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

by Susan Nagel

  Marie-Thérèse, captive for so long and so unused to kindness, had grown genuinely fond of and emotionally dependent on Madame de Chanterenne and now referred to her as ‘my dear Renète’. When she was not with her, the teenager would pen little notes and rhyming couplets to her guardian telling her how much she missed her: ‘Qui près de moi dans ces moments/Revient adoucir mes tourments?’ – ‘Who is near me in these moments/Returns to soothe my torments?’

  On August 17, the Gazette de France reported that Marie-Thérèse still did not know of the fate of her mother, aunt and brother. On August 31, the Journal de Paris reported the same information; however, by that time, the situation had changed. In the latter part of August, Madame de Chanterenne, unable to stand her friend’s torment any longer, broke the news to Marie-Thérèse. One by one, as she told the girl that each member of her family was dead, Marie-Thérèse emitted sobs of anguish and pain. Renée de Chanterenne then wrote to the Committee of Public Safety begging their pardon and explaining that she had not been able to bear the inhumanity of keeping such important information from the girl.

  In early September, the Committee at last allowed Madame de Tourzel, Pauline and the elderly Madame Mackau to visit Marie-Thérèse in prison. Madame de Tourzel had anxiously prepared herself to tell Marie-Thérèse that her family was dead until informed by Renée de Chanterenne that Marie-Thérèse had already been told. Madame de Tourzel took an immediate dislike to the Princess’s ‘companions’. She thought de Chanterenne too coarse and unfit to be in the royal Princess’s company, and when Gomin stopped her from looking at the prison register she wondered what he was trying to hide. Marie-Thérèse hugged Pauline and her mother fondly. She told them of the last time she saw her father before he died, and the women all cried together. She then showed them the room in which her brother had died. Pauline was impressed by how strong Marie-Thérèse remained throughout and thought the girl resembled all three of her parents – the King, the Queen, and her ‘second mother’, Madame Elisabeth. Marie-Thérèse revealed to her old friends that she had scribbled on her cell wall:

  I am the unhappiest of creatures. She can obtain no news of her Mother, nor be reunited to her, though she has asked it a thousand times. Live, my good mother! Whom I love well, but of whom I can hear no tidings. O, my father! Watch over me from heaven above. O, my God! Forgive those who have made my family die.

  On the wall of her late brother’s empty room, the women saw that he had written in charcoal an unfinished message to his mother, which read ‘Maman, je vous pr…’ – ‘Mummy, I beg you/promise you …’ On another wall, he had drawn a flower.

  Madame de Tourzel, Pauline and Madame de Mackau wept as they envisioned the sadness experienced by the King and his family within the walls of the Temple Prison. De Tourzel asked her how she had withstood the hardships of her incarceration, to which the Princess replied: ‘Without religion, it would have been impossible. It was my sole resource and the only consolation that assuaged my heart.’ She explained that her feelings of trust for Madame de Chanterenne and Gomin were natural ones given her situation because having been treated so horrifically for so long she would love anyone who showed her kindness. After having seen something of the misery in which Marie-Thérèse had lived the ladies were astonished when the Princess confessed to them that she still loved her country and did not hold the French responsible for her plight.

  Madame de Tourzel then broke the news that Marie-Thérèse would shortly be leaving France to live with her mother’s family in Vienna and that Franz II had agreed that she accompany her. Marie-Thérèse expressed relief that her incarceration was coming to an end but explained that she would rather have stayed in the country where her family had died, arguing that it would have been better to share in their deaths than to live ‘condemned to cry’. She added that if she had to leave France, she wanted to join her father’s aunts in Rome. She bore no affection for her Austrian family, who she felt had abandoned her mother.

  Madame de Tourzel wrote to the new King, Louis XVIII, of her visit. He responded that he would like the former governess to present an idea to Marie-Thérèse. The Princess already suspected that her trip to Vienna might culminate in her being married to Franz II’s brother, the handsome Archduke Karl. Louis XVIII, as her sovereign, her ‘father’, and her uncle, wanted her to marry his nephew and presumptive heir to the throne, the Duc d’Angoulême. He asked de Tourzel to tell Marie-Thérèse that this union would have been what her parents had wanted. Marie-Thérèse considered obedience to His Majesty as her primary duty and although she could not remember her parents ever suggesting such a thing, from that time forth she would say that she would marry no other man than the one her uncle had chosen for her.

