Adélaïde of France, A Bitter Old Hag in the Court at Versailles
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| Portrait of Madame Adélaïde by Jean-Marques Nattier. Image from Wikimedia Commons |
She was named after Marie Adelaide, Dauphine of France, her paternal grandmother. Being the fourth legitimate daughter of the king, Adélaïde was originally referred to as Madame Quatrième or “Madame the Fourth”. However, her position in the court advanced with the successive deaths of her elder sisters. From the time her oldest sister, Louise Elisabeth, died in 1759, under her father’s own in 1770, Adélaïde was the most senior Daughter of France. And amongst all of her siblings, Adélaïde was closest to Louis, Dauphin of France.
She was supposed to be raised and educated at the Abbaye de Fontevraud together with her sisters, but was permitted to stay at Versailles after a tearful plea to her father. She was then put under the tutelage of Marie Isabelle de Rohan, Duchesse de Tallard.
Although Adélaïde was attractive and considered the most beautiful among her sisters—having possessed a “striking and disturbing beauty of the Bourbon type characterized by elegance", with "large dark eyes at once passionate and soft"—she did not pay much attention to her appearance that she would usually look disheveled. Because of that, her father nicknamed her Loque, which means “tatters”.
Madame Campan, a reader to the princesses, revealed that Adélaïde had the “most insatiable desire to learn”. She learned to play “all instruments, from the horn (will it be believed!) to the Jew’s-harp". She studied Calculus, English, painting, potter’s wheel and watchmaking, as well as Italian and music under Goldoni and Beaumarchais, respectively.
In her teenage years, Adélaïde fell in love with a Lifeguard after watching him perform his duties. She then anonymously sent him a snuffbox with the message: “You will treasure this, soon you shall be informed from whose hand it comes.” After King Louis XV got wind of the news and recognized his daughter’s handwriting, he offered the guardsman a bribe—he would be granted an annual pension of four thousand so long as he should "at once remove to some place far from the Court and remain there for a very long time".
When Adélaïde got past the age when princess in the 18th century usually wed, she was matched with Charles III of Spain. She, however, refused to marry him after seeing his portrait. This rejection was allegedly the reason why the king never remarried. Adélaïde would rather stay unmarried than marry a man who was not a monarch or an heir to the throne, the reason why prospects with Prince Francis Xavier of Saxony and Prince of Conti never came to fruition.
Domineering and ambitious as she was, Adélaïde became the leader of the four unmarried sisters following the return of her siblings from the Abbaye de Fontevraud. Out of all her siblings, she was the only one with a political ambition. At age 11, Adélaïde already thought of defeating England through the method mentioned in the Bible’s Judith And Holofernes. She and her brother Louis were part of the Court’s Dévot party, which strongly campaigned against Louis XV’s chief mistress, Madame de Pompadour, who heavily promoted an alliance with Austria.
As Madame de Pompadour’s health started deteriorating, Adélaïde became closer to her father. Their closeness, however, ignited rumors that the two might be engaging in an incestuous relationship, and that Adélaïde was the real mother of Louis de Narbonne. These allegations, however, were never substantiated.
During the latter part of King Louis XV’s reign, Adélaïde and her sisters were described as bitter old hags who had nothing better to do than gossip and knit in their rooms. They would rarely dress properly, too, wearing just panniers covered by a coat when leaving their rooms.
The death of her beloved brother Louis in 1765 devastated Adélaïde. She would take custody of his papers two years later following the death of the dauphin’s spouse, becoming a major personal and political influence to her nephew, the new King Louis XVI, in the early years of his sovereignty, as well as playing a significant role in the creation of a new government.
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| Portrait of Madame Adélaïde, image from Wikimedia Commons |
Following the death of her mother and elder sisters, Adélaïde became the highest ranking female in all of Versailles, a position she lost upon the arrival of King Louis XVI’s wife, Marie Antoinette, who she despised. She was the first one to call the new Queen of France as L’Autrichienne or “The Austrian Woman”, a nickname that would stick to Marie-Antoinette for the rest of her life.
Adélaïde and her sisters contracted smallpox while attending to their ailing father, who died due to the said virus on May 1774. When they recovered from the illness, Madame du Deffand commented: "The avenging angel has shielded his sword. We shall again see the three spinsters at the new court, where they will continue their small minded plots."
The French Revolution drove Adélaïde and her only remaining sister, Victoire, away from their homeland, taking residence in Turin, Rome, then in Naples. They stayed at the Palace of Caserta, where Marie-Antoinette’s sister, Maria Carolina, was queen. Talking about their stay, the queen commented: "I have the awful torment of harboring the two old Princesses of France with eighty persons in their retinue and every conceivable impertinence... The same ceremonies are observed in the interior of their apartments here as were formerly at Versailles."
Adélaïde and Victoire later left Naples for Corfu after the former was invaded by France, before eventually settling in Trieste, where Victoire would die of breast cancer. Adélaïde passed away one year after Victoire’s death, on February 27, 1800, in Trieste, Italy. She was 67 years old. Their remains were transported back to France through Louis XVIII at the time of the Bourbon Restoration, and were laid to rest at the Basilica of Saint Denis in Paris. She was the last surviving child of Louis XV.
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