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

by Susan Nagel

  The Tuileries Palace briefly caught fire as angry mobs looted the royal apartments and searched for evidence against the King and Queen. Marie Antoinette had had the foresight to send to Comte Mercy in Brussels some of the 400,000 livres of the 800,000 which she had saved (out of her annual pension of 300,000 livres, the 120,000 she had received on the birth of Madame Royale, the 300,000 she had received upon the birth of the first Dauphin and the monies she had received upon the births of Louis Charles and Sophie). She had previously turned over some priceless gems to the care of the Assembly; however, many of these were subsequently looted from the Royal Treasury, including the pearls that had belonged to Anne of Austria and three fabled diamonds: the Regent, the Sancy, and the French blue diamond from which the Hope Diamond was carved. The Queen had sent her personal gems to Belgium with her hairdresser, Monsieur Léonard. The King had also taken a measure of precaution and asked the American Gouverneur Morris to send a great deal of money out of France with instructions to deliver the funds to Marie Antoinette and their children in the event of his death.

  Women on the streets who had raided the Queen’s personal effects were now mockingly adorned in her dresses and accessories. Her tiny bibelots were stolen and poissardes bragged about their spoils. Valuable objets d’art that had belonged to the kings of France for centuries disappeared. Even the royal children’s toys and schoolbooks were seized and defaced by citizens who believed that the two children were guilty of crimes against France simply by virtue of their birth.

  The royal family had been standing in the unbearably hot auditorium of the assembly hall for over twelve hours when, at last, it was decided that they would spend the night at the Couvent des Feuillants. Four rooms were readied for the royal family to sleep in until the next morning when they were to be brought back to the Assembly for another day of haranguing and abuse. Only the children could manage to eat their supper that evening. The Dauphin cried repeatedly, ‘Where is my dog?’ No one could answer him. The King was granted permission to send for Pauline de Tourzel in the hope that she might comfort his son, and she arrived at the convent at eight the following morning. Pauline recalled that Marie-Thérèse embraced her with great emotion and the words, ‘My dear Pauline, let us never separate again.’

  The Assembly decided that the royal family should now be moved to the Temple Enclosure, an ancient conglomeration comprising a chapel, a castle and a prison. Originally built by the Knights Templar in the twelfth century, it formed a small walled city. At the turn of the fourteenth century, King Philippe le Bel ordered the place to be burned to the ground along with most of the powerful Knights Templar. The men were tortured and left to burn alive; however, the majority of the buildings remained intact and became home to a succession of occupants including the Knights of Malta. Louis XVI’s youngest brother, the Comte d’Artois, acquired the property and often hosted lavish parties there. The Queen had always hated the place, however, and perhaps with some prescience, had often urged her brother-in-law to tear it down, dungeons and all. When the King was told that he was going to be moved to the Temple Enclosure, he imagined his family was going to be housed in the castle structure; the Queen guessed otherwise.

  On Monday, August 13, 1792, the King, the Queen and the children were driven through the streets of Paris through jeering crowds. The drivers grew so scared of retribution that they stopped frequently to regain their composure. At seven o’clock in the evening, the somber cortege arrived at the Temple Enclosure, which had been illuminated in anticipation of its new ‘guests’. Madame and Pauline de Tourzel, Madame de Chamilly, the King’s valet Hüe, and other servants were told that they would be allowed to remain with the family. Pauline de Tourzel recalled seeing the prison aglow, as if a great ball were going on inside. The family ate dinner and rooms were prepared for them, not in the castle, as the King had imagined, but in the smaller of two towers, as the Queen had predicted.

