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

  Louis-Philippe, who had always coveted the throne, now had an even more spiteful reason to wage a vengeful campaign to wrest the throne from his own cousin, Louis XVI. The Duke would become infamous. Madame de la Tour du Pin called him ‘the Regicide’. In her memoirs of the French Revolution, de la Tour du Pin wrote that she was convinced that Orléans was behind the riots in the lead-up to the Revolution. Thomas Carlyle, in his dramatic account, The French Revolution, agreed, and, referring to Orléans’s betrayal of the King, named Orléans ‘Iscariot’. The contemporary French historian Montjoye called Orléans the ‘atrocious Philippe’, and those who stormed Versailles ‘the prostitutes of Orleans’.

  By April, the Empress was again putting pressure on her daughter to get pregnant. On April 1, 1779, she wrote, ‘What you write about your dear daughter pleases me greatly, and especially the King’s love. But I must admit to being insatiable; she needs a companion, and he must not delay too long.’

  That month, the Queen contracted measles and sequestered herself so that she would not infect the King or her infant daughter. She once again caused a stir when she allowed the Dues de Coigny and de Guines, the Comte Esterhazy and the Baron de Besenval, and no female companions, to keep her amused. The month-long illness delayed any hope of pregnancy and kept her from watching over her daughter’s progress. However, by early May, she reported to her mother that the baby girl could recognize people around her with whom she was familiar. The Empress received reports from two Russian friends who said the baby looked like her mother, but based on two portraits, the Empress wrote that she disagreed.

  Marie Antoinette was aware that certain individuals remained determined to find a mistress for her husband. In order to show where he stood on the subject, the King made a public declaration of his undying affection for his wife and daughter in front of the entire court. Meanwhile, the Empress wrote Mercy that he should instruct her daughter on how to hold on to her husband’s love, and if this failed, how to handle herself in the event of a rival. Foremost, she cautioned, Marie Antoinette needed to provide the King with an heir.

  That summer, Marie Antoinette became pregnant again but suffered a miscarriage in the early stages of the pregnancy. She and the King wept together, but Louis then sought solace in the company of another woman, though not just any woman: Gabrielle Yolande de Polignac was Marie Antoinette’s closest friend at court. Louis started visiting Madame de Polignac without his wife, a development that disturbed Mercy and the Empress. She had a husband – Comte Jules de Polignac – and a lover – the handsome and entertaining Comte de Vaudreuil, one of Marie Antoinette’s favorite companions, whom the King would appoint Grand Falconer. When Madame de Polignac became pregnant in the second half of 1779 after not having had a child for a good many years, Marie Antoinette feared her worst suspicions confirmed, but she said nothing to the King hoping that his ‘infatuation’ would subside.

  The Empress, though concerned for her daughter’s health after the miscarriage, remained preoccupied about the future of the dynasty. When yet another portrait of Marie-Thérèse arrived in Vienna with a note reporting that the baby was ‘beginning to walk in her basket’ and, to the delight of the King, had said ‘Papa’, the Empress replied:

  Your letter of August 16 gave me great joy … the hopes you give me of a companion for the dear child whose portrait you sent me; she is charming, strong, healthy and has caused me the greatest joy. I have her portrait opposite me on a chair and cannot let it go; but I think also that she looks like the King.

  Most people disagreed, complimenting the child for her likeness to her mother. She was said to be graceful and to have the Queen’s features and coloring. In September, Marie Antoinette reported that the baby was in very good health, in October, ‘a marvel!’ – Madame Royale was beginning to teethe and had taken a few baby steps. In December, the Empress wrote that, thrilled as she was with the details on her namesake’s progress, the letter did not ‘make us happy concerning another pregnancy which I am awaiting with eagerness. Your daughter will soon be one year old; you must give her a little companion, we all hope.’

