The Lost King of France: The Tragic Story of Marie-Antoinette's Favourite Son

However, ‘the finest kingdom in Europe’ that Louis-Auguste and Marie-Antoinette had inherited was not all that it appeared. The visible outward signs of great wealth that greeted them every day in the sheer size and opulence of Versailles disguised a huge national debt. Their predecessors, Louis XIV and Louis XV, had pursued policies that had driven France to the verge of bankruptcy. A succession of expensive wars had aggravated the problem. In the War of Austrian Succession, spanning 1740 to 1748, France had fought as an ally of Prussia against Austria, the Netherlands and Britain. Eight years later, between 1756 and 1763, Louis XV reversed France’s historic hostility to Austria by allying with them against Britain and Prussia in the Seven Years’ War. These two wars alone cost France 2.8 billion livres (around twenty-four livres to the pound), much of which could only be paid by borrowing.

These problems were compounded by an ancient system of taxation that exacted more from the poor than the rich. The fast-growing population of France was divided into three ‘estates’. The First Estate consisted of around one hundred thousand clergy. The Second Estate comprised almost half a million nobility. The Third Estate were the commoners, the vast majority of the population, consisting of the peasants, wage earners and bourgeoisie. Under this increasingly despised system, the first two estates, the clergy and nobility, were largely exempt from taxes, even though they were the wealthiest. They also enjoyed traditional privileges over the Third Estate, whose members could rarely achieve high rank, such as officer, in the army.

As a result of tax exemptions for the nobility and clergy, the tax base was small and fell disproportionately on those least able to pay. Louis XV had repeatedly failed to tackle the problem of tax reform; time and time again, he faced opposition from nobles and clergy who were not going to give up their tax concessions. Since he could not raise money by increasing taxation, he was obliged to borrow still more. By the 1770s the government deficit was huge and growing, as annual expenditure continued to exceed revenue.

The unjust system of taxation underlined huge disparities in wealth. Peasants felt increasingly insecure as many found that their incomes were dwindling and their debts were rising. Their problems were compounded by the fact that France was still almost entirely an agricultural nation. Only around half a million people produced manufactured goods, so there were few exports to cover the cost of imports of wheat when the harvest failed. One traveller, François de la Rochefoucauld, commenting on the incredible hardships of the peasants he observed in Brittany, declared, ‘they really are slaves … their poverty is excessive. They eat a sort of porridge made of buckwheat; it is more like glue than food’. Indeed, the extreme wealth of the nobles in their magnificent chateaux in contrast to the wretched poverty of many of the people could not have been more plain for all to see.

In eighteenth-century France there was no institutional framework that would readily allow Louis XVI to tackle these fundamental problems. Administratively it was a fragmented nation, each region with completely separate customs, taxes, even different measurements and weights. Each region jealously protected its own interests and independence, which had grown up around local parlements, thirteen in all. These parlements were not like the English parliament of elected representatives. They were lawcourts of magistrates and lawyers who had paid for their seats, and who used them, not to represent the people, but principally to further their own interests. Although the king could formally overrule a parlement or dissolve it, conflicts with the parlements had been a feature of Louis XV’s reign and had stifled modernising reforms.

As Absolute Monarch, the king had authority over the military and the national system of justice, and could determine levels of taxation and influence the clergy. The difficulty was in exercising this power when the country was politically divided. Louis XVI faced a situation where no section of society was satisfied. The nobles wanted to restore ancient rights and to resist any tax changes, the bourgeoisie resented the privileges of the nobles, and the commoners criticised the tax system. The British ambassador, Lord David Murray Stormont, captured the difficulties: ‘every instrument of faction, every court engine is constantly at work, and the whole is such a scene of jealousy, cabal and intrigue that no enemy need wish it more.’ As a young, rather idealistic man, Louis XVI earnestly wished to enhance the reputation of the monarchy and build a more prosperous France, yet he knew this would require major unpopular reforms.

