The youth of the Duchess of Angoulême

Contents

FAGB

FIBST PART THE CAPTIVITY

CHAFTGB

Introduction

IF there are nations which have not glory enough, there are others which, as an offset, have too much. It may be said of French annals that in this respect they sin by excess. Our illustrious country has three legends, all of which — the legend of royalty, the republican legend, and the imperial legend — occupy many grand pages — pages which, however, contradict each other and deprive our nation of that character of unity which is as essential to the life of nations as to that of individuals. The adage, "Happy are the nations that have no history," should not be taken literally. But the fact must be recognized that nations which have too much history are not happy.

It is the misfortune of France that she has been divided against herself. United, she would have been able, as in the days of Louis XIV., to defy all Europe and repel every invasion. It is singular to note how successfully the smallest countries, providing that all hearts beat in unison, resist the most powerful forces. Switzerland has been able to make itself respected by all conquerors. The Sun-King was never able to subjugate Holland. With the troops that he had been obliged to leave in Vendue, Napoleon might have been able to win the battle of Waterloo. If account be taken of our internal dissensions, it may be said that France has more than once been vanquished not so much by foreigners as by itself.

When one passes from the study of the first Empire to that of the Restoration, a new nation seems to have come into existence. Neither the flag nor the ideas, neither the passions nor the memories, are the same. Two men of different countries are less unlike than an imperialist and a legitimist. What community of principle could exist between a volunteer of 1792 and a Chouan, between a grenadier of the Imperial Guard and a soldier of Condi's army ? To one Napoleon is a hero ; to the other he is a monster. To one Waterloo is a disaster; to the other, a victory. To one the Revolution is a deliverance; to the other it is the abomination of desolation. The same words do not mean the same things. What one calls fidelity the other calls treason. The selfsame act is characterized as virtuous or as criminal, according as one looks at it from the point of view of one camp or the other. Between contradictions so violent as these the historian feels in some

INTRODUCTION degree those anxieties which, during the Hundred Days, tormented Marshal Ney, the bravest of the brave ; he needs a strict conscience and great calmness if he would preserve in his judgments that absolute impartiality in the absence of which history would be but a discredited pamphlet, like everything else that bases itself on purely partisan spirit.

These reflections occur to us as soon as we begin the third series of "The Women of the Tuileries." It will perhaps be said that we are inclined to attach an exaggerated importance to women. In our opinion they have too often been neglected in history. Without deep study of the character and life of Marie Antoinette it is impossible to understand the Old Regime or the Revolution ; and yet it is only within the last twenty years that history has become seriously interested in this most touching and interesting figure. M. Thiers gave hardly any pages to the Empress Josephine. Nevertheless, we think that, without that woman, Bonaparte would never have been the Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Italy, First Consul, or Emperor. As to Marie Louise, feeble as her image seems at the first glance, we believe that her career illustrates both the culminating point and the decline of Napoleon better than any of the commentaries.

In later times history has made great progress. From science it has borrowed the processes of analysis and synthesis; from art, the feeling for the picturesque and local color. Michelet said:

"History is a resurrection," and this motto has become the watch-word of his disciples. They have undertaken to revivify not only things, but persons ; not only bodies, but souls. "In history," said Mgr. Dupanloup, " it is souls only that are interesting to me. Facts, common occurrences, riots, battles, victories, defeats, treaties, and all that sort of thing one is obliged to know, but all this amounts to little without the history of souls. It is really only the history of souls that touches and illumines." The developments of psychology ought, indeed, to intensify our application to the study of feminine characters. The new historic school, inaugurated by men of genius whose obscure disciple we are, has employed the methods of philosophy, painting, and the dramatic art. Considering that the life of peoples is a series of grandiose dramas, now brilliant and now dismal, it has undertaken to dispose the scenery and light up the stage, to bring to life again, not merely the principal actors, but the secondary ones and even the supernumeraries, and is persuaded that if local color is faithfully preserved, if descriptions are exact, if monuments and places where events took place appear plainly before the reader, if, especially, characters are studied conscientiously, an historical work, while adhering scrupulously to truth, may yet be made as attractive as a play, an historical romance, or a novel.

