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

by Susan Nagel

  In June, there was widespread student rioting and dissent caused by concessions made to d’Artois and his conservatives. To the students one of the most offensive of these was a reactionary educational system, nostalgic for the ancien régime when the Catholic Church and the State were inseparable and epistemology was absolute. The students, schooled under the secular Napoleonic system, opposed the Catholic pedagogy. Two days before the trial and execution of the Duc de Berry’s assassin, one of the student demonstrators was murdered by a royal guard. With blood spilled on the streets of Paris, and tensions escalating between republicans and royalists, Marie-Thérèse feared that France would once again be overwhelmed by civil war.

  The poet, novelist and dramatist Victor Hugo wrote an emotional prayer begging God, through the poor widow, the Duchesse de Berry, to save France by giving her a healthy son. The Duchesse de Berry, meanwhile, dreamt one night that she was indeed going to be mother to a King of France. She described her dream in a letter to the Comte de Brissac, ‘I beheld Saint Louis enter my room, just as he is painted, his crown on his head, his great royal mantle sewn with the fleur-de-lys, and his venerable face. I presented my little girl to him. He opened his mantle and presented me with the prettiest little boy.’

  Letters and presents streamed into the Tuileries Palace in excited anticipation. The King announced to all that because of the steadfast loyalty of the citizens of Bordeaux, if the Duchesse de Berry’s baby were born a boy he would be given the title ‘Duc de Bordeaux’, while the people of Bordeaux begged the Duchess to have her baby in their province. The King appointed the Ducs de Coigny and d’Albuféra to be official witnesses at the delivery of the baby at the Tuileries.

  On September 28, late in the evening, well after Marie-Thérèse had gone to bed, her sister-in-law went into labor. Sometime around 2 a.m. on the morning of September 29, Marie-Thérèse was awakened by one of Marie Caroline’s maids and told to hurry to the Duchesse de Berry’s room. Both Marie-Thérèse and Madame de Gontaut-Biron arrived simultaneously to the stunning sight that, amidst a room draped in black in mourning for her husband, Marie Caroline’s baby had already been born. Neither doctor nor witnesses had been present. As the baby and mother were still tied together by the umbilical cord, Marie-Thérèse instructed the governess to find two witnesses – any witnesses. Two guards arrived post haste and confirmed that the baby was indeed the child of the Duchesse de Berry. The rest of the royal household began to arrive. Ten minutes after the two witnesses signed their testaments, at about 2.30 a.m., cannon-fire roared across Paris. If the baby were a girl, there would be twenty-one guns; if a boy – one hundred and one. The people of Paris anxiously counted. When they heard the twenty-second round, they dressed and hurried to celebrate in the streets. The little Duc de Bordeaux, named for the first city to have welcomed the return of the Bourbons in 1814, was named Henri (after the great Henri IV) Charles (after his father) Ferdinand (after his maternal great-grandfather, Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies), Marie, and, lastly, Dieudonné (‘Godgiven’) – a name that had been given to the baby, born to his parents after a twenty-three-year childless marriage, who became King Louis XIV. Marie-Thérèse carried Henri, Duc de Bordeaux, to the windows of his mother’s room, where she held him to be seen by the already swelling crowds. When the King arrived, he took the baby from her arms and said, ‘This is mine!’ and, beaming at Marie Caroline, handed her a staggeringly large, brilliant suite of diamonds, ebulliently declaring, ‘And … this is yours!’

  As the late Duc de Berry had once joked, if he had fathered a son with his wife, people would immediately question the baby’s paternity. While the morning newspaper hailed the birth of the Duc de Bordeaux, it simultaneously published an unsigned protest questioning the legitimacy of little Henri Dieudonné. Although he denied having been its author, it was widely believed that it was written by none other than the Duc d’Orléans, who had, like his father on the occasions of the births of all of Marie Antoinette’s children, openly questioned the baby’s paternity. Madame de Gontaut-Biron, who had observed the little boy still attached to his mother by the umbilical cord, was angry with the Duke when she was summoned to respond to a formal challenge that he put forth. When the Duc de Coigny was called to testify, d’Orléans asked the Duke if he was absolutely certain that the baby was Marie Caroline’s. De Coigny replied: ‘As certain as I am that you are the father of the Duc de Chartres.’ James Gallatin, who was at the Palais-Royal with the Duc d’Orléans when he received the news of the birth of the Duc de Bordeaux, recalled: ‘It did not strike me that the Orléans family looked or seemed particularly pleased.’5 Gallatin recounted to d’Orléans the Duc de Berry’s dying words to his wife, confirming his knowledge of the pregnancy, and tried to reason with d’Orléans that, since no one but the Duchesse de Berry and her husband knew about her pregnancy that early on, there was his proof that de Berry was the father.

