by Susan Nagel
At Leoben, the King and Marie Caroline met face to face. MarieThérèse and the Comte Lucchesi-Palli remained in the hotel’s salon. Marie Caroline made the initial and crucial mistake of making demands. She wanted to be reunited with her children, to have a proper proclamation of majority for her son, and to replace his tutors with educators, like Chateaubriand, who could prepare him for the future and not the past. Charles, amazed at what he considered to be stunning high-handedness, refused each and every one of Marie Caroline’s demands. When she realized that her method had backfired, Marie Caroline began to sob, plead, thrash, and scream to get her way. In the hotel’s drawing room, Marie-Therese hurriedly ran from window to window, slamming them shut, and finally, to the front door, which she also closed, anxiously telling those present: ‘They can hear her in the street!’ although a crowd had already formed outside. The three-day encampment, with Marie Caroline and her entourage in the Hotel Maure and the King and his staff in the Hotel Emperor, and negotiations going back and forth between them, ended badly for Marie Caroline. She would be returning home without her children.
The Bourbon royal family returned to the Hradschin Palace in Prague and resumed their quotidian life in exile. Mass, breakfast, walks, lessons for the children, letter-writing, making gifts for the poor, and dinners with friends. Marie Caroline, meanwhile, persisted. She obtained permission to travel to Vienna to visit Emperor Franz. In an effort to compromise with all of the warring factions in his and his wife’s families, he agreed to allow Marie Caroline to visit the Chateau Brandeis in Bohemia at a safe, but honorable, distance from her children. The following summer, when she arrived at the Chateau Brandeis for her visit, she was not surprised to learn that Marie-Thérèse had seized the moment to take a trip to Carlsbad. Friends of Contessa Lucchesi-Palli insisted that the de Berry children wept with delight and kissed their mother with joy when they saw her; those at Hradschin Palace insisted differently.
Marie Caroline moved from her temporary home at the Chateau Brandeis and relocated to Schloss Brunnsee near Graz. She would also live part of each year at the Palazzo Vendramin in Venice and over the next few years would have four children with the Comte Lucchesi-Palli, all of whom would survive into adulthood.
As soon as the issue of Marie Caroline had been settled, Marie-Thérèse encountered two other matters that weighed heavy on her heart. On October 5, 1832, the now elderly and ailing Madame de Soucy, learning that Marie-Thérèse was en route to Vienna, seized what she thought was an opportune moment to remind Marie-Thérèse that after their last trip together to the Austrian capital in early 1796, Marie-Thérèse had promised undying loyalty to her traveling companion. De Soucy produced a copy of a letter that Marie-Thérèse had originally written to her in which the then teenage Princess thanked her for her kindness and acknowledged all of de Soucy’s ‘sacrifices that you have made leaving your country and your children to follow me’.
Marie-Thérèse was also greatly relieved when de Soucy was asked to leave Vienna. Marie-Thérèse thought she had heard the last of the woman, but de Soucy, who had been handsomely remunerated by the Emperor (and, for that matter, the Directory, when she was allowed an entire wardrobe at their expense), was always on the lookout for money. In 1823, it was she who had published Marie-Thérèse’s unedited account of life in the Temple Prison, no doubt at a profit; and when, in October 1832, de Soucy received no immediate reply from Marie-Thérèse, the former sous governess wrote a second letter. On October 17, de Soucy informed Marie-Thérèse, ‘cherished princess of my heart’, that she needed money to pay for her care needs because her children had refused to assist her.
On December 5, having still no response from the Dauphine, Madame de Soucy wrote to advise Marie-Thérèse that she had written a book about her life with the Princess which contained information that Marie-Thérèse would not want made public. Madame de Soucy explained that she had turned over the manuscript to her doctor, Magneux Lavergne, who was instructed to exchange the book with the Princess for a large sum of money; or, if the Princess would not be forthcoming with cash, Lavergne was to publish the manuscript, which would contain unflattering accounts of Marie-Thérèse.
Madame de Soucy wrote again on January 14, 1833, offering the Princess a peek at the manuscript’s conclusion, which read: ‘I received my princess at her entrée to life … but, alas, my princess has refused me everything.’ She wrote again on January 20 and February 16. A week later, Dr Lavergne, with Madame de Soucy’s supervision, wrote an account of what they thought they could sell the manuscript for and the profits they might reap, but stated that if Marie-Thérèse could meet those sums, they would destroy the manuscript. In conclusion Lavergne warned that Madame de Soucy had ‘stored in her bosom a secret that only the heart of a mother was worthy of containing’ and that ‘only your Royal Highness has the means to destroy the manuscript in question’.
