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

by Susan Nagel

  After sunrise, the Queen, who had been denied a non-juror priest2 and refused mourning clothes, dressed in white and asked God to forgive her sins without benefit of a clergyman. The executioner arrived and bound her wrists. When she informed her guard that she needed some privacy to relieve herself, he would not consent to leave her side, claiming that his duty was to keep an eye on her at all times. Even during her final moments the Queen of France was not accorded the privacy that ordinary citizens enjoyed: Marie Antoinette suffered the humiliation of having to squat in a corner with a guard and executioner immediately nearby. She was then taken from the Conciergerie in an ordinary cart to endure the final taunts and insults of crowds lining the streets to the Place du Carrousel. Twenty-three years earlier, she had made her way in a gilded carriage from the Rhine to the Palace of Versailles, and the masses had excitedly hailed her as their beautiful Dauphine who would carry the future of France in her womb. On this day, as she made her way from the Conciergerie, near the Place Dauphine on the Île de la Cité, she symbolized the gloaming of the ancien régime – the past.

  The Queen carefully ascended the scaffold, but accidentally stepped on the executioner’s foot. ‘I did not do it on purpose,’ she reportedly said, her apology her last words on earth. At two weeks shy of her thirty-eighth birthday, Marie Antoinette was guillotined. Later that morning, the Queen’s enemies violated the grave of her beloved son, the first Dauphin, Louis Joseph and, in celebration, disinterred the boy’s remains and tossed them into a mass grave.

  Marie Antoinette’s letter never reached Madame Elisabeth. It was intercepted and given to Robespierre, and at the time, Marie-Thérèse, isolated in her cell, doors bolted, had no inkling of her mother’s death. Nor did Louis Charles. Locked in his own room with only a bell to ring for his needs, the boy was so afraid of his jailers that he avoided all contact with them, often going without food for days rather than face potential abuse. Marie-Thérèse wrote that she continued to have no knowledge of the outside world besides the announcements of passing newsboys. It was by this means that she learnt that the Duc d’Orléans, now called a traitor simply by virtue of his aristocratic bloodline, had been executed. According to eyewitnesses, the populist Duke went to the scaffold dressed lavishly and, in contrast to the King and Queen, met his end with cowardice and fear.

  By the autumn of 1793, the capricious and bloody Reign of Terror was under way. Girondists, Jacobins, Cordeliers and other factions all had to answer to the ultimate authority: the Committee for Public Safety. Determined to break with the past, the Committee established a new, revolutionary calendar. The new regime was so rancorous, so randomly brutal that, with the Law of Suspects enacted on September 17, which created a tribunal specifically to condemn to death those it found guilty of treason, it turned neighbor against neighbor, and would shortly turn against its own leaders.

  From November 25–30, the Committee debated the notion that because Marie-Thérèse contained the vile blood of the Bourbons, she too should face the ‘national razor’. Some objected to this plan because of her age. Another idea was suggested: Why not poison the girl? Robespierre, the brilliant orator known as ‘L’Incorruptible’, and one of the leaders of the Committee for Public Safety, had always been antithetic to the royal family; this time, however, Robespierre showed some sympathy for a Bourbon and devised a plan that would spare the Princess. He argued that a law should be passed ordering all girls over the age of fifteen to marry, and if they did not within six months, they would be brought to public justice. Robespierre was aware that Marie-Thérèse would be fifteen in about three weeks’ time, and he thought that if he could find a husband outside France for ‘Mademoiselle Capet’, as the Commune referred to her, he could save her. Or, in ‘an act of equality … one could marry her off with a young sans-culotte who had been wounded in the army’. One argument that even made its way to her uncle, the Comte de Provence, in exile, was that ‘the odious Robespierre’ had designs on his ‘unfortunate niece’.