  Madame de Tourzel did not want to jeopardize the extradition to Vienna or her own place among the Princess’s entourage, so she proceeded delicately, acting as the go-between for the King’s emissaries and the Princess. The King thought it important that Marie-Thérèse bring herself up to date with political events and so piles of pamphlets and newspapers were brought in to the prison under cover. And as soon as she was allowed paper and pencil, Marie-Thérèse began her memoir of her time in the Temple Prison. She also wrote poetry, usually creating verses filled with affection for Renète and expressing how grateful she was to the woman who was able to restore to her the simple pleasures so long denied.

  The royal family’s former courtiers would arrive at the Temple Prison to visit Marie-Thérèse at noon and depart at eight in the evening. On one occasion they brought a ring made for her by the Marquis de Paroy. Apparently, Marie-Thérèse had asked him to create a ring similar to the one he had made for her mother, with images of her husband and children engraved on it. Paroy asked Pauline to measure Marie-Thérèse’s finger using a ring of her own, and happily fashioned one for the teenage girl. Marie-Thérèse was thrilled with the ring and hoped to thank him in person soon.

  One day, Marie-Thérèse placed a small piece of paper in Pauline de Tourzel’s hand. Pauline opened it as soon as she got back to her accommodation. It read, ‘I will be attached to you for life.’ On other occasions Marie-Thérèse gave Pauline some very personal mementos – the little backgammon set that Louis Charles had played with, and the gold, enamel and amber watch and chain that her mother had given her. The watch had formerly belonged to her grandmother, Maria Theresa, and was the one the Empress had given ‘Maria Antonia’ upon her departure from Vienna.

  All through September, visits from her friends continued. On October 5, 1795 (Vendémiaire 13), there was a mutiny in Paris of pro-monarchy sympathizers that was suppressed by Barras and Napoleon but which, once again, resulted in a change of government and a change in the conditions under which Marie-Thérèse was held. After the insurrection was put down, the Directory, headed by a group of five men including Barras, was formed. On November 8, officials of the new government arrested Madame de Tourzel after she was found to have letters from Louis XVIII in her possession. When Franz II learned that Madame de Tourzel had been working in concert with Louis XVIII he decided to reverse his decision and bar the former governess from entering Austria.

  Marie-Thérèse was asked to submit names of people whom she would find suitable as alternative traveling companions. Marie-Thérèse suspected that Renète would never be acceptable to the Austrians because ‘the Republic’ had appointed her. Nonetheless, Madame de Chanterenne wrote three letters to the Directory and two to the Minister of the Interior, Pierre Bénézech, requesting that she accompany the Princess to Vienna. Marie-Thérèse personally asked for Monsieur and Madame Hüe and her aunt Elisabeth’s lady-in-waiting, Madame de Sérent, although she did not know if the latter had survived the Terror. She also suggested that if the Committee required a guard to accompany her, then Gomin would be acceptable to her. Another on the Princess’s list was Madame de Mackau, but Mackau, at over seventy years of age, was simply too frail for the trip. Ultimately the Directory chose someone not on the Princess’s list: Madam
e de Mackau’s daughter, Madame de Soucy. Marie-Thérèse, like her mother, did not especially like Madame de Soucy and when she learned that de Soucy was permitted a maid for the trip, while she was not, she protested. De Soucy was also allowed to bring along a son, which Marie-Thérèse also found presumptuous.

  In November, the Austrian minister Degelmann wrote to Bacher that Franz II had personally requested that the Princess’s childhood playmate, Ernestine de Lambriquet, accompany Marie-Thérèse to Vienna and Bacher forwarded that wish to the French Minister of the Interior. Bénézech claimed that this was not possible as he had no idea where the girl was. Madame de Soucy knew exactly where she was, after all she had been instructed by the Queen to take care of her ‘daughter’. We do not know if Ernestine was among the friends who visited Marie-Thérèse in the tower prison, but we do know that she had been kept in hiding by the Mackau family from the date of the invasion of the Tuileries Palace in August 1792.