  On behalf of her daughter, Marie Antoinette began another battle with hundreds of years of French tradition, which again caused resentment at court. The Queen reduced the number of sous governesses and determined to remove the Princesse de Guémené as her daughter’s educator. The King and Queen agreed that the little Princess ought to receive as rigorous an education – secular as well as religious – as would any son, and the Queen felt that de Guémené was not the best person to do this. To separate the title from the duties entailed a long legal process and caused no small embarrassment to the King. Mercy reported to the Empress that the baby’s household staff performed with great order and exactitude and that, by January 1780, the baby was very strong, healthy and pleasing to the eye. Mercy wrote that the King and Queen remained besotted with their daughter and spent much of their time attending to the Princess and all her concerns.

  Marie Antoinette proudly wrote to her mother that by March the child was so robust that one would take her for a two-year-old. Marie-Thérèse sat, got up and walked by herself, and had never been sick a day. The little girl still did not speak very much but charmed a crowd of people, including the visiting Princesses Charlotte and Louise of Hesse, Marie Antoinette’s best friends since childhood. Surrounded by staff and visitors since the moment of her birth, Madame Royale demonstrated that she could differentiate between those who served and entertained her and the woman who loved her. Marie Antoinette wrote to her mother with maternal pride that when someone asked the Princess, ‘Where is your mother?’ Marie-Thérèse ran to the Queen with outstretched arms. Marie Antoinette gushed, ‘I felt the greatest joy.’

  When Diane de Polignac, Gabrielle Yolande’s conniving sister-in-law, suggested that the Queen give a ball despite the fact that she was feeling unwell, Marie Antoinette magnanimously hosted an all-night fête that lasted until eleven the following morning. Privately, however, the Queen was in poor spirits. She was desperate to wean her husband from her best friend and to be pregnant again.

  In April, the Queen wrote to her mother that she was longing to give her daughter a sibling. She also admitted that although she was painfully aware that the King was enamored of her best friend, she would not ask him to give up his special friendship, even though it was widely discussed that the King visited Madame de Polignac at her townhouse and that hers was the only private house in Paris he visited since he had become King. Mercy reported to the Empress that Madame de Polignac was gaining more and more prestige and favor and was to be given a great deal of money and the title Duchess after the birth of her baby. The practical reason for the King bestowing this title on the Queen’s friend was so that de Polignac could remain in the inner circle at Versailles, as protocol demanded that she retain a certain rank. Mercy assured the Empress that her daughter was bearing the situation with a dignity that Maria Theresa would be proud of.

  In early May, Gabrielle Yolande de Polignac gave birth to a son, Jules Auguste. The Comte de Provence, later King Louis XVIII, wrote in his memoir that the birth of this boy was celebrated as if he were a ‘prince of our blood’. Although Jules Auguste was Madame de Polignac’s youngest by many years, the boy would be ennobled a prince by both the Pope in 1822 and the King of Bavaria in 1838, honors none of her older children received. The birth of Jules Auguste sent the Empress into a rage, and even though she received glowing reports from her messenger that her own granddaughter was thriving, was in perfect health and was a beautiful little girl, she responded to her daughter that it was absolutely imperative for her to give birth to a boy, a dauphin.

  The following month Marie Antoinette suffered another miscarriage. This time the Empress convinced herself that the loss was no accident and she accused the Polignacs of somehow being behind the nefarious deed.

  Marie Antoinette, by contrast, maintained her composure. Although she felt estranged from the friend whom she believed had betraye
d her, that summer she recommenced the musical evenings at Versailles and invited Gabrielle Yolande to join her, in part so she could keep an eye on her. During the day, Marie Antoinette took harp lessons and encouraged the King to keep busy by resuming his hunting parties, thereby keeping him out of Madame de Polignac’s arms.

  In Vienna, Empress Maria Theresa launched a two-pronged attack on what she saw as ‘the French situation’. She continued to demand that her daughter produce an heir (‘You must give us a dauphin …’), but also instructed her ambassador to circumvent Marie Antoinette and go straight to the King’s favorite to obtain influence. On August 31, 1780, for example, the Empress ordered Mercy to persuade Madame de Polignac to influence the King’s decision in a matter of politics that would suit Her Imperial Majesty. Other developments merely added to the pressure on the Queen. The young Duc d’Angoulême, now five years of age, was removed from female care that autumn – two years earlier than was customary for the Royal Children of France – and taken to a house in the country belonging to the Marquis de Seran, who was placed in charge of the boy’s education – a decision that was understood to be a move to prepare him as heir to the throne.

