Read The Lost King of France: A True Story of Revolution, Revenge, and DNA for Free Online Page A

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 likely that they had an affair, there is no evidence that Louis XVI was not Louis-Charles’s 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 toward 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, distraught
by this hostility, returned to Versailles crying out, “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, each one 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 Elizabethinen convent in Klagenfurt. These small symbols of the empress’s children were all but forgotten. In time, they would assume great significance.

Chapter Two
    “GRÂCE POUR MAMAN”

    “This is a revolt?” asked the King, hearing of the fall of the Bastille.
“No, sire, it is a Revolution” came the reply.

    A t Versailles, Louis-Charles, 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 Cécile, his wet nurse, there was a cradle rocker, Madame Rambaud,