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

by Susan Nagel

  A few days after her arrival in the capital, Marie-Thérèse contacted her former companion, Madame de Chanterenne, who had hurried back from Naples the moment she heard of the Bourbon restoration. Marie-Thérèse sent a note to her beloved childhood friend, Pauline, asking her to visit the Tuileries with her husband and children. Marie-Thérèse arranged for an annual income for her ‘dear Renète’ and invited her often to visit her at the Tuileries. She also intervened on behalf of Madame de Chanterenne’s son (her godson), Charles, obtaining a position for him among the gardes du corps, despite his young age.

  With every day in Paris, however, Marie-Thérèse’s personal anguish was becoming more and more profound. It was at this time that she asked of Pauline a particularly difficult favor. Pauline had previously sent Marie-Thérèse mementos from the grave of her parents, and now the Duchess asked her childhood friend to take her to their burial ground in the Madeleine cemetery. Pauline arranged with the owner of the property for the two of them to visit the site in private. They left at seven in the morning, Marie-Thérèse dressed simply. Pauline described the scene. They arrived and approached the spot, marked by a black wooden cross. Marie-Thérèse, leaning on Pauline’s arm and the arm of Pauline’s son, began to involuntarily tremble. She then fell, first on her knees, and then prostrated, her face in the grass. Pauline lowered herself beside her friend. At last, Marie-Thérèse lifted her head, and Pauline saw that the Duchess’s face was wet with tears. She recalled that she cried: ‘Oh, my father! You who have obtained for me the grace of my first prayer, to return to France, please obtain the grace that I may see her happy.’

  To assuage their own guilt for the crimes they had committed against the young Madame Royale, the French assumed a common posture that it was the Austrians who had robbed Marie-Thérèse of her happiness and that her ‘captivity’ at the Hofburg had been worse than her time at the Temple Prison. Despite having longed to be back in France for almost twenty years, Marie-Thérèse was not prepared for the memories that engulfed her once she returned. She hated the Tuileries, but Louis XVIII, learning from the mistakes of his brother, understood the importance of remaining in the capital. While his pain was more a twinge of nostalgia, for Marie-Thérèse the experience of living in her mother’s rooms was almost unbearable. Either the King simply did not understand her grief after all of these years, or he chose to ignore it.

  The King’s continuing public relations campaign included daily press conferences during which he would offer the press men tidbits on his activities and stories illustrating the harmony among his ministers. Marie-Thérèse convinced the King that it would be good as part of this campaign if she were to visit other areas of France and toward the end of June she went to the spa at Vichy, where once again she took the cure. She remained there until the beginning of August when she traveled to Riom in the Auvergne region of central France. There, the mayor escorted her to the corn market. Little girls presented her with baskets of flowers and peasant women serenaded her with songs sung in the Auvergne dialect. She was warmly received at the town hall; more, she was enjoying herself. She journeyed on to Clermont-Ferrand and other small towns, their streets draped in white banners and fleurs-de-lys in her honor. In Clermont-Ferrand, sixty men dressed in white unharnessed her horses and carried her carriage to the cathedral. On August 6, she entered Lyon where the town teemed with dancing children, banners that exclaimed their ‘Love to Madame’, and tableaux recreating historic battles. She was next persuaded to visit the Île Barbe on the Rhône, where she was taken in a luxurious gondola, which was followed by a flotilla of tiny boats.

  Soon she was back again in Paris, arriving at the Tuileries on the 13th. The King, however, chose this time to grant her her wish to visit her childhood home, Versailles, and on August 17, for the first time in twenty-five years Marie-Thérèse returned to the palace. During the Revolution it had been ravaged by looters, though Napoleon had begun restoring it with dreams of installing his young royal bride and their son in the spectacular royal residence. He had also begun repairs on Marie Antoinette’s beloved Petit Trianon, and invited his sister, Pauline, to live there. Louis XVIII also, despite his public presence in Paris, had, upon his return to France, initiated and overseen a massive restoration of his childhood home, which even included additions to the legendary chateau. When Marie-Thérèse arrived at Versailles, she saw craftsmen everywhere: gilders, carpenters and masons, working away on scaffolds, attempting to bring back Versailles to its ancien régime splendor. She wandered the rooms where she had slept and played, into her mother’s bedroom where she and her late brothers and sister had been born and visited the gardens of the Petit Trianon where she and Louis Charles had frolicked without care. And then, she returned to the Tuileries, the home she despised, in order to once again stand by her uncle’s side.

