FARCE AND FRAUD
My dearly beloved sister, forgive me if, rejecting all court
etiquette, the tenderness of a brother who has never forgotten
you dictates these lines. For I declare it to you, I am living,
I myself, your own brother … . Doubt no longer of my
existence!
—LETTER ADDRESSED TO MARIE-THÉRÈSE FROM HER OWN “BROTHER,” DATED 1815
A
lthough the orphan of the Temple had been seriously ill for some time, this had been reported only to the Committee for General Security. The public, even deputies at the Convention, were not aware of the child’s precarious state of health. Consequently, news of his sudden death was greeted with astonishment and aroused the deepest suspicions.
Rumors began to circulate about the true story of the ill-fated prince. “Some contend that this death means nothing; that the young child is in fact full of life and that it is a very long time since he was at the Temple,” reported the newspaper,
Le Courrier Universel
on June 13, 1795, giving voice to the widely held view that there had been a cover-up. For many, the death and burial was a farce played by the revolutionary government to conceal the fact that the real dauphin had escaped months ago with the help of royalists who had bribed the prison guards. Others believed the burial was of a substitute child, the dauphin having been murdered months previously,
at the height of the Terror. As speculation spread, government assurances that the son of Capet was indeed dead and buried on June 10, 1795, merely added to the sense of confusion and conspiracy. The young prince was surely alive and well, hiding in a foreign country. It would only be a matter of time before he returned to France to claim his throne.
As the news reached foreign courts, they too were cynical. “There is no real and legal certainty that the son of Louis XVI is
dead,”
declared the Austrian minister, Baron Franz Thugut. “His death, up to now, has no other proof than the announcement in the
Moniteur,
along with a report drawn up on the orders of the brigands of the Convention and by people whose deposition is based on the fact that they were presented with the body of a dead child who they were told was the son of Louis Capet.” He went on to argue their motives for claiming the son of Louis XVI was dead. “The leaders of the villains” considered it in their interests to announce his death, “whilst retaining this precious prize in a secure and unknown location … in the event that a change in circumstances could threaten them.”
However, in Verona, the younger brother of Louis XVI, the Comte de Provence, did not express any doubts over his nephew’s death or attempt to investigate the details. He had his own reasons to accept the announcement. Eagerly waiting in exile to claim his own right of succession as Louis XVIII, he did so, for some, with unseemly haste, in a proclamation on June 24, 1795.
The only person, it seemed, as yet unaware of the news of the death was his sister, Marie-Thérèse, still confined above his now-empty room in the Temple and still persistently inquiring after her brother’s health. That June, reports of Louis-Charles’s death began to focus public attention on the princess’s plight. Articles were written portraying Marie-Antoinette’s daughter as the very symbol of some of the worst excesses of the revolution. On June 18, 1795, a delegation from the City of Orléans was bold enough to appear before the Convention to petition for her “speedy release” in the strongest possible terms: “The daughter of Louis XVI is languishing within a horrible prison … deprived of every comfort and support and condemned to ceaseless weeping.” If she were released, “all Europe would applaud your decision.”
Aware of the changing mood France, the guards, at last, began to request better food and clothing for their prisoner. According to Jean-Baptiste Gomin, Marie-Thérèse “was extremely reserved in expressing her wishes,” and did not dare to ask for anything but the barest minimum. In spite of her refusals, a record, dated the third of Messidor in the republican calendar—June 20, 1795—from the Commission of Public Relief to the guards at the Temple reveals that the following articles were procured for her:
Two morning dresses of colored taffeta.
Two morning dresses of nankeen and cotton, lined with Florence taffeta.
Six pairs of colored silk stockings.
Six pairs of shoes.
A green silk dress.
The sixteen-year-old “Charlotte Capet,” as she is referred to in the documents—from her third name, Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte—who had been denied even a pencil for the last two years, was suddenly in possession of a wardrobe. Although she makes no reference to it, Gomin observed later, “Madame seemed so glad to leave off the old puce dress which she had been mending up since the time of Robespierre. Her toilet was now very suitable.” After all the years during which she had discovered that to be invisible and to ask for nothing had become second nature, now suddenly her bare and shrivelled world was offering hope. Soon she was to be supplied with books. For thirteen months she had had only
La Harpe’s Travels,
which she had perused over and over again. Now she was given two other books:
Historie de France
by Velly and
Mondes
by Fontanelle. The record shows that “to this parcel were added some pencils, paper, India ink and brushes.”
