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

by Susan Nagel

  At the moment of her birth, guns had blasted, heralding her arrival. She was the cynosure of thousands of people on a daily basis. Every person in her presence, aside from her parents, was required to bow or curtsy at her feet. From the moment she could walk, all within reach would kiss the border of her gown. As a little girl she attended state events where, in a powdered wig and formal dress, she was seated near her mother on a raised platform in full view of foreign potentates and dignitaries, the entire European aristocracy, the clergy and the people of France. The Comte de la Ferronnays recalled that Madame Royale as a young girl once asked his sister, Félicie, if she had ever seen the Princess in her grand panier – the extremely wide and heavily weighted hooped skirts worn at court. Félicie responded that she had not. According to de la Ferronnays, Marie-Thérèse sighed gravely and advised, ‘Well, come tomorrow to the King’s Mass and there you will see.’ As the grand panier weighed as much as she did, Marie-Thérèse was not at all happy having to spend hours in the massive costume.

  It was a singular existence with very stringent protocol. On ordinary days, rising, dining and bed times were all ceremonial events with designated procedures and parades of servants, foodstuffs and accoutrements. Many of these rituals dated from the Middle Ages and served to demonstrate deference to the deified Most Christian King of France and his family. At noon every day, the entire royal family attended Mass in the two-story marble Palace Chapel escorted by equerries, pages and officers of the guard. On Sundays, the ritual was repeated with even more splendor. All attending were expected to be attired in their finest clothes while the King’s extended family proceeded to the chapel accompanied by the music of an orchestra.

  Madame de la Tour du Pin reported that the program of activities – the changes of clothing and rigid routine – was excruciatingly exhausting. Holidays and days of feasting proved even more tiresome and Madame Royale was required to partake of the pageantry for what seemed to be endless hours. Soldiers and noblemen received their decorations,1 each honor given great import; each foreign ambassador afforded his speech. These tributes and gatherings were enacted at the half-a-dozen palaces in which the royal family lived – Compiègne, Fontainebleau, Versailles, Saint-Cloud, Marly, Meudon. Each royal palace had its own history, architecture, furniture, tapestry, and style and color of livery – and its own set of inconveniences and rules – and wherever the King, Queen and their children went, the entire court and its trappings followed.

  At Versailles, the children’s quarters opened onto the Orangerie gardens whose spectacular fountains and gilded statues provided the morning panorama. One monthly account from the 1780s shows that among the orders commissioned for Madame Royale were eight dozen white gloves, three dozen pairs of dog-skin mittens, twelve bottles of lavender, twenty bottles of wine spirits, twenty-two pots of pomade, eighteen pots of powder and untold orders for ribbons and colored taffetas. Against this backdrop of unparalleled luxury the royal children received their academic and religious lessons and played their childhood games. While ushers, silver cleaners, hairdressers, valets, porters, laundresses and others who served the Children of France observed the children in their natural, private moments, this freedom and innocence was abruptly curtailed whenever they were asked to perform before the eyes of France.

  The Queen noticed a duality in the personality of her firstborn child -brought about, she believed, by the demands of her divided life: Madame Royale was acutely attuned to duty, formality and protocol, but she flourished when allowed to be a child and act her age. Those simple moments were mostly private ones. Sometimes very early in the morning when a chambermaid would bring the Queen a basket of fresh linen for the day, Marie-Thérèse, acting the pixy, would sneak beside the servant into her mother’s room in order to spend time alone with the Queen before the usual crowds of people came to absorb her attention. The King, who rose before eight in the morning and worked near the window of his study, had no time to escape the crowds of people once his official rising ceremony – the lever – was under way at 11.30 a.m. and his courtiers were admitted. In the 1780s, the royal household employed four times as many people as the central government. The Children of the King had to compete with musicians, librarians, pages, equerries, falconers, food staff, military personnel, clergy and foreign ministers for a moment of their busy parents’ time.

