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

by Susan Nagel

  While the family anguished over the Dauphin they also had to contend with the deteriorating health of the dynasty. The King had been experiencing renewed trouble with his cousin, Louis-Philippe, who had now inherited his father’s title Duc d’Orléans. At a meeting of Parlement on November 19, 1788, Orléans challenged the King. The role of this ancient judicial body of noblemen was to enact the King’s decrees, and it was not in its own best interest to change the status quo. Orléans, however, seized the opportunity to foster discord, committing what the King perceived as a crime of lèse-majesté. Marie Antoinette wrote to her brother that Louis, annoyed and embarrassed, banished Orléans ‘to Villers-Cotterêts and forbids him to see anyone but his family and household’. The estate being in Picardie, some 80 kilometers from Paris, this was mostly a symbolic punishment, but the King hoped that his action would chasten his cousin.

  It did not. Distanced from the court, Louis-Philippe was still able to cause damage. As for the Queen, it certainly may not have been wise to alert foreigners to the schism between the King and the Duc d’Orléans, but it soon became common knowledge anyway as Orléans came out into the open as a leader of a political movement with grievances against the King, and one of his minions made a public suggestion that a second throne be established with Orléans as constitutional monarch. A combination of spite and worry about the Dauphin’s health prompted Marie Antoinette to refuse to consent to an engagement between the Due d’Angoulême and Orléans’s only daughter, Eugenie Adelaide Louise. The Queen was perfectly in her right to withhold permission, but her actions only served to inflame Orléans’s resentment. Marie Antoinette simply claimed that she was keeping all options open for her own daughter. The Comte d’Artois, father of the Due d’Angoulême, was thrilled with the idea that his son, who would probably not inherit the throne, might nonetheless marry Madame Royale when she could have married any other crowned head of Europe. To Orléans, however, the Queen was keeping his own daughter away from the crown of France.

  Madame Royale later recalled how she had overheard her ‘papa’ being angry with his cousin, but at the time she was unaware of the larger issues facing the King. The country was going bankrupt after decades of failure to implement fiscal reforms. Two expensive wars with the British and an inequitable system of taxation and famine had exacted a heavy toll. Although Louis’s finance minister Turgot had suggested radical fiscal reforms in the 1770s, the King’s other advisors warned him against Turgot’s measures. Although they would have been good for the country, his ministers argued, they would have made many among the nobility and in the powerful guilds unhappy. Louis XVI had personally whittled down the costs of the court and although he maintained that court cost nowhere near the fiasco of the Seven Years War, and nor could it trump the total of monies loaned to the Colonies, the populace blamed the King, and even more his wife, ‘1’kutnehienne’. Frenchmen who did not benefit from the feudal system of privilege, inspired by the American Revolution, clamored for change. Among their demands was a more equal distribution of the tax obligation. Ninety-eight per cent of the population who paid taxes had no say in their own government, and the greatest burden fell on the Tiers État – the Third Estate – the middle classes and peasants, rather than on the First (the clergy) or the Second (the nobility).

  In July 13 1787, faced with opposition to reform from the First and Second Estates, an Assembly of Notables demanded that the King call the États-Généraux – the legislative body that included representatives from all sections of French society, bar the very poorest. A convention of the body had not taken place since 1614 and many of the new and rising classes of the bourgeoisie would see its calling as a rare opportunity to make their pitch for power.

  By December, the King agreed to convene the États, although he was deliberately vague about when it would occur. The following summer, faced with the arrival of a new finance minister – Jacques Necker, notoriously sympathetic to the rights of the Third Estate – the King agreed to convene the États in May of the following year.

  Chapter V

  Storm Clouds over the Palace

  The king’s prevarication over convening the États-Généraux, prompting the body to instead summon their King, had handed Orléans and his supporters a delicious victory. The États would meet at Versailles in early May 1789. It was the first stumble in a rapid loss of footing for the monarchy. The backdrop against which this political drama was being played could hardly have been more unsettling. The 97 per cent of Frenchmen who were members of neither the clergy nor the noble classes, and who were responsible for paying all of the taxes to the crown, were clamoring for reform. They looked to the nascent republic in America, and to their neighbors, the British, whose House of Commons gave more of its citizenry a voice in government, and now the Tiers État representatives were heading to Versailles to demand change.

