Madame Royale

Trianon #2

by Elena Maria Vidal

An historical novel on the French Revolutionary Age. This intriging story deals in particular with the daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, and the search for her little, lost brother. All of the major characters were real people, and the situations are based on fact. Madame Royale was written as a response to readers of Trianon, who wanted to know "What happened to the daughter?" and more about the surviving personages of the story. The period which follows the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, called by historians "the Bourbon restoration" (1814-1830), was outwardly one of rest and peace for France. Yet beneath the surface, the forces of revolution were engaged in a ruthless duel for power with those of the reaction. The conflict, played out in salons and boudoirs, in newspapers, novels and pamphlets, was nevertheless a fight to the death, from which one party would emerge the conqueror, while the other would sink into the oubliette of exile or imprisonment. The Left had many weapons. As for the reactionaries, they possessed mediocre, frail or aged princes, with followers whose religious convictions were sometimes prone to be superficial or bigoted. They had, however, one weapon, and that weapon was a woman, a woman who embodied in herself the tradition of legitimacy, of a heritage reaching far back into the mists of the early centuries of Christianity. Of cold demeanor with a heart of fire; of bitter aspect, with an unfailing generosity, her undying faith and zealous devotion to God, His Church, and the poor led her to be the heroine and defender of the idea of the Christian state. Daughter of a martyred king and queen, she was Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte of France, the Duchesse d'Angouleme, who from childhood had been called "Madame Royale." Hardcover, smythe-sewn, cream paper, 350 pages.

"An unforgettable portrait of a royal life... Madame Royale is a fantastic tribute to one of Europe's most tragic, but courageous princesses." ~Gareth Russell, author of Popular and The Audacity of Ideas

"The...backdrop of this heartrending story is that none of us can choose the circumstances into which we are born, and yet those...circumstances are the very proving ground of virtue, our own gymnasium of charity." ~Genevieve Kineke, Canticle Magazine

"Vidal gives us a gripping portrait of a woman whose personal destiny is enmeshed with the convulsions of the French Revolution and European history." ~Catherine Delors, author of For the King and Mistress of the Revolution

"In Trianon, faith gives the King and Queen the courage to face death; in Madame Royale, faith gives their daughter the courage to face life. Marie-Thérèse's story is truly one of bloodless martyrdom." ~ Cross of Laeken

Genres: Historical Fiction, France, Fiction

350 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Elena Maria Vidal grew up in the countryside outside of Frederick, Maryland, "fair as the garden of the Lord" as the poet Whittier said of it. As a child she read so many books that her mother had to put restrictions on her hours of reading. During her teenage years, she spent a great deal of her free time writing stories and short novels.

Elena graduated in 1984 from Hood College in Frederick with a BA in Psychology, and in 1985 from the State University of New York at Albany with an MA in Modern European History. In 1986, she joined the Secular Order of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel. Elena taught at the Frederick Visitation Academy and worked as a private tutor as well as teaching children's etiquette classes. During a trip to Austria in 1995 she visited the tomb of Empress Maria Theresa in the Capuchin crypt in Vienna. Afterwords she decided to finish a novel about Marie-Antoinette she had started writing ten years before but had put aside. In 1997 her first historical novel TRIANON was published by St. Michaels Press. In 2000, the sequel MADAME ROYALE was published, as well as the second edition of TRIANON, by The Neumann Press. Both books quickly found an international following which continues to this day. In 2010, the third edition of TRIANON and the second edition of MADAME ROYALE were released.

In November 2009, THE NIGHT'S DARK SHADE: A NOVEL OF THE CATHARS was published by Mayapple Books. The new historical novel deals with the controversial Albigensian Crusade in thirteenth century France. Elena has been a contributor to Canticle Magazine, Touchstone Magazine, The National Observer, and The American Conservative. In April 2009 she was a speaker at the Eucharistic Convention in Auckland, New Zealand. In August 2010 Elena spoke at The Catholc Writers Conference in Valley Forge, PA. She is a member of the Catholic Writers Guild and the Eastern Shore Writers Association. She currently lives in Maryland with her family and is working on a historical novel about her Irish ancestors. Elena blogs at http://teaattrianon.blogspot.com/.

Reviews

[Simon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Note: I had not posted this review on Goodreads. It was up on Amazon. I have brought it over because Mary-Eileen Russell, a/k/a Elena Maria Vidal has orchestrated a campaign of harassment aimed at those who post negative reviews of her novels. Eighteen months ago she crossed a line in an attempt to harm me. She wrote to the Academic Dean of the college where I work to imply that I was a deranged stalker, with wide-eyed questions about whether I posed a physical danger to her.
Because I wrote a couple of reviews. As I have explained before, I stumbled into Ms. Russell's literary effusions because I have had a lifelong interest in Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Unlike others who showed up on this thread, I actually like the hapless royals. So I read everything about them I can get my hands on. Guess what? Ms. Russell wrote two novels about them and their children. I purchased them. And I am a member of Goodreads, a site which exists not for the self-promotion of the authors, but for readers to exchange opinions. Here's the deal. If you don't like my opinion, write your own. It's a free country, at least until Donald Trump finishes choking the daylights out of the Constitution. But I digress. What the site is not about is authors getting the vapors when they don't like a review. I and others strongly suspect that Ms. Russell organizes the good reviews, but more than that, actually harasses reviewers under a variety of sock-puppet identities. I thought this nonsense had ended two years ago, but in the last month two of the sock-puppets have started up again over on Amazon. Hence this review. And before you ask, Madame Royale really did strike me as this bad. However, despite the provocation, I haven't added any snark to the original review:
***********************
Pretty ghastly, both because of the writing and the approach Vidal takes in recounting the story of Marie Therese. The writing is just bad. Fires burn "innocuously". Characters have "baited" breath. There are howlers on every page. A sample? Talleyrand and the Duchesse de Dino are sitting in a box at the theatre. They see Madame de Stael, Benjamin Constant, Madame Recamier, Prince Augustus of Prussia, and the Duc (sic) of Wellington, one right after another. After providing silly background sketches for each, Talleyrand asks the Duchesse if she spots Tsar Alexander.

