by Susan Nagel
Legitimists in France also proved unforgiving. Two of Napoleon’s twenty-six Marshals were murdered toward the end of the Hundred Days: General Ramel was killed in Toulouse, and Brune’s body was tossed into the Rhône River in Avignon. This course of vengeance was the beginning of what some refer to as La Terreur Blanche (The White Terror), when the Bourbons and their sympathizers, underneath their white banner, demanded justice. It was then that Louis began serially to dismiss ministers and strip men of their peerages. In December, Napoleon’s accomplices were put on trial. Two Marshals, Ney and Labédoyère, and the Duc de La Valette, were condemned to death, and over 250 Bonapartists were given prison sentences. Despite the tearful pleas of Mesdames de La Valette and Ney, Marie-Thérèse refused to intervene and obtain pardons for any of them, believing that traitors had to be punished. The public was stunned by such seemingly uncharacteristic behavior and the episode earned her the new epithet ‘Madame Rancune’ – Rancor. She had absolutely no doubts that her judgment had been correct until the early 1820s when a book on Napoleon’s expedition to Russia by the Comte de Ségur was published recounting tales of Ney’s unsurpassed courage. Marie-Thérèse is reported to have said: ‘If only I had known,’ and wept, regretting her own stubborn refusal to intercede on Ney’s behalf.1
During La Terreur Blanche, Marie-Thérèse decided to take action on an issue that had plaguing her since she was sixteen: she wanted corroboration, documentation and proof, once and for all, that her brother was dead. To this end she broke her silence and divulged the story told to her by Dr Pelletan to Louis XVIII so that his ministers could conduct an enquiry into the matter. Pelletan, now nearly seventy years old, was interviewed by many of Louis’s advisors, but they could come to no conclusion. An extremely frustrated Dr Pelletan wrote to Marie-Thérèse detailing his attempts to place the jar containing Louis Charles’s heart in her possession, and explaining that his efforts had been thwarted by bureaucrats. Although the courtiers who surrounded Marie-Thérèse remained sensitive to the pain any mention of her brother caused, it was in fact the very personnel on Louis’s staff who, working on behalf of their King, should have followed the matter through to its completion. The King wanted public proof, as did his niece, that Louis Charles had perished in the prison. There could be no funeral or public memorial allowing the public to grieve as there was no body; instead there seemed to be ever more speculation and fascination with the mystery of the death of the boy King. Marie-Thérèse continued to walk the painful emotional line of being both suspicious of any deception and of discovering the truth about her beloved little brother. Dr Pelletan’s letter, which detailed his account of the journey of her brother’s heart, along with the reliquary itself, never reached her.
In 1815, Louis XVII would have been thirty years old. That December a young man aged about thirty arrived in Saint-Malo declaring to be Charles de Navarre, King Louis XVII of France. Shortly thereafter he was arrested in Rouen for vagrancy, but by this time his story had spread throughout France. He wrote pitiable letters to the Duchesse d’Angoulême begging her to come and see him. His trial, in a small town in Brittany, caused a bout of national hysteria. Decazes, the Minister of Police, took matters into his own hands and sent the man to jail to await trial. The fact that a senior minister had involved himself immediately aroused suspicion. Madame Simon was taken out of her asylum to testify and she once again claimed that Louis Charles was alive and that he had been lifted from Temple Prison in a laundry basket. When she publicly offered to travel to Saint-Malo to identify the young man, Decazes and his men declared her insane.
Locked away in a provincial prison, the young vagrant received extravagant presents from citizens all over France. His story was like that of Hervagault’s before him, and bore similarities to Regnault-Warin’s popular tale Le Cimetière de la Madeleine. For the King, each new young pretender raised questions as to the legitimacy of his monarchy; for Marie-Thérèse the uncertainty was debilitating. She secretly sent two men to visit and question the young man in his cell. Rumors spread that even Madame de Tourzel had visited the man, and that she, too, believed him. Marie-Thérèse gave her first valet de chambre, the Chevalier de Turgy, a list of questions to ask him. The note was intercepted by the police and never reached him; it did, however, confirm that Marie-Thérèse took seriously claims that her brother might be alive. On February 18, 1818, the young man was sentenced to seven years in prison but four years into his sentence he died in Mont-Saint-Michel jail. It was later revealed that the man was probably one Mathurin Bruneau, a shoemaker.
