottendorf’ after a private family joke about the General’s dour wife).

  The most pressing issue for Maria Theresa, however, remained her daughter’s inability to become pregnant. In a similar observation to that of Louis XV, the Empress noted that there must have been something wrong with the Dauphin because he did not seem to be aroused by her daughter. While royal houses all over Europe were increasing their numbers, Marie Antoinette remained childless. Finally, in 1773, after three years of marriage, the couple had what they thought was sex. Still, there were no pregnancies. Doctors puzzled over their ‘infertility’. The Empress continued to receive updates from Comte Mercy, and she continued to harangue her already very anxious daughter, instructing Marie Antoinette to use all of her energy and charm to seduce her husband.

  In a letter to Comte Mercy dated November 6, 1773, Maria Theresa wrote: ‘Voilà! Three grandchildren this year and I expect a fourth in December … as for the Dauphine … nothing … I burn with desire at this moment to see her pregnant.’ Mercy wrote to the Empress on November 12, that the pregnancy would not be as soon as she would like. In response Maria Theresa wrote that she would keep hoping. Shortly after the New Year, on January 3, 1774, the Empress reiterated her frustration with the Dauphin saying that his seeming indifference to her daughter was a mystery to her and that he should get on and do his duty.

  On May 10, 1774, King Louis XV died of smallpox. The following year, on June 11, Louis-Auguste was crowned Louis XVI at the cathedral of Reims, as French monarchs had been for hundreds of years. The nineteen-year-old King was advised by his ministers that the Seven Years War had left the French treasury in a precarious position and that in order to save the money of the realm they would need to forego an official coronation for the new Queen. This was largely an excuse, however. In truth, Louis XVI’s ministers were beginning to discuss the notion of persuading the King to divorce his childless wife and send her back to Austria. Many people were already deeply concerned by the monarch’s failure to produce an heir, though the King’s brothers, the Comte de Provence and the Comte d’Artois, second and third in line for the throne respectively, were content to see their brother remain without issue. Their cousins, the Orléans clan, descended from the younger brother of King Louis XIV, maintained that they had a superior claim to the throne, questioned their cousins’ legitimacy and were quietly amused by the royal couple’s failure to procreate.

  After the Orléans cousins failed to attend Louis XV’s funeral, King Louis XVI banished his young cousin Philippe, the Duc de Chartres, from court. Chartres – who would soon inherit his father’s title of Duc d’Orléans, placing him one step closer to the throne in the line of succession – thus began a long and personal campaign against the young King that would have dire consequences for the entire country. Young Orléans took special pleasure in a rift he had engineered between the King’s youngest brother, the teenage Comte d’Artois, and the King. Orleans, it was said, had deliberately introduced d’Artois to the world of gambling and brothels at the Palais-Royal in Paris. Louis, a sober and pious young man, strongly disapproved of the evenings of debauchery, and suspected his cousin had even more nefarious motives. Venereal diseases were rampant in the brothels of Paris and a number of the Bourbons’ relations and friends had fallen ill and had perished without issue. There would be no better way to step even closer to the throne than to render the King’s youngest brother sterile or to indirectly cause his death.

  D’Artois and the King’s other brother, the Comte de Provence, had recently married the daughters of the King of Sardinia, wh
o were regarded as being ugly and as having very poor personal hygiene. The brothers, thoroughly repulsed, initially refused to sleep with their wives. The Comte de Provence remained steadfast in his refusal but d’Artois, feeling the pressure of the dynasty upon his shoulders, soldiered through his performances with disgust but regularity for the good of France. On December 17, 1774, Marie Antoinette wrote to her mother that she was upset because the Comtesse d’Artois had become pregnant. Mercy wrote the Empress that although Marie Antoinette was behaving very kindly toward her sister-in-law, it was apparent to him that the Queen was jealous. The next day Mercy wrote again saying that Marie Antoinette had now confided her extreme pain to both the Abbé de Vermond and himself.

  The King may not have spent much time with his bride, but the Queen was never alone. Owing to a surveillance system designed to protect the virtue of every French queen since the time of the fourteenth-century monarch Philippe IV, Marie Antoinette’s every move was made in front of courtiers or in public. Even her outlandish hairdos, which took hours to construct, were concocted for public entertainment. As if at the theater, onlookers would sit for hours in the Queen’s chambers, looking on while the Queen’s hairdresser, Léonard, sculpted lavish headdresses for her to wear to any one of a number of balls she would host, night after night. On Monday night, for instance, it was masked quadrilles. Aside from the constant galas and card parties offered to amuse the courtiers, any visiting dignitary or foreign head of state was feted in a style intended to impress. The Queen’s rising, eating, daily worship and bedtime were ceremoniously acted out for public consumption. If she wanted to stroll in the gardens, she was accompanied. If she wanted a glass of water, there was a chain of people who would perform small tasks until a gloved person of honor would hand her a glass.