  Worse still, the winter of 1788/89 was as harsh as any in France could remember: temperatures remained below zero degrees Fahrenheit for months and windmills were brought to a standstill, creating bread shortages. While the increase in prices had only minor impact on the nobility and the clergy, most of the people of France faced unemployment and starvation. As discontent and tension rose across the country, an uneasy mood blanketed Paris. The Seine had frozen, causing bridges to crumble and houses that had stood on the famous ponts for centuries to collapse. Ramshackle medieval tenements housing the poorest Parisians barely hung on in the inclement conditions. While the masses starved in the shadow of the Knights Templar fortress and Saint-Antoine, near the Bastille, the inhabitants of the opulent new stone mansions along the Place du Palais-Royal and the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, built during the reigns of Louis XV and XVI, seemed impervious to the harsh winter. The grand façades of these testaments to privilege welcomed a glittering assortment of noblemen – including the Duc d’Orléans whose expulsion from Paris had been short-lived – and an array of artists, philosophers and heiresses to Paris’s now legendary salons.

  The Palais-Royal, the Paris seat of the Dues d’Orléans since earlier in the century, had been recently renovated by Louis-Philippe. With towering new arcades housing galleries, cafés, an indoor riding ring, and shops of every kind, it teemed with insouciant life. The Duke had spent a fortune constructing a kind of city unto itself. During the day, jewelry merchants displayed their wares; children came to watch marionette shows and curiosity seekers observed freak shows. At night, the Palais-Royal sizzled as libertines chased women and clandestine meetings took place in the subterranean Grotte Flamande, where pleasure seekers of all classes and inclinations congregated.

  Madame de la Tour du Pin recalled that at Versailles the King and Queen quietly distributed significant quantities of aid to the poor, a gesture that gained them a measure of momentary popularity; but, it was the Duc d’Orléans with his great fortune and his high visibility in the heart of Paris who was able to make the most flamboyant and extravagant show of benevolence. Opening the Palais-Royal to the public gave the Duke a patina of liberalism and it also raised morale at a time when the ordinary Parisian was hungry for diversion from cares. Restyling himself a man of the people, Orléans changed his name to ‘Philippe Égalité’, though he continued to a live a life far more sybaritic than that of the King and Queen. He was known for his racehorses, his mistresses and an expensive taste in clothing, and for throwing money at crowds so that they would cheer him on the street. He was a great friend of the equally debauched Prince of Wales (the future King George IV).

  Orléans continued his campaign against Marie Antoinette, denouncing her as a ‘traitor’ in pamphlets and at social and political gatherings. The Queen found the Duke’s ruthless ambition and continuing hostility toward the crown troubling, and wrote of her contempt for ‘Philippe Égalité’ to her brother, Emperor Joseph II, the person who had saved her marriage. She was certainly not alone in her opinion that Orléans was intent on stealing the crown. Madame de la Tour du Pin, whose father-in-law would later that year become m
inister for war, was a witness in late April 1789 to the riots that had broken out at the Réveillon wallpaper factory after rumors of wage cuts. Madame de la Tour du Pin recalled that she was traveling home from the races at Vincennes, where she had witnessed the horses of the Duc d’Orléans run against those of the Comte d’Artois:

  It was after the last of these races, as we were driving home along the Rue Saint-Antoine with Mme de Valence, that we found ourselves in the midst of the first riot, the one which destroyed the worthy Réveillon’s wallpaper factory … M. de Valence was at the time First Equerry to the Duc d’Orléans and as we passed through the crowd of four or five hundred people which filled the street, the sight of the Orléans livery roused their enthusiasm. For a few minutes they held up the carriage shouting ‘Long Live our Father! Long Live King d’Orléans!’ and a few months later, when I had certain knowledge of the scheming Duc d’Orléans, they returned to my mind. The popular movement which ruined Réveillon had been organized, I have not the slightest doubt.

  La Tour du Pin returned to court later that day and wrote of her relief that the Duc d’Orléans was not at Versailles that day, ‘and so I avoided being embraced by that monster’.