One of the king’s first priorities was to cut back the nation’s debt. To do this he had to reduce state expenditure, starting with Versailles. Versailles just soaked up money; the palace was in need of repair and some servants had not been paid for years. Even before he was king, Louis spent nearly a quarter of his allowance in back payment to staff. He continued to be strict about the royal family’s spending and repaying debts. Provence, Artois and their wives were ordered to eat with him and the queen at Versailles to minimise demands on their own expensive households, and he discouraged the many extravagant noblemen at court from living beyond their means.

He appointed as finance minister Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, who tried to increase state revenue by stimulating the economy. He removed restrictions on the grain trade between the thirteen different regions and promoted light industry by suppressing the powerful guilds which would not allow non-members to practise a trade. This was achieved with some success. Louis was also able to introduce other reforms. He passed measures to improve the appalling state of prisons in France and abolished the barbaric practice of torturing accused prisoners which, up until then, had been regarded as a legitimate means to get at the truth of a man’s innocence or guilt. However, for all his humanitarian instincts, he failed to get to grips with tax reform, and the nation’s debt continued to rise.

While Louis XVI was trying to come to terms with his role as king, Marie-Antoinette was creating her new life as queen. She quickly understood that she was barred from politics but soon found there were other ways of exercising her power at Versailles. As Dauphine she had made no secret of the fact that she disliked the time-consuming, exacting etiquette and formality of the French court where, she felt, her life was lived ‘in front of the whole world’. Depending on their rank, courtiers could attend the rising or lever of the monarch and his family, and in the evening the ceremony for undressing, or coucher. For the all too frequent public meals, or grand couvert, the royal family could be watched dining by any member of the public who was suitably attired.

The queen’s disregard for ceremony shocked the more traditional courtiers in Versailles, who observed her on occasion to yawn or giggle during an event, perhaps disguising her expression with her fan. Needless to say, the young queen was continually reproved by her advisor on social etiquette, Madame de Noailles. Yet ‘Madame Etiquette’, as Marie-Antoinette called her, failed to inspire her protégée with the significance of these rituals. ‘Madame de Noailles held herself bolt upright with a most severe face,’ observed Madame Campan, and ‘merely succeeded in boring the young princess.’ It wasn’t long before Madame Etiquette lost her post altogether and this was followed by many relaxations in court ceremony. Madame Campan, who had lived at Versailles since her youth when she was employed as reader to the princesses of Louis XV, was concerned at the harm this might do her mistress: ‘an inclination to substitute by degrees the simple customs of Vienna for those of Versailles, proved more injurious to her than she could have possibly imagined.’ Her insensitivity to the French way of doing things was adding to the slowly creeping distrust of a foreign queen.

As Marie-Antoinette gained confidence, she began to place her own stamp on court life. She soon found she could patronise friends of her own choosing, such as the Princesse de Lamballe, of the house of Savoy. They had become friends at a winter sledge party, where, according to Madame Campan, the princess, ‘with all the brilliancy and freshness of youth, looked like Spring peeping from under sable and ermine’. Lamballe had been widowed at nineteen, when her husband died of syphilis. Marie-Antoinette found in her a sensitive confidante and soon appointed her Superintendent of the Queen’s Household, a move that caused uproar since there were others whose rank made them much more suited for the post. Unlike the Princesse de Lamballe, another intimate friend, Gabrielle de Polignac, was drawn from the impoverished nobility. Gabrielle was a generous-spirited, level-headed girl with a taste for simplicity. The queen found her husband an official position at Versailles so that Gabrielle, too, could live at the court. It wasn’t long before the queen was bestowing favours to numerous other members of the Polignac family.