The period we are about to study might inspire an artist or a ^)oet as well as an historian. We

INTRODUCTION open our recital in the Prison of the? Temple on the day when Marie Antoinette, leaving her daughter, her son, and her sister-in-law behind her, departed from it to the Conciergerie ; we shall end the tale at Goritz, in the chapel of the Franciscans, on the day when the Count of Chambord, buried at the side of Charles X. and the Duke and Duchess of Angouleme, bore the white flag like a shroud into his tomb. There are captivities, exiles, revolutions, and assassinations in this history; dramas in which the characters are courtiers, soldiers, and the people; adventures that recall the heroines of Walter Scott ; tragedies in the manner of -^schylus and Sophocles ; hosannas and anathemas; smiles, tears, splendid fetes, and sombre scenes ; contrasts to describe which would require the powers of a Shakespeare, and lessons which would have been worthy of the eloquence of a Bossuet.

The two principal heroines of this period are the Duchess of Angouleme and the Duchess of Berry. "We shall try to group around these two princesses the persons who play a part — either with the Bourbons in exile, or the Bourbons on the throne. One cannot well understand the Restoration unless he identifies himself for a moment with the ideas, hatreds, and prejudices that existed at the time. One needs to ask himself : " What should I have thought if my relatives had been guillotined; if I had fought in the ranks of the Vendean army or that of Conde ; if the education I received at my mother's knee, and

TEE DUCHESS OF ANGOUlMe the religious and political principles imbibed in infancy, if my interests, my passions, and those of my family and friends, and my entire surroundings had inspired me with a horror of the French Revolution and the Empire which was its continuation?" To the emigres the conqueror at Austerlitz was but a crowned Jacobin — a Robespierre on horseback. It was he who had prevented repentant France from casting herself into the arms of her rightful sovereign. It was he, the friend of Barras, who had prevented the Convention from going down under the weight of public contempt and indignation. It was he who, on the 13th Vendemiaire, had trained his guns upon the honest people of Paris from the steps of Saint Roch; who had fought beside former Septembrists and the gendarmes of Fouquier-Tinville. It was he who had sent Augereau, the author of the hateful coup d'etat of the 18th Fructidor to the Directory. To him were due those transportations to Cayenne in iron cages, those horrible proscriptions, described as dull guillotines, which were worse than death itself. It was he who had assassinated the Duke d'Enghien. It was he who, through his insensate ambition, had roused all Europe and left France far smaller than when he became its master. It was he who had brought upon the country the indignity of invasion, which it had not known for ages.

On the contrary, in the belief of legitimists, royalty was a paternal, tutelary, civilizing, and reparative government. In 1792, they said perfect free-

INTRODUCTION dom had been granted by Louis XVI., and all that had been done since the time of the martyr-king had been not merely useless, but disastrous. If one wants to know what the legitimists thought in 1814 of the Emperor and the Empire, let him re-read Chateaubriand's famous brochure, Buonaparte and the Bourbons. If persons who had received favors from Napoleon could express themselves about him as Madame de R^musat has done, what must those have thought and said who, like certain of the emigres, had always been his implacable enemies? What, in respect to him, must have been the ideas of the orphan of the Temple, the daughter of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, the Duchess of Angouleme? We take sides with no regime and are equally averse to the White and the Red Terror; our aim is absolute impartiality ; but we try to reproduce faithfully the circumstances which surrounded the heroines whose lives and character we wish to retrace.

The Duchess of Angoul^me and the Duchess of Berry are two types which offer a singular contrast. The first is always austere ; the other, often frivolous. But each had generous aspirations and patriotic sentiments. The heroism of the one is grave and religious; that of the other has something pagan about it : the first is like a saint ; the second like an amazon ; but as regards presence of mind and perfect coolness they are equally worthy of their ancestor, Henry IV. The two princesses represent legitimist

France, — • one on its grandiose and the other on its gracious side. As a living symbol, the first personifies the sorrows and catastrophes of royalty: at the courts of Louis XVIII. and Charles X., the other means youth and the future, radiance and the dawn.