The issue would not die. That same month, the King recalled that a young man arrived at the Tuileries in the early evening. Somehow, he was able to trail the servants into the dining hall, where he announced to the King, ‘I am Charles de Navarre.’ It did not take long for everyone to determine that the man was delusional and yet another in a parade of men determined to be acclaimed as the long-lost brother of Marie-Thérèse of France. The King determined to try to quash the controversy once and for all and locate the body of little Louis Charles. He instructed Decazes to write a letter to the Prefect of the Police to find Louis XVII’s remains and a long and expensive search began at the cemetery Sainte-Marguerite; but it, again, turned up nothing.
Eliciting even more focus on the imprisoned children of the late King and Queen, within a year after Bruneau’s arrest, Marie-Thérèse’s prison memoir, corrected and edited by Louis XVIII, was published along with the accounts by Cléry and Hüe in a book titled Mémoires particuliers sur la captivité de la famille royale à la tour du Temple. The King hoped that the circulation of this publication would not only garner sympathy for his reign, but that it would also lay to rest the public’s notion that Marie-Thérèse might have any doubt about her brother’s death as the prison memoir, again, emphatically stated that she, Marie-Thérèse, was absolutely certain that her brother had died in the Temple Prison. Although the book was a great success in terms of popularity and sales, both in France and abroad, rumor and counter-rumor concerning Louis Charles’s fate continued. On March 5, 1817, The Times of London reprinted an abridged, third-person summarized version of the memoir, with the introduction: ‘A work has appeared purporting to be written by this Princess, on the subject of the cruel confinement of herself and her Royal relations in the Temple. We know not whether it be authentic: at least it is written with simplicity and without exaggeration.’
Six years later, the journal of Marie-Thérèse would be brought out once again in a collection called Mémoires relatifs à la Révolution. At that same time, an unauthorized edition appeared. Marie-Thérèse accused Madame de Chanterenne of having betrayed her: it was the only dispute the two would ever have. Madame de Chanterenne had been in possession of two copies of the letters and journals written by Marie-Thérèse. The first was a copy that she herself had made before returning the original papers to Cléry when Marie-Thérèse had asked for them back. The second collection was, in fact, the original documents, which the Duchesse d’Angoulême had returned to her dear friend Renète, after King Louis XVIII had read and edited the account. Happily for Madame de Chanterenne, however, Marie-Thérèse learned that Renète was not responsible for the surreptitious edition. Marie-Thérèse found out that it was none other than Madame de Soucy, whom she had always found irritating, and to whom she had also given a copy as a souvenir of their journey to Vienna.
On Tuesday, January 16, 1816, Le Moniteur announced that Saturday, January 20, would be a national day of mourning. On that day, the King, Marie-Thérèse and the Princes of the Blood held a solemn prayer vigil at the royal crypt at Saint-Denis to commemorate the anniversary of the deaths of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Significantly, the King’s last will and testament, in which he begged for Frenchmen to forgive one another, was read in churches around the country. While Frenchmen grieved in each other’s arms, Marie-Thérèse wept inside the enclosed, underground crypt in private. Just two weeks later, in early February, Queen Marie Antoinette�
�s last letter to her sister-in-law, Madame Elisabeth, was found and read aloud in the Chamber of Deputies. It had been among Robespierre’s papers, which had been confiscated on 9 Thermidor. The letter made such an impression on the politicians that they decreed that each year, on October 16, the anniversary of Marie Antoinette’s death, the text of the letter would be read in every church in France. When the deputies came to the Tuileries to inform Marie-Thérèse of their decision, one of their members made an emotional speech praising Marie Antoinette’s ‘lofty virtues’, and flattering the Duchess by comparing her to her mother. Marie-Thérèse only offered a brief and perfunctory comment. The group waited for further reaction, but there was none.
