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

by Susan Nagel

  On November 17, 1827, a slate of liberals was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in parliament. The Duc d’Angoulême saw this as the perfect opportunity for his father to get rid of the ultra-royalist Villèle. According to Villèle in his memoir, although the King acted as though the turn of events was not dramatic, Marie-Thérèse was alarmed. Villèle recalled that she warned the King on December 11 of that year: ‘You abandon M. de Villèle: that is the first step that your throne descends.’ In early 1828, Villèle resigned, and the King replaced him with the equally ultra-royalist Vicomte de Martignac. Martignac was the very same man who had assisted Marie-Thérèse in her confrontation with General Clauzel in 1815. His ambitions had taken him from local politics in Bordeaux to the center of power in Paris.

  Others also sensed unrest in the air and one in particular felt he had an important mission to accomplish. In May of 1828, an eighty-one-year-old Dr Pelletan, after many failed attempts to give the heart he claimed was that of Louis Charles to the royal family, approached the Archbishop of Paris, Monsieur de Quélen, and begged him to keep the relic safe. De Quélen acknowledged receipt of the heart on May 23. When, sixteen months later, the doctor died, the heart, preserved in alcohol and stored in a crystal jar, stayed hidden behind some books on a bookshelf in the Archbishop’s library.

  Throughout 1827 and 1828 Marie-Thérèse continued her steady round of public appearances and served her King as his ubiquitous emissary of charity and kindness. The Parisian newspaper Le Moniteur chronicled that among her appearances during this period the Dauphine presided over a ceremony for the Children of Providence, traveled to Oise, visited a candle factory in Versailles, an artist’s atelier in Montmartre, placed the first stone at a church in the village of Grenelle, journeyed to Normandy, to Caen, opened a theater at Saint-Cloud for a charity benefit, and visited a hospice in Melun; she made trips to Troyes, Chaumont, Plombières, Nancy, Strasbourg, Metz, Bar-le-Duc, Besançon and visited the ruins of the ancient chateau of the Princesse de Clèves. She also continued to pay out a staggering amount – hundreds of thousands of francs per year – to charities, living the concept of noblesse oblige and refusing to accept receipts for her charitable donations, saying that it was the duty of the donor to forget his gift. Le Moniteur would frequently report on the lavish gifts given by other members of the royal family; it would report on the Dauphine’s frequent visits to military hospices, convents and hospitals, but it would never include the considerable amounts of money she left at the end of each visit.

  In truth, the Dauphine, famous for her forbearance, was growing quite impatient with her family, remarking that they were ‘like goats tethered at pasture’. For one, she wished that her husband would adopt a more robust political stance. Further, she had come to the conclusion that the Duchesse de Berry was utterly inane. Her sister-in-law’s vacuity and complete insensitivity in her eyes reached new heights when, on Monday March 2, 1829, Marie Caroline hosted an extravagant costume ball – in imitation of those hosted by Marie Antoinette at Versailles – and made a grand entrance dressed as Mary Queen of Scots, the Stuart Queen who had, like Marie-Thérèse’s mother, been decapitated.

  People read about the Duchesse de Berry’s succession of parties and balls, but, as the economy in France was still in a strong position, few complained about the cost to the public purse. Neither was the court of Charles X criticized, even though it was far more extravagant than that of the guillotined King Louis XVI. Charles X, like Louis XVI, loved to hunt, and he organized lavish post-hunt parties, and liked to play cards. It would often be Marie-Thérèse who read the newspapers and kept him abreast of political developments in Europe. Charles X supported a total of 2,219 court officials and servants. By the end of the 1820s, the little Duc de Bordeaux had more than one hundred servants, compared to the Dauphin of France in 1789 who had forty-five. As in the days of the ancien régime, throughout the reign of Charles X, the other courts of Europe looked to France for its style. The King of Bavaria sent his pages to the French court to study their equivalents; the King of Sardinia received reports detailing receptions at the Tuileries, and copied their plan; the Czar Nicholas I, younger brother of the childless Czar, Alexander I, of Russia emulated the menus-plaisirs; Emperor Pedro I of Brazil sent an envoy to the court of Charles X to study its organization and etiquette; and the United States commissioned tabourets, a kind of straight-legged stool, from a Parisian furniture manufacturer for installation at the White House. Despite the widely held notion that the Dauphine seemed to be unconcerned with style, preferring understated simplicity, her formal gowns and jewels were fabulous and courtiers and fashionable women around the world followed her lead, as they had that of her mother.

