Marie-Antoinette, Daughter of the Caesars

by Elena Maria Vidal

  One of the most famous would-be rescuers was the Baron de Batz (1760-1814) who made a number of foiled attempts to rescue the Royal Family. He finally determined to rescue the Queen from the Conciergerie and had gold in order to bribe the National Guards. He was discovered but managed to escape. In 1795 he stirred up a Royalist revolt in Paris which died as soon as a young officer named Napoleon Bonaparte fired grapeshot into the crowd.

  In the early spring of 1793, after her husband's murder, Antoinette was given an opportunity to escape from the Temple prison. Monsieur Jarjayes and the guard Toulan had a plan for her to get away, but she declined to leave her children and sister-in-law, although she knew that to stay meant her probable death. The following is a passage from the biography by Charles Duke Yonge:

  But such a flight was forbidden alike by Marie Antoinette’s sense of duty and by her sense of honor, if indeed the two were ever separated in her mind. Honor forbade her to desert her companions in misery, whose danger might even be increased by the rage of her jailers, exasperated at her escape. Duty to her boy forbade it still more emphatically. As his guardian, she ought not to leave him; as his mother, she could not. And her renunciation of the whole design was conveyed to M. Jarjayes in a letter which did honor alike to both by the noble gratitude which it expressed…It was written by stealth, with a pencil…Thus she wrote: ‘We have had a pleasant dream,that is all. I have gained much by still finding, on this occasion, a new proof of your entire devotion to me. My confidence in you is boundless. And on all occasions you will always find strength of mind and courage in me. But the interest of my son is my sole guide; and, whatever happiness I might find in being out of this place, I can not consent to separate myself from him. In what remains, I thoroughly recognize your attachment to me in all that you said to me yesterday. Rely upon it that I feel the kindness and the force of your arguments as far as my own interest is concerned, and that I feel that the opportunity can not recur. But I could enjoy nothing if I were to leave my children; and this idea prevents me from even regretting my decision.’ And to Toulan she said that ‘her sole desire was to be reunited to her husband whenever Heaven should decide that her life was no longer necessary to her children.’2

  In the September of 1793, Marie-Thérèse last saw her brother Louis-Charles, in the council room of the Temple prison. He sat in a big chair, swinging his legs, reciting the calumny about how his mother and aunt had molested him. His eyes were bloodshot; he started to weep, and grasped for his sister’s hand. Then they led him away. They interrogated the princess at length about her mother’s behavior towards her brother but the innocent young girl could only vaguely comprehend what they were implying. It was only later that she fully understood. Nevertheless, her mental suffering was intense. To quote from the memoirs of Madame Royale:

  In the beginning of September, I had an indisposition caused solely by my anxiety about my mother: I never heard a drum that I did not expect another 2nd of September: every day I went upon the leads with my aunt. The officers visited us closely thrice a day, but their severity did not prevent our receiving now and then some hints of what was passing abroad, and particularly about my mother, which was our greatest concern.

  In spite of all the efforts and vigilance of these cruel men, we always found some compassionate hearts, who felt for us. We learned that the Queen was accused of having had a correspondence beyond the walls of the prison; we therefore hastened to get rid of our writings, our pencils, and whatever we had still preserved, fearing that we might be undressed and searched before Simon's wife, and that finding these things on us might endanger my mother; we had contrived, notwithstanding the most minute searches which were made in our chambers, and amongst all the furniture, to conceal ink, paper, and pens. We learnt too that my mother might have escaped from the Conciergerie. The wife of the keeper was not insensible to her misfortunes, and paid her every possible attention.