  On December 28, 1793, English spies reported to their contact in Italy that the discussion of the murder of Marie-Thérèse had been tabled. Before the execution of the Queen, Madame de Staël, who had not, in the past, thought highly of Marie Antoinette, decided to write an impassioned plea for the life of the Queen and her children. Staël argued that the revolutionary government in France should allow Marie Antoinette to return to Austria, claiming that all of Europe was watching. She referred to the children as unfortunate victims, and warned that not only would France be judged harshly for its barbaric treatment of the children, but also a country that enacted such punishment was not destined for liberty.

  Unaware of the debate in France regarding her future, Marie-Thérèse felt abandoned, not least by her European cousins. Around Christmas, some two months after the Queen had gone to the scaffold, Marie-Thérèse heard repeated condemnations of her mother and assumed her still to be alive.

  The execution of Louis XVI and his Queen had done nothing to assuage the intense enmity felt for the aristocracy in France. The bloodletting merely increased and spread from Paris throughout the country. Now La Terreur reigned. Young children parroted their parents and were taught that the royal children were wicked, and indoctrinated into believing that Marie-Thérèse and her little brother were in league with the devil. One girl, a bourgeoise named Michelet whose father served as a guard at the Temple Prison, wrote to a friend that:

  The young princess, despite the charm of her age … is more Austrian than her mother … her looks are filled with pride and scorn … The nature of these crowned persons is truly different than our own. They are without soul.3

  In the tower, sixteen-year-old Marie-Thérèse prayed for deliverance. She and her aunt were refused ointments for sores, caps to keep their heads warm, and were even accused of making counterfeit money.

  On January 19, 1794, Marie-Thérèse heard a great deal of noise in the prison tower and wrote that it sounded as if things were being dragged. When she peeked through a keyhole and saw a great many large parcels she thought that perhaps preparations were being made for her brother to leave the prison. She imagined that a German prisoner of war or someone else was to take his place, and in her mind she baptized the unknown prisoner ‘Melchisedech’, after the biblical figure who had brought bread and wine to a victorious Abraham. She found out, however, that it was the jailer, Simon, who was moving out and she later described the decision to leave her ailing little brother alone and without anyone to care for him as ‘barbaric’.

  By spring, the Terror had turned inward. On March 24, Hébert, the man who had perpetrated so many evils against Louis Charles, was sent to the guillotine for having become an outspoken critic of the powerful Robespierre faction within the Committee for Public Safety. The Committee itself then turned its attentions to Madame Elisabeth, Marie-Thérèse’s ‘second mother’. On March 29, Madame Elisabeth petitioned the jailers for clean underwear for her niece. They responded that if she wanted clean underwear, she should wash it herself; the nation was sick of her demands. On May 9, just as Marie-Thérèse and Madame Elisabeth were going to bed, there was a loud knock at the door. Officials ordered Madame Elisabeth downstairs without Marie-Thérèse. The two kissed goodbye and Madame Elisabeth told her niece to have courage, firmness, always to have faith in God, to practice the principles of the religion given to her by her parents and to follow the last instructions that the late King and Queen had wished her to follow.

  Marie-Thérèse was once again left without information. She had no idea what had happened to her aunt. Much later she would learn that within a few hours of their separation, Madame Elisabeth, just thirty years old, had gone to the scaffold with the same dignity as her parents. At the foot of the guillotine, the women with whom Madame Elisabeth shared a cart asked to kiss her before they died. The executioners then made her aunt wait in the cart until last so that she could watch the execution of the other women.

  Madame Elisabeth had assisted in raising her nie
ce toward the goal that, as a Bourbon princess destined always to be in the public eye, she should serve as a model for all women. Madame Elisabeth could have left the country with her aunts or brothers; however, she chose instead to stay with the King and his children. Marie-Thérèse recognized her young aunt’s sacrifice and remembered her as pious, good, gentle and modest. ‘It is said that we resembled each other in face: I feel that I have her nature,’ she once wrote. She acknowledged that her aunt ‘considered me and cared for me as her daughter, and I, I honored her as a second mother’.

  The only two members of the royal family now left in the prison, separated by walls, a staircase and rebel guards, and unaware of each other’s condition, were the two children, Louis Charles, who had just turned nine, and his one-time protectress, his sister, Marie-Thérèse.