Although Marie-Thérèse’s charity was legendary, Madame de Soucy had made a tactical mistake. She was trying to intimidate the woman who had led the troops at Bordeaux. Instead of gaining the sympathy of Marie-Thérèse, whose sense of obligation, duty and Christian compassion made her greatly admired, de Soucy’s behavior, as it had in the past, only served to reinforce the Dauphine’s dislike and mistrust of her. In a letter dated March 15, 1833, Marie-Thérèse admitted to her secretary Charlet that whatever she may have confided to Madame de Soucy, and she was not sure that she had ever confided anything of a very personal nature, would have been at a time when she ‘was very young, very innocent, when I traveled with this woman … I could have said some things that she misunderstood … but I never confided secrets of that nature’. In this same note, Marie-Thérèse wrote: ‘Tell, then, this man to never write me again … that he is master to do whatever he likes with the book, that one more calumny added to those that have already been said about me is no great thing. Tell him that I would have given help to this woman as long as I had the means, knowing that she was ill and unhappy, but from the moment that she menaced me, it was all over.’
Charlet contacted Lavergne and demanded the manuscript. The doctor refused to hand it over, claiming that the information contained within ought only to be seen by Marie-Thérèse. De Soucy continued to bombard Marie-Thérèse with threatening letters, imploring the Princess to send her money. This time, it was Marie-Thérèse who erred. On July 2, 1833, she decided that since the former governess claimed destitution, she would instruct Charlet to send her the sum of 500 francs, ‘on the condition that I never hear any more from her or her book – or from that doctor’. In 1837, nearly five years after Madame de Soucy had instigated the blackmail affair, Charlet and Lavergne came to an agreement. He demanded 30,000 francs; Baron Charlet offered 24,000 in two installments. Charlet paid Lavergne 10,000 francs and informed Marie-Thérèse that he had received the manuscript. She wrote to Charlet: ‘I would like you to remit the 14,000 F left to pay. I will authorize my banker to give the money to you, but after this, I will not give any thing more to this man, nor will I listen to him speak. As for the writing, you can burn it if you like, although I hope you will live a long enough time so that I can see you again.’
Madame de Soucy died in 1840, but Dr Lavergne kept a copy of the manuscript. He wanted to be named ‘personal physician to the Dauphine’, which would elevate his career if she and her family returned to the throne. Although she refused this request, Marie-Thérèse did make more payments to the doctor, including 10,000 francs in August 1845 and another 1,000 in July 1847. Each time Marie-Thérèse insisted that the payment would be the last, but each time she sent more. Lavergne, never satisfied, wrote to Charlet: ‘I could have sold them to the government, then I would have had real money.’
In a letter dated ‘Paris, March 29, 1838’, in Madame de Soucy’s handwriting, the Marquise admitted that she received money in exchange for a journal she kept ‘relative to my voyage to Austria to accompany Her Royal Highness, Madame, child of the deceased Louis XVI’. Some historians have seen
this as confirmation that Marie-Thérèse’s putative half-sister Ernestine de Lambriquet changed places with the real Madame Royale somewhere between the gates of the Temple Prison and Vienna. It was, after all, Madame de Soucy, and very few others, who knew where Ernestine de Lambriquet was sequestered while Marie-Thérèse languished in jail. It was also Madame de Soucy who accompanied the young, blonde woman to Vienna in 1795–96; and it was Madame de Soucy who was permitted to bring along ‘a son’ and ‘a maid’ on the journey. Others were convinced that de Soucy’s information pertained to some admission on the Princess’s part during their journey about Louis Charles. Did Marie-Thérèse confess that she suspected that the little King’s real father was Comte Fersen? Or, did Marie-Thérèse divulge her own personal anguish that, since she had never seen her brother’s dead body, she was not certain that Louis Charles had died in prison?
