CHAPTER III.
EXILE AND RESTORATION.
t was midnight on the 19th of December, her seventeenth birthday, when Madame Royale left the Temple. M. Benezech, the Minister of the Interior, escorted her to the Porte St. Martin, where the travelling carriage provided for her journey to Vienna was in waiting. There went with her the Marchioness de Soucy, sub-governess to the children of France, an officer of the gendarmerie, and M. Gomin, one of the commissaries of the Temple. Hué joined her at Huningen, which she reached on Christmas Eve. Although all precautions were taken to prevent her being known, the princess was frequently recognised, and greeted with silent respect, in the course of her journey. She stayed over the 25th at the sign of the “Crow” at Huningen, and set out for Basle on the next day. As she left her room the innkeeper fell at her feet and asked her blessing. Tears stood in her eyes as she entered the carriage. “I leave France with regret,” she said, “and shall never cease to regard it as my country.”
At Basle the exchange was effected, and Madame Royale left on the night of the 26th, accompanied by Madame de Soucy and escorted by the Prince de Gavres, who had been appointed by the Austrian Emperor for the purpose. At Lauffenbourg she stayed a day to celebrate a service in memory of her parents, and at Innspruck she remained two days to visit her aunt, the Archduchess Elizabeth. She arrived in Vienna on the 9th of January, 1796.
Warmly received by the Emperor and Empress, with a household appointed for her in accordance with her rank, Madame Royale took her place at the Austrian Court, and here she spent the next four years. But amid the glitter of the Court of Vienna she was, perhaps, more truly lonely than she had been in the Tower of the Temple. Her heart was in the graves of those she loved, and the mourning garments which she wore told truly that she lived in the past. The Archduke Charles sought her hand, and the Emperor and Empress urged, and even insisted, that she should accept him. But Madame Royale steadily declined. She had no heart to give a lover; but the wish of her father and mother pointed out the path she was to take, and if she must wed it could only be her cousin, the Duc d’Angoulême. Her refusal drew down on her the Imperial displeasure, which was augmented by her careful avoidance of various political schemes into which it was sought to entangle her.
It was a great relief, therefore, to the princess when this anomalous position was put an end to in the spring of 1799 by a demand on the part of the Emperor of Russia, made at the request of Louis XVIII., in terms which allowed no refusal, that Madame Royale should be permitted to join her uncle and the other members of her father’s family at Mittau, in Courland, where they were then residing.
The princess gladly set out from Vienna in May, and on the 4th of June she was met at the gates of Mittau by Louis XVIII., his wife, and the Duc d’Angoulême. It was a touching meeting, memories of the past crowding up and dimming the happiness of the present, while rendering it more sacred. Not only her relatives, but loyal nobles of France and faithful servants of her father received Madame Royale at Mittau. Of these the most notable was the Abbé Edgeworth, who had attended Louis XVI. on the scaffold. The princess was, at her own request, left alone with the abbé, that she might learn from him the details of her father’s last moments. She ever cherished for the good man the warmest regard, and when, some years after, a dangerous fever broke out at Mittau and numbered him among its victims, it was Madame Royale who took her place by his bedside, closed his dying eyes, and followed his remains to the grave.
The thought that lay uppermost in the minds of all when the first emotions of meeting were over, was the permanent union of Madame Royale to her family by her marriage with the Duc d’Angoulême. Where the wishes of all parties were at one, there was no need for delay. On the 10th of June, six days after the princess’s arrival, the marriage ceremony took place in the gallery of the ducal castle. Loving hands had decked the altar with branches of lilac and summer flowers, and here, in a strange land, in the presence of the little court of Louis XVIII., the prince and princess plighted their troth. It was the fulfilment of a vow rather than the consummation of a love match, and the faith was plighted to the dead as much as to the living.
We have lingered so long over Madame Royale’s early life that we have no space to do more than glance at the years which immediately followed her marriage. In 1801 the exiles were obliged, through the caprice of the Czar, to quit Mittau in the depth of a severe winter. They appealed to the King of Prussia for a refuge, and he appointed Warsaw, where they remained some years. In 1805 they were again at Mittau. In 1808 they came to England. Here for two years they resided at Gosfield Hall, a seat of the Marquis of Buckingham in Essex, and here, in November, 1810, Louis XVIII. lost his Queen.