Marie Antoinette: The Journey

by Antonia Fraser

  She did not see her brother again before his death on 8 June 1795 at the age of ten. The cause was almost certainly the tuberculosis that had killed the first Dauphin, in this case exacerbated by conditions that were at best neglectful, at worst brutal. Since all the cosseting in the world and the fresh air of Meudon had not saved Louis Joseph from his pathetic fate, perhaps Louis Charles too was destined for an early death. Nevertheless what is known about his treatment indicated a level of callous indifference, the sins of the father (and the mother) being visited upon the child.

  The announcement of the boy’s death meant that the Comte de Provence in exile was at last free to claim the title of King of France. As Louis XVIII, he ascended a throne, he wrote, “stained with the blood of my family.”13 Since the new King was childless, the heir in the next generation was the twenty-year-old Duc d’Angoulême, son of the Comte d’Artois, the boy whose birth had caused Marie Antoinette such anguish in the days before her own marriage was consummated. Negotiations to free Marie Thérèse in exchange for revolutionary prisoners in Austria succeeded in December 1795 when she was just seventeen. There was then a brief squabble between Habsburgs and Bourbons over a suitable bridegroom among her first cousins for the “orphan of the Temple,” the sole surviving descendant of the martyred King. Louis XVIII won; the claims of the Duc d’Angoulême were preferred over those of the Archduke Charles, brother of the Emperor Francis II. Marie Thérèse became Duchesse d’Angoulême, but as a “Child of France”—a King’s daughter—her rank remained superior to that of her husband, a mere King’s nephew.

  Marie Thérèse enjoyed neither a happy marriage nor a happy life. The marriage was probably not consummated—in a strange echo of her mother’s early years in France—and was certainly childless. There are thus no descendants of Marie Antoinette alive today. When she returned from exile at her uncle’s side in 1814, the Duchesse d’Angoulême was received with sympathetic acclaim by the crowds, who had been brought up on the story of her sufferings. They saw an unappealing, red-faced woman with bad teeth, rather masculine-looking, who regarded them with ill-concealed loathing. She “carried her head high like her mother” but lacked the softening grace; her voice was notably harsh.14 The death of Louis XVIII in 1824 and the accession of Angoulême’s father Artois as Charles X meant that for the six years of his reign Marie Thérèse enjoyed that title made famous by her mother, “Madame la Dauphine.”

  The abdication of Charles X in 1830 brought a further change of title for Marie Thérèse, at least in the opinion of devoted royalists. For just a few moments, the time it took his son to sign a second instrument of abdication, the former Duc d’Angoulême could be argued to have been King of France. In the years that followed, some well-wishers called Marie Thérèse “Majesté” on the grounds that she was the last Queen of France (both the Comtesses de Provence and Artois had died—in 1810 and 1805 respectively). In principle, however, Marie Thérèse ended her life as her mother had begun hers, as “Madame la Dauphine.”

  It was not a happy life but in exile it was a long one. Marie Thérèse lived on until October 1851, when she was seventy-three, and died nearly sixty years after the execution of her mother. Her places of exile included Edinburgh and Prague, although she died at Frohsdorf near Vienna. In her own last testament she forgave “with all my heart” those who had injured her, “following the example” of both her parents. No doubt she did forgive her enemies. But it is to be doubted whether this sad, bitter, deeply conservative figure, obstinately old-fashioned—her dress was the despair of the Comtesse de Boigne—really had much forgiveness in her heart for what life had done to her.15

  One of the problems that plagued Marie Thérèse and undoubtedly caused her much pain was the appearance of numbers of “false Dauphins,” at least forty of them, during the nineteenth century. It could not be easily accepted that Louis Charles had died in the Temple although recent DNA research has led to the conclusion that he did. This investigation was able to be made since one of the doctors who performed the autopsy on the boy’s corpse took away his heart secretly; after a strange odyssey of thefts and recoveries, the heart came to rest in a crystal urn in Saint-Denis. Mitochondrial DNA testing, which concentrates on the scraps of genetic material found in the maternal line of descent, was done in two separate laboratories in Belgium and Germany; an announcement was made in April 2000 that the sequences were “identical” with those of Marie Antoinette, two of her sisters and two living relatives on the maternal side.*116 “Science has come to the rescue of history,” said a representative of the Spanish Bourbon royal line, the Duc d’Anjou, at the press conference.16