A perfectly consistent character, free from inconsequence and contradictions, as well as from the levity and fickleness of her sex, possessing a just mind, an intrepid heart, and a soul without fear and without reproach ; guiltless of a single bad action or wicked thought; counting among her seventy- two years, three of semi-captivity in the Tuileries, three years and four months of captivity and unutterable anguish in the Temple, and more than forty spent in exile, the daughter of Louis XVI. is assuredly one of the most majestic and pathetic figures in all history. As Chateaubriand has said: "A weak and suffering woman has often borne as heavy a load as the strongest one. There is no heart that is not moved when it remembers her. Her sufferings reached such a height that they have become one of the grandeurs of France." The just man of whom Horace speaks has no more energy and moral force than this woman. One might say of her: Impavidamferient ruinoe.

The orphan of the Temple pardons, but she does not forget. The tortures that crucified her youth have cast a black veil over her whole life. The Tuileries appears to her only as a fatal spot which recalls the mournful daj^s between the 20th of June and the 10th of August. During the entire Restoration she refuses to pass Place Louis XV., the square of crime, on which were erected the scaffolds of her father, her mother, and her aunt, the incomparable Madame Elisabeth. In her manners and turn of mind the Duchess of Angouleme resembles Louis XVI. rather than Marie Antoinette. Her character, like that of her father, is a mixture of goodness and rusticity. She has not her mother's elegant instincts and feminine charm. The society of the Little Trianon would have distressed her beyond measure. She thinks that the crown should not be an ornament, but a burden. She cares nothing for theatres, ornaments, and fetes. Her voice is somewhat harsh. Piety is the foundation of her soul. Nothing equals her faith unless it be her courage. Her feelings are deep, but not sentimental. The romantic side of suffering offends her. Annoyed by hearing herself called the modern Antigone, she mistrusts what might be called literary tears and emotions made to order. Taught in the school of misfortune and versed in all the palinodes of courtiers by hard experience, she dislikes to make a spectacle of her griefs. She hides them in the depths of her heart as in an impenetrable sanctuary, and confides her regrets and troubles to God alone. She thinks that a grief like hers needs neither comment nor publication. Nothing is affected in the Duchess of Angouleme, nothing theatrical, nothing factitious. All is sincere, all is austere, and all is true. This is what gives that

10 THE DUCHESS OF ANGOUZtME

grandiose figure, more worthy than attractive, more rude than gracious, a something truly noble and imposing.

The Duchess of Berry presents herself under a different aspect. By her romantic disposition and taste for the arts, she recalls the heroines of the court of the later Valois. She is a woman of the Renaissance rather than of the nineteenth century. A worthy descendant of the B^arnais, she has his good-humor and his valor, his gaiety and grace. Amiable, good, and charitable, unaffected and not conceited, unprejudiced and not spiteful, fond of room and liberty and sunlight, half Neapolitan, half French, she patronizes men of letters, painters, and musicians. She prevents the Tuileries from resembling a barracks or a prison. The court is brightened by her smile. Louvel's poniard interrupts her career of joy and pleasure. On the dismal night of February 13, 1820, she is sublime in her sorrow and despair. This widow of twenty-one years excites universal sympathy. She is flattered and exalted to the skies when, in the course of the same year, she gives birth to the son whom courtiers call the child of Europe, the child of miracle.

The catastrophe of 1830 comes. The Duchess of Berry is not disheartened. In spite of Charles X. and the Duke and Duchess of Angouleme, she plunges without hesitation into the most daring adventures. A reader of Walter Scott, one would say she wanted to add a chapter to the Jacobite exploits of Diana Vernon, Alice Lee, and Flora Maclvor. She is reproached with having put faith too readily in the promises of her partisans; but how many oaths had been taken to her and her son ! Is an imaginative, an emotional woman inexcusable for thinking she is still in the age of knights and troubadours ? The legend of the Duchess of Angouleme is the Temple, and that of the Duchess of Berry is La Vendee. The daughter of Louis XVI. all alone, sweeping her own room, mending her only gown, escaping as by miracle from a band of jailers and tormentors; and the mother of the Count of Chambord, disguising herself as a servant, walking barefoot through a crowd of spies and gendarmes, crouching for sixteen consecutive hours without eating and almost without breathing in the narrow hiding-place of the house of the Demoiselles Duguigny, at Nantes, both affect the heart with tenderness and pity.