Louis XVIII’s new militia included the return of the Swiss Guard, a carefully appointed royalist ‘Garde Royale’. Louis made his brother, d’Artois, head of the less loyal National Guard and in another act of reconciliation, on February 5, the National Guard was fêted at a celebration at the Tuileries. To wild applause, Marie-Thérèse visited all of the twelve banquet tables, which had been adorned with escutcheons of the great Kings of France. She had proved as valiant a soldier as any and the military admired her. Five hundred women and a thousand men, recalling Marie-Thérèse’s gallant efforts in Bordeaux the year before, stood and cheered her. Shortly afterwards the King commissioned the painter Baron Gros to depict the moment the Duchesse d’Angoulême bid farewell to the people of Bordeaux in April 1815, another fine piece of propaganda organized by Louis XVIII.
Others continued to pay tribute to Marie-Thérèse for her suffering, bravery and piety. Madame de Chateaubriand, wife of the celebrated writer and statesman, founded the Infirmerie Marie-Thérèse in Paris, a shelter for former émigrés and priests who had suffered during the Revolution. The structure would be completed in 1819. First to contribute to the hospice in her honor was the King of Prussia, widower of Marie-Thérèse’s great friend, Queen Louise. That same year Louis XVIII turned the prison cell at the Conciergerie in which Marie Antoinette spent her final weeks into a public shrine. And in recognition of her piety, the Church had given Marie-Thérèse the honor of naming bishops and cardinals.
While the King was building his portfolio of tributes to the past in an attempt to shore up the Bourbon legend, the Duc d’Angoulême, looking to the example of the revered first Bourbon King, Henri IV, found a new and productive role for himself. He sought to unite quarreling factions around France, and in doing so earned respect and a growing reputation as a thoughtful man and skillful negotiator. He also established a power base in the south and then toward the west as he rode to the borders to evacuate the Spanish soldiers who had invaded during Napoleon’s return.
Although it was widely acknowledged that the d’Angoulêmes were the powers behind the throne, their union had failed to produce any children. Marie-Thérèse was nearly forty. The Bourbon dynasty needed a son and heir in order to continue, or at the very least, legitimate royal children. For this the Bourbons turned to the King’s younger brother, the thirty-eight-year-old Duc de Berry. Although the Duke already had a common-law wife and two daughters in London, his English family was not recognized by his uncle, the King, nor by the Church. The King selected an official bride with the blessing of Marie-Thérèse. This would be seventeen-year-old Princess Marie Caroline of Naples, granddaughter of Marie Antoinette’s favorite sister, Maria Carolina of the Two Sicilies, and niece of the wife of the current Duc d’Orléans. She was a Bourbon as well as a niece of the Habsburg Emperor, Franz of Austria.
In preparation for Marie Caroline’s arrival, Marie-Thérèse organized the bride’s multi-national household staff and a lavish ancien-régime-style wedding feast was set for June. A reception was prepared for Marie Caroline in the southern seaport city of Marseille echoing the welcome given in October 1600 to Henri IV’s second wife, the Italian Princess Marie de’ Medici, so spectacular and significant that it was immortalized by the great painter, Peter Paul Rubens. Cannon roared, a flotilla appeared, and the town was bedecked in crimson for the very young – and very sexy – Marie Caroline. She remained ‘in quarantine’ for two weeks and then was paraded through the towns of France, where she was warmly welcomed as the hope for the future of the dynasty.
On June 15, Marie Caroline arrived in the forest at Fontainebleau, which served as a romantic backdrop to the couple’s first meeting. Tapestries had been placed on the grass inside a great tent inside which the royal family would host a great feast. Louis XVIII, who was now so fat he could no longer walk by himself and had to be carried in a chair by servants, made the formal introductions, and upon presenting the teenage bride to her new sister-in-law, referred to Marie-Thérèse as ‘our angel’.
Although the Duc de Berry had been corresponding with his fiancée, and the two had flirted in their letters, he really had no idea what to expect. When at last he met his bride he was immediately smitten. Despite the fact that Marie Caroline’s French was very bad, the young Sicilian was recognized by everyone as a breath of fresh air. Just as Louis XV had been enchanted with the delicious young Marie Antoinette, Louis XVIII was sure that his nephew would find his bride irresistible – and, hopefully, fertile.
Others were less impressed. James Gallatin, son of the now US ambassador to France, Albert Gallatin, considered the new Duchesse de Berry to be spoilt and bad mannered. James Gallatin recorded many such private opinions of the French royal family in his journal. He thought that the Duc d’Angoulême appeared very stern but knew that he was, in fact, a kind man. The Duc de Berry was extremely handsome and was great fun. As for Marie-Thérèse, she enjoyed a special place of honor in Gallatin’s heart. He, like many people, regarded her as a saint, and the two exchanged many conversations during which he remained impressed by her kindness, sweetness and compassion.