  Like her mother, Marie-Thérèse sometimes chafed at life at Versailles, and Marie Antoinette sympathetically and lovingly dubbed her daughter ‘Mousseline Sérieuse’ – ‘serious muslin’ – an oxymoronic appellation. On the one hand, Marie-Thérèse looked light, bright and breezy, like muslin -blonde, fair (almost transparent) skinned. She laughed and played gaily, even robustly, in the gardens at the Petit Trianon, and at her mother’s Hameau, the whimsically constructed farmhouse with its very own menagerie and chicken run, where the Queen and her chosen company would play at being peasants – although their milk pans were designed by Sevres. On the other hand, frequent pomp and pageantry took its toll on a young girl who, dressed in formal gowns and uncomfortable wigs, often appeared glum, grumpy and humorless in the presence of grown-ups. Seeing her daughter’s demeanor, Marie Antoinette worried that her little ‘Mousseline Sérieuse’ was in fact missing out on the carefree childhood that she herself had enjoyed in Vienna. As a treat one afternoon, the Queen arranged for a swan-shaped sleigh to take Marie-Thérèse for a ride around a park, a gesture that delighted the Princess and one that softened her heart considerably toward her mother.

  The author and statesman, François-René de Chateaubriand, described her as proud and beautiful in the nobility of her rank and in the innocence of a young child. Citing Guirlande de Julie, he wrote that she seemed, to him, ‘like the orange blossom’.2 No one dared utter but the highest praise and compliments in the presence of Madame Royale. She was flattered and fawned over by all, and she felt herself to be unique and remarkable. One day the Queen saw a lovely child at court around the same age as Marie-Thérèse. (The little girl, named Julie Bernard, would later become Madame Récamier, famous for her beauty and her liaison with François-René de Chateaubriand.) The Queen was so enchanted with the child that she sent her off to the nursery to play with Madame Royale. When the girl was introduced to Madame Royale, the Princess was decidedly frosty, annoyed that her mother found another little girl worthy of praise, and even more annoyed to be compared with a ‘commoner’.

  Many negative accounts portray Madame Royale as a spoilt and impossible brat, haughty and unkind; however, a deeper reading shows a strong-willed, intelligent and precocious child, whose patience was frequently tested as she was forced to live and perform in an adult world of unrelenting pomp and circumstance. The Baronne d’Oberkirch was a visitor at Versailles in the 1780s. In her memoirs she recounts that she had offered kind and obsequious words to the girl telling her how pretty she looked. Marie-Thérèse answered rudely that she thought the woman had displayed great audacity to speak to her. When sous governess Madame de Mackau gently corrected her, Madame Royale extended her tiny hand for the Baroness to kiss and then curtsyed to display good manners. The Baroness, who thought the little girl resembled the Queen, was charmed. In her memoirs, she reported that the girl was ‘a miracle of beauty, spirit, precocious dignity’, recalling that on one occasion, Madame Royale asked if the name Oberkirch was a German name and the lady replied ‘no’, she was from Alsace. ‘Oh, that is better! I would not like to like foreigners,’ replied the young Madame Royale. Madame Royale’s sous governess recalled one day, after having instructed the nine-year-old Princess on Plutarch and the Stoics, she accidentally stepped hard on the girl’s foot. Marie-Thérèse said nothing. That evening, the governess noticed that the Princess’s foot was bruised with dried blood on it. She asked her charge why she had not complained, and Marie-Thérèse replied: ‘At the moment when you hurt me and I was in pain, it would have pained you more to know that you hurt me.’

  Another time, Madame Royale stunned the Abbé de Vermond and all with
in earshot when, informed of the very good news that the Queen had not died after a bad fall from her horse, Madame Royale remarked that if her mother had died, she would be free to do what she liked. Like any child resentful of grown-ups controlling her life, Marie-Thérèse responded with the childish frankness that lacked any guile.

