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

by Susan Nagel

  Although the capital was only twelve miles away, it took the royal cortége six hours to reach the gates of Paris where the Mayor, Bailly, greeted them with the words, ‘What a beautiful day, Sire, for the people of Paris to have in their city Your Majesty and his family!’ As Bailly presented the King with the keys to the city, the King replied: ‘It is always with pleasure and confidence that I find myself among the people of my good city of Paris.’ Bailly, repeating the King’s response for the crowds, omitted the words, ‘with confidence’. Marie Antoinette shouted out at him, ‘Repeat: with confidence!’ The King added, ‘I sincerely hope that my sojourn will restore peace, harmony and submission to the law.’ Although the royal party was weary and shaken – the children having witnessed unimaginable horrors – Mayor Bailly and General Lafayette showed little sensitivity. The two men insisted that the cortége proceed to the Hôtel de Ville so that the people of Paris could see their king. For three hours, the King’s family rode slowly in circles around the city. The Marquis de La Maisonfort spied them en route, noticing that Lafayette looked as pale as his horse. La Maisonfort thought Lafayette looked stupefied – puzzled, as if he wondered what on earth was going to happen next. According to La Maisonfort, himself an experienced soldier, Lafayette and his fellow revolutionaries had begun a battle without having an endgame, a war without an exit plan. Ironically, their enemy, His Most Christian King, was also the Pacifist King, the ruler who consistently refused to fire on his own people.

  For one thousand years, France had been governed by the axiom, ‘As wills the King, so wills the law.’ No longer was the King’s demande his command. He and his family were now at the mercy of the people he had once called his subjects. As the royal family wound their way around the streets of the capital, longing for rest but dreading their new resting place, they all knew that their new guards would be neither faithful nor friendly, and although for those who had lived through the events of the day, it would be indelible, the trauma of the whole experience would remain personal and relative. Marie Antoinette said of the events of October 5-6, 1789, ‘I saw everything, knew everything, and forgot everything.’ Marie-Thérèse would pen her own version of those two days some ten years later.

  Chapter VII

  A New Home

  The royal party arrived at the Tuileries Palace, bewildered and exhausted, at around 10.30 that night. Out of the darkness a stranger reached in and lifted the Dauphin from the carriage, causing the Queen to almost faint. The stranger made no effort to kidnap the little boy, but stood calmly with the Dauphin in his arms. The man, Jean-Baptiste Cléry, had long ago been promised a job in service of the first the Dauphin. However, when Madame de Polignac forgot to assign him a post, he wrote to the Queen who assured Cléry that she would not forget about him and that some day, if she had another son, she hoped that he could serve the royal family by looking after him. When Cléry learned of the march on Versailles, he set out on foot to come to the aid of the young prince. Realizing that he would not arrive in time, he went to the Tuileries and waited to assume his new responsibilities. Like Madame de Tourzel, who joined the royal family after the fall of the Bastille, both Cléry and the governess placed their own lives in danger in order to serve the royal children, and both would prove extraordinarily faithful. With the four-year-old boy in his arms, Cléry walked with the royal family into their new quarters.

  The Tuileries Palace, on the right bank of the Seine, next to the Louvre, was commissioned by Catherine de Medici in 1564, following the death of her husband King Henri II. It had not been inhabited as a major royal residence since the mid-seventeenth century. Louis XIV lived there for a short time while Versailles was under construction, spending the winters there from 1667 to 1671; but for the most part the building had been abandoned for well over a century. The royal family occasionally used the Tuileries as their pied à terre when they were in town for changing between official events. According to Felix d’Hézecques, there had not even been a fire lit in this building since Louis XV and the castle was, for the most part, sparsely furnished and contained no mirrors. It was dark, dank and smelly, and the children immediately hated the place. When the Dauphin complained that the house was ugly, the Queen apparently replied: ‘My son, Louis XIV lived here and liked it. We do not want to be more difficult than him.’ The King apologized to his family on the first night because they were forced to sleep on chairs, rugs and tables.

