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

by Susan Nagel

  Responding that she would ‘teach the generals how one serves the King’, she rode to the barracks of nearby Saint-Raphael, her horse flanked by two generals. As she stood calling for inspection, the regiment of National Guard formed a square around her. When the Princess charged them with their duty to fight, only twelve men stepped forward to swear their allegiance. One of the captains stepped forward and said, ‘Your Highness can count on us to assure her personal safety.’ She responded, ‘It is not about my personal safety, but about service to the King! Will you or will you not serve?’ The soldiers shrank, admitting they had no taste for civil war.

  She traveled next to another barracks and here she faced further dissent. Some drowned out her words with cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ Humiliated but not deterred, she proceeded to the Château Trompette, the ancient fortress that served as the home of the Régiment d’Angoulême, her own. Outside the castle walls a sentry stopped her and told her she could only proceed if her guards remained outside. ‘I will enter alone,’ she responded and passed across the drawbridge, but was stopped inside by the commander. ‘What motive do you have, refusing my guards access to this fortress?’ she demanded. ‘I take orders from the King, not his relatives,’ barked the soldier. ‘Understand that my men will not fight other Frenchmen,’ he warned. ‘Then will you remain neutral if the National Guard and the King’s loyal volunteers attack?’ she asked. ‘If the National Guard attacks, we will fire at them.’ She looked at his subordinates and asked, ‘Do you share the opinion of your leader?’ They nodded affirmatively. At this precise moment she realized her efforts were futile. With great sadness she told them: ‘Then you will no longer be considered Frenchmen, for they remain faithful to honor.’

  One lone soldier broke ranks and stepped forward, ‘Madame,’ he said, ‘I will not add to the number of traitors. I will die for the King, for you, before I betray my oath and I will follow you everywhere I can render myself useful.’ Marie-Thérèse replied: ‘I am happy with you, Captain; you will not make such a sacrifice.’ The other soldiers voiced their disapproval but the soldier stood his ground. Marie-Thérèse issued them with a challenge stating that she was prepared to do her duty and they ought to follow her example. One last time, Marie-Thérèse surveyed the men: ‘And do you not recognize me? Is this not the Angoulême Regiment to whom I speak? Is that not the name you carry? … And do you not call me your princess?’ There was no response. Silence was her exit cue and she turned and reflected: ‘It is so cruel, after twenty years of exile and unhappiness, I will have to expatriate once again. I, nevertheless, will never cease to swear – I make this vow: For France! Because I am French! You are no longer Frenchmen. About-face! Withdraw!’

  She found Martignac and directed him to cross the river and tell General Clauzel ‘that in happier times I distinguished him and now he has displayed his devotion. I only demand of him one thing: that is to postpone his entrance into Bordeaux until tomorrow. Tell him that is my wish.’

  Marie-Thérèse determined to inspect the remaining 1,700 National Guard of the local garrison that afternoon and the people of Bordeaux crowded along the banks of the Garonne to watch. The white flag of the Bourbons flew on one side of the river while Clauzel and his men stood on the other displaying the colors of the Revolution. Clauzel, believing he had been duped, ordered his men to aim their guns at the royalists. The tension was unbearable as Marie-Thérèse arrived in her calèche. The crowd waited for her to speak, and she stood in the open-topped carriage so they could see and hear her. She addressed the Bordelaise: ‘People of Bordeaux! The garrison will no longer protect you. I have come to ask you for one more sacrifice. Will you swear to obey my command?’ The crowd replied that it would. She surveyed the throngs of people and the enemy on the other bank and declared: ‘You have demonstrated great honor. Preserve your loyalty for better times. I order you to cease fighting.’ The crowd then protested that they were willing to die for her. ‘The King’s niece commands you. Obey. Now, I am leaving you. It is time for me to bid you farewell.’ As she sat down, the crowd broke ranks to cheer her. Clauzel, expecting an attack, ordered his soldiers to prepare to fire; but there was no onslaught. Instead, Marie-Thérèse threw ribbons and feathers from her hat to the cheering crowds as her carriage moved slowly out of the city.