  Marie-Thérèse and Hüe both attested to the fact that the Princesse de Lamballe was among the royal retinue in that ‘fatal place’, as she later described it; however, the Baronne de Courtot, detailing another drama that took place far away in London, specified that the Princess did not arrive until at least one week after the incarceration of the royal family. Courtot claimed that days after the invasion of the Tuileries in August, Lamballe, still in London, received another letter dated ‘14 aout’ also from Paris, believed to be signed by the Queen. This missive was a short one, written in shaky handwriting, and pleading, ‘Come to me at once. I am in the greatest of danger.’ Without concern for her own life, Lamballe and her lady-in-waiting ‘started that same day for Cherbourg with our three serving-women and two men … We reached Paris on the 25th day of August’. The very next morning, she and the Princesse de Lamballe, who had spent the night with the Duchesse de Laiancourt ‘and was now half-distraught with terror, having with the utmost difficulty escaped from a gang of infuriated ruffians who pursued her through several streets’, decided to make their way to the Temple Prison to be with the Queen. According to her lady-in-waiting, Lamballe ‘implored me to join her in seeking refuge with the Queen in the Temple; prison walls offered better security than this mad whirlpool of a city, where bands of ravening monsters hunted down every decently dressed person they caught sight of’.

  When they arrived, a guard laughingly told them that he was happy that they had ‘saved us the trouble’ of coming to arrest them, and he brought them to see the Queen. When Marie Antoinette saw her favorite, she was stunned and asked Lamballe why she had returned to Paris. The women then all realized that the note had been a forgery. They surmised that the person who would most profit from Lamballe’s death and who had most likely been behind it was the Duc d’Orléans, smugly ensconced at the Palais-Royal. Lamballe, as the widow of the only son of the fabulously wealthy Duc de Penthièvre, would have shared in an enormous inheritance with the duke’s only other child – Orléans’s wife. Courtot recalled muttering to herself, ‘Philippe d’Orléans, this is your handiwork!’

  Among the most detailed accounts of the royal family’s detention in the Temple Prison are those penned by Marie-Thérèse and the King’s servant, Monsieur Hüe. Marie-Thérèse recalled that, at the request of the King, indecent engravings were removed from the walls of her room. However, what pained the King’s daughter more was the insulting way in which her father was being treated. The jailers called him by his first name instead of ‘Sire’ or ‘Your Majesty’. Marie-Thérèse hated one harsh jailer in particular, a man named Rocher, whom the children recognized from their capture at Varennes, and whom, she felt, took perverse pleasure in humiliating the family. She recalled that Rocher sang an offensive song around the family and would puff the smoke from his pipe right into the King’s face as he passed, knowing that the King hated the smell of tobacco.

  Hüe wrote that as the days went by the King borrowed a prodigious amount of books from the 1,400-volume library collection left by the Knights of Malta. He would read early in the morning before his family joined him in his room for breakfast at 9 a.m. According to Hüe, the Queen kept a copy of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, which she read ‘night and day’, and he wrote that the King one day, reflecting on the books around him, pointed at those by Voltaire and Rousseau and charged, ‘Those two men have been the ruin of France.’

  The Queen taught Marie-Thérèse to fix her own hair before seeing her father, and the mornings were spent en famille while the King taught the Dauphin Latin, French literature, history and geography. The Queen instructed Marie-Thérèse in Bible studies and music, and the ladies spent hours at their needlework. Hüe requested that some busts be brought from Marie-Thérèse’s drawing master, Van Blarenberghe, to enable the Princess to continue her lessons in portraiture. The revolutionary functionaries on duty at the prison did not recognize the busts as copies of famous ancient sculptures and believed them to be models of the heads of the Kings who were at war with France; they also suspected that the busts had been
used to smuggle secret messages to the King.

  Madame Elisabeth taught mathematics to both the children. When the illiterate, innumerate guards spied the children’s arithmetic, they thought that the children were writing in a secret code. The King read some Racine and Corneille to his son and when it was the Queen’s turn to read the tragedies of Racine aloud, the guards listened closely, proclaiming her ‘bloodthirsty’. At first, the family was allowed into the courtyard in the afternoons. The Dauphin played ball and quoits, and sister and brother sometimes engaged in teetotum, a spinning-top game Pauline had given the boy, and shuttlecocks. To pass the time, the King devised riddles for them all from old issues of the Mercure de France, and he and the Queen played backgammon and piquet.