  Marie Antoinette nervously tried to maintain her focus on a new pregnancy and the progress of her daughter. She believed that Marie-Therérèse needed to spend as much time as possible out of doors and away from the stuffy apartments of the older castles like Compiègne and Fontainebleau, where the court moved from time to time. On September 17, as a result of teething, the toddler suffered febrile convulsions. Marie-Therérèse experienced three weeks of fever and pain during which, her mother reported, she was completely sweet and good-tempered. While the court moved on to the Château Marly, where Louis XIV had gone to escape Versailles and his own stringent protocol, Madame Royale convalesced at Versailles with her mother by her side. Other than her bout of teething, the child exhibited excellent health overall and the Queen pointed to her remaining at Versailles as the reason for this. The arrangement, of course, made it all the more convenient for Marie Antoinette to spend more time at her beloved Petit Trianon. The Empress saw right through Marie Antoinette’s ruse and reminded her daughter that Rousseau and his notion of living in simplicity with nature might be fine for the masses, but the Queen of France and her daughter had inherited responsibilities, and these they could not escape.

  Marie Antoinette had often remarked on how young and pretty her mother looked, even after she was widowed. Indeed the Empress had always taken great care and interest in her own health and that of her family. (She was an early proponent of inoculation, and after a smallpox epidemic in Austria in the late 1760s, the Empress received an injection of the vaccine, which prompted many of her countrymen to follow suit.) However, during the autumn of 1780 the Empress’s health suddenly deteriorated. She had joined a hunting party and been caught in a downpour. Over the next few days she grew weaker, coughing and wheezing. Realizing she would not recover, she wrote letters to her children and made additional bequests in her will for the country’s soldiers, schools and poor.

  On November 29, Maria Theresa died at the age of sixty-three of ‘hardening of the lungs’. Almost immediately after her death, Marie Antoinette became pregnant with the son both she and her mother had longed for.

  Chapter III

  Playmates

  During the 1780s, dignitaries from across the globe made pilgrimages to Versailles to observe court custom and to see for themselves the Queen’s personal style, which was copied around the world. French-style gardens, furniture, fashion, porcelain and etiquette echoed in the most unlikely places; even the Ottoman court at the Topkapi Palace installed a garden and French interiors à la française when a young French woman, kidnapped and offered to the Sultan as a present, became his favorite. Marie Antoinette’s most cherished friends and family members, such as her childhood companions, the Princes and Princesses of Hesse, also made their way to Versailles to greet little Madame Royale and to expose themselves to French etiquette.

  The Hessians, however, were among the least important sovereigns to cross the threshold of Versailles during Marie-Thérèse’s childhood. Her parents would play host to some of the world’s most powerful emperors and monarchs, including her uncle Joseph – now Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II – Gustav III of Sweden, the future Czar Paul I of Russia, and various rulers of the Habsburg dynasty. Marie-Thérèse would be presented to all of them, endear herself to many, and retain close ties with some who would help her after her parents’ death.

  In the summer of 1781, Marie-Thérèse’s uncle Joseph, once again traveling incognito under the name Comte Falkenstein, returned to Versailles to visit his pregnant sister. He saw for himself the young girl who was his late mother’s namesake and agreed that she was indeed very much like the portraits that had so pleased the late Empress in Vienna. She was everything her mother had said she was – robust, active and clever. The Queen herself, entering the third trimester of her latest pregnancy, was in excellent health and spirits. Brother and sister – Emperor and Queen – strolled in the gardens at the Petit Trianon, watching illuminations in the sky. It was a bittersweet time for the pair as they each faced the prospect of fulfilling the destinies planned for them by their mother.