  The deputies began arriving at Versailles for the convention of the États-Généraux toward the end of April. Many of them, wrote Madame de la Tour du Pin, carried with them a proclamation that the Duc d’Orléans had ‘sent to all the bailiwicks where he owned property’. These representatives, many from provincial towns, had been told incredible stories about the Queen and they all wanted to see the Petit Trianon. Marie Antoinette was a perfect hostess, allowing the members of the États-Généraux to wander freely through the grounds of the palace as well as some of its interior. Some looked for the diamond-encrusted closets, others for the columns wreathed in rubies and sapphires – none of which existed except in fabulists’ accounts. Some members of the group believed that they would see the King in an intoxicated state every day -information also gleaned from hostile pamphlets and rumor-mongers.

  Although May 5 was the day designated for the formal opening of the États-Généraux, the convocation began a day before on the 4th with a religious preamble to the political wrangling. The two churches in the village of Versailles – Notre Dame on the rue de la Paroisse and Saint-Louis on rue Satory – were to be the start and end points of a massive cavalcade. Tapestries had been hung along the route and locals rented out their windows for handsome prices to onlookers who came to cheer on the deputies. Although some members of the États-Généraux arrived at the church of Notre Dame at 7 a.m., it would be another three hours before the King and Queen emerged from the palace, with Madame Royale in tow, to take to their carriage at the head of a procession of soldiers and deputies – the Tiers État dressed simply in black, the nobility attired in ceremonial splendor and the clergy, led by Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld, dressed in purple.

  En route, the King and Queen indicated their acknowledgement of a most important spectator who was seated near a window in the Lesser Stables at the Place d’Armes. The Dauphin had been allowed to come to Versailles from Meudon for the day in order to watch the procession. The seven-year-old boy, whose weight had plummeted, lay propped up on pillows, covered in sores, hunchbacked and ravaged by rickets, his legs no longer able to support him. His frail appearance caused noticeable distress on the faces of his parents.

  The cortege continued, passing crowds of people along the streets shouting ‘Vivat Orléans! Vivat Orléans’:, but when the King, Queen and Madame Royale descended from their carriage at Notre Dame they were greeted with virtual silence. Stepping out into the sun, Louis XVI blinded in gold cloth strewn with diamonds – diamonds as buttons, diamonds as buckles on his shoes, diamonds on his garters, and on his ribbons and medals. He also wore the famous 140-carat cushion-shaped Regent diamond on his crown, which he had worn at his coronation, and a diamond sword. The Queen shimmered in violet and white embroidered with silver pailletes and displayed some of the world’s most famous diamonds: in her hair the pale yellow 55-carat flawless ‘Sancy’, and, on her body, the De Guise and the Mirror of Portugal, whose suite included the fifth and sixth Mazarin diamonds.

  For this momentous occasion, however, the Queen chose to leave her décolletage bare. Marie Antoinette, who understood theater and ceremony better than anyone, was still stinging from the accusations surrounding the 1785 scandal that became known as the ‘Diamond Necklace Affair’ and she wanted to issue a public statement of her own discontent. The controversy had involved a con artist named Jeanne de Lamotte who had forged the Queen’s signature, duping the Cardinal de Rohan into colluding with her so that she could obtain an outrageously expensive necklace from the Crown Jeweler without paying for it. Despite the fact that the courts of Paris determined that Marie Antoinette was absolutely blameless and had been ignorant of the swindle, there were many skeptics who still thought the Queen was guilty. When, in the 1770s, Louis XVI’s ministers had denied Marie Antoinette a formal coronation, she had gleefully – and not without a little spite – substituted outlandish hairdos for a tiara.

  After the assembly concluded its devotions at Notre Dame, it moved on to the church of Saint-Louis. Though the Duc d’Orléans had been elected as a deputy, he opted, in direct violation of the King’s orders, not to march with the other Princes of the Blood but rather with the politicians -leaving his fifteen-year-old, the Due de Chartres, to walk with the nobility in his place. Inside the church, the Bishop of Nancy preached a sermon on the profound disparity between the poor of France and the intemperate, self-indulgent aristocracy. Hatred for the Queen, whom many of the people called ‘Madame Deficit’, had escalated to a level of mania. Illustrated pamphlets flooded the streets depicting the Queen variously as a nymphomaniac, a lesbian, and, in another, using a dildo. The Bishop now played to the crowd, roundly condemning the Queen for her extravagance. He failed, however, to mention the millions of livres spent by the Duc d’Orléans on the Palais-Royal or the fact that he had turned his Parisian palace into a playground for all that was profane and profligate.

