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

by Susan Nagel

  On December 11, King Louis XVI was placed on trial. He was no longer allowed to see his family and the Dauphin was moved to his mother’s room. Although the King was forbidden contact with his loved ones, Cléry managed to get messages to and from the man now disrespectfully called ‘Louis Capet’, after his ancestor King Hugues Capet, who reigned from 987 to 996. No longer permitted a title of nobility, Louis was, however, allowed pen and paper to prepare for his trial. He also used these utensils to write notes to his family. In a brilliant piece of subterfuge, the family communicated thus: Cléry would tie a string around the King’s note, forming it into a little ball. The little ball would be hidden in a cabinet and would then be collected by a loyal servant named Turgy. Turgy would pass the note to Madame Elisabeth. Madame Elisabeth would answer the note, and put it in a small ball of wool. She would then give the little ball of wool to Turgy who would throw it under Cléry’s bed when he walked by. Next, Cléry would pass it to the King. This way, when, for instance, Marie-Thérèse suffered continuous pains in her legs, the King could be secretly informed of her malady, and on December 19, her fourteenth birthday, it was Cléry who brought Marie-Thérèse a birthday present from her father. It was an almanac for the year 1793 – the year in which both her parents would be guillotined.

  On Christmas Day, the King wrote his last will and testament. He asked his children to remain united, to obey their mother and to think of his sister, Madame Elisabeth, as their second mother. His advice to his son, should he ‘have the unhappiness of becoming King’ was:

  to dream that he must devote himself entirely to the happiness of his people, that he must forget all hate and resentment … that he cannot provide for the people’s happiness unless he rules according to the laws, but at the same time, he cannot make the people respect him and know the good that is in his heart unless he has the necessary authority.

  Louis XVI now prepared to die. In January 1793, out of 719 possible votes, 366 members – a slim majority – of the Jacobin assembly ordered the execution of the King. His own cousin, the Duc d’Orléans, was among those who voted for the regicide. When word of Orléans’s treachery reached England, the Prince of Wales ordered his friend’s portrait to be removed from the wall of their men’s club and his name scratched off the membership roster. European aristocracy as a whole shunned the Duke for the rest of his life – which was not for much longer, for on November 6, 1793, he too would go to the guillotine.

  At the revolutionaries’ convention, the Americans Thomas Paine and Gouverneur Morris condemned the brutality of regicide and made eloquent, impassioned speeches pleading for the King’s life. There ensued a discussion of the notion of sending the King and his family to America where they would live as ordinary citizens. In fact, a small group of royalists were already on their way to an idyllic piece of land on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, which they would call ‘Azilum’ – asylum. In the town, which became known as French Azilum, the émigrés built a house, ‘Grande Maison’, with the hope that the royal family would be allowed to live there in peace. Another group near the town of Wiscasset, Maine also joined together to build a home for the King and his family harboring the same hope. Although the French admired the young country and its colonists who had battled for their own democracy, the Assembly voted to reject the Americans’ pleas.

  On Sunday, January 20, a crier walked by the Temple Prison, beneath the royal family’s quarters, announcing that King Louis XVI had been given the death sentence. That is how the Queen and her children found out that the King was going to die. Cléry was with the royal family when the King came to them and, from seven until after ten that night, he watched the distressing farewell. Marie Antoinette and Louis Charles clung to the King, but it was Marie-Thérèse who became hysterical. In his memoir, Cléry recalled how the usually composed Marie-Thérèse wailed so uncontrollably that she fell onto the floor in a state of near unconsciousness. Later, the Queen’s favorite portrait painter, Madame Vigée Le Brun, asked Cléry to recount what had happened so that she could paint the family one last time, but when Madame Le Brun heard the details she was too upset to paint the scene. Another artist, Jean-Baptiste Mallet, did, however, attempt to capture it in a watercolor based on the recollections of a guard on duty. Other artists would follow with their own interpretations.