Marie-Thérèse decided to stop paying the doctor and Dr Lavergne never did publish the manuscript. If, in fact, there had been secrets of such import, and not merely youthful indiscretions or mistakes of an embar rassing nature, surely Madame de Soucy could have made available her own book, and not just the memoir of a teenage girl, to the highest bidder long before the Bourbon exile of 1830 when, if the matter were that explosive, for example, a state secret or matters concerning a conspiracy, she could have received far more money.2
The Bourbon fortune, of course, was always attractive to adventurers. Among those who came forward to claim their ‘entitlement’ was a woman named Pauline Verber. Verber insisted that she was the daughter of Marie-Thérèse of France, born in the Temple Prison as a result of the Dauphine having been raped by one of her jailers. There were at least a dozen other women in France, the Holy Roman Empire and the United States, each of whom claimed to be the daughter of Marie-Thérèse of France, born of rape or adultery.
One story concerned the daughter of a Dr Thiollier. Thiollier had served as physician to Louis XVIII’s wife, Marie-Joséphine, while they lived in Mitau around 1799–1800. While he was in Mitau, Dr Thiollier, a bachelor at that time, suddenly came in the possession of a baby girl. The doctor raised the girl, and after the Bourbon Restoration in 1815 they moved back to his home town, Lyon. That same year, the girl, named Joséphine Thiollier, married. On the marriage documents her mother is listed as an English woman the doctor claimed he had married in Switzerland in a town whose civil offices had burned down at the turn of the century, destroying all records. Dr Thiollier was named ‘Baron Villeneuve’ by Louis XVIII, apparently on the suggestion of Marie-Thérèse, who visited Lyon, where she happily received the Baron and his daughter, the new bride. Joséphine Thiollier eventually divorced her husband and assumed the name Madame Plasaret de Villeneuve. After her death in 1880, one of her daughters claimed that, although her mother would never divulge the secret of her origins, the family believed that she was, in reality, the daughter of Marie-Thérèse and a lover.
There were also at least forty men who, over the years, dragged Marie-Thérèse and her family through various court systems claiming to be her long-lost brother, Louis Charles. In France, the self-styled Baron de Richemont continued his campaign to be acknowledged as King of France. In the early 1831 he published his ‘memoir’, which caused a sensation. In it, he challenged Louis-Philippe and disparaged Marie-Thérèse, his ‘sister’. In response, in 1831, the historian A. Antoinette de Saint-Gervais wrote a powerful book called Preuves authentiques de la mort du jeune Louis XVII. Saint-Gervais’s book refuted Richemont’s allegations. Saint-Gervais was not the only one to take action against the Baron de Richemont. In 1833, King Louis-Philippe, irritated by the pretender’s fantasies, had him thrown in jail.
That same year, another man claiming to be the rightful heir to the throne of France also began to create disturbance. His story was first published on August 16, 1831, in the German newspaper Leipziger Zeitung. According to this report, a man named Carl Wilhelm Naundorff insisted that he, too, was the real King Louis XVII of France. Naundorff arrived in Paris in the spring of 1833, just as Marie-Thérèse had begun her treatments in Carlsbad. During the summer of 1833, Naundorff was able to meet with Madame de Rambaud, who had served as Louis Charles’s maid. Madame de Rambaud was overcome with emotion when she met with Naundorff. They reminisced about Versailles and he told her about his daring escape from the Temple Prison. According to Naundorff, a mute child named Tardif had been substituted for the Dauphin in November 1794. Later the child was replaced with one dying of tuberculosis. Naundorff asserted that after he was removed from the Temple Prison, among his various and astonishing adventures, he had been kidnapped, captured by a French ship on the open seas and eventually, in 1810, he arrived in Germany where he became a clockmaker.
In August 1833, after her meeting with the German clockmaker, and examining his vaccination marks, moles and a scar on his lip, which she remembered Louis Charles had received from a rabbit bite, Madame de Rambaud was almost convinced that the man before her was Louis Charles. She set one more trap: she held up a little blue suit she had kept that had belonged to the Dauphin and asked Naundorff: ‘Do you remember when you wore this in Paris?’ Naundorff replied: ‘No. I only wore it once at Versailles.’ Rambaud nearly fainted and immediately wrote to Marie-Thérèse in Prague with the thrilling news that King Louis XVII of France was, indeed, still alive. Others who also believed Naundorff included Marco de Saint-Hilaire, Chamberlain to Louis XVI, and Monsieur de Joly, a former minister of the murdered King.