Two days after the Fontainebleau festivities, the official wedding took place at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. The interior of the church was illuminated by thousands of candles. Baskets of fruits and flowers, symbolizing the fertility of the dynasty, were suspended midair, banners proclaiming the glories of France swagged across columns, and the nave was festooned with blue velvet embroidered with gold fleurs-de-lys. Parisians had been celebrating since early morning and women scrambled for their most elaborate gowns for the occasion. The bride, dressed in white satin embroidered with silver lamé, wore a glittering diamond diadem. Marie-Thérèse was attired in white silk, her hair coiffed with her rarely worn diamonds and a white ostrich feather. The obese King, in vivid royal blue trimmed with lace and pearls, ornamented himself with both the Regent and Sancy diamonds, the legendary and historic gems that had disappeared during the Revolution, when they were allegedly stolen from the treasury by marauders. They had reappeared just as mysteriously as they had disappeared. The Comte d’Artois sported the uniform of the Colonel General of the National Guard; the Duc d’Angoulême the uniform of Grand Admiral; the Prince de Condé the white and gold uniform of Colonel General of the French Infantry; and the groom the court robes of King Henri IV.
The formal celebrations took place later that afternoon at the Tuileries Palace, contrary to Marie-Thérèse’s wishes: Louis knew she hated the place and would have preferred Versailles but the King insisted the wedding take place in the capital. Marie-Thérèse, as ever, performed her duty impeccably and chose to place her own stamp on the festivities. For the wedding celebrations she had planned an evening of nostalgia. Two-thirds of the invited guests were courtiers from the ancien régime who had served at Versailles before the Revolution. With a wand in his hand, the first maître d’hotel escorted the King to his table for the fabled grand couvert repast; whenever His Majesty required a drink, he would proclaim the monarch’s desire in a loud voice, as was the ancient custom. The officers of the crown, the aides-de-camp, the men of the chamber and others on duty stood in lines on either side of the royal table. No one was permitted a seat except for the nobility with the rank of no lower than a duke or duchess. At the King’s table sat the royal Princes
and Princesses – with the exception of the Orléans family, who, because the event had been organized by Marie-Thérèse, had been pointedly excluded. There was a magnificent display of fireworks featuring a Temple of Hymen, a symbol of the bride’s virginity and the hope that she would become the mother of a future king. After the illuminations, the King and the d’Angoulêmes escorted the newlyweds to their new home, the Elysée Palace on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré for the ceremony leading to the consummation of the marriage. The grand aumônier, the Bishop of Hermopolis, blessed the marriage bed and the royal party bid goodnight to the Duc de Berry and his bride.
That summer, the de Berrys settled into their home near the Champs-Élysées. They could often be seen arm in arm with their heads together on promenades. They were both fun loving: the young bride was vivacious, and it was clear that this was truly a love match. The people of Paris soon learned that the Duchesse de Berry, upon hearing the sound of her husband’s footsteps, would run down the stairs and leap into his arms. Her husband would then carry her back up the stairs. Some of her household staff delighted in the romance; while others maintained that the young bride needed to be taught better manners. Marie-Thérèse for one dismissed her young sister-in-law as silly, frivolous and ill educated and brought in her etiquette expert, Monsieur Abraham, to teach the Duchess to dance and learn the ways of the French court, while she, herself, wasted little more time thinking about the young bride.
There may have been harmony at the Élysée Palace, but all was not well at the Tuileries. Almost immediately after the wedding of the de Berrys, the d’Angoulêmes left Paris again for a tour of the royalist south and west of France. Although Marie-Thérèse would be hailed, her husband’s position there had changed. While Marie-Thérèse and the Comte d’Artois were deeply politicized ultra-royalists, wanting a return to such ancien régime policies as less freedom for the press, more power for the Church, and complete sovereignty for the King, Louis XVIII was more pragmatic – the consummate politician. The King and his inner circle, Richelieu, Decazes and a handful of others, were moderates. They adhered to the changes that the Charter of France had implemented, guaranteeing a parliamentary government.