  Before he bid his family goodnight, the King told them that he would see them in the morning. The Queen, who did not even have the strength to undress herself, lay in her bed, weeping and trembling with grief all night. Marie-Thérèse lay on the floor beside her. It snowed until daybreak, when the snow turned to mud. The King was permitted to have a priest with him during his last hours and he requested the Abbé Edge-worth, who also accompanied him to the scaffold. As the King could not bear to again face his family’s suffering, he did not keep his word to his wife and children. On January 21, Louis XVI went to the guillotine without a final adieu. Over 80,000 National Guards were mobilized; 3,600 soldiers were stationed strategically around Paris, and 1,500 soldiers protected the prisons. The Dauphin heard the sound of drums and, flailing his arms at his guard, screamed, ‘Let me out! Let me out!’ The jailer asked the sobbing boy where he planned to go. ‘To talk to the people so they don’t kill my father!’

  By 10.30 a.m., the Queen knew that her husband was dead. She kneeled on the floor in front of her son and said, ‘The King is dead. Long live the King!’ She then rose, and all three women – Marie Antoinette, Marie-Thérèse and Madame Elisabeth – curtsied deeply before Louis Charles.

  Marie Antoinette, Marie-Thérèse and Madame Elisabeth and the new seven-year-old King waited for news. They hoped that Cléry would return and tell them about Louis XVI’s last hours. After the King’s execution, however, government officials refused to allow Cléry to meet with the Queen, and shortly afterward, he left the Temple Prison. Cléry was especially troubled at not being able to speak with Marie Antoinette because the King had given him an important final mission: before going to the scaffold, the King had removed his wedding ring and signet ring and placed them together in a packet with locks of his children’s hair. He handed it all to Cléry to take to the Queen with a message: the King asked Cléry to deliver the packet to the Queen and tell Marie Antoinette that he would only have removed his cherished wedding band in death.

  The packet containing the ring, the locks of hair and the King’s seal was found and confiscated by prison officials. Two months after the King’s death, a kind-hearted official named Toulon secretly slipped the packet to the Queen, and for this gesture to the widow he was guillotined. The Queen managed to smuggle the packet to her former secretary, Jarjayes. On the fifth anniversary of the death of Louis XVI, Cléry was in Blakenberg with the late King’s brother, the Comte de Provence, and he offered to let Provence read the journal that he had kept of his time in the Temple Prison. When Provence got to the passage about his late brother’s personal effects, he went to a drawer and pulled out a note signed by Marie Antoinette, the Dauphin and Marie-Thérèse along with the signet ring, and asked Cléry if he recognized the items. Cléry was overcome.

  On January 28, one week after the death of Louis XVI, the Comte de Provence and a group of émigrés, now in Westphalia, held a memorial service for the King and proclaimed the Dauphin, Louis XVII, King of France. The Count, in exile, declared himself Regent until the boy’s majority in a little more than five years’ time. Both the young King and his teenage sister, quite ill after their father’s execution, remained without medical care. Marie-Thérèse had persistent leg pains and boils from an infection she had contracted from being confined in her filthy quarters. It took over a month for her to recover and she believed that it was only her own sad state that kept her mother preoccupied and from going mad with grief. The Queen refused to walk upstairs to the outdoor gallery because she simply could not bear walking past the King’s room.

  As the months wore on, life in the prison for the Queen and her children became even more punitive. In early Ma
y, the little King was again ill with a very high fever and a pain in his side. Despite the Queen’s continual requests for Dr Brunier, the boy was denied medical treatment. At last, a doctor was allowed to see him, and he had the good sense to consult the boy’s own physician. The fever subsided, but the pain in his side did not. Marie-Thérèse insisted that her brother’s health was never the same after that.

  On July 3, the guards arrived to separate Louis Charles from his mother. Terrified, the eight-year-old boy threw himself at his mother and she refused to let go of him. Threats against her own life did not frighten Marie Antoinette; it was only when the jailers threatened to kill her son that she at last acquiesced. She was so distraught that she could not dress him, so Marie-Thérèse readied her younger brother for solitary confinement. Louis Charles kissed his mother, sister and aunt goodbye and was dragged away in tears by the prison guards. For days and nights, Marie-Thérèse and her mother could hear his cries and then his screams when the guards beat him for crying. There was a small chink through which the Queen could watch her son pass in the distance, and she lived for those moments, ‘her sole hope, her sole occupation’ wrote Marie-Thérèse.

