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

  MARIE-THÉRÈSE

  THE FATE OF

  MARIE ANTOINETTE’S DAUGHTER

  SUSAN NAGEL

  For Hadley,

  my passionate historian

  Contents

  Many homes of Marie Therese

  The Bourbon Line

  The Habsburg Line

  Preface

  PART ONE: SINNER

  I Sex and Politics

  II Child of France

  III Playmates

  IV Once upon a Time

  V Storm Clouds over the Palace

  VI The End of the Fairy Tale

  VII A New Home

  VIII A Dangerous Game

  IX The Losing Side

  X Two Orphans

  XI Sole Survivor

  PART TWO: SAINT

  XII Every Inch a Princess

  XIII Vienna

  XIV The Émigrés

  XV The Birth of a Strategist

  XVI A Bride

  XVII The New Antigone

  XVIII Country Life

  XIX The Only Man in the Family

  XX Restoration

  XXI Birth, Death and a New Dauphine

  XXII Mending Fences

  XXIII Suspicions Confirmed

  XXIV Blackmail

  XXV Queen of France

  XXVI The Matriarch

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Chronology

  Notes

  Bibliography

  By the Same Author

  Many homes of Marie Therese

  The Bourbon Line

  The Habsburg Line

  Preface

  After the brutal beheadings of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette in 1793, dozens of young men and women around the globe came forth with astonishing tales of escape and adventure, claiming to be the long-lost children of the slaughtered Bourbon King and his Austrian-born wife. The royal couple had four children: their eldest, Marie-Thérese-Charlotte, named for her maternal grandmother, the Empress of Austria; Louis Joseph, known as the Dauphin; Louis Charles; and the youngest, Sophie. Louis Joseph and Sophie both died in early childhood of natural causes. Marie-Thérese and Louis Charles, who became the Dauphin after his brother’s death, accompanied their parents to the notorious Temple Prison in Paris where they lived a life of physical and mental deprivation from 1792–95.

  Sadly, we now know for certain what became of Louis Charles, the adored son whom Marie Antoinette called her chou d’amour. In 2000, two scientists, Jean-Jacques Cassiman of the University of Leuven in Belgium and Bernard Brinkmann of the University of Munster in Germany, using a lock of hair from the head of Marie Antoinette, proved through exhaustive DNA testing that the heart of a little boy who had died in the Temple Prison was, in fact, the heart of Louis Charles, Dauphin of France, known after his father’s death as Louis XVII. The tiny heart had apparently been cut from his body by the doctor performing the autopsy and smuggled out of the prison in a handkerchief. The doctor brought the heart to his home, placed it in a jar, and kept it. After the doctor’s death, during a time of continuing political upheaval in France, the heart was removed from the house, making a fantastic clandestine journey from palaces to churches and libraries over a period of two hundred years. In June 2004, the jar containing the boy’s heart was ceremoniously laid to rest in the royal crypt in St Denis, outside Paris, where it will remain in perpetuity.

  The DNA results put to rest the scores of claims fabricated by desperate, delusional or merely greedy pretenders and finally offered conclusive evidence that there was only one surviving child of the royal couple: Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, known as ‘Madame Royale’, and as the daughter of the King, ‘Child of France’. For years after the French Revolution, Marie-Thérèse, who escaped the Temple Prison at midnight on her seventeenth birthday, lived under the threat of abduction or assassination. Two of her cousins were murdered long after the French Revolution had ended, and it was widely known that the daughter of the King of France remained a key target. She was also the subject of intriguing rumors and conspiracy theories.

  Through letters scattered among the aristocracy, a story circulated that Marie-Thérèse had been raped in prison and was pregnant when she fled her captors. Further commentary claimed that she was not only pregnant, but so mentally frail that she was in no way fit to be a royal bride to her intended husband, the Austrian Archduke Karl, brother of the Holy Roman Emperor. These allegations fueled suspicion that the daughter of Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI had changed places with another girl.