Later in June, the Committee of Public Safety decreed that a woman should be appointed as her companion, and they selected Citizeness Madeleine Bocquet de Chantereine. Madame de Chantereine soon realized that Marie-Thérèse did not yet know about the death of her family. Details were given to her “amid tears and sobs; and thus at a single stroke, Madame learned of the loss of all that she loved best … . The wounds of her heart
now formed one great wound and all her griefs merged into one general grief … . She knew now that she was alone upon the earth.”
The two women were permitted to walk freely in the garden. As the word spread, royalists anxious to catch sight of the daughter of Louis XVI would wait in the houses of the Rue des Cordeliers, where the top windows overlooked the Tower wall. Monsieur François Hue, the king’s former Gentleman of the Bedchamber, who had not seen her since the day he was removed from the Tower in 1793, rented a house on this street and made a point of waving to her to provide encouragement. It is even said that Madame Hue, who could play the harp, would arrange small concerts at the hour that the princess took her walk; a ballad was specially composed to give her hope:
Be calm, unhappy one,
These doors will open soon;
Soon from thy chains set free,
’Neath radiant skies thou’lt be …
After weeks of negotiation, on September 3, 1795, her former governess, the Marquise de Tourzel, and her daughter, Pauline, finally obtained permission to visit Madame Royale. “Madame came to meet us, embraced us tenderly and led us to her room, where we mingled our tears for all the objects of her regret,” wrote the marquise. The two women were amazed at the change in Marie-Thérèse. “We had left Madame, frail and delicate looking. Now after three years of captivity, we were astonished to find her beautiful, tall and strong and with that air of nobility which is a marked characteristic of her appearance.” Nonetheless, the marquise was keenly aware of her state of mind. “Madame betrayed not the faintest touch of bitterness … yet she added such touching remarks concerning the slight account in which she held her life, that it was impossible to hear her without our being deeply affected.” Determined to raise her spirits, the marquise and her daughter came to see her as often as possible.
On one of these visits, Marie-Thérèse offered to take her guests to see the different rooms of the Tower. As they went down to the second floor, the
Marquise de Tourzel stopped at the threshold and could not bring herself to enter, knowing full well that these were the rooms where her young charge, Louis-Charles, had suffered so greatly. Pauline and Marie-Thérèse went into his room together. The only remaining trace of his sad little presence were some words etched in charcoal on the wall of his cell:
“Maman, je vour pr
—” The message to his mother was unfinished. For whatever reason—whether stopped by Simon or other guards—he had never been able to complete the sentence. On another wall there was a child’s drawing of a flower.
However, on October 5, 1795, growing dissatisfaction with the government led to a pro-royalist insurrection in Paris. The marquise and Pauline de Tourzel were with Marie-Thérèse when they heard shots fired and cannon booming near the Tuileries. They delayed their departure, unwilling to leave her alone. When they eventually left, “silently and in great anxiety,” the women found “crossing the bridge was terrible; we could see the smoke and flame of the cannon incessantly discharged.”
A twenty-six-year-old gunnery officer from Corsica was in charge of the cannons: Napoleon Bonaparte. His exploits on that day would signal his striking debut on the political arena and turn the relatively unknown
Little Corporal
into a name that was on everyone’s lips. By this time, Napoleon had over fifteen years of military experience, having entered the royal military college of Brienne at the age of nine. In 1784, he had trained at the prestigious École Militaire in Paris, and later, had been stationed at Valence and Auxonne and distinguished himself at the siege of Toulon, earning promotion to brigadier general. Faced with the insurrection of the crowd against the Convention in October 1795, Napoleon made a plan that was bold and decisive. Although vastly outnumbered, anticipating that the crowds would advance up the Rue Saint-Honoré, he had placed cannon strategically on the steps of the Church of Saint-Roch. The rebellion was suppressed by a “whiff of grapeshot.” Napoleon was heralded as a hero of the revolution, welcomed into Parisian society and soon appointed to command the Army of the Interior.