  The officers came again for linen for my mother, but they would not give us any account of her state of health. They even took away from us some pieces of tapestry which my mother had begun, and on which we were working, under pretence that these works might contain mysterious characters, and a secret mode of writing.3

  Louis-Charles, in the meantime, was being devoured by the Revolution. The policy of revolutionaries so often seems to be that of taking children from their parents’ care. After being forcibly removed from his mother the Queen in the summer of 1793, the eight year old was beaten and otherwise abused, especially when he refused to deny God. The Dauphin, when caught saying his prayers as his mother had taught him, was kicked in the face by Simon his jailer. He was taught to sing obscene songs and curse and swear. He was shown pornography. Since he had lost his father, the little boy had probably been chafing against being cooped up with weeping women, and being a sensitive and impressionable child who had already been traumatized by loss and violence, he was easily manipulated, as any child in such circumstances would be. We might also recall what the Queen wrote to Madame de Tourzel in 1789 when Louis-Charles was four years old:

  He is admirably faithful when once he has promised any thing, but he is very indiscreet; he is thoughtless in repeating any thing that he has heard; and often, without in the least intending to tell stories, he adds circumstances which his own imagination has put into his head. This is his greatest fault, and it is one for which he must be corrected.4

  Simon and the soldiers gave him alcohol so that he became drunk. It was in an intoxicated state that he signed the testimony that his own mother had committed incest with him, surely not fully understanding the connotations of the deed. One can see from his handwriting that he was not himself, especially when comparing it with his former schoolwork.5

  Why did the builders of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” feel compelled to torment a child? Because they knew that children are the future. To manipulate and enslave a child’s mind, to weaken his free will through alcohol, pornography and sexualization, is to make him a creature of the state, an automaton, a drone. The horror of the Temple prison has been replicated, in some degree at least, by every totalitarian dictatorship, by the communist and fascist regimes who wished to enslave Christianity and make a god of the nation-state. When the state becomes a god, it is insatiable, for every false god is a demon.

  The orphaned daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette was aware that her small brother Louis-Charles was in the room below, ill and abused with no one to care for him, especially after the Simons left the Temple, if what they did can be considered care. She was not permitted to see him and when he died of tuberculosis at the age of ten on June 8, 1795, she was not even allowed to keep vigil by his corpse. Only when his body was removed was Madame Royale allowed to go down into the garden. She ever after harbored doubts as to whether her brother had really died because of the rumors that he had been replaced by another boy.

  The children of Louis and Antoinette were not the only innocents to suffer during the Revolution. Many French people, particularly the peasants of the Vendée, rebelled against the Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity that were being imposed upon them through bloodshed. They resented their churches being taken over and eventually closed by Republic, while the priests were killed or exiled. They took up arms; the Revolutionary government exercised the harshest brutality upon the

  uncooperative citizens, including torture, rape and mutilation. General Westermann and his bleus were especially notorious for their sadism towards children. There were atrocities all over the Vendée, in Lyon and other French towns and cities where the Revolution was not appreciated. It was the blueprint for the mass murders of the totalitarian regimes of later centuries. Many children died, many young lives were shattered at the dawn of the modern world. Madame Royale, who became known as the “Orphan of the Temple” was the living symbol of all the lost children of France.

  A month after the Queen’s death there began the noyades or "Republican marriages" in Nantes. Under the orders of the Republican
Jean-Baptiste Carrier, those citizens who had resisted the Revolution were stripped naked, tied together, put in boats and drowned in the middle of the river. Many innocent, non-political persons, including young girls and nuns, were subjected to such grisly deaths. Usually it was a naked man and woman who were tied together and drowned. The practice was accompanied by other sadistic indignities as well. The Revolution showed no mercy in its macabre mockery of both marriage and baptism.

  Madame Élisabeth had always been deeply aware of the danger to her own life by staying with Louis and Antoinette but she refused to leave her brother’s family. She stood at Louis’ side on June 20, 1792 when the mob stormed the Tuileries and hoped that the people would mistake her for the Queen so that her sister-in-law would be spared. When Louis XVI was killed and the Dauphin taken away and brutalized, Élisabeth comforted Antoinette and young Madame Royale, keeping them from despair. When a friend wondered if Madame Élisabeth could escape on her own, it was said, “Madame Élisabeth is inseparable from the queen; she would not leave her for the most splendid crown in the universe.”6 After the Queen’s death in October 1793, the aunt and the niece remained in the Temple prison, enduring humiliations and taunts of the jailers. Élisabeth trained Marie-Thérèse how to survive in confinement, knowing that soon she would be alone. Élisabeth had instructed her niece not to ever let the jailers find her undressed or in bed.