  The 1820s had seen the rise and expansion of industrialization in parts of Europe and in America. The first phases of railroad systems as well as new technologies had created new fortunes. Bankers were now heroes, and a prosperous class of capitalists was beginning to dictate social values. Although she had always anticipated an arranged marriage for herself, Marie-Thérèse could not quite grasp the notion of alliances among merchant families where young girls were bartered into marriage for the sake of business. Money became the new virtue, and people were rewarded for simply having a lot of it. Marie-Thérèse had been raised in a world where bloodline and Christian ideals gave one dignity, and she was quite uncomfortable with this burgeoning, modern and very secular civilization. People pointed to material success with pride, but it would not be for extravagance that the Bourbons would be faulted.

  As the great novelist Stendhal remarked, at the very moment when the average citizen, the ‘everyman’, had begun to believe in his own self-importance and had begun to take an aggressive role in his own self-determination, success and personal liberty, the Bourbons had been returned to the throne. They had created a government profoundly ill at ease with itself. The Charter under which King Louis XVIII had been forced to rule had presented an incongruous mixture of ancien-régime and revolutionary concepts, two orders so paradoxical their union was almost destined to fail. Although Louis liked pomp and ceremony, his more conservative brother demanded it. At the court of Charles X, there were six classes of ‘entrées’ – permissions and entitlements to enter a room in the presence of the King. There were those who could enter the King’s bedroom while he slept, the first of the Cabinet, or the grand; those who could enter at anytime as long as they were announced and the entrées of the Cabinet; those who could enter a room a little before the hour when the King would hear Mass (which included the military household of the King, royal guards, the cardinals, Chancellor of France and the President of the Chamber of Deputies); those of the Hall of the Throne, who could appear when the King sat for his formal audience; those with admittance to the first salon preceding the Hall of the Throne; and those who could enter the second salon (subsets of equerries and those who participated tangentially in ceremonial positions). The Dauphine too had her own staff of clergy, ladies of honor, ladies of the bedchamber, companions, ladies-in-waiting, military aides, equerries and the like. A return to such formal protocol was regarded as an echo of the past and had little in keeping with democratic reform.

  In the summer of 1829, Charles X himself began to make reactionary decisions that even Marie-Thérèse thought unwise and too extreme. The first of these was to place Prince Jules Auguste de Polignac in his ministry. Polignac, forty-nine years old, was thought to look very much like the King – and, therefore, like the late Louis XVI. He was the son born on May 14,1780 to Gabrielle Yolande de Polignac, whose special friendship with the late Louis XVI had caused great pain to her best friend, Marie Antoinette.

  The name of Polignac was infamous in France. It was hated by those who had believed in the Revolution as well as those members of the ancient nobility who recalled that the mother of Prince Jules had arrived at the court of Versailles with an insufficient pedigree. It was Louis XVI who had ennobled her with the title of ‘duchess’ when this boy was born. Those French men
and women born years after the Terror had heard stories of the excessive favor given to the Polignacs at court, which had contributed to the eruption of great violence. And when, in 1815, Jules de Polignac had refused to swear allegiance to the Charter; he antagonized a great many people. Immediately after Charles X appointed Polignac, a new political faction headed by Lafayette and Talleyrand, and funded by the Duc d’Orléans for whose benefit this party was created, banded together to reaffirm the Charter and oppose the policies of Charles X. Marie-Thérèse shrewdly cautioned the King that his association with Polignac could be politically disastrous; he ignored her, but she sensed a familiar ill wind in the air.

  That autumn, the King and Marie-Thérèse went on a goodwill tour of eastern France. While on the road the Dauphine became extremely agitated and asked an escort where she was. On being told she was in Varennes, she screamed at the officers to get her out of there as quickly as possible. The news of her erratic behavior spread and when she appeared on a balcony with the King in Nancy she was greeted with jeers. That winter, General Clauzel, the man who had forced her out of Bordeaux nearly fifteen years earlier, was elected to serve in parliament. Marie-Thérèse took the public affirmation of this man as a personal insult.