  The jailers’ instructions, apparently issued by the National Convention, were to remove all traces of ‘arrogance and royalty’ in the boy, and to prepare him to testify against Marie Antoinette. His own harsh jailer, a shoemaker named Antoine Simon, took his orders from Jacques Hébert, a powerful member of the Commune and publisher of the radical newspaper, Le Père Ducbesne. Hébert, a former monk, masterminded the torment perpetrated on the boy, according to Marie-Thérèse. Hébert’s minions taught the young king obscene language and poured alcohol down his throat until he became ill. Simon would tell the little boy that they were going to guillotine him, as they had his father, until Louis Charles passed out with fright. The boy was forced to wear the clothing of the revolutionaries and was coerced into signing a document stating that his mother, his sister and his aunt had all sexually molested him. Both the Spanish and English Foreign Secretaries received information from their spies at the Temple Prison that prostitutes had been brought to the prison to rape and infect the eight-year-old boy with sexual diseases so that the Commune could manufacture ‘evidence’ against the Queen. Louis Charles developed constant diarrhea yet nothing was done to treat his illness.1

  On July 31, the National Convention approved a proposal to destroy the royal necropolis at Saint-Denis. The lead and bronze caskets of a thousand years of Kings, Queens and Princes of the Blood was to be melted down to make bullets. At the beginning of August, the Committee of Public Safety began its program of emptying the coffins and dumping the bones of France’s rulers into a mound of quicklime. At the same time, their living Queen, Marie Antoinette, was moved to the Conciergerie, a medieval prison on the Île de la Cité, which would be her last ‘home’. When the officials arrived to remove the Queen from her daughter, Marie-Thérèse begged them to allow her to go as well, but they refused. The Queen embraced her daughter and told her to have courage, and, as her father had instructed, to obey her aunt as a second mother. On leaving the tower, the Queen hit her head on the lintel of the door. A government official asked her if she had hurt herself. ‘No. Nothing can hurt me now,’ were the last words her daughter heard her say.

  Marie-Thérèse and her aunt Elisabeth cried themselves to sleep for weeks. Every time Marie-Thérèse heard the beating of drums she feared that it might signal her mother’s execution or another massacre. She was relieved to find that she and her aunt were mostly ignored except when servants brought in food and water. Marie-Thérèse made her own bed, swept her floors and saw almost no one. She and her aunt were searched every day and they were no longer allowed to walk along the tower gallery.

  While Marie-Thérèse anxiously awaited news of her mother, on August 25, a poster nailed on the door of Marie Antoinette’s beloved Petit Trianon at Versailles announced an estate sale like no other. From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and every day thereafter all furniture, paintings, objets, pots and pans, clothing, books and any and all personal and intimate belongings of the royal family – even the wardrobe, schoolbooks and toys that had belonged to the children – would be sold to the highest bidder. A note on the announcement stated that goods to be exported would be exempt from taxes. Thus began the incomprehensible dismantling of the entire complex of the Palace of Versailles. Architectural structures, sculptures, priceless antiques, as well as tokens of mere sentimental value, were stripped from the premises. While serving as US Minister to France between 1794 and 1797, James Monroe would make many purchases of furniture, porcelain and plate in France, which he would bring back to America, including, from Versailles, a desk on which he would in 1823 craft the document known as the ‘Monroe Doctrine’, as well as a china scent bottle decorated with cabbage roses and the initials ‘MA’ etched on it in gold.

  As pieces of her life were making their way to Parisian antiques dealers, Marie Antoinette waited in her cell at the Conciergerie expecting to die, though holding on to a fragment of hope that she and her children might yet be rescued.

  There had, in fact, been a number of well-intentioned but ill-fated attempts to rescue the Queen including one that became known as ‘the carnation plot’ when a flower bearing a note was dropped at the Queen’s foot in order to forewarn her of the attempt. Another involved an eccentric Englishwoman, a former actress called Mrs Charlotte Atkyns. The highly determined and slightly delusional Atkyns traveled to Paris and managed to slip into the prison disguised as a National Guardsman. Here she hoped to change places with the Queen and thus save her. According to Atkyns, although she was able to see Marie Antoinette, she was only able to hand the imprisoned Queen a posy of flowers – and in the process create a legend concerning her own exploits.