  The King also taught the Dauphin a new prayer, which the boy said every night before going to bed:

  God, all-powerful, You who have created me and redeemed me. I adore you. Preserve the days of the King, my father, and those of my family. Protect us against our enemies. Give Madame de Tourzel the strength she needs to sustain herself through the pain she endures because of us.

  After the Dauphin was put to bed, the King, the Queen, Marie-Thérèse, and Madame Elisabeth would have dinner. Before retiring for the night, Marie-Thérèse would say goodnight to her father and he would kiss her hand. She would often affectionately jump on him, her arms around his neck, while he hugged her and bid her goodnight.

  Marie-Thérèse recalled that her father ‘was lodged above on the third floor of the building adjacent to the main body of the Tower; having a municipal guard in his room’. Madame Elisabeth ‘occupied a kitchen’ with Pauline de Tourzel and Madame Navarre, another servant, and the Queen was stationed ‘below in a salon with me and afterward with Madame de Lamballe’. The fact that Lamballe was ‘afterward’ may corroborate Courtot’s story that the Princess arrived at the Temple Prison at a later date and was not with the royal family at the Tuileries at the time of the invasion.

  The chaos of events makes it difficult to pinpoint the accuracy of some accounts. Again, while the Baronne de Courtot claims that she and the Princesse de Lamballe were not in Paris until the end of August, she also corroborates Hüe’s account that the royal retinue was removed from the Temple Prison and she was there when it happened.

  Hüe claimed that it was on August 19, after the French learned that the Duke of Brunswick’s armies had enjoyed some victories over the rebels, that the Princesse de Lamballe, among others in the royal entourage, was taken to the prison of La Force. Courtot described the heartrending scene on that day when the Queen and Lamballe were forced to part: ‘they literally tore my sobbing Princess from the arms of the Queen so roughly that her Majesty nearly fell. One more kiss, one last fond look, and the two friends parted never to meet again in this life.’ Courtot accompanied Lamballe and was relegated to a crowded dungeon at La Force, before being released shortly afterward. Hüe, also taken away and questioned, was permitted to return to the Temple Prison to serve his king.

  Back at the Temple, Hüe recalled that the family only learnt of events in the outside world when they were allowed to walk in the gardens where they could hear the shouts of newsboys. By this means the royal family learned that Lafayette, once the nation’s greatest hero, had been declared a traitor by the Commune – the revolutionary metropolitan government of the city of Paris – and that he had escaped for neutral Liège. Marie-Thérèse recalled that on the morning of the day of Saint Louis, August 25, she heard the revolutionaries loudly singing their new anthem ‘Ça Ira’, a song of victory by the people over the aristocrats and the clergy. Hüe was also with the royal family when they heard news of the victory of the army of princes at Verdun.

  Marie-Thérèse recalled that the King and Queen continued to be threatened in front of their children. Her brother would cry and tremble when he heard the jailers describe the ways in which they were going to torture and kill the King. Marie-Thérèse wrote that her father would respond with ‘calm and contemptuous silence’. Her mother had always maintained her dignity and poise in front of the guards, but on September 2, a three-day massacre began in the city that broke the Queen’s resolve.

  On day two of the slaughter the Princesse de Lamballe was taken from La Force on to the streets of Paris, decapitated, disemboweled and her breasts cut off. The Baronne de Courtot was convinced that the murder had been carried out on the orders of the Duc d’Orléans in order to taunt the Queen and benefit his wife. The Princess’s head was placed on one pole, her mutilated body on another. A mob bearing the two pikes then marched to the Temple Prison where the prison guards let them into the courtyard and paraded Lamballe’s head under the Queen’s window. According to Marie-Thérèse, the jailer, Rocher, shouted with joy upon seeing the head. Although the mob screamed for the Queen to appear at her window, she did not. When questioned by the King as to what was going on outside, a young officer replied: ‘Well, if you want to know, it is the head of Mme de Lamballe they wish to show you.’ The Queen was overcome with terror and Marie-Thérèse recalled that her mother cried all night.