  She was required for the celebrations of the Fête Saint Louis on August 25, a significant state occasion. The Duke of Wellington, who was growing increasingly unpopular due to his outspoken and unsolicited advice to the new French government, was, nonetheless, invited to the dinner at the Tuileries. Afterwards there was a firework display for all the people of Paris to enjoy. Four days later, on August 29, it was the people’s turn to honor the royal family. The King and his family attended a gala at the Hotel de Ville where Marie-Thérèse was seated, according to her status as the daughter of the late King, next to her uncle. The Baronne de Chabrol was given the honor of serving Marie-Thérèse her meal. After dinner, a cantata by the Italian-French composer Luigi Cherubini was performed.

  It became apparent that the daughter of the House of Bourbon, which had ruled for centuries by divine right, was believed by many to possess some inherent quality of miraculous power. Marie-Thérèse was nearing thirty-six, almost the age her mother was when she was led, white-haired, to the guillotine. The provincial women of France now prayed for Marie-Thérèse to have a baby, a Child of France. On the very day of the Fête Saint Louis, the churchwardens of Nîmes vowed to make an offering of a solid silver statue, the weight of a baby, if Marie-Thérèse were to give birth to a boy. On September 24, in the Journal de Nantes, an article appeared stating:

  There is, in the Church of Saint-Eloi, a beautiful statue of the Virgin. All of the women of this parish congregate in front of this august image as the pastor has planted at her feet a great stalk of silver lilies. Five flowers express our recognition of what we possess, and a bud, for what we pray. The women of the parish have been celebrating a novena. One can read at the base of the white marble pedestal, underneath the bouquet of lilies: ‘Offering to Mary for the happy fecundity of the daughter of Louis XVI, and the perpetuity of the Bourbons on the throne of France.’

  It was in the provinces, and in the countryside in the company of ‘good Frenchmen’, that Marie-Thérèse was at her most comfortable. The Comte de Villèle noted in his journal that when Marie-Thérèse visited Toulouse in 1814, she received an enthusiastic and lavish welcome, though she later reproached Villèle for allowing the town to spend so much money on the reception. She was decidedly not happy in Paris surrounded by Bonapartists who required her to feign gaiety or among the members of the new ‘fashionable society’ who frowned on her sincere piety. She would often avoid women’s functions in the capital altogether, preferring instead to go horseback riding in the Bois de Boulogne. Nor did she find the new parliamentary monarchy appealing. She firmly believed that the King ought to rule by divine right and that the new, so-called government by charter, a paean to the Revolution, was a sham, wherein only less than a quarter of 1 per cent of the country were actually eligible to vote, and only men over the age of forty who paid taxes over 1,000 francs a year were able to hold office. Rather than sit in on her uncle’s political meetings, she chose to visit the poor and make gifts including little paper notebooks, which she sold for the benefit of the émigrés who still needed assistance. She treasured these friends who had suffered and would visit them privately. She also made very public tours, as her mothe
r had done to show her support for French industry, to places like the Gobelins tapestry manufacturing facility at Sèvres.

  Everywhere she went in Paris, Marie-Thérèse faced one agonizing memory after another. On the site of the former Temple Prison, where her family had spent their final days together, she ordered a cypress tree and a weeping willow tree to be planted. On the anniversary of her mother’s death, she remained alone in her room at the Tuileries in prayer. Both she and the King were intent on having proper burials for their families killed in the Revolution. The bodies of Marie-Thérèse’s parents, which had been identified in 1805, were exhumed from amongst the 3,000 corpses in the Madeleine cemetery so that they could be placed in the royal crypt at Saint-Denis. The gravediggers were also told to look for the remains of other royal corpses in the mass grave, which had been stolen in 1793 from the necropolis at Saint-Denis. Some were found and identified. Louis Charles’s body, however, was not. It was rumored that his body had been taken to another mass grave at the cemetery of Sainte-Marguerite, where those who had been beheaded at the guillotine during the Terror had been laid. (That spot, today, is at the Place de la Nation.)