  While Marie Antoinette’s friends were trying desperately to free her, her enemies were preparing to put her to death, and they would use her own children toward that purpose. On October 8, Marie-Thérèse was taken downstairs to her brother’s cell. She was alarmed by how ill and bloated he had become in the short time since they had been separated. She also noticed that the boy whom the Queen had once playfully described as ‘a peasant child … big … fresh-faced and fat’ had hardly grown in height at all since he had entered the prison. The government officials questioned her about Varennes, her prison guards, and ‘a great many vile things of which they accused my mother and my aunt. I was aghast at such horrors, and so indignant that, in spite of the fear I felt, I could not keep myself from saying it was an infamy’.

  Some commentators have claimed, with great melodrama, that Marie-Thérèse’s spirit was broken by these proceedings; that at some point under interrogation she collapsed and suffered a nervous breakdown. According to her own journal, however, although she cried with shock when she understood the perversity of the officials’ questions, and when they tried to make her dishonor her mother, Marie-Thérèse stood her ground for hours. She refused to name anyone involved in the flight to Varennes or any sympathetic prison officials. She wrote later that her parents had always taught her that ‘it was better to die than to compromise anyone, no matter whom’. Marie-Thérèse noted that although they examined Madame Elisabeth for one hour, they questioned her for three. She believed that the men assumed that because she was young, she would be intimidated. She clearly was not.

  At the Conciergerie the Queen was interrogated for days, and on Monday, October 14, she was put on trial. Unlike the King, she was not permitted to mount a defense. At the last minute, two lawyers arrived and asked to have the proceedings delayed so that they could read all of the ‘evidence’ that had been collected against her. They were denied their request. Marie Antoinette’s trial was a sham; but, as usual, she impressed everyone with her dignity. As she sat on an unimposing armchair that had been placed on a small platform, the clerk read out the accusations against her, calling her the ‘new Agrippina’ – a reference to the infamous sister of Caligula, who was said to have enj
oyed incestuous relations with her brother, to have had undue influence over her son, Nero, and was accused of plotting the downfall of Rome.

  The charges against Marie Antoinette included crimes against France stemming as far back as her arrival as a fourteen-year-old Dauphine. She was accused of spying for her brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, and of giving him vast amounts of money from the French treasury. She was charged with masterminding the trip to Varennes and, worst of all, of sexually abusing her son. When she heard the testimonies of Simon and Hébert that her son had accused her and her sister-in-law of molestation, the Queen became distressed, realizing that they must have first harmed or tortured Louis Charles in some way. Incredulous and struck dumb, Marie Antoinette eventually found her voice and replied: ‘If I have said nothing, it is because nature refused to respond to such a question posed to a mother.’ She then made an appeal to all mothers, refuting the charges as grotesque and, although her courage and her words garnered sympathy from even those who disliked her, she was nonetheless sentenced to death.

  At 4.30 in the morning on October 16, 1793, hours before she was to be guillotined, Marie Antoinette wrote her final thoughts in a letter to her sister-in-law Madame Elisabeth. Mistakenly believing that Marie-Thérèse had been separated from her aunt, the Queen addressed her note only to her sister-in-law and not her daughter. Her only regret, wrote Marie Antoinette, was that she was abandoning her children. She asked forgiveness from her enemies, and from Madame Elisabeth for the time she persuaded the King not to let Madame Elisabeth join a convent as she had wished. The Queen wrote that she regretted her interference and begged pardon from the woman to whom she would commend her children. Marie Antoinette also begged the virtuous Madame Elisabeth to forgive little Louis Charles for his ignorant allegations. She implored her sister-in-law to understand his terrible situation and his innocence. The Queen asked her to kiss her ‘poor and dear children’ and say goodbye to them, and, as her husband had before her, she expressed her final hope that they would reunite and love each other, always help each other, and forgive the people of France.