  The next morning the Queen penned a note to her longtime confidant, Comte Mercy, who had fled to Brussels. ‘I am fine, be at ease,’ she wrote the Austrian ambassador; ‘I am sorry that we have been separated, but it is better that you stay where you are for a while. Adieu, you can depend on my everlasting feelings for you.’ Mercy, her mother’s eyes and ears at Versailles for ten years, had performed his duty to the Empress often to Marie Antoinette’s detriment; however, as Marie Antoinette had matured and had become the matriarch of her own family, Mercy had grown to admire the woman he had observed as a frivolous, young Dauphine, and the two had developed a very strong bond after the Empress’s death.

  Marie Antoinette was most definitely not ‘fine’: as she addressed the staff on October 8 her voice quavered and her eyes filled with tears. The King silently stood by her side. Life at the Tuileries would be a time of continual strain for the royal party, comprising the King, Queen, Madame Royale, the Dauphin, Ernestine, Madame Elisabeth, and their loyal servants (the Comte and Comtesse de Provence were moved on the second day to the Palais du Luxembourg). The atmosphere was tense and unpleasant. To establish his own authority at the Tuileries, General Lafayette had installed Major Gouvion, an officer he could trust, who was to ensure that the troops served Lafayette and not the King. The hundreds of soldiers posted by Lafayette stood in the hallways and outside in the gardens, demonstrating the power of the people over the monarch and piercing the royal family with fear. Madame Campan revealed that the Queen, who kept a bowl of powdered sugar near her bedside to mix with water to make it palatable, asked her lady-in-waiting to change the bowl frequently in case it had been poisoned.

  One hostile element had, however, been removed from Paris – albeit temporarily. General Lafayette had no intention of repeating the blunder that he had made on the evening of October 5, and once he learned of the Due d’Orléans’s perfidy in the insurrection, Lafayette brought his evidence to the King. Although the royal couple were convinced of their cousin’s culpability and would have preferred to be completely rid of him, they chose not to discuss such matters in public and instead put on a united front. Lafayette and the royal couple determined that the Due d’Orléans should be banished, and that the public would be told that the Duke was being sent on an important mission to England. It was hoped that such a gesture would send a conciliatory message to the people. Some, who had been surprised by Orléans’s actions and now mistrusted him, asserted that he was probably an English agent anyway and had been on a mission to dethrone his cousin and cause destabilization in France on behalf of King George III.

  Writing to Mercy, Marie Antoinette conceded that reports of the bloody carnival at Versailles were true and she asked him not to attempt to return to the French court. Mercy replied that he together with the Holy Roman Emperor hoped to hatch a plan to help the royal family escape; but on October 10, Marie Antoinette instructed her friend to resist writing to her brother Joseph for the moment. The Emperor himself, ever the loving brother, wrote his own sentiments in a letter dated October 12, 1789, which was smuggled into the Tuileries by the Baron d’Escars. (Although the royal family was under close surveillance, they were able to pass some correspondence through a chain of loyal sympathizers and spies.) In his letter, Joseph reassured his sister that he was indeed their loyal ally and that the ‘most beautiful monarchy in the entire world’ would never be destroyed. Both Louis XVI and his youngest brother, Artois, contacted Charles IV of Spain, who had succeeded his own father in 1788, requesting that the Spanish king stand by his cousins. Louis had no desire to encou
rage invasion by a foreign country, but the King of France was hoping that a public statement accompanied by diplomatic protest would remind the Assembly that their King had friends in high places with armies at their disposal.