  The King’s response to the Bishop’s attack on his wife was to appear to be asleep. Marie Antoinette had told Léonard, her hairdresser, that she was going to perform like an actress and she sat unmoved throughout. Gouverneur Morris, who observed the Queen for much of the gathering of the Assembly of Notables, remarked that to him the Queen often looked as if she were mentally plotting revenge. After a day of insults hurled at both King and Queen, their majesties returned to the palace in separate coaches. Although Marie Antoinette was exhausted from the day’s events, she spent the evening listening to her husband rehearse the speech that he was going to deliver in front of the entire États-Généraux the next day.

  The États-Généraux convened at 9 a.m. in the grounds of Versailles in the neo-classical building, the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs. The building, constructed to house spectacles for the amusement of the King of France, could accommodate up to five thousand people. Approaching noon, about twelve hundred members representing the clergy, the nobility and the rest of the citizenry were seated in the room, the Duc d’Orléans with his minions. At 1 p.m., ten-year-old Madame Royale accompanied her parents to the assembly hall where they were received in silence. (The Duc d’Orléans, on the other hand, had been applauded wildly.) At the very moment at which the King’s subjects should have kneeled in solemn reverence before their sovereign ruler, the members of the Tiers État remained on their feet – a deliberate affront to the puissance and dominion of the King of France. His Majesty’s throne in the Apollo Salon had always been curtsyed and bowed to – even when the throne was empty and the King elsewhere. His Most Christian Majesty, dressed in the Order of the Holy Ghost ablaze with diamonds, noticed his cousin seated among the commoners and beckoned to him to join his own family. Orléans, however, declined. Then, in a moment of grand gallantry, the King gestured to his wife to sit; she refused and curtsyed to her husband so deeply and with such elegance that some i
n the crowd, at last, responded with ‘Vive la Reine!’

  The damage, however, was done. Marie-Thérèse was present at the moment when a monarchy that had ruled by divine right for over thirteen hundred years had, in one defiant gesture, been diminished, and she watched in stunned and incomprehending silence as her beloved father was ridiculed and her mother disdained.

  The King tried to rise above the insult and proceed on a conciliatory note. Beginning with the now famous statement, ‘Gentlemen, the day my heart has waited for for so long has finally arrived,’ Louis acknowledged the financial difficulties burdening the country and promised reform. Stating that he believed that ‘a happy accord’ could be reached, he insisted that his intentions stemmed from ‘my love for my people’.

  Louis had not been unaware of the need for drastic reform, but he had relied on a series of finance ministers with varying methodology and opinions. Turgot, Calonne, Brienne and Necker had all failed to rescue the drowning economy. Between 1786 and 1788 the King himself had cut the cost of the court from 37,650,000 to 31,650,000 livres. By 1789, that cost had dropped to just over 24 million livres, 1.3 million of which went on his children. The number of servants at Versailles totaled considerably less than during the days of Louis XV and the number of horses in the King’s stables shrank from 2,215 to 1,195 in the three years up to 1787. A good part of the King’s expenses was spent on maintaining the habits of his brothers and their households, which, according to records kept at Versailles for the year 1789, totaled 8,240,000 livres in addition to court expenditure of approximately 24 million. Other than those expenses, many of the costs of the court of France were expenditures of the state, it being the obligation of the King to pay for certain services for the people, and this included pensions. All of this took place at a time when the average annual income of a doctor or lawyer was between 1,000 and 6,000 livres and that of a nobleman 80,000 livres. While the people of France condemned the King and Queen for their self-indulgence and extravagance, Louis XVI ran his entire court of thousands of people on about 30 million livres. In contrast, his cousin, the Duc d’Orléans, enjoyed a personal annual income of almost 7 million livres – significantly higher than any other individual in France.