Author Topic: King Louis XV and his family  (Read 59456 times)

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bell_the_cat

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Re: King Louis XV and his family
« Reply #30 on: December 11, 2005, 08:19:47 AM »
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There is an interesting story in the memoires of Countess de Boigne!It is said that the King Louis XV entered Madame Adelaide's bedchamber to inform her that Madame Louise had left in the nignt...When she heard this Madame Adelaide's first cry was:''WITH WHOM''?  ;)


;D

According to Campan, Mme Adelaide was furious with her father for keeping Louise's plan of running off to the convent a secret, and only telling her when Louise had gone!

elena_maria_vidal

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Re: King Louis XV and his family
« Reply #31 on: December 18, 2005, 12:26:55 PM »
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There is an interesting story in the memoires of Countess de Boigne!It is said that the King Louis XV entered Madame Adelaide's bedchamber to inform her that Madame Louise had left in the nignt...When she heard this Madame Adelaide's first cry was:''WITH WHOM''?  ;)


That's really funny! (Mme de Boigne is an inexhaustible source of court gossip.)

Offline Eddie_uk

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Re: King Louis XV and his family
« Reply #32 on: December 20, 2005, 06:44:25 AM »
I think the author Stanley Loomis in his good book on Madame du Barry sums up the mesdames well!!.......

"Mesdames made up in the consequence of their birth for what they had missed in the way of domestic felicity, consoling themselves with the thought that Daughter of France was a rank higher than any that could possibly come to them by marriage on this earth. They lived in semi-retirement in vast connecting apartments at Versailles and here, dominated by the elder, Madame Adelaide, they brooded over ineffectual plots which rarely hatched. Madame Adelaide was a sour, thin-beaked old maid, immensly proud and of haughty aspect, who was filled with disgust by the unseemly conduct of her father, the King. She never dared confront His Majesty directly with her distaste, but attacked obliquely and in secret. In the privacy of their chambers, the sisters continually stirred up a brew of mischief, never realising that their drops of poison were eating into the foundations of the very edifice which supported them. Adelaide and Victoire would live to see the consequences of their malice. They would barely escape the guillotine, leaving Paris in 1791 in the dead of night on the pretext of a pious pilgrimage to Rome. In Rome, under the protection of the Holy Father, they lived in exile, praying to God that He spit down flames of vengence to destroy the monsters of the revolution, never reflecting that they themselves had been among the first to intrigue against the monarchy"

Still you can't help liking them!  ;D What where their thoughts on the executions of Louis, Antoinette and Elisabeth? do any of their letters survive? :)
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bell_the_cat

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Re: King Louis XV and his family
« Reply #33 on: December 20, 2005, 11:07:53 AM »
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I think the author Stanley Loomis in his good book on Madame du Barry sums up the mesdames well!!.......

"Mesdames made up in the consequence of their birth for what they had missed in the way of domestic felicity, consoling themselves with the thought that Daughter of France was a rank higher than any that could possibly come to them by marriage on this earth. They lived in semi-retirement in vast connecting apartments at Versailles and here, dominated by the elder, Madame Adelaide, they brooded over ineffectual plots which rarely hatched. Madame Adelaide was a sour, thin-beaked old maid, immensly proud and of haughty aspect, who was filled with disgust by the unseemly conduct of her father, the King. She never dared confront His Majesty directly with her distaste, but attacked obliquely and in secret. In the privacy of their chambers, the sisters continually stirred up a brew of mischief, never realising that their drops of poison were eating into the foundations of the very edifice which supported them. Adelaide and Victoire would live to see the consequences of their malice. They would barely escape the guillotine, leaving Paris in 1791 in the dead of night on the pretext of a pious pilgrimage to Rome. In Rome, under the protection of the Holy Father, they lived in exile, praying to God that He spit down flames of vengence to destroy the monsters of the revolution, never reflecting that they themselves had been among the first to intrigue against the monarchy"

Still you can't help liking them!  ;D What where their thoughts on the executions of Louis, Antoinette and Elisabeth? do any of their letters survive? :)


With all respect to Stanley Loomis, this is a bit simplistic.
As I've tried to point out on this thread, each of the sisters had different characters, shaped by the different ways in which they were brought up. Their political activities were not entirely frivolous, although they were ultimately ineffectual.

Adelaide and Victoire moved out (pushed out?) of Versailles in the 1780s into their own chateau of Bellevue, where (like Marie Antoinette) they had a model farm.

I don't think they fled in the dead of night as Loomis says. They were allowed to leave by the National Assembly, and were accompanied by a considerable entourage - it wasn't like the flight to Varennes a few months later.

Adelaide expressed her view of the king's mistresses quite openly. She spent the 1750s in alliance with the Dauphin opposed to the Pompadour's policies. When told of Louise's departure she may have let slip the "who with?" barb, but Campan recalls that she scolded the king loudly for not having told her of Louise's intentions.

Loomis is famous for poor research unfortunately. He didn't have access to the internet like I do!

About the executions - of course they were horrified!
Vigée Lebrun painted Adelaide and Victoire in Rome at the time that the royal family were trying to escape France, and recalled how Victoire suddenly burst in joyfully with the (premature) news that the king had reached safety!





« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 06:00:00 PM by bell_the_cat »

Offline Eddie_uk

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Re: King Louis XV and his family
« Reply #34 on: December 20, 2005, 01:15:48 PM »
Very interesting thanks Bell!!