With her newfound friends, Marie-Antoinette’s life became more fun and increasingly indulgent: a whirlwind of masked balls, plays and operas in Paris, race meetings and hunting parties. Even Madame Campan, who invariably writes appreciatively of her mistress, was critical. ‘Pleasure was the sole pursuit of everyone of this young family, with the exception of the king,’ she wrote. ‘Their love of it was perpetually encouraged by a crowd of those officious people, who by anticipating their desires … hoped to gain or secure favour for themselves.’ Who would have dared, she asks, to check the amusements of this young, lively and handsome queen? ‘A mother or husband alone, had the right to do it!’ Although the king rarely joined her for these social events, he threw no impediment in her way. ‘His long indifference had been followed by feelings of admiration and love. He was a slave to all the wishes of the queen.’ However, her mother, hearing of these indulgences, was quick to warn Marie-Antoinette in frequent letters from Austria: ‘I foresee nothing but grief and misery for you.’

Gambling soon became another irresistible occupation for the young queen, who managed to accumulate heavy debts, which her husband settled from his private income. Constantly frugal himself, Louis failed to impose this self-discipline on his young wife. Worse criticism was to come when she began to ring up bills for diamonds, followed by more diamonds, in increasing size and quantity, until her mother wrote in some distraction: ‘a Queen can only degrade herself by such impossible behaviour and degrades herself even more by this sort of heedless extravagance, especially in difficult times … I hope I shall not live to see the disaster which is all too likely to occur.’ Marie-Antoinette replied, ‘I would not have thought anyone could have bothered you about such bagatelles.’

Inevitably all this played into the hands of the rumour-mongers. Malicious gossip soon spread about how much money the queen was spending. Apart from jewels and clothes – around 170 creations a year – not to mention her famous hairdresser, Léonard Hautier, who came out from Paris each day to create a powdered, coiffured fantasy up to three feet high, she also lavished money on the Petit Trianon. This was an elegant neoclassical pavilion about a mile from Versailles given to her by the king, which she refurbished to her own taste, including the creation of an English-style garden. This little private heaven was a place where Marie-Antoinette could escape the suffocating etiquette of court and enjoy being informal with her friends; but of course, the money poured into the Petit Trianon, together with enormous sums spent on generously favouring her friends, created jealousy and hostility amongst those who were not so favoured. Courtiers frustrated not to be part of her inner circle maliciously called the Petit Trianon ‘Little Vienna’.

Marie-Antoinette’s Austrian blood still rankled with many in France. All too many nobles had had relatives killed by Austrians in recent wars or at least had fought against Austrian troops. The queen’s apparent contempt for French customs soon made her enemies among the nobility. ‘Apart from a few favourites … everyone was excluded from the royal presence,’ complained one nobleman, the Duc de Lévis-Mirepoix. ‘Rank, service, reputation, and birth were no longer enough to gain admittance.’ Some nobles, he said, stayed away from Versailles rather than endure snubs from such a young, apparently light-headed and frivolous foreigner.

Yet she was not without admirers; she particularly cultivated the good-looking and fashionable men, such as the king’s youngest brother, Artois. With his cosmopolitan air and ease with women, he was only too happy to oblige the king and escort the queen to countless social events. On one occasion, in January 1774, at a masquerade at the opera in Paris, through her grey velvet mask Marie-Antoinette found herself talking to a tall, attractive man with a somewhat serious expression. He was finishing a European grand tour and, as he talked, she realised he had a delightful Swedish accent. Always drawn to a foreigner, she became interested in this aristocratic stranger who was so at ease in Parisian high society. The glamorous Count Axel Fersen made an instant impression.

Not surprisingly, her relationship with her husband was under strain. Anxious about his new role as king, he seemed intimidated by this sophisticated and beautiful wife whom he could not satisfy. ‘The king fears her, rather than loves her,’ observed one courtier, who noticed the king seemed much happier and more relaxed when she was absent. Marie-Antoinette, in turn, chose the company of young men full of energy and wit who would flatter and amuse her; she found it difficult to be patient with such a dull and unexciting husband. Yet they both wanted the marriage to succeed and, in particular, they both wanted an heir.

