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

by Susan Nagel

  In early October, the royal family set off toward Trieste and the Adriatic. They stopped in Linz at the Hotel Canon and proceeded to Slovenia. They crossed the Ponte del Torrione, which spanned the Isonzo River, and arrived in Gorizia, famous for its fine air. It was here, for a time, that Marie-Thérèse’s elderly great-aunts had lived during the Revolution. The Count Coronini-Cronberg, head of an ancient noble family in the region, had placed a castle at the disposal of the exiled Bourbon King and it would be here that Charles would reside with his grandson. Marie-Thérèse, Louis-Antoine and Princess Louise rented the medieval Castello di Strassoldo in the center of town.

  While cholera ravaged much of the Austrian territories, the exiled Bourbons, thinking they had escaped the plague, began to enjoy the simple daily pleasures of Gorizia. Not two weeks after their arrival, however, on the morning of November 3, Charles began to feel unwell. For two days, he suffered extreme fever and bouts of vomiting. Charles’s doctor, Bougon, pronounced that the exiled King had indeed contracted cholera. While Marie-Thérèse remained at Charles’s bedside, there were many decisions to be made in the event of the death of the exiled King of France.

  Communications were immediately dispatched to the Austrian Emperor since Charles’s final resting place was still a matter of political importance. France was out of the question. Emperor Ferdinand offered a Cappucine crypt where many of Marie Antoinette’s family members had been buried; however, Metternich did not want to cause friction with King Louis-Philippe. Other proposed sites included Graz, where the Comtesse d’Artois had been buried, and Naples, where a collateral branch of the Bourbons were interred. Another solution was considered. From the moment of his arrival in Gorizia, Charles had enjoyed taking walks to a distant hill where a Franciscan convent stood nestled on the mountain-top. The cloister, called Castagnavizza, had harbored a number of French citizens seeking refuge during the Revolution. Castagnavizza was under the protection of the Thurn und Taxis family. When approached they immediately granted their permission for the exiled Bourbon King to be buried at the convent.

  Charles X died at 1.30 a.m. on November 6, 1836. To honor him, many of the townspeople draped the windows of their homes in black. He was buried days later in a white marble sarcophagus bearing the inscription: ‘Here rests the Very High, Very Powerful, Very Excellent Prince, Charles X by Name, By the Grace of God, King of France and of Navarre, dead in Gorizia the sixth of November, 1836, age seventy-nine and twenty-eight days.’ He left his considerable fortune of 6 million francs to his son and to his grandchildren. Although many in France mourned the late King, Louis-Philippe flaunted custom and chose not to wear mourning clothes in honor of his late cousin.

  In early January 1837, Marie-Thérèse, Louis-Antoine (now King Louis XIX to legitimists), Prince Henri and Princess Louise traveled to Vienna for the wedding of a Habsburg cousin. Another Marie-Thérèse, the daughter of Archduke Karl, was about to become Queen of the Two Sicilies and sister-in-law to Marie Caroline, the former Duchesse de Berry. The wedding took place at the same church in which the bride’s father had acted as stand-in for Napoleon, when the Emperor of the French had married his Austrian Princess in 1810.

  It was nearly forty years since Marie-Thérèse had seen her onetime intended husband Archduke Karl. He had married Princess Henrietta of Nassau-Weilburg, a great beauty, some thirty years younger than himself and twenty years younger than Marie-Thérèse of France. She was a great-great-granddaughter of King George II of England, and proved quite fertile. The couple had seven children together. Their eldest son, who would also become a famous military leader, would marry the daughter of Ludwig I of Bavaria and his Queen, Thérèse of Saxe-Hildburghausen, one of the daughters of Charlotte, the Duchess of Saxe-Hildburghausen, who had sworn to keep the secret and protect the identity of the ‘Dark Countess’.

  Karl had continued his career as field marshal even after Napoleon’s defeat, and after his wife’s premature death in 1829, he spent his time writing books on military strategy. He still presented an impressive figure when Marie-Thérèse saw him at the wedding that January: the patriarch of a large and happy brood, he was strong, upright and dashing, in stark contrast to the Duc d’Angoulême whom Chateaubriand described as nearly stick-thin, old beyond his years and attired in shabby clothes. For Marie-Thérèse her visit to Vienna was bittersweet: it was both a pleasant time among family and a reminder of the sacrifice she had made for her own dynasty, a sacrifice which, ironically, had resulted in neither realm nor issue.

