by Susan Nagel
She may very well have been his ‘everything’, but as the object of worldwide curiosity and fascination, she was also of great use to Louis. Prints from an engraving of Marie-Thérèse walking somberly in the snow, memorializing her journey from Mitau, quickly appeared all over Europe. In France, the drawing became so popular and ubiquitous that Napoleon banned it. The French police had dispatched spies to Warsaw not only to spy on Louis but also to keep watch on the d’Angoulêmes. Marie-Thérèse, now a little older and wiser, also realized, as did her uncle, the propaganda value of the prison memoir she had written and knew that there were discrepancies between the two accounts. Determining that she needed to get it back from Madame de Chanterenne, to whom she had entrusted it upon her departure from the Temple Prison, she asked Cléry to write requesting its return. In addition to providing the authentic testament of her family’s suffering, Marie-Thérèse, as an advocate for a Bourbon restoration, needed to affirm her uncle’s claim as the sole legitimate heir to the throne. Despite a real and constant gnawing at her conscience that she was unsure if her brother had truly perished in his prison cell, she publicly affirmed in her own statements that her brother had died in the Temple Prison and that she was the sole surviving ‘Orphan of the Temple’.
Outwardly, the French royal family in exile complied with Napoleon’s dictum: on the streets of Warsaw, the King of France was called the ‘Comte de l’Isle’ and his niece the ‘Marquise de la Meilleraye’. Within the walls of their home in Warsaw, where they could not be seen, it was business as usual with court etiquette enacted, their roles performed as if at Versailles. Louis spent his days writing and reading: in one letter, he mentioned that Marie-Thérèse’s beloved dog, Coco, had been killed in an accident and that since it was the last link between her and her brother, she was bereft. It was turning into a stunning game of charades and together, Louis XVIII, Marie-Thérèse and the Due d’Angoulême made a formidable team, their private doubts subsumed for a public role. Louis had more faith in his niece as a monarch than in his own nephew, and, when it came to political plotting, the King relied on the opinion of his niece rather than the man who might someday be king. Marie-Thérèse consistently sent any surplus funds to help French émigrés. She visited convents and the poor, as her mother and her aunt had taught her. Word spread immediately of the kindness and goodness of the ‘Marquise de La Meilleraye’, and she was hailed, as her uncle had proclaimed her time and again, as a gift from God.
Marie-Thérèse had become the focus of cult-like adoration among the Polish nobility. In tribute to the ‘New Antigone’, Comtesse Branicka arranged for the French royal family to spend the summer at the Palace Leszczynski – a bold and clear statement of sympathy for the Bourbons. Despite the rumors that Napoleon would extend an olive branch to the younger generation of Bourbons, Napoleon decided to act otherwise. At the ancestral home of their Polish forebear, the French royal family learned that Napoleon had made peace with the Pope. They now knew that not only were their plans for Italy dashed, but, with a pact that ensured the safe return of the clergy to France, their own role as defenders of the Christian faith would be usurped by the new accord between Napoleon and the Pope. Yet, for Louis and his family there was no other option but to continue to maintain their belief in their inherited right to rule France.
Funding their court in exile continued to be a challenge. Salaries had to be paid and meals and lodging provided for the King’s attendants and their own servants. Once the King had established himself in Warsaw, an extended retinue of courtiers began to turn up from Mitau to serve their King. Others appeared from all over Europe, once again, to receive remuneration for various services they had performed for the cause. Louis received some money from his cousin, Charles IV of Spain, who continued to provide an allowance, and later that year Czar Alexander agreed to restore less than half of what his father had paid the Bourbons in exile. They also continued to receive about 50,000 florins from Franz – interest on the money that Marie Antoinette had smuggled out of France, which the Emperor rightfully owed Marie-Thérèse, while the Comte d’Artois managed to arrange for some money to be sent from Britain.