However, as the years passed, no heir was produced, which incited much malicious gossip. In the autumn of 1775, five years into the marriage, Parisian women were heard shouting revolting obscenities at Marie-Antoinette at a race meeting, mocking her for not giving birth to a dauphin. In the same year she wrote to her mother to tell her about the birth of Artois’ first son, the Duc d’Angoulême, now third in line to the throne. ‘There’s no need to tell you, dear Mama, how much it hurts me to see an heir to the throne who isn’t mine.’ Despite this pressure, Louis remained, to say the least, rather uninterested in sex. The best doctors were consulted and various diagnoses were made, although no serious impediment to the match was found. Marie-Antoinette told her mother that she tried to entice her husband to spend more time with her, and reported enthusiastically early in 1776 that ‘his body seemed to be becoming firmer’.

The empress, however, required much more than this to seal the all-important political alliance. The following year, in April 1777, Marie-Antoinette’s brother, now the Emperor Joseph, came to visit Versailles, charged, amongst other things, with trying to ascertain why no heir was forthcoming. Joseph was enchanted with his sister, whom he described as ‘delightful … a little young and inclined to be rash, but with a core of honesty and virtue that deserves respect’. It would appear from Joseph’s private letters afterwards to his brother Leopold of Tuscany that during his six-week stay he did not shrink from probing the intimate details of their marriage: ‘In the conjugal bed, here is the secret. He [Louis] has excellent erections, inserts his organ, remains there without stirring for perhaps two minutes, and then withdraws without ever discharging and, still erect, he bids his wife goodnight. It is incomprehensible.’ Joseph continued, ‘he ought to be whipped, to make him ejaculate, as one whips donkeys!’ As for Marie-Antoinette, he wrote that she was not ‘amorously inclined’, and together they were ‘a couple of awkward duffers!’

Joseph reproved his sister for not showing her husband more affection. ‘Aren’t you cold and disinterested when he caresses you or tries to speak to you?’ he challenged her. ‘Don’t you look bored, even disgusted? If it’s true, then how can you possibly expect such a cold-blooded man to make love to you?’ Marie-Antoinette evidently took his advice to heart. That summer she was elated to tell her mother that at last she had experienced ‘the happiness so essential for my entire life’. The king and queen’s sexual awakening brought them closer together and, early the following year, she reported that ‘the king spends three or four nights a week in my bed and behaves in a way that fills me with hope’. Some weeks later Marie-Antoinette proudly announced to her husband that she was at last expecting a baby. Louis was overjoyed.

On 19 December 1778 Marie-Antoinette went into labour. At Versailles a royal birth, like eating or dressing, was a public ritual, open to spectators who wished to satisfy themselves that the new baby was born to the queen. As the bells rang out, ‘torrents of inquisitive persons poured into the chamber’, wrote Madame Campan. The rush was ‘so great and tumultuous’ that it was impossible to move; some courtiers were even standing on the furniture. ‘So motley a gathering,’ protested the First Lady of the Bedchamber, ‘one would have thought oneself in a place of public amusement!’ Finally, when the baby was born, there was no sound, and Marie-Antoinette began to panic, thinking it was stillborn. At the first cry, the queen was so elated and exhausted by the effort that she was quite overcome. ‘Help me, I’m dying,’ she cried as she turned very pale and lost consciousness.

Princesse de Lamballe, horrified by the agony of her friend, also collapsed and was taken out ‘insensible’. The windows, which had been sealed to keep out draughts, were hurriedly broken to get more air, courtiers were thrown out, the queen was bled, hot water fetched. It took some time for the queen to regain consciousness. At this point ‘we were all embracing each other and shedding tears of joy’, writes Madame Campan, caught up in ‘transports of delight’ that the queen ‘was restored to life’. A twenty-one-gun salute rang out to announce the birth of a daughter: Princess Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte or Madame Royale. ‘Poor little girl,’ the queen is reported to have said as she cradled her daughter. ‘You are not what was desired, but you are no less dear to me on that account. A son would have been the property of the state. You shall be mine.’