  Privately, the King interviewed the widow of the man who had claimed to have secretly moved Louis Charles’s body from one spot to another. On December 13, Marie-Thérèse went to the Hôpital des Incurables to meet with Madame Simon, a patient there, and the wife of her brother’s sadistic jailer. Marie-Thérèse dressed very simply and went incognito so as to deflect gossip. Madame Simon was not expecting the visit and Marie-Thérèse, presenting herself as just some ordinary visitor, located the old woman, who regaled her with stories about Louis Charles. Madame Simon insisted that the boy did not perish in the prison, and, in fact, had come to visit her in 1802. When the Duchesse d’Angoulême asked Madame Simon how she had recognized the boy, the old woman replied: ‘Well, I recognize you, Marie-Thérèse, despite your disguise.’ Distressed by the encounter, Marie-Thérèse left immediately.

  That winter an old report by former revolutionary Committee of Public Safety Commissioner Harmand de la Meuse began to be circulated. It claimed that when the members of the Assembly visited Louis Charles in prison he did not seem to be able to hear or speak. The revival of this account caused a resurgence of speculation that the little boy they saw had been a deaf mute substituted for Louis Charles while the real Louis XVII had escaped the Temple Prison and might still be alive.

  On January 21, the twenty-second anniversary of the death of King Louis XVI, the exhumed bodies of the late King and Marie Antoinette were taken to the royal crypt at Saint-Denis. Marie-Thérèse, upholding the ancient tradition that the King and his family did not attend funerals, remained locked in her room at the Tuileries deep in prayer throughout the procession and burial ceremony at Saint-Denis, though she could hear the artillery discharges firing in the distance. When the body of her mother had been unearthed, the laborers had found some locks of hair, a ring and some garters that they felt they should give to the authorities to be passed on to the Duchesse d’Angoulême. It fell upon the Marquis de la Maisonfort to deliver these personal effects, and on January 22 he met with her at the Tuileries to do so.

  Marie-Thérèse approved Louis XVIII’s plans for the construction of a memorial building, the Chapelle Expiatoire, on the site of the mass grave at the Madeleine cemetery. The structure, designed in the grand neoclassical style by Pierre François Léonard Fontaine and Charles Percier, would take nearly ten years to complete and Marie-Thérèse would visit the site regularly to watch progress. It was also determined to erect another monument at the Place Louis XV, where Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and Madame Elisabeth, whose body had been located at the Errancis cemetery, had all been guillotined. The shrine, which was never completed, was to be a three-sided sculpture raised on a plinth carrying testaments to each victim. On one side a statue of Louis XVI would be shown ascending to heaven assisted by an angel, with the words of the Abbé Edgeworth (‘Son of Saint-Louis, Ascend to Heaven!’) and the late King’s own words forgiving the people of France. Another side was to contain a bust of Queen Marie Antoinette accompanied by her words, ‘I have seen all, understood all, and forgotten all’, and the third was to be a bas-relief of Madame Elisabeth with the quote ‘Do not undeceive them’, a reference to the incident at the Tuileries. This public project, the first stone of which would not be in place until 1826, would effectively be left abandoned four years later.

  On January 27, while visiting the patients of a hospital, l’Hôtel-Dieu, Marie-Thérèse was introduced to its chief surgeon, a Dr Philippe Jean Pelletan. Dr Pelletan had been trying, through various contacts, to meet with Marie-Thérèse from the moment she had returned to France. In the doctor’s unpublished memoirs, he recounted that she ‘said with kindness that she had known me ‘‘from other days’’ and asked me, if, effectively, 1

  Despite her discomfort at being in Paris, Marie-Thérèse performed her duties impeccably, attending with her uncle the opera, theater, dinners, a party given by her jovial brother-in-law, the Duc de Berry; and in February, Marie-Thérèse hosted a party at the Tuileries during which there was a performance by actors from the Théâtre des Variétés. The American James Gallatin wrote in his diary how, one March morning, he and his father, Albert, were received privately by the King and the Duchesse d’Angoulême. ‘She looked very sad,’ he noted in his diary. James told Marie-Thérèse that he was going into politics, and the Duchess wondered aloud if he was a bit too young. When he protested that he was seventeen, she pronounced, ‘But, he is a baby!’ The Gallatins, who would enjoy a close relationship with Marie-Thérèse for nearly ten years, all admired her. James once described her in his diary as ‘the most royal-looking personage one can possibly imagine’.