Indeed, d’Artois continued to live a carefree and comfortable existence. The painter, Madame Vigée-Lebrun, recalled in her memoir that, while she was in London in 1802, it seemed that d’Artois and his son the Due de Berry were quite able to enjoy themselves despite the difficult lives of their family members. She remembered the evening that de Berry and his cousin, the Duc de Bourbon, accompanied her to the home of the scandalous Lady Emma Hamilton. Lady Emma, who, onlookers claimed, downed three bottles of port that evening, entertained her French guests by posing inside a life-sized frame offering her visitors an array of live tableaux.
Still, d’Artois ensured that Louis would receive an immediate payment of £5,000 and an additional £6,000 per year from Parliament. Louis felt that his family was coming together. It had been Marie-Thérèse – by offering to sell the gift of diamonds from Czar Paul – who had saved them initially. In addition they had managed to cut expenditure quite dramatically: Monsieur Hüe was given a list of cost-cutting measures to implement, down to the number of candles permitted to each courtier. In his memoir, published later without Marie-Thérèse’s permission, but still with great sympathy for the Princess, Hüe recalled that the winter of 1801–02 was a particularly harsh one causing great deprivation, but that Marie-Thérèse performed stoically throughout, though she often appeared to have been crying and she, of course, remained childless.
Her strength was continually tested. Jean-Marie Hervagault, the young man who had pretended to be Louis Charles, had made quite an impression on influential people around Europe. He had even met with the Pope and twenty cardinals. A prominent bishop, the now republican Charles de la Font de Savine, who had met Louis Charles at Versailles, traveled to meet Hervagault and when he insisted that the man was indeed Louis XVII there was public uproar. Napoleon tried to quash the story, but that failed owing to the public’s continuing fascination. When his attempts to quiet public interest failed, Napoleon’s prosecutors charged the pretender with fraud and brought Hervagault to trial. Jean-Marie was sentenced to four years in prison, which caused another outcry.
Hervagault was moved to the prison of Bicêtre, and as Napoleon had hoped, the public lost interest in him over time. However, others would come forward with their claims and stories; each one would be reported and cause Marie-Thérèse distress. She had to quell her doubts, in public at least, for the sake of the Bourbon monarchy, but her heart was conflicted. When asked if she were truly certain that her brother had died, she would answer firmly that she, more than anyone, would never support a king who was not the rightful one.
On March 25, 1802, France and Britain signed the Peace of Amiens, in which Britain formally recognized the French Republic – a treaty that, for the moment, halted hostilities and allowed Napoleon to channel his energies into his domestic agenda, which included creating public schools and a new constitution. On August 2, Napoleon was named ‘First Consul for Life’. In February 1803, upon the orders of the King of Prussia – but at the instigation of Napoleon – Louis XVIII was presented with a decree that stated that he, Napoleon, had not been responsible for the fall of the monarchy in France, that the First Consul for Life was not a regicide. The document claimed that Napoleon had reinstated a strong government in France and therefore it was necessary for the Bourbons to renounce their hereditary claims to the throne of France. Three days later, on February 22, 1803, with Marie-Thérèse at his side, Louis XVIII presented his answer to the King of Prussia (and Napoleon). It read that although he had great respect for the military talents of the First Consul, he would not relinquish his right to the throne. At the bottom of the page on the same letter was a statement signed by the Duc d’Angoulême declaring that he, too, refused to renounce his own claim. On March 22, Marie-Thérèse’s cousin, the Duc d’Enghien – Louis-Antoine Henri de Bourbon-Condé – sent one of his own from Ett
enheim, in case Napoleon did not understand Louis XVIII’s message. Another letter ‘dated April 23, Wanstead House Essex’, arrived from the Ducs de Berry, d’Orléans and his brothers, which echoed their joint affirmation that they would not renounce their respective hereditary rights to the throne of France.
On April 30, Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States, thus ending French sovereignty there, and in mid-May, a little over a year after it had been signed, the Treaty of Amiens was broken. The French charged that the British had not evacuated Malta; the British responded by claiming that Napoleon’s most recent aggressions had violated both the Treaties of Campo Formio and Lunéville. After both governments accused each other of having improperly seized ships, Napoleon ordered the imprisonment of all English male citizens currently in France, making Britain and France enemies once again.