  After the wedding, the exiled, legitimate King and Queen of France returned to their very simple life at the Castello di Strassoldo in Gorizia. Many Frenchmen traveled to see them in Gorizia to offer their condolences, often arriving at the Castello di Strassoldo with news and books from France as they knew that ‘Queen Marie-Thérèse’ loved to read. An old friend, Alexandrine du Montet, asked if she had read Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, which had been a wild success throughout Europe, and was surprised for a moment but then understood when Marie-Thérèse admitted that she simply could not bear to.

  They were now a family of four, living in one house: King Louis XIX of France and his wife, Queen Marie-Thérèse, Henri and his sister Louise, the remnants of the thousand-year-old Capetian dynasty all living together in Slovenia with a skeleton staff and their most loyal friends, the people who refused to abandon them. The members of the French contingent continued to include, among others, the Duchesse de Blacas and the Vicomtesse d’Agoult, Marie-Therèse’s friend of nearly forty years. Marie-Thérèse also enjoyed making new friends, and she grew especially fond of the members of the Coronini family.

  Their days followed a routine that rarely changed. Marie-Thérèse and Louis-Antoine rose early and attended Mass. Marie-Thérèse, who left her home about six in the morning to go to church, was usually seen wearing black. While she was at church, the teenage brother and sister would begin their own morning of lessons. At ten the family would reunite for breakfast. A menu would be placed on the table. Their maître d’hôtel would ceremoniously announce that breakfast was served and everyone would eat off plates decorated with fleurs-de-lys. Each member of the family would then go about their business for the day. The children would continue with their lessons; Marie-Thérèse would perform her needlework and visit the poor. Every afternoon, she and her husband would take a walk together, sometimes around town, sometimes to the convent of Castagnavizza.

  Twice weekly, in the early evenings, the doors of the Castello di Strassoldo opened to the local aristocracy. The guests wore evening clothes and gloves – black or gray, depending on the season – and all would rise whenever ‘King Louis XIX and his Queen’ entered or left a room. Marie-Thérèse would do likewise in deference to her husband. They would play loto and whist; sometimes there were concerts; sometimes, if someone spontaneously burst into song, an amateur musician would play an accompaniment on the piano. Princess Louise depicted one of these merry soirées in a gouache painting; it hangs today in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Bordeaux. At other times they visited friends in Hungary and Germany, actively taking part in la belle saison.

  The Dark Count and Countess, like a couple in a fairy tale, continued to live in seclusion, locked away with their secret in Castle Eishausen. In November 1837, on one of her solitary promenades along the forest paths, the Countess caught a chill, was confined to bed and died days later, on November 25. Before sunrise on the 28th, the old servant Schmidt, a tailor named Marr, two brothers named Schmidt, six pallbearers and a Totenfrau (‘death’s woman’) assembled in the entrance hall of Castle Eishausen around the open casket. Inside, a corpse of a woman lay dressed in white. The casket was lifted into the hearse and it was accompanied by another carriage to the graveside. On a small hillside, nearly hidden under brush, a prayer was said as the casket was lowered to its final resting place. All of this was completed in darkness and without the presence of the Dark Count who was too distraught to participate. In a note to Pastor Kühner’s widow,
Vavel de Versay admitted that his loss was almost impossible to bear. In the most revealing comments that he ever made about the ‘Countess’, he referred to ‘Sophie Botta’ as a ‘poor orphan’.

  Days after the funeral, some local women acquired a number of chemises embroidered with fleurs-de-lys that had been given away. Years later, a Dr Lommler, who performed the autopsy on the body, admitted that he was stunned by the corpse’s resemblance to Marie Antoinette. Vavel de Versay continued to live in the vicinity of Castle Eishausen until his death on April 8, 1845. Items that had belonged to ‘Sophie’ were among his effects and in September of that year Charlotte, Princess Paul of Württemberg instructed her attorney to buy some of ‘Sophie’s’ belongings including a gold embroidered bag that she herself had given the woman whose identity had for so long been a mystery.