Marie-Thérèse tried to remain calm and insisted that she would wait for more evidence. During a private meeting with the Vicomte de la Rochefoucauld she asked him to investigate thoroughly this Mr Naundorff. On returning to Paris, de la Rochefoucauld set out to follow him. On November 16, de la Rochefoucauld reported back to Marie-Thérèse that, in fact, not only did Naundorff bear a striking resemblance to Louis Charles but his mannerisms and demeanor were so convincing that de la Rochefoucauld felt a bit light-headed with anxiety about the whole affair.
Marie-Thérèse proceeded with caution; despite Naundorff’s pleas to meet with ‘his sister’, she refused. Some of his supporters thought her callous and claimed that the Dauphine was reluctant to meet with Naundorff because she, herself, was a fraud and her charade would be uncovered. After the New Year, in January 1834, Marie-Thérèse agreed to meet with Naundorff’s lawyer, Morel de Saint-Didier, so that he could present his client’s case and offer her evidence. The elderly Madame de Rambaud, so earnest in her support for Naundorff, traveled to Prague with Saint-Didier. Marie-Thérèse, concerned that de Rambaud herself was an impostor, refused to meet with the woman and would only accept documents from Saint-Didier. Former courtiers who had taken up Naundorff’s cause pleaded with Marie-Thérèse, but she refused to meet with him.
At the end of January, Marie-Thérèse received a note from de la Rochefoucauld who told her that two men had tried to assassinate Naundorff in the Place du Carrousel. Naundorff seized the moment to write ‘his sister’ that he had been longing to see her for many years, that he had written to her over the years, and that he suspected it had been King Louis XVIII, to whom he had also written, who had kept brother and sister apart.
In October 1834, Baron de Richemont was put on trial. In the middle of the trial, Morel de Saint-Didier rose and, with great melodrama, exclaimed that he represented the real Louis XVII of France. Baron de Richemont was found guilty of defrauding the people of France. Mr Naundorff continued his claims for years to come, even going so far as to file a lawsuit against Marie-Thérèse in the hope that she would appear in court in person. He, too, was eventually arrested and details of a nefarious past as a con artist and arsonist surfaced. So intent was he on his story, that he and his family had assumed the name of ‘Bourbon’. When Naundorff died on August 10, 1845, his survivors – wife and children – insisted that his death certificate read, ‘Louis XVII’. After his death, his widow tried to sue Marie-Thérèse for her ‘husband’s inheritance’, asked the court to invalidate th
e 1795 death certificate of Louis Charles, and restore rights to her children.3
The summer of 1833 had brought the picaresque adventures of Marie Caroline, the appearance of Carl Wilhelm Naundorff and the blackmail attempts by the venal Madame de Soucy and Dr Lavergne, causing Marie-Thérèse much vexation and threatening her well-being. Gossip had surrounded her for years, like the scandalmongering that the Duc de Guiche was her lover and this had allowed him to advance quickly in his career, or the stories about illegitimate children, or the rumor that the real Marie-Thérèse was living quietly in a small town in Germany and that she, the Dauphine of France, was, in fact, a substitute. During each of these trials, she, as always, found solace in prayer. In France, in England, in Prague, wherever she lived, Marie-Thérèse maintained an altar in her bedroom. It was an armoire where she kept candles and the relics that had belonged to her mother, brother and father.
Here she would kneel many times a day. She would sometimes show visitors, especially children, her collections. She would tell them the stories about her parents, their deaths, and her own personal recollections of prison, her escape, and her life as the daughter of the King of France. Marie-Thérèse’s mother had delighted in her birth, telling her newborn daughter, ‘You shall be mine’, and although Henri and his sister Louise would eventually be reconciled with their mother, for now these children were hers, and she would show them, and tell them, and teach them.
Chapter XXV
Queen of France
In March 1835, Marie-Thérèse’s cousin, friend and adversary, Emperor Franz of Austria, died. The new Emperor, Ferdinand I, an epileptic who was also considered mentally impaired, wished to use the Hradschin Palace for his coronation. Marie-Thérèse, having many times experienced a change in the wind with a change in régime, understood that their time in Prague was coming to an end. In May, she suggested that the family travel to the spa at Teplitz and when it seemed evident that the new Emperor would be installing himself in a more permanent manner at the Hradschin, the family instructed the Duc de Blacas to purchase the chateau at Kirchberg. At first the Bourbons hoped to make this their new home, but the region was soon engulfed by a cholera epidemic. Henri developed a serious fever, causing everyone great anxiety. As soon as he was recovered, Charles X, who would soon be seventy-nine, decided that he would establish his family elsewhere and in a milder climate.