  Though the Queen understood that as the one implementing correction and discipline she was bound to be the less favorite of the parents, she was nonetheless determined to provide her daughter with some lessons in humility. Every Sunday, Marie Antoinette arranged for her daughter to host dances for any child, not just the children of the nobility, who arrived properly dressed. Madame Royale was also encouraged to write homilies on the evils of ‘the airs of grandeur’ and ‘the virtues of affability’, use her needlecraft skills to make socks for the poor and to offer some of her own allowance money to the poor. One New Year’s Day, expecting her usual presents, Marie-Thérèse and her brothers arrived at the Queen’s sitting room where all of the newest dolls and mechanical toys were spread out for what they thought was their choice. The Queen, however, informed her children that the toys were only theirs to look at. As it had been a very bad winter, and other children were starving, she wanted her own children to understand why they should not receive any toys that year. She explained that the money she would have spent on purchasing the toys was instead going to buying necessities for other children. The toys were all wrapped up and returned. The startling lesson, at a time when Marie-Thérèse was old enough to comprehend the example of sacrifice, guided her throughout her life and later, Marie-Thérèse would be known for her kindness to others.

  Another of the Queen’s ideas was to take Marie-Philippine de Lam-briquet to the castle every day as a playmate for Madame Royale. Madame Royale was instructed to take turns waiting table on her new friend, whom the Queen re-named ‘Ernestine’ after the heroine of a popular novel by Madame Riccoboni. Ernestine went home to her parents every evening until her mother died on April 30, 1788, at which time the Queen adopted her and brought her to stay at Versailles. The two little girls, who looked very much alike, lived alongside one another as sisters. All legal documents refer to the girl as the daughter of Philippine de Lambriquet but do not include the mention of Jacques, who, by the end of 1788, had been promoted to serve on the staff of the King. Ernestine received the same education as Marie-Thérèse, and the Queen spared no expense. She happily paid for additional tutorial services by A. M. Gattescky, master of languages, to teach the ten-year-old Italian and geography.

  On November 9, 1788, the King signed a formal document giving Ernestine, ‘in consideration of the services of her deceased mother’, a pension of 12,000 livres. The accounting records of Versailles showed staggeringly high purchase orders for the child’s comfort and pleasure.3 Fine furniture, a pianoforte, the most expensive candles, games, books, satin dresses and the white Bourbon feathers for her hair, taffetas, gloves, and powders created a gilded childhood for this daughter of a chambermaid. When the royal family traveled to their other palaces, Ernestine went with them. The Duchesse de Polignac treated her as if she were another royal child. Those on less intimate terms with the royal family referred to Ernestine as ‘the girl who is always with Madame Royale’. She stood, slept and grew up side by side with her best friend, her putative half-sister, Marie-Thérèse, and the two girls, inseparable, enjoyed their similarities. They appeared, almost as a decorative ensemble, with the Queen at the theater, at military spectacles, and at Mass. And when the royal family eventually faced doom, the Queen seemed as frantic for the safety of Ernestine as she was for her own children. ‘What will become of us is uncertain, but… never forget that Ernestine is my daughter,’ Marie Antoinette once told sous governess Madame de Soucy, and the Queen added that she and Ernestine ‘would love each other for eternity’.

  Although Madame Royale could be impudent, and impatient, she was also extremely caring and kind-hearted, showing great tenderness toward Ernestine, Louis Charles, her maiden aunts, and, of course, the King. On June 29, 1786, when the King arrived home from a trip, Marie-Thérèse ran to the balcony shouting, ‘Papa! Papa!’ Carrying one brother and dragging the other behind her, the trio waved and screamed as the King leapt out of his carriage, bounded up the stairs and rushed to lift his daughter in the air. On December 11, 1787, Marie Antoinette wrote to her friend, the Hereditary Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, that Marie-Thérèse had had a mild case of the measles and that the Queen had spent three weeks with her daughter while the child recovered. The Queen remarked with pleasure in the letter that her daughter had become quite ‘a person’ and that, despite her infirmity, she had been ‘a very nice companion’.