  The nineteenth-century world was obsessed with the idea that the royal children in the Temple Prison had in fact changed places with doppel-gängers. C. S. Forester alludes to the idea of there having been a ‘switch’ in his novel Lord Hornblower, in which he creates an encounter between the swashbuckling British naval hero Horatio Hornblower and Marie-Thérèse, then the Duchesse d’Angoulême. Hornblower is charmed by the ‘high-spirited’ and ‘lovely’ Duchess, and adds that he finds her warmth and familiarity ‘very un-Bourbon-like’. He ponders why she is ‘acting with a condescension a trifle excessive in a king’s daughter, a future queen of France’, but decides that it must be because she is ‘the only living child of Marie Antoinette, whose charm and vivacity and indiscretion had been proverbial. That might explain it.’ Rumors of a ‘switch’ and suspicions as to the fate of the Dauphin even spread to the American frontier, where satirist Mark Twain alluded to the phenomenon in four of his most popular novels: in Huckleberry Finn, for instance, Huck declares himself to be the missing ‘little boy dolphin’.

  In 1814, upon the return of the Bourbons to France, the Duchesse d’Abrantès wryly remarked that it had been over twenty years since anyone had seen a Bourbon, and ‘no one quite knew who was who anymore’. In the days before the invention of photography and mass media, people relied on portraiture, which was wildly unreliable, to know the faces of their ruling families. In the case of the French Revolution, where so many of the courtiers were executed, there were very few people living afterwards who could serve as eyewitnesses, or say with any certainty, ‘That is Madame Royale.’ After all, Marie-Thérèse had entered the Temple Prison a girl and vacated its walls, after more than three years of isolation, a young woman. Various portraits of her, one supposedly executed days after her escape from the Temple Prison, do, in fact, show facial changes including a nose that is inexplicably different from the pictures of her as a young teenager.

  Only months after Marie-Thérèse made her dramatic journey from the Temple Prison to Vienna, the American Gouverneur Morris, who had known Marie-Thérèse as a little girl, saw her at the Prater. Morris remarked that she was ‘much improved’ since he had seen her in France and that she looked so much like the late King, that he could with certainty dispel one rumor – that she was the daughter of Marie Antoinette’s alleged lover, the Swedish Count, Axel Fersen.

  Another rumor, which also originated at the court of Louis XVI, concerned the birth of a young girl named Ernestine de Lambriquet. Gossips whispered that Ernestine was not the daughter of a chambermaid and a manservant of King Louis XVI’s brother as was claimed, but the illegitimate daughter of that same chambermaid and King Louis XVI himself, making her Marie-Thérèse’s half-sister. That certainly would have explained not only why Ernestine looked so much like the King but also why she and Marie-Thérèse were often called ‘twins’ and why she was raised alongside the young Princess as her ‘playmate’. Ernestine was just a few months older than Madame Royale, and it was not uncommon for illegitimate children of a
monarch to be brought up under royal protection alongside legitimate heirs to the throne.

  Two hundred years after the demise of the Holy Roman Empire and the thousand-year-old Capetian dynasty, of which the Bourbon branch was its last, there remained one final nagging controversy. It is claimed that a woman known as the ‘Dark Countess’, who lived as a recluse at Eishausen Castle near Hildburghausen, Germany, was, in fact, the real Marie-Thérèse and that Ernestine de Lambriquet posed as Marie-Thérèse, went on to become the Duchesse d’Angoulême, Dauphine of France, and, to legitimists, the Queen of France in exile. The ‘Dark Countess’ was said to appear in public only infrequently, and when she did, she wore a dark veil to cover her fair hair, high coloring and blue eyes. Her companion was a man who referred to her as ‘Your Grace’, and the pair spoke with each other in French. Eishausen had a subterranean cave and tunnel, an escape route into a forest, and local inhabitants noted that the couple would often receive mysterious visits from courtiers and servants of Europe’s royal houses.