  Chapter XI

  Sole Survivor

  Before her execution, Madame Elisabeth had instructed Marie-Thérèse that if she were to be left alone in the prison she should ask for a female companion. The guards were often drunk, and rumors abounded that the young girl had already been raped in prison.1 Marie-Thérèse obeyed her aunt, but she was denied anything and everything she asked for. She asked the guards where her aunt was and received the sarcastic reply ‘getting some air’. She asked to be taken from the prison to see her mother, and was met with silence. She begged to see her brother, but was denied contact due to an official order from the Committee of Public Safety.

  Two days after Madame Elisabeth’s death, Marie-Thérèse received a surprise visitor. A man appeared in her cell. Neither Marie-Thérèse nor many of the guards knew his identity; his visit was obviously a secret. She wrote that the officials with him showed him great deference and she believed the man who looked at her with such insolence to be none other than Robespierre. He examined her reading materials and her cell and then left. Onlookers wrote of Marie-Thérèse’s composure during the visit. She had informed the prison officials that she would not speak one word to her guards or visitors unless they told her the whereabouts of her mother and aunt, and she made no exception for this particular visitor. Instead of speaking, she handed him a note addressed to the Convention, unaware that the Committee of Public Safety was now in control. The note read: ‘My brother is sick. I have written to the Convention for permission to nurse him. The Convention has not yet responded. I reiterate my demand.’

  English spies recorded that on the evening of May 23, 1794, Robespierre returned to the prison, this time to kidnap Marie-Thérèse’s brother. It was claimed this was to test palace security and that he brought the boy back to his cell a day later. According to the spies, the Committee of Public Safety had no knowledge of this escapade, if it indeed occurred at all.

  Each morning, Marie-Thérèse swept her room and ate her breakfast quietly. Government officials refused to supply her with new books to read and she had grown bored of the ones she had: Voyages by La Harpe, and a prayer book, which she had read over and over. She no longer knew the names of the people who brought her food, and she no longer spoke with anyone unless a formal interrogation was demanded, and in that case she answered in as few words as possible.

  Louis Charles also suffered alone. His sheets were left unchanged for months and he remained in the same clothes for over a year. His excrement remained in his room; no one bothered to remove it. He was severely light deprived and suffered from rickets. For a long while Marie-Thérèse had heard his cries for his mother and his screams when he was beaten. He was permitted neither fresh air nor medical care and eventually he lost the ability to walk.

  Marie-Thérèse was completely isolated not only from her brother but also from the events of the Revolution still ravaging France. Cut off from news, she measured the political winds – a change of power or a change of mood – by the arrival of new officials in her room. She also knew that something significant had occurred if she heard the beat of drums and the ringing of church bells. She knew nothing, for instance, of the insurrection of royalists in the Vendée. In one of the bloodiest massacres in history, over 100,000 men, women and children died in that western region of France when the local citizens took up arms to defend their faith and, by extension, the monarchy, against the Revolution.

  On June 10, the Law of 22 Prairial (the date of the revolutionary calendar) was enacted. This law empowered every citizen to turn in any person believed to be an ‘enemy of the Revolution’. This draconian ordinance limited the ability of the accused to defend themselves, guaranteeing almost certain death merely on the word of one’s neighbor or enemy. One month later, on July 27 (the revolutionary date 9 Thermidor) the Committee of Public Safety ordered the execution of Robespierre without trial. Among the accusations hurled against ‘L’Incorruptible’ by his political enemy, Barère, was the charge that he had plans to marry Marie-Thérèse and place himself on the throne. On the morning of July 28, Robespierre and more than twenty of his comrades were guillotined. Found among Robespierre’s possessions and under his mattress after his death were some very personal mementos of the late Queen – a lock of hair that Marie Antoinette had cut from Louis Charles’s head, locks of the Queen’s own hair, and the last letter that Marie Antoinette had written to her sister-in-law, Madame Elisabeth, on the morning of her execution – stolen as grisly tokens and proof of his own power. One day after his execution, the Dauphin’s sadistic former warden, Antoine Simon, was also guillotined.