  Although she was expected to behave in a manner beyond her years, Marie-Thérèse was, of course, still a child. She was not at all privy to her parents’ private thoughts and plans concerning her future, despite the fact that her uncle, the Comte de Provence, would later assert otherwise. During the 1780s, she was innocent of the fact that her place and position as the heiress to the legacy was the cause of infighting among the different branches of the Bourbon family. The deaths of her baby sister and aunt and an awareness of growing tensions around her, however, affected her deeply. Madam Campan wrote of Madame Royale’s fear of a man named Castelnaux from Bordeaux who was obsessed with the Queen. The pale and sinister-looking Castelnaux fantasized that he was the Queen’s lover and stalked Marie Antoinette and her children. He would appear at the Petit Trianon when the children were in the gardens with their mother, and at Versailles when the Queen had card parties. He would travel to Fontainebleau to be the first to greet the Queen when she descended from her carriage, and he would arrive at the theater to stare at Her Majesty whenever she attended a performance. Although he made many courtiers nervous, the Queen, anxious for her children’s safety, charmed him into docility and chose to treat him as a naughty schoolboy.

  There were those who were certainly not as fanatically attached to the Queen and, in fact, her detractors became as frightening and insidious a presence to Madame Royale. Unlike other children, Marie-Thérèse was very often included in her parents’ social outings, and she became acutely aware of the growing animosity toward her mother. By the late 1780s, more and more courtiers were openly expressing dissatisfaction with their Queen and what they perceived to be insulting behavior toward the majority of those who were not among her intimate circle. Instead, such courtiers began spending more time in Paris, enjoying the gaiety of the theater, the opera and dinner parties. When the Queen – who actually agreed with their notion that there was much more fun to be had in Paris -took Marie-Thérèse to Paris to attend the theater, not for publicity, but for the little girl’s enjoyment, the public vociferously criticized Marie Antoinette for exposing the daughter of the King to ‘the common people’.

  At the end of July 1788, Marie-Thérèse, usually the picture of good health, suffered a severe fever. The Queen, frantic with worry, spent two nights awake by her daughter’s side; the King joined them for one of the nights, he too staying awake and keeping vigil the entire time. Marie Antoinette wrote to her brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, that their daughter’s sweetness and stoicism in bearing up to her illness made her and the King ‘weep’.

  Marie-Thérèse recovered in time to meet the envoys of Tippoo Sahib, King of Mysore, India. Their exotic appearance with turbaned slaves in tow fascinated the entire court. In August, the foreign guests were treated to fountain spectacles, rides in barouches and a formal ceremony in the Salon d’Hercule during which Marie-Thérèse sat by her parents’ side and watched in amazement as the Indians made presentations to her father wearing native headdress and suits made of Moroccan leather. The easterners had never seen women in décolletage, and the French court had never seen anything like them. The Queen was so dazzled that she commissioned Madame Tussaud to sculpt them in wax to immortalize their visit. This would prove to be the last state dinner hosted by King Louis XVI and his Queen.

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p; Although Marie Antoinette appeared to radiate excitement and enthusiasm, in private she was in great anguish. The Dauphin’s health was rapidly declining. He had become a pitiable little boy who had grown a hunchback and had trouble breathing. In early 1789, the decision had been made to move him to the royal palace at Meudon, the official residence of the Dauphin of France. Situated on an elevation, the air at Meudon was believed to have therapeutic properties. The castle was close enough for the King and Queen to visit, yet it was a world away from the hectic court life. To spare the King and Queen, the doctors told his parents that he was simply teething. It was, of course, untrue, and as she told her dearest friends and family, the Queen admitted to them and to herself that she knew her son was dying. The Dauphin himself understood that he was not getting better, and he would frequently state so, adding to his parents’ already unimaginable heartache. For his seventh birthday, on October 22, 1788 – the ‘age of reason’ when his education was transferred from a governess to a male tutor – there had been a great celebration at Versailles. Among the many presents the Dauphin received from courtiers and family members were jeweled animals. His favorite present, however, was a movable gold and enamel swan given to him by his mother. When, barely a few months after the party, he was taken to Meudon, his servants packed a few of his toys but forgot to pack this particular toy, so precious to him. Louis Joseph insisted that they wait until it was found, and when it was not, he overheard someone remark that it was, indeed, a bad omen. From that day forth, the boy believed that he would languish. His sister, who had already mourned the death of one younger sibling, braced herself for his death by clinging to her other little playmate, Louis Charles. Although they were over six years apart, Marie-Thérèse determined to protect him at all costs, and she kept her baby brother constantly at her side.