  The following day, Hüe, who had been with the family when they learned of Lamballe’s tragic fate, was removed from the Temple Prison and placed in the jail at City Hall. As Hüe was being evicted, the King gave him a farewell token of esteem – a lock of hair, which His Majesty cut from his head himself. ‘This is the only present I can give you now,’ apologized the King as he handed it to his faithful servant. Hüe would always consider it his greatest treasure.

  Outside the jail, indiscriminate massacres continued, sometimes resulting in the deaths of children. The Commune began collecting evidence against the King at the Tuileries and at the homes of the royal family’s loyal friends and servants. Anyone who was suspected of possessing letters that had been written by the royal couple was denounced and had his or her house ransacked.

  The Queen had entered the prison with only 25 louis, a sewing kit, a small hand mirror, two tiny packets filled with locks of her children’s hair (the ones living and dead), a ring also containing locks of hair of her husband and all four of the children she bore, and portraits of the Princesse de Lamballe, and her two German childhood friends, Charlotte and Louise of Hesse. Friends of the royal family, including the British ambassador’s wife, found clandestine ways to get linens and money for provisions passed to the King and his family. Marie-Thérèse was permitted to send for some clothing, including handkerchiefs of cotton batiste, blouses, a skirt, two corsets, a percale dress, napkins, two linen caps, seven cotton batiste scarves for her neck, and gray and black stockings.

  The royalists were all hopeful that the family would soon be rescued; but even though Brunswick had had some successes in Verdun and Longwy, and French émigrés were working hard at gathering momentum abroad to rescue the King, the roads to the capital were so crowded and the progress so slow that the attempt was shortly called off. The armies of émigrés and their royalist allies were passionate about their cause, but most were inexperienced and they proceeded in unwieldy carriages with bystanders as if on parade, not in battle. In addition, the September massacres had dented their morale, allowing the French revolutionary forces to prevail. Heady with victory, on September 21 the Commune declared the monarchy and all aristocracy officially dead, and the government of France was officially renamed the National Convention. The Commune’s words resounded, plastered everywhere on posters and pamphlets. The old elite in France had been abolished, and to make their point, the Convention ordered construction workers to raise the Temple Prison walls to ‘obliterate the presence of the King’. On September 26, the King was moved into the great tower. On the 29th, all writing utensils, wax and paper were removed from all members of the royal family.

  The prison officials allowed the family to reunite with the King for dinner, but for the rest of the day the King remained in solitary confinement in the dungeon. On October 26, the Queen, Marie-Thérèse, the Dauphin and Madame Elisabeth were moved to the same tower and a r
outine much like they had had in the small tower was resumed. The family, who once presided over France’s greatest palaces, now lived in damp, dark quarters with bars on the windows and centuries of residue and filth on the walls and floors. The ground floor and second story of the tower contained offices and lodging space for the prison officials and guards. The King, the Dauphin and Cléry, who was allowed to serve him, were placed on the third floor and the women on the fourth. The fifth floor contained an open-air gallery where the family could walk as they were no longer permitted to stroll in the gardens.

  Marie-Thérèse now shared a room with her mother directly above the King’s, and similar to his in layout. She wrote that the walls of her room were covered in shabby blue and green striped wallpaper and on one wall there was a marble chimney-piece. A clock with a bronze figure of ‘Fortune’ sat on the mantle. The Queen slept in a canopied bed covered in green damask; Marie-Thérèse in a tiny bed near her mother. Cléry had requested a more comfortable bed for the teenage Princess, but his request was ignored. Cotton curtains and valances framed the windows and there was one chest of drawers, two chairs and a screen behind which the women could dress.

  Every nod, every motion, every conversation was scrutinized by the guards. The group was forced to speak loudly so that their jailers could understand their words. On November 6, after dinner, the family heard screams from the street calling for the King’s head. On November 14, the King became ill with pains and a high fever, but the officials would not permit a doctor to visit him for a week. In the meantime, the rest of the family began to exhibit similar symptoms, and the little Dauphin contracted whooping cough. When Louis Charles cried out in the night for his mother, the guards did not permit the Queen to comfort him. On December 3, the Queen requested bouillon but her cook was not allowed to prepare it, and the ailing Queen went to bed without eating.