To be honest by many contemporary accounts they don't sound like people you would want to be friends with.  :)
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bell_the_cat

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Re: King Louis XV and his family
« Reply #35 on: December 20, 2005, 01:56:52 PM »
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Very interesting thanks Bell!!

To be honest by many contemporary accounts they don't sound like people you would want to be friends with.  :)


I think Victoire would have been all right on her own. Mme Campan seemed to like her well enough.

She was quite religious, and took the fasting days very seriously in spite of being very fond of good food. Campan reports that she made her cook hold the fowl over a strainer for a bit to drain off the fat: if less than a certain amount of fat came off the fowl would be judged to be not "gras" - so Victoire could happily indulge.

Offline Eddie_uk

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Re: King Louis XV and his family
« Reply #36 on: December 21, 2005, 06:01:52 AM »
Yes i ment you wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of them!! Thats very interesting thanks Bell. What a sad end to a life so used to splender! It must have been awful for them.

I wonder why Maria Carolina was not particularly friendly? I know she could be funny at times.

They must have been devastated to hear of the deaths of Louis and Elisabeth. Did they keep in contact with Clothide in Sardinia? Perhaps they could have gone their. I remember reading Clothide wanted to get Elisabeth over.
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Offline Eddie_uk

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Re: King Louis XV and his family
« Reply #37 on: December 21, 2005, 06:13:59 AM »
Madame Victoire in 1791



Madame Adelaide in 1791


Both painted by Madame Le Brun while their sisters where in exile in Rome.
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bell_the_cat

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Re: King Louis XV and his family
« Reply #38 on: December 21, 2005, 06:39:00 AM »
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Yes i ment you wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of them!! Thats very interesting thanks Bell. What a sad end to a life so used to splender! It must have been awful for them.

I wonder why Maria Carolina was not particularly friendly? I know she could be funny at times.

They must have been devastated to hear of the deaths of Louis and Elisabeth. Did they keep in contact with Clothide in Sardinia? Perhaps they could have gone their. I remember reading Clothide wanted to get Elisabeth over.


I expect Maria Carolina had heard about them from Marie Antoinette, maybe she blamed their rumour mongering for what had happened to her sister. Also Maria Carolina (like Marie Antoinette) wasn't so reactionary and conservative as Mesdames were. She later became much more reactionary though!

I don't know about Clothilde. She was in Sardinia at this point, and Savoy had been annexed by France. I don't know why Adelaide and Victoire didn't go there - maybe they thought it was too uncivilised (goats and pirates!).

Update: Clothilde's husband was forced to abdicate his mainland territories and retire to Sardinia in the same month (December 1798) that Mesdames were obliged to leave Naples.

Thanks for posting the pics!
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 06:00:00 PM by bell_the_cat »

Offline Eddie_uk

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Re: King Louis XV and his family
« Reply #39 on: December 21, 2005, 06:58:50 AM »
Thanks for info bell. It's nice their bodies were brought back to France to lie in St Denis. Maybe they could even have joined the suites of the Comte de Artois or Provence.
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bell_the_cat

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Re: King Louis XV and his family
« Reply #40 on: December 21, 2005, 07:56:07 AM »
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Thanks for info bell. It's nice their bodies were brought back to France to lie in St Denis. Maybe they could even have joined the suites of the Comte de Artois or Provence.


This would have been difficult: the Comte d'Artois was in London if not already in Scotland. The Comte de Provence was in Mittau (now Latvia!), as guest of the Tsar, who asked him to leave the following year.

bell_the_cat

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Re: King Louis XV and his family
« Reply #41 on: December 29, 2005, 02:26:58 PM »
Maria Carolina wrote them a letter though, when the royal family was evacuated from Naples (courtesy of Lord Nelson). She said that Adelaide and Victoire would be welcome to join them in Sicily, if they could find a way of getting there.

The problem was that Naples was in complete chaos - it was worse than Paris in the September massacres. The lazzaroni who were the Neapolitan version of the sans culottes, but who were loyal to the royal family, were busy massacring anyone with republican sympathies. Mesdames decided the best way would be to go over the mountains to the Adriatic where they get a boat to Sicily. After many adventures they ended up being protected by a Russian general who took them to Corfu (Tsar Paul luckily remembered his stay at Versailles in the 1780s as Comte du Nord!). By this time there were no boats to Sicily so they took up an offer from the Austrian Emperor to go to Trieste.

Maria Carolina had a terrible journey to Sicily during which her youngest son took ill and died.
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 06:00:00 PM by bell_the_cat »

elena_maria_vidal

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Re: King Louis XV and his family
« Reply #42 on: December 31, 2005, 12:52:22 PM »
Goodness! I never heard this anecdote. I sometimes wonder where they all would have been without crazy Tsar Paul. It is a good thing that Louis, Antoinette and especially little Madame Royale were so kind to him when he visited Versailles. (Recall the story of how little Madame Royale climbed on the mercurial Tsar's lap and said,"You are a nice man. I like you. Someday, I will come and visit you." The innocent childhood gesture touched the Tsar so much that many people think that is why he was later so kind to the exiled Bourbons.)

Sissi

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Re: King Louis XV and his family
« Reply #43 on: January 30, 2006, 11:26:28 AM »
madame Adelaide



Madame Victoire





 Sorry if theses pictures were already posted but I cannot see the ones posted in the first pages!

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Re: King Louis XV and his family
« Reply #44 on: March 07, 2006, 11:08:51 AM »
Was she known as Queen Marie or Queen Maria in France?
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