  The Dark Countess died on November 25, 1837, and was buried before dawn. Her death did nothing to dispel the rumors, however. The public records stated that the dead woman’s name was ‘Sophie’ – the name that Marie-Thérèse used when traveling incognito. The documents also state that ‘Sophie’ was ‘fifty-eight’ at the time of her death – making her the same age as the daughter of Marie Antoinette. Among the contents of Sophie’s estate was furniture and clothing emblazoned with the Bourbon family crest, the fleur-de-lys, and an ornately chiseled turquoise and gold collier also engraved with the fleur-de-lys, which has since been authenticated as having belonged to the murdered Queen of France. Also among the Countess’s personal effects was a livre d’heures – a liturgical prayer book – written in French, which had been published in 1756 by the Austrian Imperial imprinter, Thomas Trattner, in Vienna, and which contained white and blue bookmarks decorated with Bourbon escutcheon and symbols. On one page within was a hand-drawn portrait of a woman with her nose erased. It was widely known that Marie Antoinette had had her livre d’heures with her on the day of her execution, and it was believed that the book had traveled through many hands, including those of the French revolutionary leaders Robespierre and Marat, before turning up at auction in England. Shortly after the auction, and long before the story of the Dark Countess became known, it was told in England that Marie Antoinette’s prayer book had been sent to a small town in Germany called Hildburghausen. Today, the book resides in a museum in France. In 1954, a member of the German noble family of Saxe-Altenburg, Frédéric de Saxe-Altenburg, wrote the book L’Énigme de Madame Royale, in which he contested that various members of his family had inherited possessions that had belonged to the Dark Countess along with a pledge to never reveal the secret story that there had, indeed, been a ‘switch’.

  On October 16, 1851 – some fourteen years after the death of the Dark Countess – the Duchesse d’Angoulême, suffering from pneumonia, rose to observe, as she did every year, the anniversary of the death of Queen Marie Antoinette of France. She died at Frohsdorf Castle near Vienna three days later on October 19, holding the wedding band that had belonged to King Louis XVI. On October 28, her nephew, the Comte de Chambord, eulogized her, stating that she lived according to ‘not only the double majesty of virtue and sadness but also to the grand principles in which rest our future’. Her body was laid to rest at the peaceful convent of Castagnavizza in Slovenia, the crypt selected by Charles X for his exiled Bourbon family.

  The story of Marie-Thérèse is one laden with paradoxes. The French considered themselves to be the most refined of Europe, the guardians of the most civilized society and their court the most rarefied; yet they became embroiled in the most barbaric and bloodthirsty revolution that, for the royal Children of France, was a Moloch. As a young girl, the public perceived Marie-Thérèse as a sinner – a spoilt and arrogant little girl; but she was, of course, just a child trained to perform. By the time of the Terror, hatred for her bloodline had grown to such a level that she was vilified by the masses, declared ‘evil’, and locked away in prison. However, when the nation needed to expiate itself for its crimes, it proclaimed her a saint. While Ernestine, the King’s putative child, was neither damned nor noticed, Marie-Thérèse, as the legitimate daughter of the King and Queen of France, was scrutinized from the day she was born. Both women may have shared a father, a history, and a legacy that connected them back to the Merovingian Kings of France, but only one of them was the daughter of Marie Antoinette, and only one of them was raised to fulfill her duty as the standard bearer of a thousand-year-old dynasty.

  Part One

  Sinner

  Chapter I

  Sex and Politics

  When holy roman emperor Joseph I died without a male heir in 1711, the crown passed to his brother, Charles VI. At that time, twenty-six-year-old Charles had no children. If Charles were to have a son, that boy would have been next in line to inherit the throne; but, if Charles were to have daughters, his late brothers’ daughters would have precedence over his own female issue. In order to ensure continuation of his own dynasty and to preempt any claims to the throne by his nieces or other branches of the mighty Habsburg family, Charles, still childless in 1713, drafted a document called the Pragmatic Sanction. The Sanction laid down a code of succession in which Charles’s eldest child, male or female, would inherit all the disparate Habsburg lands – including Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and parts of Italy. However, before the Sanction could become law Charles had to negotiate fiercely with his nieces, cousins and various regional princes to persuade them to accept the measure.