  Marie-Thérèse left behind her a farewell address to the citizens of Bordeaux, which someone pinned to the city wall the following morning. The Times of London published it in its entirety:

  Brave Bordelais, Your fidelity is well known to me; your devotion, unlimited, does not permit you to foresee any danger: but my attachment for you, for every Frenchman, directs me to foresee it. My stay in your city being prolonged might aggravate circumstances, and bring down upon you the weight of vengeance. I have not the courage to behold Frenchmen unhappy, and to be the cause of their misfortune. I leave you, brave Bordelais, deeply penetrated with the feelings you have expressed, and can assure you that they shall be faithfully transmitted to the King. Soon, with God’s assistance, under happier auspices, you shall witness my gratitude, and that of the Prince whom you love.

  Marie-Thérèse

  As crowds congregated to read her message, Clauzel arrived to take control of the city. The General told the people of Bordeaux that it was the Princess who had saved their lives. ‘I would not have hesitated for one minute to shower you with bullets,’ he told them, ‘but she has written the most beautiful page of her own history. It is the duty of every soldier to respect such great courage.’

  When apprized of his niece’s actions, King Louis XVIII, now in Ghent, compared her to Marguerite d’Anjou, the fifteenth-century Princess of Lorraine, who married King Henry VI of England and led the Lancastrian troops on her husband’s behalf in the War of the Roses. At the Tuileries, an awestruck Napoleon said of the Duchesse d’Angoulême: ‘She is the only man in the family!’

  Marie-Thérèse journeyed to the coastal town of Pauillac and boarded the English ship the Wanderer for a life in exile once more. As she explained to Fanny in her letter, although she had left most of her personal effects in Paris, she kept part of her diamond collection with her throughout. The ship sailed along the northern coast of Spain in bad weather and docked at last on April 8. The new King of Spain, Charles IV’s son, Ferdinand, agreed to offer her asylum, but little military assistance, and realizing that once again it would be in England where she would find more help, she ordered her English captain to sail to the English Channel. On April 19, a year to the day that she had bid farewell to Hartwell for France, Marie-Thérèse came ashore at Plymouth at ten in the morning. Here, as she told Fanny, she was greeted by ‘the sincerest cries of ‘‘hurrah!’’ … women waved their handkerchiefs in the air and all of the carriages had been decorated with white cockades. This lasted through the many miles as I traveled to London, where I arrived on the 21st at the home of the ambassador [the Comte de la Châtre] to the King my uncle.’

  La Châtre had distressing news for her: her husband had been taken prisoner by Napoleon’s General de Grouchy in Pont-Saint-Esprit, despite a previous agreement to permit the Bourbon Prince to travel to Spain. The execution of the Duc d’Enghien came immediately to everyone’s minds – Napoleon’s message to the Bourbons some ten years since. La Châtre wrote to Blacas, Louis XVIII’s minister, that the Duchesse d’Angoulême ‘displayed the greatest courage on the receipt of this dreadful intelligence, but tears filled her eyes when she was alone with me’.

  Marie-Thérèse had confided to Fanny that she had received a stream of threatening letters from Napoleon’s generals, that ‘everything demanded combat’ and that, while she had been forced to flee, she was not ready to concede defeat. In London, she sprang into action, first writing to her cousin, the Duc de Bourbon, father of the murdered Duc d’Enghien, urging him, ‘I know that the King desires that you immediately go to the Vendée, and I think that your presence there is very necessary: you will revive their spirits … this province is very important and nece
ssary to our cause. Do not lose any time, I beseech you, to get there as soon as possible.’ She also wrote to Louis XVIII in Ghent of her experiences in Bordeaux, proclaiming the Bordelais ‘excellent’, and her feelings of loyalty to the town where she had ‘raise[d] the sword’. She angrily referred to Napoleon as ‘that man’, to Clauzel with contempt, and to the turncoat soldiers as ‘cowards’.

  A few days later, she received the welcome news that d’Angoulême had been set free, had sailed to Barcelona and had made his way to Madrid. She confided her deepest anxieties about her husband’s whereabouts as well as her relief upon hearing about his safety in her letter to Fanny: ‘how happy I am! He has suffered greatly, but Heaven has taken pity on him, and has returned him to us.’ On May 9, she wrote again to the Duc de Bourbon. ‘You can judge all I have suffered, upon learning that [my husband] had been taken prisoner and my happiness last Saturday, to learn from himself that he had arrived in Spain in good health’.