  Mindful of her condition and taking advantage of her brother’s presence, the Queen sought to scale down the numbers of those attending the entertainments laid on for her brother’s visit that summer. She objected especially to the hordes of noblesse présentée who usually turned up for such occasions often expecting handouts or entitlements. In order to be presented at court in France, a person had to prove that he or she was descended from a noble family that went back to the year 1400. By the time of the reign of Louis XVI the numbers of noblesse présentée had risen to thousands. The Queen regarded most of these as dull ‘hangers on’ who just added to the excruciating rigidity and formality of the court. She preferred company that was more interesting and fun – such as writers, artists and, very often, foreign ministers and their wives. The King, excited by the possibility of an heir to the throne, relaxed court rules and allowed presentations to be made at court on the basis of achievement rather than lineage (during the 1780s, 30 per cent of those presented at court would come from this bracket). Louis ignored the complaints of the many excluded from the festivities and hoped his subjects would put the Queen’s health before their own pettiness. However, in this he miscalculated. By the time of the Queen’s confinement, much of the nobility harbored even more bitterness and resentment toward the ‘Autri chienne’, insisting that this change in protocol was due to her foreign influence. Some of those disgruntled members of the out-of-favor haut monde issued pamphlets, once again, accusing the Queen of infidelity.

  Still, anyone could wander the grounds of Versailles, as long as he or she arrived suitably dressed, and any subject could present a petition to the King on his way to Mass or to the hunt. Such openness to the public had created the zoo-like conditions under which the Queen had given birth to Madame Royale three years earlier. For the birth of his second child, the King decided to take far greater control. He announced that only members of the royal family, a few ladies of the Queen’s household and the Lord Chancellor would be permitted to witness the birth of the baby. Again courtiers whined that they were being deprived of a historic moment. The King issued a directive to all, including the Queen’s closest friends, that no one was to tell of or signal in any way the sex of the baby until he himself felt that the Queen was recovered enough from the birth to learn of it.

  The King also personally orchestrated a search for a wet nurse, which became a nationwide competition. The successful candidate given the honor of suckling the next Child of France was a buxom woman, whom Marie Antoinette nicknamed ‘Madame Poitrine’, or ‘Madame Breasts’. ‘Madame Poitrine’ was the wife of a gardener who, according to courtiers, added humor to her post when she sang the song ‘Marlbrouck s’en va-t-en guerre’ to the little boy while she nursed him. The song, whi
ch she brought with her from her small, country village, was about the first Duke of Marlborough’s defeat in France and was sung to the tune of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. Apparently, she sang it so often that others at court, including the Queen, frequently joined in.

  The King too was in an effervescent mood and proved justified in his optimism. On October 22, 1781, at 1.15 p.m., Louis Joseph, the Dauphin, was born. The King, in tears, lifted the male infant in front of the window to the crowds below. The Queen nervously awaited the news, and, when the King gave him to his mother he said in a raised but solemn voice, ‘I present the Dauphin to his mother, the Queen.’

  The newborn boy was baptized, as Marie-Thérèse had been, by France’s grand aumônier, Cardinal de Rohan. The Comte de Provence once again stood in for a godfather – this time, the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II of Austria – and the King’s sister, Madame Elisabeth, for the King’s younger sister, Clothilde, Princess of Piedmont. The Dauphin was immediately invested with the blue ribbon of the Saint-Esprit and the cross of Saint-Louis. Madame Campan recalled that upon seeing his newborn cousin, the Duc d’Angoulême, who had just lost a place in line for the throne, remarked to his father, the Comte d’Artois, ‘Look how tiny he is!’, to which the Comte replied: ‘The day will come when you will think him great enough.’

  The nation, however, was jubilant. Fireworks lit up the skies of Paris. Fountains flowed with wine. Prayers were said in every chapel. The festivities around the country lasted for two weeks. Once again, the Opéra opened for a free performance: a few hundred people were expected but nearly six thousand showed up cheering ‘Vive le Roi!’, ‘Vive la Reine!’ and ‘Vive Monsieur le Dauphin!’ As if to express the fact that the baby’s smallest functions were deified, a new color, a drab olive green, was given the name ‘ caca-dauphin’ (‘the heir’s excrement’) and became sought after by the fashionable, adding to the silliness of the delirium. And when the Queen, having once again lost a considerable amount of hair in pregnancy, asked Léonard to fashion something attractive, he created a short, feathery cut, which he named coiffure a l’enfant in the little boy’s honor; this, again, caught on among the fashionable.