  Monseigneur Macchi, the papal nuncio, hailed Henri the ‘Child of Europe’. The royal family, so dispirited after the death of the Duc de Berry, revived with the birth of his son. ‘He is all of ours,’ declared the King, joyfully. Louis was in a very good mood for another reason as well. In 1817, he had met the Comtesse Zoë du Cayla when the Countess’s own mother-in-law, taking her daughter-in-law’s side against her own son, petitioned the King for assistance with the couple’s separation. By 1820, Madame du Cayla, a thirty-five-year-old woman whom most described as attractive and agreeable, was solidly ensconced as the King’s ‘favorite’. Despite the King’s lack of mobility, he and Madame du Cayla enjoyed private time together every Wednesday afternoon at which times, commanded Louis, they were not to be interrupted. Marie-Thérèse treated Madame du Cayla with disdain, much as her mother had Madame du Barry. The Princess made her displeasure known and even begrudged a growing friendship between Madame du Cayla and her own friend, Madame de Choisy. The Duchesse de Berry was less judgmental and thought it politic to be kind to the King’s special friend.

  This proved a smarter strategy. The Duchesse de Berry, who had already earned the King’s admiration for giving the family an heir, now earned his adoration. For the moment, anything she asked was granted. In order to keep her husband’s memory alive, the Duchesse de Berry requested that his staff serve the Duc de Bordeaux. The King agreed. When, the morning after Henri’s birth, a delegation of over five hundred soldiers asked to see the little Prince, the Duchesse de Berry asked the King if they could all pay their respects, regardless of rank. Once again, the King agreed. At six o’clock in the morning, MarieThérèse greeted the regiments. At noon, the entire family went to the Tuileries chapel together for a Te Deum to give thanks for the birth of the little boy, the future of the Bourbon dynasty.

  Earlier in the year, Maréchal Berthier’s widow had induced the King to sell the Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley while a nationwide fundraising effort began to purchase it. Upon the birth of the Duc de Bordeaux, the committee presented the fabulous Renaissance castle as a gift to the new baby. Six weeks after the infant’s birth, the poet Lamartine, traveling in Naples, offered his own contribution. In ‘Ode on the Birth of the Duc de Bordeaux’, Lamartine called Henri the ‘Miracle Child’:

  He is born, child of a miracle

  Who inherited the blood of a martyr

  He is born of a belated oracle

  He is born of a final breath

  After the birth of the ‘miracle child’, Pauline de Béarn recalled how she heard her childhood friend, the Duchesse d’Angoulême, sigh and, as de Béarn described it, ‘unselfishly’ unburden herself: ‘At last I am resigned forever to remain childless.’ Marie-Thérèse’s joy in life was often tempered by the caution of personal experience. The day after all of the festivities and celebrations surrounding the birth of Henri, a servant found Marie-Thérèse in a pensive mood. ‘Your Highness was very happy yesterday,’ he said. ‘Yes, very happy yesterday, but today I am reflecting on the destiny of this child,’ she replied. James Gallatin, too, recalled th
at at a ball at court in October, when ‘some near-sighted Hungarian officer, not seeing he was in front of the Duchesse d’Angoulême, caught his spur in the lace of her dress and tore yards of splendid lace … she was so gracious, so womanly … the “descendant of a hundred kings” certainly applies to her … [yet, he] had never seen so sad a face’.