  For a while, Marie-Thérèse and her husband had been able to correspond. Marie-Thérèse was told that these intimate letters had since found a wider audience as Napoleon had intercepted and published some of them. One could now read, for instance, that the Duke addressed his wife as ‘my beloved Gioia’ – meaning ‘joy’ in Italian. Although Marie-Thérèse had, in the past, accepted the fact that some of her letters would be opened by police and spies, she was furious that Napoleon would make her private letters public.

  From the ambassador’s home in London, Marie-Thérèse continued to wage her campaign to oust Napoleon. She knew that she could count on her old friend, the Prince Regent, so she petitioned him for men and munitions. The moment Napoleon had reached the shores of southern France, another allied coalition, comprising over 700,000 troops from England, Prussia, Nassau, Brunswick, Hanover, and the Netherlands, formed to do battle with ‘the Usurper’. On June 12, Napoleon left Paris with 125,000 soldiers heading east, presumably to cross the Rhine. With about 74,000 of the troops, instead of waiting for an allied attack, he marched into Belgium. About seven miles southeast of Brussels, at Waterloo, 150,000 of the allied forces commanded by the Duke of Wellington and the Prussian General von Blücher surrounded the French army, and on June 18, 1815, the coalition pounded Napoleon’s army into the ground, putting an end to what has become known as Napoleon’s ‘Hundred Days’.

  The Duke of Wellington immediately sent a courier with word of the allied victory to Louis XVIII in nearby Ghent, who then made preparations for a second return to France and requested that Marie-Thérèse join him immediately.

  The King entered Paris on July 8, but Marie-Thérèse decided to delay her return to the capital until the 27th. When she arrived she refused all pomp and circumstance. She was disgusted by both her uncle’s cowardice and the fact that the Bourbons were returning to an occupied country. The allied governments were enraged that the former Emperor of the French seemed to enjoy the complicity and collaboration of so many French citizens, and they were going to be less forgiving now. This time, Marie-Thérèse resolved, she was not going to watch from the sidelines; this time, she would have a say in the governing of France.

  Chapter XX

  Restoration

  When the bourbons were restored for a second time it was the triumphant Duke of Wellington who presided as generalissimo over the chaotic scenes in Paris. Prussian and British soldiers stood guard on the road from Saint-Cloud to Paris and on the roof of the Tuileries. When off duty they gambled at the Palais-Royal. Wellington had been acting as mediator between the partisan politicians of France and the ministers and monarchs of Europe who were in disunity about the country’s future. A number of proposals had been considered: one, supported by the Czar, who was angry with Louis for having rejected his daughter, Grand Duchess Anne, as the wife of the Duc de Berry because of her religion, was to put the Duc d’Orléans on the throne. There were factions who believed the monarchy of Louis XVIII to be impotent, like that of his brother before him. Louis argued that he had not fled out of cowardice, but because he had had insufficient military support. He also pointed a finger at the allies for permitting Napoleon to serve out his captivity in such proximity to France, and thus make easy his return. This time Napoleon would be confined on the barren, remote South Atlantic island of St Helena.

  France would be forced to pay huge war reparations to the allies. In Paris, representatives of the Austrian, Italian and Dutch governments concentrated on retrieving artworks from the Louvre and elsewhere looted by Napoleon from their respective countries. The most conspicuous of these was the famous bronze horses which the Emperor had had removed from St Mark’s Square in Venice and had perched atop the arch at the Place du Carrousel. Despite Talleyrand’s attempts to stop the removal of the sculpture, the horses were now going home. The Pope sent his own emissary, the sculptor, Canova, who reclaimed works of art and manuscripts belonging to the Vatican.

  Marie-Thérèse deduced that, as she had always been most warmly welcomed in Bordeaux, that region would best serve as her stage. On August 15 she traveled there, after a brief stay in Paris, to consolidate her support. She and her husband, who had been traveling from the south after his sojourn in Spain, met on the road to the city of Bordeaux. Their visit was a triumph. On the banks of the Garonne a pavilion had been constructed to welcome the couple, who rowed toward it on a gondola. Once ashore, the Duke mounted a horse to enter the city while Marie-Thérèse was placed inside a specially prepared carriage. Her horses were unfastened and she was lifted in her carriage through the streets to cheering crowds. A new flag was commissioned by the citizens of Bordeaux: the Bourbon white now edged in a green trim – the color of the d’Angoulême livery.