Despite this success, there was still great pressure on Marie-Antoinette to conceive a male heir. To her delight, early in 1781 she found she was pregnant again. After the traumas of Marie-Thérèse’s very public delivery, spectators were banned from the next birth. In fact there was such deep silence in the room as the newborn emerged that the queen imagined she had again only produced a daughter. Then the king, overwhelmed with pride and delight, ‘tears streaming from his eyes’, came up to the queen and said, ‘Madam, you have fulfilled my wishes and those of France. You are the mother of a dauphin.’

A hundred and one cannon heralded the long-awaited birth of a son: Louis-Joseph. The news was greeted by wild celebrations: fireworks, festivities and fountains of wine in Paris. There was such ‘universal joy’, said Madame Campan, that complete strangers ‘stopped one another in the street and spoke without being acquainted’. A delegation of Parisian artisans and craftsmen came to Versailles with generous gifts for the young child. The king, at last showing confidence, was all smiles, remaining on the balcony a long time to savour the sight and constantly taking the opportunity to say with great pleasure, ‘my son, the Dauphin’. The royal line had an heir and the continuity of the monarchy seemed assured.

Nevertheless, for all the triumphant public displays, the monarchy was being imperceptibly undermined, sinking slowly beneath an ocean of debt. Furthermore, like his forebears, Louis XVI had found himself drawn into policies that added to the debt. He had agreed to provide secret funds to help General Washington’s army in America against Britain and soon sent troops and supplies as well. Support for the American revolution against the British was popular in France. Many wanted to retaliate for the defeats suffered in the Seven Years’ War, such as the Marquis de Lafayette, whose father had been killed by the British. Lafayette set sail for America in 1777 and was soon appointed major general, serving George Washington. His daring exploits were widely reported in France as he led his men in several victorious campaigns.

Louis XVI had found himself increasingly involved in the American war. In 1778 he recognised the American Declaration of Independence and signed a military alliance with the Americans. The eight thousand French soldiers who went to America made a significant difference to the war against England. Much to her disappointment, the queen’s favourite, Count Fersen, was one of many who volunteered to join the French expeditionary corps. However, as the fighting dragged on, the French government was forced to spend heavily to finance the military campaign against England.

A succession of finance ministers came and went, seemingly unable to get to grips with the deficit. Instead of reforming the tax system, Louis tried to solve the problem without alienating the aristocracy. Each year he was forced to borrow more to balance the budget, sinking further and further into debt. When his reforming finance minister, Turgot, tried to change this, he became so unpopular at court, especially with Marie-Antoinette, that he was dismissed.

His successor, Jacques Necker, a Swiss banker appointed in June 1777, attempted to reorganise the tax system but soon became embroiled in further borrowing at increasingly exorbitant interest rates. In 1781, in an attempt to win the confidence of creditors, he published the Compte Rendu, a highly favourable report of the state finances. His ambitious plan failed. His figures were challenged and in the ensuing furor, finding that he did not have the full support of Louis XVI, he resigned.

He was succeeded in 1783 by his rival, Charles Alexandre de Calonne. Calonne tried to tackle the problem by boosting the economy with increased state spending, especially on manufacturing. This only served to deepen the crisis and he was forced to contemplate further taxes. To add to the difficulties, a long agricultural depression gripped the country and inflation was rising. All this was exacerbated by the effects of the American war. Although the French secured a victory against England in the American War of Independence, aid to the Americans between 1776 and 1783 had added around 1.3 billion livres to the spiralling national debt. And there was another hidden cost of supporting America: the returning men, inspired by what they had seen overseas, brought back revolutionary ideas.