  Élisabeth was thirty years old when she was killed in May of 1794. Knowing she was to die, she offered to God the sacrifice of her life. At her trial she was condemned for plotting against the Revolution. In her memoirs, Madame Royale describes the last days of her aunt.

  In the beginning of spring we were refused candles, and we were obliged to go to bed as soon as it grew dark. Until the 9th of May nothing extraordinary happened. On that day, at the moment we were going to bed, the outside bolts of the doors were drawn, and a knocking was heard. My aunt begged of them to wait till she had put on her gown; but they answered that they could not wait, and knocked so violently, that they were near bursting open the door. When she was dressed, she opened the door, and they immediately said to her, ‘Citizen, come down.’ — ‘And my niece?’ — ‘We shall take care of her afterwards.’ She embraced me; and, in order to calm my agitation, promised to return. ‘No, citizen,’ said they, ‘you shall not return:— take your bonnet, and come along.’ They overwhelmed her with the grossest abuse. She bore it all patiently, and embraced me again, exhorting me to have confidence in Heaven, to follow the principles of religion in which I had been educated, and never to forget the last commands of my father and mother. She then left me.

  Down stairs they detained her a considerable time in searching her (though they found nothing), and in writing an account of their proceedings. At length, after a thousand insults, she was put into a hackney-coach, with the crier of the revolutionary court, and taken to the Conciergerie, where she passed the night. The next morning they asked her these questions.—

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Élisabeth, of France.’

  ‘Where were you on the 10th of August?’

  ‘In the palace of the Tuileries, with my brother.’

  ‘What have you done with your jewels?’

  ‘I know nothing about them; besides, these questions are wholly useless. You are determined on my death. I have offered to Heaven the sacrifice of my life; and I am ready to die—happy at the prospect of rejoining in a better world those whom I loved upon earth.’

  They condemned her to death. She asked to be placed in the same room with the other persons who were to die with her. She exhorted them, with a presence of mind, an elevation of soul, and religious enthusiasm, which fortified all their minds. In the cart she preserved the same firmness, and encouraged and supported the women who accompanied her. At the scaffold they had the barbarity to reserve her for the last. All the women, in leaving the cart, begged to embrace her. She kissed them, and, with her usual benignity, said some words of comfort to each. Her strength never abandoned her, and she died with all the resignation of the purest piety. Her soul was separated from her body, and ascended to receive its reward from the merciful Being, whose worthy servant she had been.

  It is impossible to imagine my distress at finding myself separated from my aunt. I did not know what had become of her, and could not learn. I passed the night in great anxiety, but, though very uneasy, I was far from believing that her death was so near. Sometimes I tried to persuade myself that they would only banish her from France, but, when I considered the manner in which she had been carried off, all my fears revived.7

  While awaiting death, eyewitnesses reported how Élisabeth inspired the other prisoners: “She seemed to regard them all as friends about to accompany her to heaven….the tranquility of her mind subdued their anguish.”8 On May 10, 1794 she recited the De Profundis on the way to the guillotine. The princess was the last of a group of twenty-five people to be executed; they each knelt before her, asking her blessing. Some say she fainted in the process; the sound of so many decapitations was too much. When it was Élisabeth’s turn, the executioner pulled her bodice down very low off her shoulders, and she begged for modesty’s sake to be covered. There were no cheers when Élisabeth’s head was thrown into a basket, the crowd was silent, and some reported the scent of roses filling the square, a miracle from the Middle Ages to disturb the dawn of modernity. Many regarded her as a saint, including Pope Pius VII, and perhaps someday her cause will be introduced.