  There were very few around in the late 1830s who could still have remembered Marie-Thérèse from her youth at Versailles, and their numbers were growing fewer by the month. Madame de Tourzel had long since died. In 1838, Renée de Chanterenne passed away at the age of seventy-six. The Comte de la Rochefoucauld (the Duc de Doudeauville) had also died. In 1839, the Vicomte de la Rochefoucauld, who had assumed his father’s title, appeared once again at the door of the exiled French royal family to write another story. Although Charles X had approved of the story of the journalist’s trip to Buschtierad, when de la Rochefoucauld arrived in Gorizia on March 22 he was given a very chilly reception by Louis-Antoine’s staff. He wrote in the Pèlerinage à Goritz that he found the locals ugly and dirty. The Castello de Strassoldo was small, sad, inadequate and bourgeois. ‘Although there is a porter, no one stops you as you enter the courtyard and head under a vaulted ceiling to a staircase. Straight opposite the stairs you open a double door that opens onto a large room which serves as both drawing room and dining room, and “Voilà”, the habitation which contains the Bourbon dynasty.’

  The rooms, he noted, were basic. To the right of the main salon was the suite belonging to Henri, comprising a bedroom and a study. Here he kept two pretty vases from Paris, locks of his mother’s hair, a portrait of his father, and paintings that he and his sister had executed. In Princess Louise’s room was an iron bed sent from Paris, two paintings – one of her brother and one of her mother. There was a work-table, some simple furniture, a small library, a few statuettes, and some Bohemian glass in different colors.

  Unlike her husband, Marie-Thérèse was delighted to see her old friend. De la Rochefoucauld interviewed people in the town of Gorizia who claimed to admire the Bourbons living among them. He wrote that he was in awe of Marie-Thérèse, this ‘long-suffering woman’, and that she was, for him, and for so many others, the example of Christian compassion. He reported that Marie-Thérèse took him to a Mass at the local cathedral in honor of the recent death of Marie, a Princess of Württemberg. She was also a daughter of Louis-Philippe, the Citizen King. De la Rochefoucauld noted that although Marie-Thérèse was quite complimentary about Louis-Philippe’s wife, Marie Amélie, saying that her Italian cousin was ‘very charitable’, she refused to refer to her as Queen.

  Louis-Antoine told de la Rochefoucauld that he and his wife repeated a prayer daily that Madame Elisabeth had taught her: ‘Seigneur, whatever may arise, or whatever may arrive, we are convinced that You have wished the greatest good for us.’ Marie-Thérèse reminisced with de la Rochefoucauld about other women who had meant so much to her during her childhood and who were now gone, like Madame de Tourzel. She seemed grateful that she could open her heart to him, commenting that ‘women so rarely find the occasion to express their feelings’. He noted that she was extremely hospitable to the townspeople as well as to visitors. On Easter Sunday, March 31, de la Rochefoucauld joined a group of French legitimists, determined to hail the man they saw as their rightful King, gratefully gathered at the Castello de Strassoldo to dine with the royal couple.

  However, what de la Rochefoucauld really wanted to know related to a far more substantial matter. Now that Charles X was dead would Louis XIX be prepared to return to the throne in the event of another revolution, or would he honor his abdication in favor of his nephew? Although Louis-Antoine was not happy to speak about the matter, Marie-Thérèse had no qualms about telling the writer that she and her husband had but one common desire: to see their nephew on the throne of France. She told de la Rochefoucauld that his visit to Gorizia and, indeed, his story should be about how she and her husband were preparing Henri, ‘our child’, to rule. The journalist may have found little majesty in their lifestyle, but he readily admitted that he found majesty in her sentiments.

  De la Rochefoucauld was then allowed to meet with Henri and his tutors. He described him as a young, vigorous, healthy and handsome young man who, like his father, loved the arts. Although he studied, rode well and fenced brilliantly, Henri admitted that his greatest teacher was his aunt. De la Rochefoucauld had his story. Upon his departure, Henri and Louise each presented him with a gift. Henri had painted a castle, and Louise, angels. The eighteen-year-old young man gave a message to the people of France of his own. ‘We love all who love our cherished country and who serve her loyally,’ he declared, his aunt looking on with an approving smile. Days later de la Rochefoucauld saw Marie-Thérèse on a personal matter. He requested some memento of the late King Charles X. Handing him the cup from which the late King had drunk his hot chocolate, Marie-Thérèse apologized: ‘This is the only thing I can offer you. The jewels of my father were shared among his friends and his garde robe was given by us to Monsieur Gros, the son-in-law of Basset, his faithful valet de chambre’