  Paul François Jean Nicolas Barras, a soldier and Jacobin nobleman who had risen to prominence in the Convention, had, with the help of his young protégé, Napoleon Bonaparte, successfully suppressed insurrections in the south of France, fighting loyalist and English forces, most notably at the siege of Toulon where Napoleon had been artillery commander. Barras was subsequently appointed Commander of the Army in Paris. Napoleon, meanwhile, showed that he was equally skillful in the conquest of women when, upon returning to the capital, he stole Barras’s mistress, the widow Josephine de Beauharnais. Barras showed little animosity toward his henchman for his actions and continued to support his advancement. Barras openly explained to friends that he was, in fact, quite relieved because Madame Josephine had been proving to be an expensive distraction.

  Marie-Thérèse recalled that at six o’clock on the morning of July 28 (10 Thermidor) she heard the guards’ cry to arms, the drums beat, the gates to the prison open then close and shortly afterwards the bolts of her brother’s cell door being drawn back. She dressed hurriedly. It was Barras. He had decided to visit the royal children in the prison. Despite his active participation among the Jacobins and in the Revolution, Barras respectfully addressed the children as ‘Prince’ and ‘Madame’. Barras recorded in his memoirs the pitiable conditions he witnessed. On entering the little boy’s chamber, he reported that he could barely breathe owing to the noxious smell. There he found the nine-year-old lying in a tiny bed, little more than a cradle, in the middle of an intolerably filthy room. The boy was drowsy and weak and he kept glancing nervously at his jailers. When Barras asked to speak with Louis Charles, the boy said that he was fine and that he just wanted to sleep. It was clear that the child did not want to say anything critical of his conditions for fear of retribution. Barras next climbed the stairway to see Madame Royale, whose room he found in a better state. When Barras questioned Marie-Thérèse she refused to answer him.

  Barras ordered that the children be allowed to walk every day in the courtyard in order to get some exercise and fresh air. He reported to the Committee of Public Safety that the boy needed to see a doctor. His request was ignored. However, three days after his visit, a new guard – a twenty-four-year-old man from Martinique named Laurent – appeared in Marie-Thérèse’s room and asked if she needed anything. He addressed her politely and removed a bed from her room to give to her brother, whose bug-infested bed was to be disposed of. She learned that a new government, with Barras and his group at the helm, was responsible for the more humane treatment.

  Laurent too was overwhelmed by the ste
nch and horrific sight of the boy’s room. Louis Charles lay inert on the cot-bed, his skin green-gray, his stomach bloated, his eyes enormous and his face hollow from malnutrition. He had black, blue and yellow welts all over his body and his nails were excessively long. Laurent immediately ordered that the child should be bathed, the vermin that covered his body removed and all the furnishings and curtains in the room removed and burnt. He asked for there to be an inquiry into the Dauphin’s condition and that very same day members of the Committee of Public Safety came to inspect the boy’s cell. Unlike Simon, who had scornfully called the boy ‘Capet’, Laurent always referred to him as ‘Monsieur Charles’. Occasionally, Laurent would carry Louis Charles up to the tower gallery so that he could look at birds and trees and stars. The quality of the prison food did not improve, however, and Louis Charles remained too debilitated by malnourishment and other ailments to walk by himself. While talk of liberty pervaded France, the two children remained cruelly incarcerated.

  One child vanquished; one defiant. Marie-Thérèse still refused to speak with anyone but she sensed that Laurent might be more willing to give her information about her mother and aunt, and so she finally decided to speak with him. He was, however, under strict orders not to divulge the fates of Marie Antoinette or Madame Elisabeth. At all other times, Laurent followed orders but performed his duties with kindness and compassion. Previous guards had taken away all candles and matchboxes from their royal charges, leaving them to endure long periods in darkness. One day, after the powder magazine at nearby Grenelle exploded, terrifying Marie-Thérèse, Laurent returned her box of matches and candles to her. Now, noises in the dark would be less frightening.