  The two sides of the exchange tried to keep the route of Marie-Thérèse’s journey from Paris to Vienna a secret and disseminated misinformation to that effect. The Prince de Gavre, chosen by the Emperor to meet Marie-Thérèse in Switzerland, was well aware that Louis XVIII had his men positioned to snatch his niece: the Prince de Condé, erroneously believing that Marie-Thérèse would follow the same route in reverse that her mother had taken as a new bride, was waiting in Germany. Franz II believed that the Spanish King might also try the same thing and that there were others who might try to kill the Princess.

  On December 4, La Gazette Nationale reported that Marie-Thérèse had left France the previous month. According to the newspaper, a communiqué dated November 23 from Basel stated that ‘the daughter of Louis XVI is expected tomorrow’ and that she was already on her way from Belfort. The story, however, was incorrect and premature.

  Meanwhile, the Directory had been taking great pains to create a lavish trousseau for Marie-Thérèse to underscore the impression that the teenager had been treated well. While the couturiers were putting the finishing touches to the much-discussed wardrobe, the actual plan of escape was hatched. It was decided that, because of the dangers of transporting a Bourbon across France, Marie-Thérèse would travel incognito as a girl named ‘Sophie’. Madame de Soucy, Gomin, and a soldier named Méchin, who was to pose as ‘Sophie’s’ father, were to travel with her in the same carriage. The party was afraid that Coco would bark and draw attention to the travelers, so they agreed to send him in another carriage with Monsieur Hüe, a servant named Monsieur Baron, Meunier the cook, Madame de Soucy’s son and her maid.

  At 11.30 in the evening on December 18, Marie-Thérèse hugged Renète de Chanterenne goodbye and handed her a batch of papers, her account of her life in the Temple Prison, which she wanted her to keep safe in the event that she did not survive her journey, and a tender note of farewell, which she had written the day before. Fifteen minutes later, two knocks, the pre-arranged signal between the Directory’s Minister of the Interior, Pierre Bénézech, and prison official Etienne Lasne, were heard at the prison’s side door. At precisely midnight on her seventeenth birthday, December 19, 1795, Marie-Thérèse quietly slipped out of Temple Prison accompanied by Bénézech, who led her to a waiting carriage in the adjacent rue Meslay. As the church bells chimed the hour, she remarked to her companion that she had been in the prison for three years, four months and five days.

  Part Two

  Saint

  La Royne Ergaste voyant sa fille blesme

  Par un regret dans l’estomach enclose

  Crys lamentables seront lors d’Angolesme

  Et au germain marriage forclos

  Nostradamus, Century X,

  Quatrain 17

  (The Murdered Queen seeing her daughter pale

  From a deep sorrow internally enclosed

  Lamentable cries will be those of the Duc d’Angoulême

  Whose marriage to his first cousin foreclosed)

  Chapter XII

  Every Inch a Princess

  In fleeing france, Marie-Thérèse was unwittingly running right into the arms of warring factions, many of whom wanted to either kill or kidnap her. First, there were the obvious: the anti-royalists who wanted her dead. Next, there were those who had far less overt reasons, those who wished to influence her choice of husbands so as to alter the map of an already turbulent Europe. While the French-funded experiment in democracy in America was enjoying the second term of its peacefully elected first President, George Washington, France was emerging out of a series of bloody and violent coups d’état and into an uncertain future. Causing further chaos for France was the Holy Roman Emperor’s anti-republican coalition on the continent and skirmishes with England on the open seas in the Mediterranean and in the Caribbean. While its armies were able to claim victories in Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands and on the west bank of the Rhine, forcing Prussia, Spain and Hessen-Kassel to sign three separate treaties collectively known as the Peace of Basel, France remained embroiled in battles with Austria and England.