  Charles had one son who died in infancy and two daughters who would survive him. The eldest, Maria Theresa, became heiress to the throne and because Charles assumed that whichever husband she chose would, in reality, rule the Empire, she was allowed to marry for love. In 1736, nineteen-year-old Maria Theresa married Francis of Lorraine and by the marriage settlement the region of Lorraine was ceded to France, and Francis was given the title Grand Duke of Tuscany and with it vast territories and riches.

  In 1740, Charles died and Maria Theresa ascended the throne, becoming Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, Archduchess of Austria, and Duchess of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla. Despite the fact that during his lifetime Charles had devoted his diplomatic energies to having the Pragmatic Solution accepted by the major rulers of Europe, after his death Bavaria, France, Prussia and Spain immediately contested the document, advancing claims to great portions of the Empire. A war fought on many fronts, the War of Austrian Succession lasted for eight years during which time Charles of Bavaria was elected Holy Roman Emperor. The Austrians were able to defeat the French and Bavarians in Bohemia, sign a short-lived armistice with Frederick of Prussia, and, at last, when Charles of Bavaria died, secure the title Holy Roman Emperor for Maria Theresa’s husband, Francis. Through her husband’s election as ‘Holy Roman Emperor, Francis I’, Maria Theresa received the title ‘Empress’.

  Maria Theresa was acutely aware that as a female ruler her position would remain tenuous as without a male heir the legitimacy of the Sanction would be continually challenged. She and Francis would have sixteen children together – ten of whom would reach adulthood – but for the first three years of her marriage Maria Theresa gave birth only to daughters. Finally, in 1741, she gave birth to a son, Joseph, and was able to consolidate her position.

  Despite Francis’s widely acknowledged philandering, the royal couple successfully created a public image of family, piety, sobriety and good works. Although the royal tribe presented a somewhat casual family lifestyle – moving between the Hofburg Palace in Vienna and the nearby summer home, Schönbrunn Palace – there was nothing haphazard about their plans for their children. Each child was groomed for a specific role or marriage. Joseph was destined for and trained to be Holy Roman Emperor; Leopold II inherited his father’s title, Grand Duke of Tuscany, when Francis I died in 1765; and Max Franz became Elector of Cologne. To the
other young Archdukes and Archduchesses Maria Theresa applied the Habsburg family motto: ‘Let other nations wage war; you, happy Austria, achieve your ends through marriage,’ and she busily sought out and arranged marriages for them that would benefit the Empire. Eighth-born Maria Amelia fell in love with Prince Charles of Zweibrücken. The Empress and her minister Kaunitz disapproved of what they thought was an inferior match and forced the twenty-three-year-old Princess to marry the Duke of Parma, five years her junior and mentally impaired, in 1769. Maria Carolina, thirteenth-born, became Queen of Naples and Sicily. And in 1768, in what would prove the most tragic and ill-fated union, thirteen-year-old Maria Antonia was informed that she would be sent to France as the bride of Louis-Auguste, the Dauphin and future King of France.

  In the 1750s, after centuries of hostility, Austria and France united against the British, but their alliance proved a disaster when, at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, a British victory left France without much of her American territories and with heavy debts from a series of defeats. Maria Theresa and King Louis XV of France hoped that the marriage of their children would engender a more lasting truce between the two defeated Empires. Although many in France decried the proposal as a crime of miscegenation, Maria Antonia and Louis-Auguste were, in fact, both descended from Anne of Austria, the mother of France’s King Louis XIV (although as the daughter of the Spanish King Philip III, she had never actually set foot in Austria and came to the French court directly from Spain).

  Until the time of her engagement, Maria Antonia had been largely ignored by her mother. She had been raised by a series of tutors, maids and courtiers. Like most aristocrats, Maria Antonia was fluent in French, though she had never ventured further than the outskirts of Vienna. She loved music and was a talented ballet dancer – her graceful carriage always regarded as one of her finest attributes. The rest of her education was poor, however, and it was later discovered that the pretty and beguiling young Archduchess had been able to persuade her tutors to allow her to skip key subjects such as history and culture. These instructors, afraid of losing their posts, often completed Maria Antonia’s homework for her, telling the Empress that it was the work of the child.