To the end of their lives the Duchess of Angouleme and the Duchess of Berry retained their characteristics and ways of doing things. In her latest exiles, the daughter of Louis XVI. was what she had been in the Temple and the Tuileries, an august princess, a noble Christian, a saint. The mother of the Count of Chambord never ceased for an instant, either before or after her misfortunes, to be a lovable and attractive woman. Catastrophes under whose weight so many other princesses might have succumbed, could not break the springs of her spirit.

Like Homer's Andromache, she smiled even amid her tears. When, toward the end of her career, so fertile in vicissitudes of every kind, one saw her entertain with such affability and grace, or was present at the banquets, balls, concerts, and private theatricals she gave at her palace in Venice, her wit, her good humor, and gaiety caused surprise. Nobody could imagine himself in the presence of a woman who had gone through so many trials, exiles, and revolutions — of a wife whose husband had been assassinated, and a mother whose son had been deprived of his heritage. No princess in prosperity, no sovereign on the throne, displayed more amenity, more charm, or more enjoyment than this proscribed woman.

Before beginning the study we are now approaching, let us cast a rapid and comprehensive glance at the career of the two women who are its principal heroines.

II

The daughter of Louis XVI. was born at Versailles, December 19, 1778. Her birth nearly cost her mother's life. "Poor little girl," said Marie Antoinette, " you were not wished for, but you shall not be less dear. A son would have belonged more particularly to the State. You will be mine; you shall have all my care, you shall share my happiness and lighten my griefs." On the day when the young Princess nlade her first communion, her father addressed her these words which she was never to forget: "Remember, my daughter, that religion is the source of happiness, and our support in the troubles of life. Do not believe that you will be sheltered from them. You are very young, but you have already seen your father more than once afflicted." Trials had come very early to the future orphan of the Temple. In June, 1789, she lost her brother, the first Dauphin, who died of consumption, like the monarchy. During the terrible night of October 5-6, she awoke, all in a tremble, at the moment when her mother was escaping, half-dressed, from her chamber, while the populace were rushing into it and thrusting their bloody pikes into the royal couch. In the morning she was at Marie Antoinette's side when the Queen was forced to make her appearance on the great balcony of the chateau of Versailles, in obedience to the orders of an infuriated multitude. "No children," shouted the mob. No children, ... as if the madmen dreaded lest the sight of innocence might lessen their fury. A few minutes later, the poor little Princess, in the same carriage with her father and mother, that carriage preceded by pikemen carrying the heads of the murdered body-guards, made the fatal journey from Versailles to the Tuileries, vestibule of the prison and the scaffold. She accompanied her parents at the time of the flight to Varennes. She saw the heroic Dampierre fall, crying as he died, "Long live the King!" After June 20, 1792, when the