  Some of the nineteenth-century stories of “false Dauphins,” who made their claims before science had performed its useful service to history, have a colourful flavour. There was, for example, the Frenchman Pierre Louis Poiret who ended up in the Seychelles archipelago; he had apparently been cared for by a cobbler called Poiret after being smuggled out of the Temple. His numerous descendants were given suitably Bourbon names including Louis Charles and Marie Antoinette. In the opposite hemisphere, a man known as “Indian Williams” gave interviews in support of his claim. The son of Eunice Williams, kidnapped by a tribe of Native Americans, with a Native American father, “Indian Williams” pointed to the fact that there was no record of his birth among the family records; he was, however, finally unmasked by Mark Twain among others.17 But to Marie Thérèse, the romance of such implausible notions hardly appealed. Troubled as she might be by the claimants, for her, Louis Charles remained the brother who had so wickedly traduced their mother.

  When Marie Thérèse first returned to France, she was escorted to the site of her parents’ graves by Pauline de Tourzel, by now Comtesse de Béarn. It was seven o’clock in the morning and the Duchesse d’Angoulême wore an inconspicuous dress, with a veil over her hat. The ladies were conducted by Pierre Louis Desclozeaux, an old lawyer who lived at 48 rue d’Anjou with his son-in-law; he remembered the two interments and had subsequently tended the sites. When the cemetery was closed in 1794—one of the last to be buried there was Jacques Hébert on 24 March—Desclozeaux made a garden out of the area, planting two weeping willows as a commemoration. Shown the place, Marie Thérèse trembled, fell on her knees and then prayed for the happiness of France—that prayer so frequently on both her parents’ lips.18

  The testimony of this good man—Desclozeaux’s “religious care” would be commemorated on his own tombstone—was important when the two royal bodies came to be exhumed, starting on 18 January 1815. The Queen’s body was discovered first, deteriorated to a heap of bones, but with the head entire. According to Chateaubriand, who was a member of the party of inspection, it was recognizable by the special shape of the Queen’s mouth, recalling that dazzling smile she had given him at Versailles on 30 June 1789. More prosaically, some of her hair and the two elastic garters that she wore to her execution were found, perfectly preserved. The Prince de Poix, in service right up to 10 August 1792, fell fainting backwards at the sight of these relics. The next morning the relics of Louis XVI were recovered.19

  The remains of both King and Queen were held briefly at the house in the rue d’Anjou and prayers were said before they were sealed up in new coffins with appropriate inscriptions concerning the majesty and titles of the occupants. On 21 January 1815 there was a procession to the cathedral of Saint Denis; it was the twenty-second anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI. This was the traditional resting-place of the Bourbon dynasty—where the Dauphin Louis Joseph had been interred, for example, in 1789—but it had been horribly pillaged during the Revolution. The caveau (vault) of the Bourbons was now to be restored to due dignity.

  In the main body of the cathedral today there is an idealized sculpture of the royal couple at prayer commissioned by the restored King. The crowned Louis XVI on his prie-dieu looks up to heaven, noble, even handsome, as though “the son of St. Louis” is indeed ready to ascend. Marie Antoinette, sculpted in décolleté and h
igh-waisted gown of a later period, in necklace and earrings and wearing a long lace headdress, kneels submissively at his side with her eyes cast down. Below in the vault itself, the black marble tomb of Marie Antoinette, lying amid those of other Bourbons, enjoys a kind of last captivity behind bars ornamented with the fleurs-de-lys of France. In contrast to that of the Habsburg crypt in Vienna, the atmosphere of the caveau of the Bourbons is chilly and silent, and there are no flowers.

  Two chapelles expiatoires were erected at the orders of Louis XVIII. One, designed as a classical mausoleum, marked the site where the royal remains were originally interred. It lies in the “Square Louis XVI” as it is now termed, a pleasant green space off the Boulevard Haussmann. Inside are two marble groups, one depicting Louis XVI and the Abbé Edgeworth by Bosio, and one “Marie Antoinette supported by Religion” by Courtot; the face of Religion has a strong resemblance to Madame Elisabeth. The second commemorative chapel, extensively restored in 1989, was erected at the Conciergerie, with altars and black velvet curtains heavily fringed in silver; the names of the three royal martyrs, Louis XVI and Madame Elisabeth as well as Marie Antoinette, are recorded, and there are paintings depicting such scenes as “The Queen in the Conciergerie receiving the Succour of Religion,” “The Queen waiting to be conducted to the Conciergerie” and “The Queen’s Last Communion.”