  Describing their new life at the Tuileries, Marie Antoinette wrote that she saw no society and that she and her children slept in two rooms – Marie-Thérèse right by her side. A few days later the rooms were rearranged so that the royal family would be more comfortable in the long term. The King slept on the first floor (where Napoleon would later sleep), with the Dauphin near his bedroom. The women – the Queen, Madame Royale, Ernestine, Madame de Tourzel and Pauline -were on the second floor with a private staircase joining their rooms to those of the King and the Dauphin. The only non-royal person to be given a key to the private stairwell was the children’s governess, Madame de Tourzel.

  The Queen had wanted the sleeping arrangements that way for the children’s safety. Besides, the children remained traumatized. Madame Royale had become distinctly quiet and withdrawn. Though still only a child, Marie-Thérèse already felt nostalgic for her childhood at Versailles. The Dauphin had recurring nightmares. By day he was often confused and asked questions. Why did the King no longer have his gardes du corps? The Queen replied that the King of France did not need protection from his people. The Dauphin asked a guest why people use the saying ‘happy as a queen’, as ‘my mother is never happy. She often cries.’ Pauline de Tourzel wrote that every person who came to the Tuileries to see the royal family was nonetheless enchanted with the little Dauphin, exclaiming him to be a beautiful child. Madame Campan described a touching scene in which the four-year-old told his father that he had something serious to discuss with him, and asked his father why the people of France, who had loved him, were now so angry with him. The King sat his son on his knee and explained that although he tried to make the people happy, it was their leaders who were angry with him and it was these leaders from the provinces who had not been able to curb the excesses. They needed to work together to correct the financial problems. He begged his son not to blame the people of France, and the Queen instructed him to be kind and affable to everyone. When the Mayor of Paris arrived to see the family just days into their confinement, the little boy made a great effort to be charming, and then whispered in his mother’s ear: ‘Was that right?’

  The fiction that poured out of the drama of the French Revolution chronicled the daring exploits of heroes like the Scarlet Pimpernel and Dickens’s doomed Sydney Carton. In fact, contemporary accounts confirm that there was great gallantry in the face of peril together with acts of great kindness. Reports from the borders tell of how chivalric Swiss men took pity on young women fleeing France and underwent marriages of convenience, thereby allowing the women to enter Switzerland with their escorts. In some cases, the ‘husbands’ were found to have married eighteen or twenty times.

  After the insurrection of October 6, it became nearly impossible to get a passport to leave France and the new National Guard stepped up its patrols of the borders. Yet, from Brussels to Parma, Coblenz and Russia, sympathizers and expatriates gathered, building nests of intrigue, hatching plots to rescue the King, or just the Queen and the children. All of these plans included the final destination of Vienna where most assumed that the Queen and her family would be welcomed with open arms.

  On the morning after their arrival at the Tuileries, the Queen met with her secretary, Jacques Matthieu Augeard, who wrote that he had scarcely entered and closed the door when the Queen went to see if they were being overheard. ‘We are not safe here,’ whispered the Queen, ‘let us go somewhere else.’ The Queen took Augeard to another room where Madame Royale was sitting. The Queen asked her daughter to leave them as they had something secret to discuss. While they spoke, Augeard noticed the tiny ottoman upon which Madame Royale slept. The secretary had come armed with an escape plan for the Queen and the children. The Queen thanked him, but declined, stating she could not leave her husband.

  As a king, Louis XVI was prone to indecisiveness, but as a husband and father he immediately understood the importance of creating some semblance of normality for his family, in spite of the highly restrictive circumstances. Marie-Thérèse’s pianoforte was brought from Versailles along with some other pieces of furniture and a few portraits, lending familiarity and comfort to the Tuileries. To distract her daughter from their unpleasant new surroundings, the Queen asked Madame de Tourzel to hold tea parties for Marie-Thérèse and to invite other children. For a few hours, Madame Royale, Ernestine and Pauline laughed and played hide and seek with their guests. On Thursday evenings, the King held public dinners. He continued to rise early, pray and meet the Queen and their children for breakfast. For their displaced courtiers, the King and Queen re-established a measure of the routine they had known at Versailles. The royal family received diplomats on Sundays and Thursdays; the grand convert, the King’s formal public dinner, when his entire family was in attendance, was scheduled for Sundays. The King’s lever and coucher, his ceremonial rising and goodnight, were resumed to honor those who wished to continue to serve His Majesty. Among their faithful servants, however, were those who came with other intentions. The King and Queen were convinced, and quite rightly, that some of the servants and soldiers around them, many of whom had been appointed by Lafayette or who had received their new posts as favors from the National Assembly, were spies. Others, they were convinced, were in the pay of the Due d’Orléans.