14 THE DUCHESS OF ANQOULtUE

populace had invaded the royal residence, a National Guard said to the Queen, pointing to the young Princess as he did so: "How old is Mademoiselle?" Marie Antoinette replied : " She is at an age when such scenes cause only too much horror." On August 10, the poor child left the Tuileries, clinging to her mother's hand ; and in the narrow box of the Logographe^ only eight feet square by ten feet high, for sixteen hours together, in suffocating heat, lacking air and lacking food, she witnessed the death-struggle of royalty. When she was confined in the Temple she was not yet fourteen. She entered it with her family, August 13, 1792. She remained there until December 18, 1795. Deprived, one after another, of her father, her brother, her mother, and her aunt, she was at last left alone in her prison. Subjected in a place of anguish and torture to the rigors of solitary confinement, a punishment not then inflicted on the greatest criminals, she escaped the fate of the unfortunate Louis XVII. only by a miracle of moral force and physical energy. However, the hardships of her captivity were lessened at the close of 1795. Some friendly persons were allowed to enter the dungeon of the Temple. But the young Princess remained inconsolable. " It would have been better for me to share the fate of my relatives, " she said, "than to be condemned to weep for them. " She regretted that she too had not ascended the scaffold. It was decided to exchange her for the Conventionists whom Dumouriez had delivered up to Austria. But exile seemed to her no sweeter than captivity. "I would prefer," she said, "the smallest house in France to the honors which everywhere else await a princess so unhappy as I." Some one said to her just as she was crossing the frontier: "Madame, France ends here." Her eyes filled with tears. "I leave France with regret," she exclaimed, "for I shall never cease to regard it as my country."

She arrived in Vienna January 9, 1796. She had just completed her seventeenth year. Her beauty, sanctified by misfortune, possessed a touching charm which inspired respectful admiration. She lived for nearly three years and a half in the Austrian capital, where she was not really free. She wanted to rejoin her uncle, Louis XVIII. She wanted to marry her cousin, the Duke of Angouleme, in accordance with the last wishes of her father and mother, while the court of Vienna proposed to give her to the Archduke Charles. Their object was to detain her as a sort of hostage, and use her marriage with an Austrian prince as a means of promoting the dismemberment of France. She defeated all these combinations by her presence of mind, firmness, and patriotism. In May, 1799, she was finally permitted to rejoin her uncle, Louis XVIII. , at Mittau, in Courland, and in the following month she was married there to the Duke of Angouleme. A caprice of the Czar Paul drove her and her uncle from this asylum where she had found comparative repose, and which

16 THE DUCHESS OF ANGOVLtME

she left in January, 1801. She crossed Lithuania during a wintry storm, amidst a driving snow. It was then that people began to call her the French Antigone. "Nothing extorts a complaint from her," wrote Count d'Avaray at this period. "She is an angel of consolation to our master and a model of courage to us all. Ah ! how well the daughter of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette has profited by the lessons and examples of her childhood!" This was an eventful journey for the exiles : after Mittau, Memel, Koenigsberg, and Warsaw; back to Mittau again, and then, in England, Godsfield Hall and Hartwell. In 1814, a gleam of light appeared in this sombre destiny. On Annunciation Day, March 25, the Duchess of Angoul^me, who was then at Hartwell, learned that her husband had made a triumphal entry into Bordeaux. On April 24, she landed with Louis XVIII. at Calais. Her long exile was at an end. She arrived at Paris with the King on May 3, in an open carriage drawn by eight white horses; the streets were strewn with flowers and the houses hung with verdure. Indescribable enthusiasm and universal emotion were shown as she passed by. When she crossed the threshold of the Tuileries, that fatal palace which she had never seen since August 10, 1792, two hundred women dressed in white and adorned with lilies, kneeled before her, saying: "Daughter of Louis XVI., give us your blessing!" Overcome by emotion, she fainted away.

This pathetic scene drew tears from every eye. We are men before we are royalists, imperialists, or republicans. Pity belongs to no party. Napoleon used to say: "Imagination rules the world." It is certain that the Duchess of AngoulSme's presence beside her uncle exerted a moral force and influence of the greatest value to that Prince. The conqueror of Austerlitz had shown France the majesty of glory. That of misfortune made its appearance with the daughter of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. Of all the persons belonging to the royal family, this holy woman most impressed the crowd, because, unlike Louis XVIII. and the Count of Artois, who had been abroad during the death-struggle of monarchy, she had shared all the anguish of the martyred King and Queen, at the Tuileries, Varennes, and in the dungeon of the Temple.