  Miracles seemed to be in the air and at the age of forty-two, Marie-Thérèse believed that she was pregnant. While royalists were certain of the connection between the Bourbon blood and the divinity, liberal sympathizers like the Duchesse de Broglie, the daughter of Madame de Staël, were skeptical. On November 25, 1820, she wrote to her friend the Comtesse de Castellane: ‘One hears everywhere the noise about the pregnancy of Madame; but it is sheer stupidity.’ Jean-Baptiste-Jacques Augustin, Painter in the Cabinet of the King, sought to please his patron with a portrait of the Duchesse d’Angoulême pregnant. Keenly aware of Louis’s devotion to Henri IV, Augustin chose to base the image on a scandalous late-sixteenth-century portrait of one of Henri IV’s mistresses, Gabrielle d’Estrées. Allegedly to signify that d’Estrées was pregnant with César, the King’s bastard son, d’Estrées is seated in a wash-tub with her sister, who is pinching her nipple. In his painting, Augustin depicted the Duchesse d’Angoulême with her right hand on her left breast – a clear message that she was, like Gabrielle d’Estrées, expecting a child. On February 15, 1821, in another note to the Comtesse de Castellane, just two months after her complete dismissal of the possibility that the Duchesse d’Angoulême was with child, de Broglie reluctantly conceded: ‘They say positively the Duchesse d’Angoulême is pregnant; Madame the Duchesse de Berry is only half-smiling.’

  James Gallatin recorded in his diary that on February 16, there was

  a magnificent ball at the Tuileries … the Duchesse d’Angoulême was superbly regal; her train of white velvet thickly embroidered with gold fleurs-de-lys with a broad gold border, lined and faced with ermine; her dress entirely of superb lace, which they told me had belonged to her mother; the highest diadem of emeralds and diamonds that I have ever seen, it was quite four inches. A veil of superb lace hung down below her shoulders; a belt and stomacher of diamonds and one enormous emerald in the center; from the shoulders hung great strings of diamonds.6

  Marie-Thérèse was radiant, and then subsequently devastated when it became clear that she was not pregnant at all. She had mistaken the symptoms of the onset of menopause for pregnancy. Her childbearing days were now behind her and instead she would have to be content in the role of aunt. Ironically, the public had often considered her the ‘Mother of France’, and, in newspapers, it was often she, and not Marie Caroline, who appeared in illustrations holding the miracle child.

  On the first day in May, the Duc de Bordeaux was baptized at the cathedral of Notre Dame with full pomp and splendor, though not without threat of incident. The young Prince and his governess, Madame de Gontaut-Biron, traveled in the first coach of a cortège of twenty-seven carriages. On their way out of the Tuileries, a stranger approached the governess and handed her a note warning: ‘Urgent. Be on your guard at the Pont Neuf where the carriage will stop, and then take care of the Prince.’ She called out to the commander of the soldiers escorting their carriage, ‘This concerns you,’ and handed him the note. The soldier read it and swore that nothing would happen to the baby. Indeed, they all arrived safely at the cathedral and after the holy water, prayers and acclamations, the King signed the baptismal certificate and the royal family returned to the Tuileries Palace without incident.

  That evening, fireworks filled the skies in many towns around France. Ten thousand packages of sugared almonds were distributed on the streets of Paris and the Opéra and theaters staged spectacles commemorating the event. The Duchesse de Berry had stated that if she were to give birth to a son, she would make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Notre-Dame de Liesse in Picardie, and she left for the shrine on May 20.

  By the end of the summer, the Duchesse de Berry was back in Paris and ready to resume her social life. Her hair had grown back, and, naturally vivacious, she began to entertain and attend parties once again. Nearly eleven hundred people attended the first reception she hosted since her husband’s death. The social calendars reveal balls, dinners and theatrical presentations hosted by the Duchesse de Berry on a regular basis. Things looked very good for the Bourbons: they had an heir, and, earlier that summer, Napoleon Bonaparte, ‘the Usurper’, had died.

  While the Duchesse de Berry planned her day around her evenings, Marie-Thérèse ached to play the role of mother. When Madame de Gontaut-Biron contracted scarlet fever, the children were invited to sleep in their aunt’s bedroom. Marie-Thérèse, recalling her own early, idyllic childhood at her mother’s Hameau and the Petit Trianon, decided she needed a country estate. She wanted a place where the children could breathe clean air and where they could frolic without concern for the formalities of the Tuileries. Besides, she disliked the capital for its dirt, its chaos and its memories. On December 29, 1821, ten days after her forty-third birthday, Marie-Thérèse purchased the estate of Villeneuve-l’Étang to the west of Paris in Marnes. Its previous owner had planted an Orangerie on the estate out of admiration for the great gardens at Versailles. Marie-Thérèse hired the architect Maximilien Villiers to completely renovate the house.