  At ten years old, Marie-Thérèse learned to conduct her conversations carefully, to censor every thought before she uttered a word; she also learned to communicate with her parents through a special sign language concocted by the Queen, a secret code used only by the royal family. She was old enough to understand that it was not a game and that her family’s very existence depended on her discretion; it was a burdensome responsibility for such a young child. There were no moments of privacy, none like the special times she had shared with her family at the Petit Trianon. Like her mother, Marie-Thérèse longed for a return to Versailles. She missed the countryside, her very own menagerie at the Hameau, and the beautiful aromas of the gardens. The city stank and was dirty. The gardens at the Tuileries, a popular place for Parisians to stroll, were tiny by comparison, and now that the royal family was in residence the courtyard was constantly filled with curiosity-seekers hoping to catch a glimpse of the children playing outdoors or of the King and Queen on a promenade. Hordes of people would trample through the gardens, come right up to the palace windows and peer inside in order to watch the King, the Queen and their children or shout for them to come out so that they could get a closer look. Sometimes the Queen would suffer so much for the cooped-up children that she would insist on taking them to the great public park, the Bois de Boulogne, leaving the palace by a discreet staircase in the Pavilion de Flore. To attend Mass, they had to walk on a terrace through an arcade where throngs of people gathered to leer at them.

  Marie-Thérèse also learned a cynical lesson about politics at this very young age. She knew that people had cried for bread, yet from the tiny windows of her room she saw wagon after wagon filled with flour sacks, said to have been spoiled for having been in storage too long, driven to the Seine where their contents were dumped into the river. Marie-Thérèse kept a close watch as her parents’ attempts to reach out to the people were rebuffed. The Queen, although deprived of many of her own luxuries, continued to give openly to charities. Young Madame Royale accompanied her mother to visit the factories at the rue Saint-Antoine, the hotbed of hatred against the Queen, and the Queen took the Dauphin to visit orphanages to show him how fortunate he was. The people of Paris, however, grew more openly hostile, and the royal family retreated more and more behind the palace’s walls. The Queen gave up her box at the theater to avoid public scrutiny. The outings to the Bois de Boulogne became fewer and further between: the abuse hurled at the family disturbed the children so much that the guards would often have to whisk them back to the Tuile
ries.

  That October, the National Assembly moved from the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs to Paris. Because of the level of unrest a form of martial law was placed on the city, though this proved to be ineffective. Having whittled down the powers of the King, the constitutionalists now sought to dismantle those of the Church. On October 10, a proposal came to the floor of the Assembly that stated that the government would subsume all property owned by the Catholic Church in France. Ironically, it was the Bishop of Autun – Prince Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand – who initiated the bill that would be passed one month later. A further blow was struck to Church authority, again from within, when, in October 1789, a political club at first comprising mainly deputies to the National Assembly from Brittany convened at the Jacobins’ friary on the rue Saint-Honoré, not far from the Tuileries. Dominican friars had set up their first monastery on the rue Saint-Jacques in Paris, thereafter acquiring the name ‘the Jacobins’. The political club, initially calling itself ‘The Society of Friends of the Constitution, meeting at the Jacobins in Paris’, soon acquired the same sobriquet. As they gained political momentum as the party of the people (calling all other political factions ‘elitist’), they enacted policies that resulted in widespread violence against French priests and the complete intolerance of religion in general.