  De la Rochefoucauld traveled homeward with his notes. Henri had informed the writer of the code his aunt had taught him to live by: ‘Princes are no more than the last of men before God … when one humbles oneself before the Supreme Majesty one does not humiliate the rest.’ It was Marie-Thérèse who also taught him that court was a place of chimera, where a king could be led astray by those of ambition, and she advised him to live among the people. Marie-Thérèse, who had lived in so many European countries, insisted that part of Henri’s continuing education should be to see as much of the world as he could. The days of the King of France living in isolated splendor were no more. If Henri were someday to rule France – and both Louis-Antoine and Marie-Thérèse were convinced that their nephew would, indeed, be recalled by the people – then it was imperative for Henri to understand the world around him.

  Henri traveled throughout Switzerland, Italy, Germany and Austria, where he had meetings on politics with Metternich, ‘the coachman of Europe’. He also made a point of traveling to the towns of Banat de Temesvar, Charleville, Saint-Hubert and Seultour, Romanian villages that were established by the citizens of Alsace and Lorraine who, upon the call of the Empress Maria Theresa, had settled there in the 1770s to provide Austria with a cultural buffer from the Muslim world. Henri spent time in each of these places, talking to people, soaking up local customs, and learning about industry. When he went to Rome to meet with the Pope, Louis-Philippe’s envoy there issued a strong protest. On September 30, 1843, Henri wrote to Chateaubriand from Magdeburg, Germany that his intentions were to travel to England. On November 22, Chateaubriand wrote to Madame Récamier that he was setting out to meet ‘my king’. In London, over two thousand legitimists organized a demonstration demanding that Henri ascend the throne of France.

  In early December 1843, Louis-Antoine became ill with cancer, and his health declined rapidly. He saw local doctors, experts from Padua and specialists sent from Vienna by Metternich. He suffered terribly for six months, went blind, and died on June 3, 1844. At his bedside, his sobbing wife repeated the same words that the Abbé Edgeworth had uttered at the scaffold at her father’s death: ‘Son of Saint Louis, ascend to heaven!’ Louis-Antoine had written a last request which read: ‘I wish to be buried as simply as possible in the very place where I died.’ His funeral took place on June 8 and the entire town turned out to line the streets as the cortège pro
ceeded to the cathedral. The exiled ‘King Louis XIX’ was then interred at the convent of Castagnavizza near his father.

  Now that both her father-in-law and husband were dead, Marie-Thérèse, like many widows, decided that she needed to make some changes in her life. She felt that Marie Caroline had been banished long enough and it was time for the family to reconcile. It was also time for a change of scenery. Marie-Thérèse set about purchasing a new home. In the 1830s, the Duc de Blacas had bought a home about fifty kilometers south of Vienna named ‘Frohsdorf’, named for the little village in which it stood. He offered it to Marie-Thérèse and she accepted it. Frohsdorf, or ‘village of frogs’, was formerly known as ‘Krottendorf’, ‘village of toads’. Krottendorf, of course, was also the name of the General who became the butt of a private joke between Marie Antoinette and her mother, the Empress, and was used to refer to Marie Antoinette’s maddeningly regular menstrual periods. When ‘General Krottendorf’ at last did not arrive, it had signaled the conception of Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte; and Krottendorf – now Frohsdorf – would be the place where she would die.

  Chapter XXVI

  The Matriarch

  Schloss frohsdorf was described by some as a simple white country house, unfit for a queen. It was, in fact, a lovely place. It was two stories high, with nine large windows on each level and a balcony flanked by pillars. It also had a tower and a moat and faced a large plain, which ended at the foot of the mountain range that united the Styrian Alps with the Carpathian range, separating Styria from the Archduchy of Austria. The snow-topped mountains provided an idyllic distant vista. It was from this house, in the presence of such luminaries as Marie-Anne of Savoy, now the Empress of Austria, and the Dowager Queen Caroline of Bavaria, that in 1845 Princess Louise married Ferdinand-Charles de Bourbon, Prince of Lucca, who would become Charles III, Duke of Parma upon his father’s death in 1849.