  From Bordeaux, at the beginning of September, Marie-Thérèse traveled to Toulouse where once again, the horses were detached from her carriage, it was hoisted in the air and she was received with cheers. On September 11, she returned to the Tuileries to stand by her uncle and ensure she had a say in the appointments of his ministers and to his court. Five days after her return, Joseph Fouché, a former Jacobin who had voted for the execution of Louis XVI and whom Marie-Thérèse called the ‘butcher of Lyon’ for his revolutionary misdeeds, was dismissed from his post as Minister of Police and sent to Dresden as ambassador. Shortly after that Talleyrand – ‘Prince Weathervane’ – was forced to offer his resignation. Marie-Thérèse also understood that it was time for her uncle to humor their ‘cousin’, Czar Alexander. On September 22, Marie-Thérèse met with the Czar at the Tuileries, and they talked for hours. Not long thereafter, despite Marie-Thérèse’s antipathy toward the moderates, the Duc de Richelieu, whom the Czar had appointed Governor of Odessa in 1804 and who was Alexander’s personal favorite as a choice for Louis’s new Foreign Minister, was given the job.

  As at Hartwell, Marie-Thérèse took charge of protocol at the royal palaces, relying on her own etiquette expert, Monsieur Abraham, whose memory of Versailles was flawless. It was decided that the King’s livery would be blue, silver and red; the Comte d’Artois’s, green and pink; and both the d’Angoulêmes and the Duc de Berry would have green and gold.

  As she had during her return to France one year earlier, Marie-Thérèse selected her staff for the royal household at the Tuileries from among those who had been close to her mother and from her own friends from childhood and years of exile. This time, she embarked with less emotion and more calculation; although the King had stayed the course of the Charter, Marie-Thérèse felt little need for pretense: there would be little forgiveness for Bonapartists and absolutely no nobles of the Empire among her retinue.

  King Louis XVIII, the parliamentary Bourbon King, began his day quite differently from that of previous Kings of France. Instead of allowing the public into his bedroom, he prayed there alone. Members of the court now congregated in the Salle du Trône and the Grand Cabinet, public rooms, and in rooms like the Salon Bleu and the Salon de la Paix, again, not in the chamber of His Most Christian Majesty, which was now on view to anyone
in the city who wanted to pay for a ticket to enter. Adopting the more simple daily routine of country life he had observed at Hartwell, the King would begin his day early and eat his meals earlier than was the form at Versailles. Louis also liked to take afternoon drives: that exercise was not only a pleasurable holdover from his Hartwell days, but it was also a way for him to ensure a presence in Paris, the nexus of power. Although for the moment, the English dominion over France may not have been popular with the people, visiting Englishmen would always be welcome at the court of Louis XVIII, and he would never forget their kindness to him and his family.

  The year before, when Louis stayed at Compiègne, he had, despite being appalled by the decor, chosen to ignore Napoleon’s intrusive redecoration of the Bourbon home and referred to the Emperor as a ‘good concierge’. Upon the family’s second return, Marie-Thérèse ordered the removal of each and every bee, eagle and ‘N’ from all the royal palaces that Napoleon had occupied on the Île de France. She was not prepared to endure the presence of the Bonapartists any longer – not at her table, nor in the King’s cabinet. Her father had asked that she forgive the people of France, but she would not tolerate Napoleon’s warriors. Neither would she suffer the presence of her cousin, the Duc d’Orléans, whose movements she had been monitoring. During the Hundred Days, before his escape to England, Orléans had overtly shown his contempt for the regime of Louis XVIII. While Marie-Thérèse had been leading the King’s troops in Bordeaux, Orléans, before leaving France, had ordered the soldiers under his command in Lille to return to their barracks rather than fight. Once in exile, he had refused to join his sovereign in Ghent and, in a signal that he was most definitely his father’s son, he not only circulated pamphlets criticizing the Bourbon King, he attempted to persuade Wellington to place him on the throne of France instead of his cousin. For now, Louis decided to listen to his niece and banish Orleans from French soil.