Britain had been kind to the Bourbons. Louis, d’Angoulême and Marie-Thérèse were all firmly convinced that the British would vanquish ‘the Usurper’. Napoleon, however, was no longer amused by Parliament’s tolerance of the French royal family, and he determined to send his own message to the Bourbons. And it was to be a message of the most personal, vicious kind.
In the autumn of 1803, an unusual couple arrived in the tiny German town of Ingelfingen in Württemberg, bordering the Rhine, attracting great interest from the townspeople. The young woman – blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and estimated to be in her early twenties – wore a veil to cover her face. The man, considerably older than the young woman, seemed aristocratic and foreign. The man received post addressed to ‘Herr Vavel de Versay’. Locals overheard them speaking in French and took to calling them the Dark Count and Countess. The couple employed an obviously high-caliber servant, the kind who might have been trained at a royal palace, which, local residents concluded, meant that the couple must be important. One of the servants in the town had gossiped that she had worked on the young woman’s laundry and that all of it was embroidered with the Bourbon fleur-de-lys; while the son of a town councilman named Kraus claimed he had managed to catch a glimpse of the young woman’s face without her veil on. At one point, after the couple’s departure, the young man had been shown a picture of Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte of France and exclaimed: ‘But that is my Comtesse de Vavel!’ Their sudden and mysterious departure from the town at two o’clock in the morning, toward the end of March 1804, was equally stupefying.
‘Vavel de Versay’ and his young, blonde companion had fled immediately on receiving terrible news. It had all started when Napoleon’s chief spy, Karl Schulmeister, had forged a note from the Princess Charlotte de Rohan-Rochefort, claiming that she had been kidnapped. When her lover, the Duc d’Enghien, came to her aid, Napoleon’s men seized him. D’Enghien was accused on trumped-up charges of having taken part in a conspiracy against Napoleon and sentenced to death. He was executed by a firing squad on the night of March 21, 1804. As d’Enghien held a lantern against the dark to guide his executioners, Napoleon’s soldiers shot him in the heart. A young Bourbon Prince – and the last Prince of the House of Condé – had been murdered on the direct orders of the First Consul. Napoleon’s message to the Bourbons in exile could not have been clearer.
No one could quite explain the link between the execution of the Duc d’Enghien and the abrupt and hasty departure of the ‘Dark Count and Countess’ from Ingelfingen. Suspected to have been any number of men, some speculated that ‘Vavel de Versay’ was an alias for the illegitimate son rumored to have been born of an alleged liaison between Count John Albert Bentinck and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Another story at the time claimed that Vavel de Versay had been appointed to protect his companion by Napoleon’s Foreign Minister, Talleyrand. Others believed he was an agent of King Louis XVIII, and still others thought he was one of Franz II’s loyal minions.
In the 1920s, Elizabeth Hawkinson Whitshed, an author known professionally as ‘Mrs Aubrey Le Blond’, revealed that much of the story about the Dark Count and Countess had been culled from private Bentinck family papers. She explained that Charlotte Sophie, the daughter of the Count of Altenburg, who had married William Bentinck, a younger son of the Earl of Portland, in 1733, had left a cache of letters that gave detailed portraits of ‘famous contemporary personalities’ of the latter half of the eighteenth century. Among the Bentinck family’s own skeletons was the belief that their son, John Albert, had been the lover of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire in the early 1770s. Mrs Le Blond admitted that it was widely suspected that the pair had produced an illegitimate son who would grow up to be the man known as the Dark Count. In 1954, a member of that same German noble family, Frederic de Saxe-Altenburg, penned the book L’Énigme de Madame Royale, in which he disclosed 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.