  In May, the Dauphin left for the southern coast to see off a contingent of French troops bound for France’s expansionist war against Algeria. On June 14, 1830, when 34,000 French soldiers landed near Algiers, the royal family was in Paris hosting a series of feasts in honor of the King and Queen of Naples. On July 5, the Algerians surrendered. The French celebrated their victory and Marie-Thérèse, who made her father-in-law promise that he would not do anything rash while she was away, set off on her annual pilgrimage to take the waters in Vichy. In her absence the King yielded to Prince Polignac’s plans. On the morning of July 26, Le Moniteur reported that on the previous day, Sunday, the King had taken the extraordinary measure of signing an ordinance from his home at Saint-Cloud that revoked the fifteen-year-old Charter – an instrument that at least acknowledged libertarian concepts – and repealed freedoms that had been granted to the press.

  Marie-Thérèse only learned of the King’s betrayal on reaching Macon on her way back to Paris. She immediately realized that the end was near, telling her traveling companion, the Comte de Puymaigre: ‘It is the worst pity that I was not in Paris.’ On July 27, she appeared at the theater in Dijon and was met with hostility. As she traveled toward the Île de France, she discovered that Paris was once more under siege. For three days – ‘Les Trois Glorieuses’ – angry men and women refused to work. Carts were overturned to form barricades and gunfire was heard once again in the capital’s streets. Royal ensigns that hung over shop windows were torn down and symbolically burnt. The police fired into the crowds, killing several people. A powder magazine was ransacked, with citizens turning the Place Louis XV, the Place Vendôme and the Carrousel into artillery batteries. It was an excruciatingly hot July, and over the next two days cannon fire ripped through Paris, church bells pealed continuously and a black flag was hoisted over the Madeleine church. Marauders invaded and ransacked the palace of the Archbishop of Paris. The crystal jar that was claimed to contain the heart of Louis XVII fell to the floor and splintered into pieces. A man who found Dr Pelletan’s papers took them to the home of Pelletan’s son, PhilippeGabriel Pelletan. Two days later, the younger Pelletan went back to the Archbishop’s home, where he found what remained of the heart smelling of ethyl alcohol – as his father had described – and covered in sand and glass. Nonetheless, Philippe-Gabriel was able to collect it, remove the shards of glass and place it in a new jar, thus preserving his father’s secret.

  Madame de Boigne recalled the violence perpetrated during those three days in Paris and the hatred once again directed toward the monarchy: ‘I can positively affirm that throughout this and the following days I heard no cries except “Long live the Charter!” ‘ A deputation of the Chamber appeared at Saint-Cloud and begged the King to rescind his decree. The Marquis de Sémonville urged him, for the sake of the safety of the Dauphine who was en route to Paris, to placate the people. The King replied that Madame, the Dauphine, was as prepared to die for France as he was. The Dauphin, Louis-Antoine, had joined the infantry to fight the rebels and soon returned to be with his father when troops began to march on Saint-Cloud. The King, however, remained blase, explaining to the Comte de Broglie: ‘Jules [Polignac] has seen the Holy Virgin again last night. She ordered him to persevere, and promised that all would end well.’6

  Marie-Thérèse, however, was not as cavalier. She arrived at Tonnerre on July 30 at five in the morning in her grand royal carriage. She was met by her secretary, Baron Charlet, who had traveled to meet her to apprize her of the violence that had raged in Paris for the previous three days. With Charlet’s help, she abandoned her carriage and luggage, changed into the costume of a maid and transferred to a rather basic coach in order to avoid detection by the National Guard, once again under the command of Lafayette. As she journeyed toward Saint-Cloud, Charlet went on ahead with orders to take care of her affairs, including to sell her beloved Villeneuve-l’Etang. The house was purchased by the Vicomte Decazes, brother of the minister Marie-Thérèse had blamed for the Duc de Berry’s death.