Within a few weeks of the insurrection in Paris, negotiations were hurriedly
completed to dispatch the last living symbol of the royal family from the republic to avoid the risk of her presence stirring further royalist sentiment. Marie-Thérèse was to be exchanged for French prisoners held by the Austrian government. Before leaving her prison, Marie-Thérèse was most anxious to acquire any mementos of her family that had been removed during their captivity; she was only too aware of certain personal possessions “removed from my mother soon after our arrival at the Temple.” Gomin knew these were locked in a sealed chest of drawers in the lower room of the Tower. Various officials came to break the seals and form an inventory. However, she was not allowed even to see these personal reminders of her parents and their former lives together. Nor was she allowed to have the companion of her choice to escort her to Vienna. After the royalist uprising, the Marquise de Tourzel was arrested once more, interrogated, and imprisoned.
Toward the end of 1795, arrangements were finally completed for her journey. Marie-Thérèse travelled incognito, under the name Sophie. “I left the Temple at eleven o’clock on the night of the 18th December,” she wrote, “without being seen by anyone.” Waiting for her at the outer gate was the minister of the interior, Benezech, and his assistant. She took his arm and walked down the deserted street of the Temple to his carriage: “We made several turns about the streets until we reached the boulevards in front of the Opera House where we found a travelling carriage.” She could hardly believe that she was out in the streets of Paris at last, in the chill December air, unnoticed by passersby, just another anonymous Parisian but one hardly able to contain the huge prospect of freedom ahead. “At the gates of Paris our passports were demanded,” she recalled, and then they set off at speed into the night. It was her seventeenth birthday.
In a curious reversal of her mother’s journey as a hopeful young princess twenty-five years earlier, Marie-Thérèse made her way across France to the border and toward Austria. According to the minister, at the frontier her eyes filled with tears: “I leave France with much regret,” she said. “I will always regard it as my country.” At Basel, officials arranged the transfer of
the prisoners—to much cheering and shouting of
“Vive la République”
as the French prisoners were released. By a strange coincidence, one of them was Jean-Baptiste Drouet, the sharp-eyed postmaster who had proved so instrumental in the arrest of the royal family on their flight to Varennes.
It was January 9, 1796, before her carriage finally turned into the entrance drive of her mother’s childhood home, the Hofburg in Vienna. She knew of it from her mother, and suddenly here it was, hope turned into solid bricks and mortar, and with all the pleasant associations of her mother’s childhood. Although in exile, the young princess now had her freedom, and “all the charm of early youth,” according to her former guardian, Gomin. “Her features, which had been extremely delicate in childhood, had formed into beauty; her eyes were large, and her hair had turned chestnut color … . She kept hers long and wore it without powder in a knot behind her.”
However, according to the French literary historian Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the young princess who arrived in Vienna was irrevocably scarred by her experiences in the Temple Tower. She had been imprisoned at the age of fourteen, “and it was in that long series of terrors, enigmas, and painful nightmares that the years and dreams of girlhood, usually so lighthearted, had passed.” Now, despite her youthful appearance, he considered “her very soul had been attacked.” Indeed, “the young slip of a girl” was so blighted by her early experience that, Sainte-Beuve wrote, “it seems to me that on leaving the Temple, both the life and the soul of Madame Royale were finished. They were closed to the future; all their sources, all their roots were henceforth in the past.” Such was the horror of the scenes that had been impressed on her mind that she now seemed quite incapable of finding happiness. “In order to understand her,” he wrote, “we must never cease to remember that all that calls itself springtide joy and bloom … was suppressed and blighted in her. Her soul, scarcely in its first dawn, was suddenly reduced and worn to the barest thread … and could no longer change.” Even in her freedom, her prison was still with her as she solemnly retreated within herself. “Indeed, she did not retreat,” adds Sainte-Beuve, “for she lived there.”