  In these Franz II had his own agenda. He wanted to reclaim Lorraine, lost to France in 1766, and if, in these unstable times for France, he could place a Habsburg on the country’s throne that would be an even sweeter victory. Although the rebel government of France had already ignored Franz’s petition for the return of Lorraine, the Holy Roman Emperor hoped that once his coalition of allies prevailed and his brother, Archduke Karl, was married to Marie-Thérèse, Austria could place the pair on the throne, and, in effect, subsume France. Charles IV of Spain and Louis XVIII in exile suspected their cousin’s motives and determined to quash any such scheme. Louis XVIII saw himself on the throne of a restored France, and Charles, despite the recently signed peace treaty with France, still hoped to obtain lands adjacent to Spain. At the center of each of these schemes and bound for Basel and, she imagined, freedom was Marie-Thérèse, the intended bride of two of the most powerful men in Europe: Archduke Karl of Austria and Louis XVIII’s nephew, Louis-Antoine, the Duc d’Angoulême of France.

  Bénézech had explained to Marie-Thérèse before leaving Temple Prison that she was going to have to travel incognito and that she could face many dangers; however, she thought the minister was exaggerating and, for now, remained unintimidated. Bénézech and the blonde young woman were driven at pace to the rue de Bondy behind the derelict Opéra, where a post chaise, more suitable for the long journey into exile, awaited them. Marie-Thérèse later learnt that during her imprisonment the Opéra, where she had spent so many happy evenings with her parents, had closed down and a new opera house on the rue de la Loi had opened just four months earlier. Madame de Soucy, a gendarme named Méchin, and Gomin, waited nervously in the carriage. Méchin helped Marie-Thérèse board the coach and Bénézech bid the party farewell. As they made their way toward the outer edge of Paris, it became clear to Marie-Thérèse that Gomin, de Soucy, and Méchin were petrified, fearing that at any moment anti-monarchists might halt the carriage and abduct or murder any or all of them. At the city gates, guards examined their fake passports and allowed them to pass. Positioned along the route were spies – and mercenaries – in the pay of Franz II, Charles IV of Spain and Louis XVIII in exile. After all, this particular coach contained a very precious commodity – a seventeen-year-old woman whose hand in marriage could lead to vast lands, wealth and the throne of France.

  Out on the open road, the carriage reached its first staging post, the little village of Charenton, where it was necessary to bribe the local officials in order to press onwards. At nine the next morning, they arrived in Guignes where they breakfasted quickly and within half an hour were on their way once again. Marie-Thérèse, who understood better than her companions that an uneventful beginning did not necessarily assure smooth passage, was still noticeably tranquil when, at two o’clock in the afternoon in the town of Provins, her true identity was uncovered. The royal party had stopped to change horses, and as ‘Sophie’ alighted from her carriage an officer guessed her true id
entity. Marie-Thérèse’s calm reaction suggested that she almost expected the charade to fail.

  It did not take long before locals arrived hoping to get a glimpse of the daughter of the martyred King. This time, there were no angry shouts, no swords thrust at the carriage, no bloody heads on spikes, and no arrests. Instead, with a show of silent respect, the officer, on horseback, escorted the entourage to the next staging post, the town of Nogent-sur-Seine. When the travelers stopped to refresh themselves at an auberge, the innkeeper’s wife greeted Marie-Thérèse with great deference. News of the Princess’s arrival had spread fast and crowds formed outside. As Marie-Thérèse made her way gingerly from the inn to her carriage, uncertain as to whether the crowd was hostile, she was showered with blessings and cries of support. Cheered by this reception, Marie-Thérèse decided they should dine and stay overnight at the next town, Gray in the Haute-Saône. Although Méchin remained nervous, he deferred to the Princess’s wishes.

  In Gray, Marie-Thérèse learned that the Tuscan ambassador, Carletti, had been lying in wait for them but that he had now left. Dispatched by Emperor Franz’s brother, Ferdinand III, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, to spy on the caravan, Carletti had actually been pretty close to his target, but missed his mark because he had asked the local townspeople only to watch for two carriages traveling in convoy. As she made her way to the French border towns, Marie-Thérèse realized that her safe delivery outside France might be thwarted not so much by revolutionaries as by the machinations of soldiers, ambassadors and spies sent by squabbling monarchs.