  “I will never be happy here. I can feel the Queen’s ghost asking what I am doing in her bed.” Thus spoke Josephine, wife of the then First Consul Napoleon when he decided to move into the Tuileries in 1800. One can understand her dread; it was a palace still marked with the bloodstains from the Swiss Guards murdered there eight years previously. Did Napoleon placate the ghost of Marie Antoinette by studying and copying the marriage ceremonies of 1770 when he married another Archduchess of Austria in 1810? But the new Empress of France, Marie Louise, never felt completely at home in a country where the people had killed her great-aunt.20

  Certainly the Queen’s ghost has walked in the 200-odd years since her death—literally so, in the belief of some. The most celebrated and also the most controversial sighting is that by two English ladies, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, who were lost in the grounds of Versailles on 10 August 1901. Their account of seeing a beautiful fair-haired lady in an old-fashioned dress with some companions in the grounds of the palace was published ten years later under the title An Adventure. Given the fatal date of 10 August, the Misses Moberly and Jourdain came to the conclusion that they had somehow entered the reveries of the Queen while at the National Assembly on that date in 1792, looking back on her life at Versailles, coupled with the events of 5 October 1789 when she was brought news of the march of the market-women from Paris.

  Various explanations have been put forward for this episode involving two eminently respectable “donnish” women, in turn Principals of St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. Did the Misses Moberly and Jourdain see some real people—possibly actors—and trick them out with false memories? Perhaps they were influenced by the case of the medium Hélène Smith, which was discussed in a book published shortly before their own experience. Smith’s spirit control was Cagliostro, who was allegedly madly in love with Marie Antoinette; as a result Smith was “reincarnated” as the Queen in trances over several years. Recently, however, it has been suggested that there was some kind of emotional subtext to the women’s adventure; since Moberly and Jourdain hardly knew each other in 1901, “the vision of Marie Antoinette in some way . . . made possible Moberly and Jourdain’s lifelong homoerotic attachment.”*11721

  The idea of Marie Antoinette as a tribade—the eighteenth-century word for a female homosexual, based on the Greek word for friction—was sedulously preached at the time in lewd pamphlets as a means of abuse. But it has meant that her name, generally coupled with that of the Lamballe, has been entered more pleasantly in homosexual annals as worthy of honour. Marie Antoinette and the Lamballe rated a mention in Radclyffe Hall’s novel of 1928, The Well of Loneliness, originally banned for its openly lesbian theme.22 The poet of homosexuality, Jean Genet, was fascinated by the story of Marie Antoinette. She was one of the four women in history who interested him, as he once told a friend, the others being the Virgin Mary, Joan of Arc and Madame Curie. A foundling himself, he derived inspiration from the fact that Genet had been the maiden name of Marie Antoinette’s favoured First Lady of the Bedchamber. It was indeed the story of Marie Antoinette’s execution that was acted out by the eponymous characters in his 1947 play The Maids as part of their elaborate fantasies.

  In modern terms, therefore, Marie Antoinette has become a gay icon. Whether or not the Queen was actually a tribade in the full sense of the word—it has been suggested here that her early feelings for the Lamballe and her intense attachment to the Polignac were more emotional than physical—this respect makes up for the coarse insults of her own time.

  This is paralleled by the attachment that many romantically minded crowned heads have had to the memory of the unfortunate Queen. Ludwig of Bavaria made Lindenhof, his favourite place, a replica of the Trianon. The Empress Eugénie, with no connection except that of rank, devoted herself to recovering some of Marie Antoinette’s possessions for the Great Exhibition of 1867. From the point of view of hindsight, however, by far the most compelling attachment is that of Alexandra, the last Tsarina of Russia.*118 She had Marie Antoinette’s picture on her desk in the Winter Palace. There was a Gobelin tapestry of the Queen and her children, after the family portrait by Madame Vigée Le Brun, presented by the President of France, in the Tsarina’s corner drawing room at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Seloe.23