  Villeneuve-l’Étang would be a place where, reminiscent of her mother, she could be herself and where she would invite only those people whose company she enjoyed. Most importantly she hoped to create a second home for her niece and nephew and to organize parties for them. There was a billiard room for the adults’ enjoyment, and a library which she stocked with travel books and histories of the Revolution. She instructed her agent to find furniture for the home, and she approved the purchase of several pieces commissioned by her mother. She assembled a menagerie for the children’s delight – and for their health. Her very own herd of cows provided the Duc de Bordeaux and the Princess Louise with fresh milk and cream. Marie-Thérèse was so proud of her farm that she often brought samples of the excellent cream back with her to Paris, and regarded it as a special treat for her favorite guests. A well-known story illustrating Marie-Thérèse’s less-than-saintly side concerns a dinner party at the Tuileries at which the Duc de Richelieu, whose politics she openly disliked, was a guest: she offered her homemade cream to the person to the Duke’s right and to his left, but refused to share it with Richelieu himself.

  Villeneuve-l’Étang also gave Marie-Thérèse the perfect excuse to avoid going to Versailles. James Gallatin recalled attending a party at Versailles on April 20, 1821, hosted by the Comte d’Artois. Gallatin reflected in his diary that at one point during the party he found himself peering out a window toward the Cour d’Honneur and thinking about Marie-Thérèse: ‘Most people are leaving Paris now … The Court is at St Cloud. The Duchesse d’Angoulême loves it [at Saint-Cloud], but nothing will induce her to go to Versailles. I am not surprised – the memories would be terrible for her.’7

  Gallatin admitted in his diary that he knew for sure that Marie-Thérèse believed her brother was still alive, a belief only made more painful for her by the steady trickle of pretenders coming forward with fantastical tales. In early 1823, as the Gallatins were preparing to return to the United States, they were approached by a woman from the American West who told Albert Gallatin that she had met Louis XVII, ‘the little boy Dauphin’, and that he had arrived in America dressed in the finest clothing. The boy had been raised by Native Americans, had converted to Christianity and was known to many as ‘Indian Williams’. Now a grown man, he claimed that he could only remember a prison, a mob and a very beautiful mother and insisted that he was the brother of the Duchesse d’Angoulême. When it was discovered that he received a regular stipend from a French nobleman, his story was given credibility for many. In truth, his real name was Eleazar Williams and he was the son of a Native American woman and a Caucasian father. Unlike Louis Charles, whose eyes had been blue, Williams’s eye
s were hazel-colored. The difference in eye color did nothing to deter Williams from his claims, and he magnanimously offered to allow King Louis XVIII to retain his right to the throne in exchange for a large cash settlement. Another story that circulated at the same time was the tale of Pierre Louis Poiret, who claimed that he had been smuggled out of the Temple Prison and sent to the Seychelles. There, he presided over his own tropical court for believers.

  The Gallatins had been very close to the Bourbons for years, and on the eve of their return to America, the Duchesse d’Angoulême surreptitiously handed Albert Gallatin a sealed packet, ‘begging him to take great care of it’. Albert Gallatin arrived back at his Paris home at 21 rue de l’Université and opened the package.

  It contains several copies of letters addressed to her from America from people who imagine they are the Dauphin (Louis XVII) and from others who state that the poor child was given into their care. A note from her begging father to investigate the matter if he possibly can, as it is the great wish of her life if her brother is alive to be able to find him. Of course father will do all he can, but he is very skeptical on the matter and fears that wicked people are trying to prey on her feelings with a view of making money.8

  Gallatin went back to America with the lasting impression that Marie-Thérèse was the consummate performer. Always gracious and serene in public, she was evidently in constant turmoil. At the beginning of 1823, she had yet another trial to endure. King Ferdinand VII of Spain, descended from the Bourbon Henri IV and the Habsburgs, had been deposed by rebel soldiers. Louis XVIII appointed the Duc d’Angoulême head of the French army that was sent to invade Spain and return Ferdinand to the throne. Marie-Thérèse feared for her husband’s safety and set off at the end of April for the Spanish border in order to be closer in case of news with a retinue that included Pauline de Béarn.