  The King and the Duchesse de Berry had been able to watch some of the insurrection through a spy-glass that had been placed on the top floor at Saint-Cloud. On the morning of July 30, they watched with horror as the tri-colored flag was raised over the Tuileries. The Dauphin made a brave effort to rally French forces, but was hindered by conflicting and incomplete information and directives. Even his own soldiers were beginning to grumble that his wife had been a better general in 1815. Most of the military defected and fighting spread throughout the entire Île de France.

  On July 31, Charles X, determined to appear strong and uncompromising, but fearing for his life and for his family, packed up his grandchildren and the Duchesse de Berry and left Saint-Cloud accompanied by about 4,000 garde royale and gardes du corps, and headed for Versailles. The Duc d’Angoulême rode on horseback among the soldiers. Along the way they faced obstructive and hostile crowds and by the time they reached the Grand Trianon, Charles decided that it was time to make haste to his hunting lodge at Rambouillet, an even greater distance from Paris. The Duchesse de Berry, who adored the novels of Sir Walter Scott, seized the opportunity to dress as a man and arm herself with pistols, her father-in-law remarking that she looked just like one of Scott’s heroines. The party reached Rambouillet at about nine in the evening.

  While the King and his family had been making good their escape from the capital, in Paris, outside the Hotel de Ville, General Lafayette embraced the Duc d’Orléans in front of a delighted crowd of thousands.

  As Marie-Thérèse journeyed from the provinces she saw that everywhere the white flags of the Bourbon dynasty had been replaced with the banner of the Revolution. That evening, July 31, she reached Fontainebleau and found the palace virtually deserted. She learned of her family’s whereabouts, and left for Rambouillet the next morning. When she arrived, the King’s first words to her were: ‘My daughter, will you forgive me?’ She replied simply: ‘Let us forget the past.’

  As Marie-Thérèse had predicted, Charles X was forced to abdicate. On August 2, the King and the Dauphin signed a document relinquishing their hereditary rights to the throne in favor of Henri, the Duc de Bordeaux. Many historians have claimed that for the twenty minutes between the time the King signed the document, the ink dried, and the Dauphin read and put his own name to the paper, Marie-Thérèse was the last Queen of France from the senior Bourbon line. In truth, to legitimists, she would only become Queen upon the death of her father-in-law. The three – the King, the Dauphin, and Marie-Thérèse – all believed that this gesture of devolution to the young boy would ensure his place on the throne.

  When the Duc de Bordeaux was informed that he was King of France, the boy and his sister were in another room arranging chairs into a carriage.
Seated high on the group of chairs playing coachman with an imaginary whip in his hands, the nearly ten-year-old boy was told that his grandfather, despite all of his best efforts, had not succeeded in making the people of France happy. Little Henri replied that he could not believe that his wonderful bon-papa could make anyone unhappy and continued lashing his invisible horses.

  Four months before the revolution of 1830, on March 29, King Ferdinand of Spain abolished Salic law in favor of his daughter, Isabella, to the prejudice of his younger brother, Charles. When the French Bourbons were told of the news, Marie-Thérèse grumbled that France should have done the same thing long ago.

  Chapter XXIII

  Suspicions Confirmed

  On August 3, approximately 14,000 armed Parisians and members of the National Guard marched toward the royal family’s hide-out at Rambouillet. As soon as the King received word of the threat of impending violence he knew it was time to go. Marie-Thérèse, the aging King and Louis-Antoine prepared to leave France once more. They packed their personal effects, silver and other finery into splendid carriages; the King arranged for the crown jewels to be returned to the treasury in Paris, and Marie-Thérèse packed every one of the treasured souvenirs that remained to her of her parents and siblings. The Duchesse de Berry, with the vainglorious notion that she would, like other great matriarchal figures of history, Marguerite de Navarre, Margaret of Austria and Louise de Savoie, influence a King, planned to remain in France as Regent of her son.

  Marie-Thérèse bid a tearful farewell to Pauline de Béarn. It would be the last time the childhood friends would ever see each other. Pauline recalled that the Dauphine, who said she had nothing more precious to give her cherished friend, relinquished the seal that had belonged to her mother which the Queen had worn suspended from her watch. Marie Antoinette had given her daughter this memento the day she was removed from the Temple Prison.