  Reopened as a museum in 1997, the Alexander Palace now has the tapestry restored to its former position. The official explanatory booklet states: “This idyllic world was watched over by the sad and prophetic smile of Marie Antoinette of France . . . Alexandra and the children may well have met Marie Antoinette’s gaze as they left the palace for good at dawn on 1 August 1917.” The “sad and prophetic” gaze of Marie Antoinette had already had an opportunity to look down on the Tsarina. In 1896, on a state visit to France, Alexandra was given Marie Antoinette’s room in Versailles. She personally was delighted, but the arrangement was greeted with “suppressed horror” by her entourage who found the association “ominous.”24

  A notice in the Conciergerie today adjures the visitor: “This prison can now serve as the laboratory of a new experience; to look without passion at the symbols of murders long past.” Looking without passion is always a good plan where history is concerned. But is it really possible with regard to the career and character of Marie Antoinette? The two-hundredth anniversary of her birth in 1955 was marked by an eminent exhibition at Versailles. Apart from pictures and sculpture, furniture and jewellery, its memorabilia included a corsage with the arms of the Dauphine embroidered on it, fragments of pink satin embroidered with jasmine, a white footbath garlanded with flowers and ornamented with illustrations of Aesop’s fables, a pair of blue Chinese parrots once in her room at Versailles—and black silk stockings and garters such as she wore at her execution. Yet the British novelist and historian Nancy Mitford, herself the admiring author of a biography of the Pompadour, was moved to deliver a diatribe on the subject in the London Times. Marie Antoinette she considered “frivolous without being funny” and a woman of “monumental stupidity.”25

  The year 1993, marking the two-hundredth anniversary of the Queen’s death, found a gathering at the site where she was guillotined at the Place du Carrousel, at the corner of the Place de la Concorde, which included descendants of the faithful aristocrats; an actress from the Comédie Française read the Queen’s last letter to Madame Elisabeth. But an interactive play put on around the anniversary, Je m’appellais Marie Antoinette, by André Castelot and Alain Decaux and produced by Robert Hossein, allowed the audience to vote on her fate, with the options of liberty, lifetime imprisonment—or execution. Although the majority voted, on the evidence given, for banishment, some still vote
d for execution. Marie Antoinette, who was recently estimated to be, with Napoleon, “the most famous figure in the entire length and breadth of French history from Joan of Arc to Charles de Gaulle,” continues to have her passionate admirers and her equally vehement detractors.26

  Undoubtedly it is the death of Marie Antoinette that casts a glow of nobility over her life story. Some of her admirers understood this from the first, such as Horace Walpole who had once hailed her as Virgil’s “true goddess.” He reflected “coolly” for three days before writing on the subject to his friend Mary Berry and then pronounced: “Mine is not grief now. No, it is all admiration and enthusiasm!” The last days of “that unparalleled Princess” with not one friend to comfort her were so superior to any death ever exhibited or recorded that he would not choose to revive her evenif he could—unless of course she could be restored to a true happiness that would include her children. “Let history or legend produce a similar model.”27

  Certainly the “greatness” at the end for which Marie Antoinette was much praised was true enough. “Unhappy Queen! What courage and what firmness she has shown!” exclaimed Madame Adélaïde in September 1793—the very aunt who had spoken so dismissively of l’Autrichienne twenty-three years earlier. “How has she talked to all these villains! . . . If only everything had depended on her!”28

  Let it be remembered, however, that this constancy was not a virtue that she exhibited on one solitary occasion in October 1793. On the contrary, Marie Antoinette faced a remarkable, even horrifying, tally of potentially violent assaults between 5 October 1789 and her death four years later. The howling invasion of Versailles, the events at the Tuileries of 20 June when she had to hide and the still more awful ones of 10 August, followed by the threats to her personally in the Tower during the September Massacres, as the crowd exhibiting the head of the Princesse de Lamballe wanted to acquire “the head of Antoinette” as well; these were simply the most salient episodes. They leave out of the account other occurrences that were merely deeply unpleasant, such as the mobbing of the carriages intended for Saint Cloud and the slow torture of the return from Varennes, to say nothing of the gross, often maniacal threats to her person to which she had to listen almost daily—with the hope but not the absolute assurance that the words were empty.