Le Blond had, herself, traveled to Germany to try to uncover the truth about the identity of the mysterious man, but it was ultimately O. V. Maeckel, in his 1926 book Das Rätsel von Hildburgbausen, who had been able to trace the path of the man behind the mystery. Maeckel disclosed at last that the man, traveling incognito under the name ‘Vavel de Versay’, was in fact Leonardus Cornelius Van der Valck, a man of Dutch origin who had served both as a soldier in the army of French exiles and as a minister to France. In 1799, Van der Valck was in Paris and in 1800 he was in Linz at the same time as the Duc d’Enghien. From there, he went to Schweinfurt, and, in October 1801, Cornelius Van der Valck appeared in Regensburg, Germany, in order to renew his passport. He was then traveling with a young, blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman, who appeared to be about twenty years of age.
Van der Valck’s passport renewal was approved and his passport signed by the local French Consul General, Theobald Jacques Justin Bacher – the very man who had received instructions from Franz II to bring Ernestine de Lambriquet with Marie-Thérèse to Vienna when he was French Minister in Switzerland; the man who had negotiated Marie-Thérèse’s release; and the man who visited her in her hotel room in Huningue and turned her over to the Austrian delegation in Basel. Was there a special relationship between the Dutchman Cornelius Van der Valck and the Bourbon family? He was, indeed, an ardent supporter of the Bourbons, and, according to Saxe-Altenburg, Van der Valck, who assumed the alias ‘Vavel de Versay’ at his convenience, had corresponded regularly with Princess Charlotte de Rohan-Rochefort. Finally, Saxe-Altenburg claimed that shortly after the assassination of the Duc d’En-ghien, Prince Friedrich Ludwig von Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen received a top-secret report from an employee that on March 31, 1804, ‘Herr Vavel arrived safely with the unlucky daughter of the late King Louis XVI’.
In Warsaw on April 9, King Louis XVIII and his court were informed of the Duc d’Enghien’s assassination. The Duchesse d’Angoulême and the Abbe Edgeworth went to the Convent of the Benedictions in Warsaw to tell Louise de Condé about her nephew’s murder. That afternoon, Marie-Thérèse wrote to the slain soldier’s inconsolable grandfather, the Prince de Condé.
I take the pain that you are feeling and my heart shares in it sincerely. Despite all that I have suffered, I never could have imagined the hideous event which places us all in mourning. This morning, I went to see Louise whom I found calm in her pain that Religion and Resignation to the will of Providence can give … she was only concerned with you … I beg you, I vow that your courage sustains me … your health … resist … the too justly dolor of our cruel and common loss …
The stunned Bourbons now understood that their lives were in grave danger. And they were horrified when just a few days after the young Duke’s assassination, the Spanish King, his Bourbon cousin, awarded Napoleon the Order of the Golden Fleece. Louis, who, as a Bourbon cousin, had also been given this same honor, wrapped up his own medal and put it away with a note that included the comment that he refused to share such an honor with ‘a great criminal’:
Religion could engage me to forgive an assassi
n, but the tyrant over my people will always be my enemy … Providence, in its mysterious secretiveness, may condemn me to finish my days in exile, but neither posterity nor my contemporaries has the right to say that in adversity was I, for one instant, unworthy of inheriting the throne of my ancestors.
Marie-Thérèse echoed her uncle’s sentiments, but was dismayed when, on April 25, ‘the Criminal’ – as she now referred to Napoleon – had the French Senate pass a new law once again permitting hereditary monarchy, allowing him, on May 18, to proclaim himself Hereditary Emperor of the French. Louis wrote a letter of protest, asking the monarchs of Europe to join against the man who had appointed himself ruler of France. Not one sovereign responded. Franz, fearing that Napoleon would try to seize control of the Holy Roman Empire, created a new title for himself, as if he were conceding in advance to the Corsican-born General. Franz’s titles included the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Hungary and Bohemia. Aware that Napoleon, if victorious, would attempt to carve up the Holy Roman Empire to his own design, Franz took the pre-emptive step of declaring himself ‘First Emperor of Austria’, a less expansive, less threatening title.