The Duchess of Angouleme was already a legendary figure. She was at Bordeaux when the first Restoration came to grief; perhaps, had she been with her uncle, she might have prevented Napoleon's re-entry into Paris. At Bordeaux she made the most energetic efforts to defend the royal cause, and even the imperial troops admired her firmness and her courage. Nevertheless, she was obliged to go into a new exile, which lasted only three months. On July 27, 1815, she returned to the Tuileries, but this time with a feeling of profound sadness. March 20 had robbed her of many illusions. The recantations that went on during and after the Hundred

Days showed her human nature under a discouraging aspect. A Frenchwoman, she was humiliated by the foreign occupation; a royalist, she considered the presence of a regicide in the councils of Louis XVIII. as a disgrace to royalty.

February 13, 1820, she was at the bedside of the Duke of Berry, who had been stabbed. "Courage, brother," she said to him; "but if God calls you to Himself, ask my father to pray for France and for us." On the day after the birth of the Duke of Bordeaux, which had been a great consolation to her afflicted spirit, one of her household said to her: "Your Royal Highness was very happy yesterday." "Yes, very happy yesterday," she answered in a melancholy tone, " but to-day I have been reflecting on the destiny of this child." In 1823, her husband's successes in the Spanish campaign gave her pleasure, but in thinking of the deliverance of Ferdinand VII., her mind reverted to the sad fate of Louis XVI. One of her letters ends with the touching exclamation: "It is proved, then, that an unfortunate king may be rescued."

The Duchess of Angouleme had foreseen the revolution of 1830. When Charles X. parted with M. de Villele, she had said : " It is true, then, that you are allowing Villele to leave you. My father, to-day you are taking the first step down from the throne." She was travelling when the King signed the orders which were the cause of his fall. She was unable to rejoin him until after the three days of July. In

1830 as in 1815, fate had removed the only woman who might have saved the royal cause.

A new and final series of exiles then began for the unfortunate Princess which was not to end with her life, for she is exiled even in her grave. At Lullworth, Holyrood, Prague, Kirchberg, and Goritz, she remained what she had always been, a model of resignation and dignity. Chateaubriand has said: " The most precious moments of our life were those which Madame the Dauphiness permitted us to spend near her. Heaven had deposited a treasure of magnanimity and religion in the depths of that soul which even the prodigalities of misfortune could not exhaust. For once, then, we met a soul sufficiently lofty to permit us to express, without fear of wounding it, what we think concerning the future of society. One could talk about the fate of empires to the Dauphiness, because she could, without regret, see all the kingdoms of earth pass away at the feet of her virtue, as many of them had dwindled into nothingness at the feet of her race."

The Duchess of Angouleme lost her husband June 1, 1844. The Count of Chambord induced her to remain with him. He was more attached to her than to his own mother. As her husband, after the abdication of Charles X. had found himself King for a moment before abdicating himself, she was never addressed except as Queen. Men of all parties held her in profound esteem. Some time after the revolution of February 24, 1848, she received a visit

20 THE DUCHESS OF ANGOULtUE

from M. Charles Didier, a republican. "Madame," said the traveller, " you cannot possibly have failed to see the finger of God in the downfall of Louis Philippe." "It is in everything," she answered. Her interlocutor was struck with the patriotic sentiments she displayed. "One might have supposed," he has written, "that after suffering so much in France and at the hands of Frenchmen, she must hold the country and its inhabitants in aversion; but nothing of the kind. Strange phenomenon! The more she has suffered in France and by France, the more she is attached to it. She will permit no one to assail it in her presence ; she never speaks of it herself but with love and regret. Her last wish, as she often says, is to be buried in France. Surely a more ardent patriotism was never seen; such a passion for one's native land recalls that of Foscari, who adored Venice in the midst of the tortures that Venice inflicted on him." The death of the daughter of Louis XVI. was as saintly as her life had been. She breathed her last sigh at Frohsdorff, October 18, 1851, aged seventy-two years and ten months. She was buried at Goritz, in the Franciscan chapel, at the side of Charles X. and the Duke of Angouleme. This inscription was placed on her sepulchral stone : " vos omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite^ et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meusf^'' — O, all ye that pass by, attend and see whether any sorrow is like unto my sorrow !