During the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century France, writers like François Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau had set out radical new ideas in political philosophy. Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters of 1733 indicted the French system of government and were suppressed. He continued to challenge all manifestations of tyranny by the privileged few in church or state. Rousseau’s The Social Contract, published in 1762, tackled the great themes of liberty and virtue and the role of the state, creating a new sense of possibilities and opportunities. Intellectuals began to reject established systems of government; ‘reason’, they argued, had greater value than the king’s claim to a ‘divine right’, and they no longer saw the monarch’s rights and privileges as unchallengeable. Political issues became much more widely debated in the salons and academies of Paris. Why support a system that had the great mass of the populace in chains to abject poverty? Surely the people, rather than the king, should determine levels of taxation? Is a republic morally superior to a monarchy? Educated Frenchmen began to see in America’s Declaration of Independence a better model to follow. With the establishment of the American constitution there was a practical alternative to the monarchy of France.

Growing discontent with the government found a tangible focus in the popular press in the increasingly vitriolic portrayal of the queen. Although with the responsibilities of motherhood she had begun to moderate her earlier excesses and spent much time with her children, she had many enemies at court and the slanders continued unabated. In the streets of Paris, pornography, cartoons, prints and libelles poured out an endless barrage of spiteful criticism which, before long, became common truths throughout France. The production of these pamphlets was a commercial enterprise and writers fought to outdo each other in their ever more outrageous copy. The queen was portrayed as wildly frivolous and extravagant, with no care for the welfare of her people. Much was made of her seven years of childlessness and she was accused of lesbian relationships, especially with her favourites, Gabrielle de Polignac and the Superintendent of the Household, Princesse de Lamballe: ‘In order to have children, Cupid must widen Aphrodite’s door. This Antoinette knows, and she tires out more than one work lady widening that door. What talents are employed! The Superintendent works away. Laughter, games, little fingers, all her exploits proved in vain.’

Even when she fulfilled her role as mother, Marie-Antoinette was portrayed as unfaithful, turning the king of France into a ‘perfect cuckold’.

Our lascivious Queen

With Artois the debauched

Together with no trouble

Commit the sweet sin

But what of it

How could one find harm in that?

These calumnies demonising the queen became increasingly explicit and obscene. The Love Life of Charlie and Toinette, of 1779, outlines in graphic detail the ‘impotence of L— —’ whose ‘matchstick … is always limp and curled up’, and how ‘Toinette feels how sweet it is to be well and truly fucked’ by Artois. In the pamphlets and libelles, the queen’s voracious sexual appetite required more than one lover: Fersen, Artois and others were implicated. There was even a fake autobiography, A Historical Essay on the Life of Marie-Antoinette, which first appeared in the early 1780s and proved so popular it was continually updated, purporting to be her own confession as a ‘barbaric queen, adulterous wife, woman without morals, soiled with crime and debauchery, these are the titles that are my decorations’. Yet for many her worst crime was undeniable: she was Austrian. To the gutter press of Paris, in addition to all her other failings, she was invariably l’Autrichienne, stressing the second half of the word, chienne or ‘bitch’.

In March 1785 Marie-Antoinette had a second son, Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie. Could Count Axel Fersen have fathered this child, as some historians have suggested? He was the only man out of the many named in the libelles with whom the queen might have had an affair. There is no doubt of their mutual attraction, yet historians cannot agree over the nature of their relationship. Was this a courtly romance, where Fersen discreetly adored the queen from a distance? Or was this a romantic passion with many secret rendezvous in the privacy of her gardens at Trianon? The many deletions in Marie-Antoinette’s correspondence with Fersen, made years later by the Fersen family, make the matter impossible to resolve. The most likely conclusion is that, although it is probable that they had an affair, there is no evidence that Louis XVI was not Louis-Charles’ father. Quite the reverse: courtiers noted that the date of conception did indeed neatly coincide with the dates of the king’s visits to his wife’s bedroom.

