Victoire of France: Madame Quatrième

A painting of Madame Victoire de France by Jean-Marc Nattier. 

One of the most controversial figures in the French court during the reign of King Louis XVI was her aunt, Madame Victoire. She was born Marie Louise Thérèse Victoire on May 11, 1733 at the Palace of Versailles in France. Victoire was the fifth daughter and seventh child of King Louis XV of France and Queen Maria Leszczyńska. Victoire had an older sister who died three months before her birth, thus he was originally known as “Madame Quatrième” or “the fourth daughter of the King”. She was later referred to as Madame Victoire.

Unlike their older siblings, Victoire and her younger sisters were not raised at the Palace of Versailles as their father’s chief minister, Cardinal Fleury, considered it too expensive. Each princess had to have her own “maison” or household, comprised of hundreds of servants and attendants. Instead, they were sent to the Royal Abbey of Fontevraud, an ancient and prestigious monastery dubbed as the “Queen of the Abbeys”.

In her memoirs, educator and lady-in-waiting Jeanne Louise Henriette Campan criticized Louis XV’s decision of sending her younger daughters to Fontevraud, saying: “They were brought up as mere boarders in a convent eighty leagues distant from the Court.” Madame Campan also revealed of the trauma Victoire acquired from her stay in the monastery. “Madame Victoire attributed certain paroxysms of terror, which she was never able to conquer, to the violent alarms she experienced… whenever she was sent, by way of penance, to pray alone in the vault where the sisters were interred.”

On March 24, 1748, ten years after entering the Royal Abbey of Fontevraud, the 15-year-old Victoire wrote to her father, asking permission to return to court. The king yielded to her daughter’s request and sent Duchesse de Duras to collect her. He also appointed three maids-of-honor to attend to Victoire.

Since the Royal Abbey of Fontevraud was not a teaching institution, Victoire’s and her younger sisters’ education were neglected. Upon their return to the court, they made up for lost time by studying extensively, devoting almost their entire time on honing their skills. “…They enabled themselves to write French correctly, and acquired a good knowledge of history. Italian, English, the higher branches of mathematics, turning and dialing, filled up in succession their leisure moments," said Madame Campan.

Victoire had “beautiful, tender, soft brown eyes” and “fresh complexion”, and was described as “handsome and very graceful”. Apart from her physical allure, she was also known for the “goodness of her heart” and her “bright smile” that “gave the impression of happiness and health, which, together with her desire to please, radiated from her whole personality”. She was well loved by both her staff and the society.

In 1753, Victoire was suggested to marry her brother-in-law, King Ferdinand VI of Spain, whose wife Barbara of Portugal was seriously ill at the time. The Spanish queen, however, overcame her illness and survived for another five years. No other suitable partner was found after Ferdinand, so Victoire remained unmarried for the rest of her life.

Over time, Victoire became overweight that her father came to refer to her as “Coche” or “Piggy”. She and her sisters were close to her brother, Louis, Dauphin of France. It was him who encouraged his monastery-raised sisters to further their knowledge upon their return to the court. She supported her sister Madame Adélaïde in a campaign against their father’s mistresses, Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry.

Victoire’s favorite lady-in-waiting was Marquise de Durfort, who “afforded to Madame Victoire agreeable society” and with whom the princess spent “almost all her evenings… and ended by fancying herself domiciled with her”.

Château de Bellevue, about 1757.

Madame Victoire and her sisters took care of their father from when he fell ill and until his death due to smallpox on May 10, 1774. The Mesdames were also infected, but they all recovered. Following the king’s death and the ascent of their nephew, the new King Louis XVI, Victoire and her sisters were allowed to keep their apartments in the Palace of Versailles. The Mesdames, however, distanced themselves from the court and preferred to stay in their own Château de Bellevue in Meudon, the chateau formerly owned by Madam de Pompadour, and redesigned by the sisters, where they created a jardin anglais orné at Brimborion, similar to Chantilly or Trianon. They would also travel to Vichy each year, bringing with them each time a retinue of at least 300 people.

Victoire and the rest of the Mesdames were not too keen on the new queen, Marie-Antoinette, who introduced informal habits, such as informal evening family dinners, that veered away from and undermined the formal court etiquette. This resulted to an exodus of the old court nobility, which all gathered in the salon of the Mesdames. Austrian Ambassador Mercy revealed that the salon was a center of intrigues against Marie-Anotinette, and that the Mesdames tolerated poems that satirized the queen.

The French Revolution prodded Victoire and the rest of the Mesdames to leave France for Rome. After much delay and controversy, the sisters finally arrived in Rome on April 16, 1871. They resided in the palace of Cardinal de Bernis, the French ambassador to Rome, and received protection of the Pope. They stayed there for five years. According to writer Ellis Cornelia Knight, “They were highly respected by the Romans; not only by the higher orders, but by the common people, who had a horror of the French revolution, and no great partiality for that nation in general."

When the Revolutionary France invaded Italy in 1796, Victoire and sister Adélaïde set off for Naples and resided at the royal court in the Palace of Caserta, where Marie-Antoinette’s sister, Maria Carolina, was queen. The queen had a difficult time dealing with the sisters, saying, "I have the awful torment of harboring the two old Princesses of France with eighty persons in their retinue and every conceivable impertinence,” adding, “The same ceremonies are observed in the interior of their apartments here as were formerly at Versailles.”

Following the invasion of France, the two sisters left Naples for Corfu before settling in Trieste. There, Madame Victoire, who outlived eight of her nine siblings, died of breast cancer on June 7, 1799. She was 66 years old. Adélaïde died a year later. Both of their bodies were transported back to France by Louis XVIII during the Bourbon Restoration. Their remains were laid to rest at the Basilica of Saint-Denis.