  That March, the Duc d’Angoulême came to his wife’s rescue. He proposed a month-long tour of central France, after which he would take his wife to visit his seat in Bordeaux, the first city to hail the return of the Bourbons. Because she was greeted so enthusiastically by crowds throughout her journey, Marie-Thérèse wrote to the King: ‘I have concluded that the Bourbons are really affirmed on the throne.’ She later recorded the visit in a twelve-page letter to her dear friend, Marie-Françoise – ‘Fanny’ – Roisins, now married to Prince Nicolas Esterhazy de Galantha and living between Budapest and Vienna.2 Opening her letter ‘Ma chère Fanny’, Marie-Thérèse described her arrival in Bordeaux as ‘the most lovely in the world’ as the quay was covered with well-wishers. ‘My husband and I loved it!’ she effused. She rode in a calèche while the duke, on horseback, inspected the troops. On March 12, the anniversary of the date of her husband’s arrival in the city of Bordeaux, she went to the very spot where he had received the keys to the city to the general admiration of all.

  Their joy, however, was cut short by news that Napoleon had escaped from his island prison. Forces had been sent by Louis XVIII to intercept him but the 5th Regiment of the Line under Marshal Ney had turned and were now proceeding up the Rhône valley, led by their former commander, en route for the capital. The Duc d’Angoulême departed immediately to lead the King’s 4,000 loyal volunteer troops in Nîmes. Marie-Thérèse remained in Bordeaux and with the ‘courage of a lioness’ took charge.

  Each morning, after prayers, the Duchesse d’Angoulême described how she would face the barracks full of soldiers and speak to them of their duty to France. As she reviewed the troops, she would shout ‘Vive le Roi!’ and thank them for their loyalty. She would then drive to the town hall where she would encourage the authorities to sign up more volunteers in the fight for the King. Napoleon, however, was able to swiftly re-ignite old loyalties and raise a regular army of over 140,000 and a volunteer army of almost double that. He re-entered Paris victorious on March 20. A day earlier Louis XVIII had fled to Brussels, though not before instructing Hüe to remove the diamonds from the royal crown, pack them into artillery cases and get them out of the country.

  In command from the Tuileries Palace, Napoleon face
d but one obstacle to complete success in France: Bordeaux, where a small army headed by the Duchesse d’Angoulême was entrenched. Despite instructions from the King that, for her own safety, she must join him in exile, Marie-Thérèse refused to leave. She wrote how she began and ended each day with her soldiers. Early morning Mass would be followed by inspection at their barracks where she would praise their loyalty, urge them on and confer with their leaders. Each day she would examine the list of volunteers at the town hall and each day the numbers would dwindle. It was getting harder to mobilize men now the King himself had fled France.

  Napoleon understood that Marie-Thérèse would require careful handling and that he could not be seen to harm the ‘Orphan of the Temple’. So he dispatched General Bertrand Clauzel to persuade the headstrong Princess to leave the country under the Emperor’s protection. The ensuing standoff between Napoleon’s aide-de-camp and the granddaughter of Empress Maria Theresa was detailed by Marie-Thérèse in her letter to Fanny and by General Clauzel in his reports.

  Clauzel had stationed his troops on the banks of the Garonne River. He delegated a small group of prisoners to cross the river and deliver a message to Marie-Thérèse that read: ‘Bordeaux is in my hands. I could enter it tomorrow if I chose to.’ Disgusted with the disloyalty of so many of the French generals whom her uncle had decorated and who had become turncoats, like Decaen, causing local dissent, Marie-Thérèse refused to meet with Clauzel’s emissaries. Instead, she sent a local politician, Monsieur Jean-Baptiste, Vicomte de Martignac to give Clauzel a defiant message of her own: she would never surrender. Clauzel retorted that he would ‘occupy Bordeaux without firing one shot – when I want, how I want. Tell Madame well that I would already be in Bordeaux if I did not want above all to allow her to leave for wherever she wants to go. But tomorrow, I will have the emperor’s authority recognized as sovereign in Bordeaux.’