  Meanwhile, the guards were tormenting Louis-Charles, awaking him at all hours of the night, torturing him by sleep deprivation. It became a game for them to call “Capet, are you awake?” and shout at the boy until he climbed out of bed and appeared at the door of his cell. In the streets of Paris, the Reign of Terror was at its height. On July 17, 1794, the sixteen Carmelite nuns of Compiègne were guillotined. Antoinette had sponsored the vocation of the prioress, Mother Thérèse de Saint-Augustin, by providing her with a dowry. Ten days later Robespierre was guillotined, and the Reign of Terror came to an end. 6,594 people had been executed by guillotine, including 2,639 just in Paris, and another 25,000 murdered in various ways in the rest of France. After the Thermidorians guillotined Robespierre, their leader Barras, who has been described as having the soul of a louse, visited the Temple, and appointed the young Creole Christophe Laurent to take charge of the orphans in the Temple. Laurent was polite and told Madame Royale that he had cleaned her brother’s cell, and deloused him. But he never allowed her to see her brother, nor did he call a doctor. Neither child was allowed any fresh air.

  In November Madame Royale was visited by Gomin, who brought matches, and candles, too, let us assume. He assured the princess that her brother was being nurtured, when in reality the child was ill, mute and covered with infectious sores. When Harmand, the chief of the metropolitan police, who had replaced Michonis after he was guillotined, visited the little prisoner in December, he found a dumb boy with rickets, covered with tumors, but still able to walk, and obviously able to obey simple commands. At the end of March 1795, Laurent was sent away from the Temple, to be replaced by Lasne. It was Lasne who at last summoned a physician for the unfortunate boy. On May 6, Dr. Pierre-Joseph Desault visited the boy and was shaken by his condition, the result of mistreatment and neglect, which he reported to the authorities. Within a month, the doctor died of a mysterious illness. There were those who thought he had been poisoned.9 Two more doctors were sent to the Temple, Jean-Baptiste Dumangin and Philippe-Jean Pelletan, but they found the poor child too far gone for medical aid. They made certain he was cleaned up and made as comfortable as possible as he lay dying. Meanwhile, both the Spanish government and Charette, the leader of the Royal and Catholic army of the Vendée, were demanding the release and safe delivery of Madame Royale and Louis XVII, in exchange for peace. The Directoire of Barras badly needed peace from both its external and internal foes, but would not surrender Madame Royale until the child in the room below had died on Ju
ne 8, 1795. Dr. Pelletan removed the heart of the boy and preserved it in alcohol and it was later used in the DNA tests of the 21st century to prove that the child was the son of a Habsburg princess.10

  How dark must have been the thoughts of Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte de France on the midnight of December 18, 1795, the eve of her seventeenth birthday, as she prepared to be sent to her relatives in Austria. She had not only experienced a bloody revolution, but she had been subjected to verbal abuse and the constant threat of physical molestation. Since the guards would make surprise visits to her cell at all hours of the day and night, the teenaged princess, Madame Royale of Versailles, would sometimes spend the night in a chair, petrified. One by one, her parents, her brother, and her aunt had been taken away, until she was alone in the dreary Temple prison in Paris. After her brother died, she was sent a companion from the Barras government, a lady called Madame Renée de Chanterenne, who told her what had happened to her family and helped her to write her memoirs. Meanwhile, the citizens of Paris began to remember her. They stood on the roofs of neighboring houses so they could glimpse their princess when she went for a walk in the garden. Many wept for her, and public indignation rose against the government. Kindly Parisians sent her a dog and a baby goat for company. In October 1795, it was arranged that Marie-Thérèse de France would be exchanged for the four commissioners of the Convention delivered up to Austria by Dumouriez in April, 1793. She left the Tower of the Temple during the night of December 18, 1795. Madame de Tourzel and her daughter Pauline as well as Madame de Mackau came to be with her. They begged to travel with her to Austria but were not permitted. As she stepped out of the tower, she turned to the French minister who had come to escort her to the border. “I am grateful for your attentive and respectful manner,” said the princess. “But even at the moment you are giving me liberty, how can I help thinking of those who crossed this threshold before me? It is just three years, four months, and five days since those doors were closed on my family and me; today I go out, the last and most wretched of all.” The Temple was razed to the ground by order of Napoleon in 1811.