However, so successfully had lampoonists demolished the queen’s reputation that when she made her traditional ceremonial entry into Paris after the birth of her second son, there was not a single cheer from the crowd. As she walked though the dark interior of Notre Dame towards the great sunlit western door and square beyond, the awesome silence of the crowd was the menacing backdrop as the clatter of horses’ hooves rang out in the spring air. It was in stark contrast to the tumultuous celebrations that had greeted her on her arrival in Paris as a young girl. The queen was distraught by this hostility, crying out as she returned to Versailles, ‘What have I done to them?’

She could no longer turn to her mother in Austria for advice. The Empress Maria-Theresa never had the satisfaction of knowing that her daughter had finally provided two male heirs. After a short illness, she had died of inflammation of the lungs. Marie-Antoinette was inconsolable, reported Madame Campan. ‘She kept herself shut up in her closet for several days … saw none but the royal family, and received none but the Princesse de Lamballe and the Duchesse de Polignac.’ Even at a distance, her mother had been a powerful influence in her life, constantly providing shrewd and critical guidance. She felt her isolation now, in a foreign court, with all the responsibilities of queen, wife and mother.

Marie-Antoinette did have one treasured memento of her mother, a lock of her hair, which she wore close to her skin. And in Austria, concealed in the empress’s rosary, there was a small token of her distant daughter. The delicate chain of black rosary beads was entwined with sixteen gold medallions encasing locks of hair from her children. After her death, the rosary passed to her oldest daughter, the invalid, Maria-Anna, who lived in the Elisabethinen convent in Klagenfurt. These small symbols of the empress’s children were all but forgotten. In time, they would assume great significance.

2 ‘GRÂCE POUR MAMAN’ (#ulink_8acac720-6a82-53e3-8014-7147e5733f1d)

‘This is a revolt?’ asked the king, hearing of the fall of the Bastille.

‘No sire, it is a revolution,’ came the reply.

Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt (July 1789)

At Versailles, Louis-Charles, the Duc de Normandie, lived a charmed life, well protected from the ‘trifling disturbances’ – as they were sometimes known at court – beyond the palace gates. In the royal nursery, under the sensitive administration of the Governess of the Children of France, the Duchesse de Polignac, his little empire was well endowed with servants. Apart from Cecile, his wet nurse, there was a cradle rocker, Madame Rambaud, and his personal rocker, Madame Rousseau, otherwise known as ‘Rocker to the Children of France’, whose sister, Madame Campan, worked in the Queen’s Household. Valets were appointed such as Hanet Cléry, a particularly loyal and discreet servant who had been in service to the royal family since 1782. In addition, the Duc de Normandie had two room boys, four ushers, a porter, a silver cleaner, a laundress, a hairdresser, two first chamber women, eight ordinary women and a periphery of minor staff all vying for importance.

The nursery on the ground floor of Versailles opened out onto the large terraces and acres of ornamental gardens beyond; rows of orange trees and neatly trimmed box bushes receded into the distance, geometrically arranged around circular pools with tall fountains cascading onto statues, gilded each year. Any infant tumble from the prince as he took his first steps would bring a kaleidoscope of riches to view; wherever he looked, his soft and silken world was perfect. His mother watched his excellent progress with delight. Louis-Charles was glowing with vitality, ‘a real peasant boy, big, rosy and plump’, she wrote. This contrasted sharply with his brother, Monsieur le Dauphin, who although more than three years older was constantly prone to infections.

Monsieur le Dauphin was eventually moved out of the nursery and established in his own official suite on the ground floor of Versailles, ousting his Uncle Provence. His older sister, Madame Royale, also had her own apartment near Marie-Antoinette, under the Hall of Mirrors. Apart from occasional state duties, such as the grand couvert, where they would dine in public – Madame Royale with her hair powdered and wearing a stiff panniered gown, the Duc de Normandie usually sitting on his mother’s lap – their lives were shielded from the public. The Duc de Normandie was taken on carriage trips around the park and visits to the farm at the Trianon, or he could play in his little garden on the terrace. Occasionally there would be trips to nearby palaces at Marly, Saint Cloud or Fontainebleau.