"Why, yes. His box is beside the one reserved for the Royal Family, near the center of the first tier. He is surrounded by all his Russians, and looks quite sulky."
"That does not surprise me," observed Talleyrand. "He has had many reasons to be so. For one thing, he wanted Louis-Philippe to be King."
"I know, Uncle. The Tsar told me so himself, just yesterday. He despises the Bourbons. 'They never learn anything,' he said."

See what Vidal did there? See how adroitly she gives you both history AND an actual quotation? The book hums along like that on page after page.

Characters behave oddly. For example, early on Vidal pretty much puts the cards on the table. Louis XVIII is the villain of the piece, and probably knows More Than He Should about the Fate of the Dauphin. Or does he, despite the overwrought deathbed wheezes of his Queen? The hapless Louis Charles seems to pop up everywhere, and Marie Therese makes field trips to other old women who might have information about the missing boy. But she never does anything about the information she receives (or deduces from the way in which a woman kisses some locks of hair). Indeed, Marie Therese continues to hang out with her uncles, Berry and her husband in what can only be described as one of the more unattractive royal families in history. There is a scene near the end of the book wherein Caroline, Duchesse de Berry and a hot-blooded Neapolitan (honestly, is there any other kind?) ticks off the priggish Marie Therese. I am reasonably sure that Vidal wants the readers to feel sorry for her eponymous heroine, but it is more likely that most will be on Caroline's side against the battle-ax Madame Royale has become.

It is also hard to tell where Madame Royale's religiosity leaves off and Vidal's own takes over. There are pointless scenic side trips to Catherine Laboure's cell, as well as an account of Our Lady appearing to the saint that defies belief. The Blessed Mother is careful to refer to the Archbishop of Paris as "Monseigneur". Because, you know . . . etiquette. Sadly, there is not one credible description of religious consolation experienced by Marie Therese, Charles X, the Duc d'Angouleme or anyone else brought forward as good Catholics. Instead, Vidal Greek-choruses us along with countless overwrought descriptions of how bad life has been since the Revolution knocked the pins out from under the monarchy, and thereby messed up the proper relation of the French to God. Or something. Honestly, the book is so poorly written it is virtually impossible to determine exactly WHAT point Vidal thinks she is making. One thing is sure, though. The Revolution had nothing to do with Louis XVI's or Marie Antoinette's behaviors.

It takes real dedication to make Marie Therese de France's life this boring, but Vidal is more than up to the task.

[Leslie Zemeckis]

I always wanted to know what happened to Marie Antoinettes only surviving child
Interesting if not compelling gives details to her final years searching for her brother and for her place in France

[catzkc]

This book is complete and total, biased drivel! It is a work of garbage that is not worth the paper it is printed on (or the digital space it takes up). It is pure, uneducated tripe attempting to pass as something of substance. But the stench it gives off quickly reveals it to be the outlandish pile of trash that it is!

https:/teaattrianon.blogspot.com/2017/12/tro...

[Catherine Delors · Rating 5 out of 5]

The French Restoration (1814-1830) is an era woefully neglected by historical novelists. Fortunately, Elena Maria Vidal helps fill this void with her Madame Royale.

Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte de France, Duchesse d’Angoulême, was the eldest child of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, and later the last Queen of France, albeit for a few minutes, until her husband’s abdication on a fateful day of July 1830. For most of her life, she was known simply as Madame Royale.

Vidal gives us a gripping portrait of a woman whose personal destiny is enmeshed with the convulsions of the French Revolution and European history. In the novel, we first meet Thérèse, as we will simply call her, in her English exile, presiding over the shabby court of her uncle, King Louis XVIII. There I must admit to being prejudiced: the setting of the beginning of Vidal’s novel is exactly the same as that of the conclusion of my own Mistress of the Revolution: Hartwell House, an estate in the English countryside. I had not read Madame Royale when I wrote my own novel, and was startled by the coincidence.

The point of view of the novel is that of Thérèse, which is to say informed by her royalist conviction and deeply held Catholic faith. A lesser novelist might have been carried away by her identification with her heroine, and tempted to give us a hagiographic description of the royal family and its supporters. But here we get to see historical characters, flaws and all. We meet King Louis XVIII, who “did not like to discuss conspiracies, since he himself had been involved in so many.” True enough, Louis XVI had no more determined and dangerous enemy than this all too clever brother.

We also meet his Queen, Marie-Josephine de Savoie, no less an enemy to Marie-Antoinette in the glory of her past Versailles days, now a pathetic alcoholic, blurting out inconvenient truths in front of her husband and courtiers, and yet touched by the grace of contrition at the very end of her life. And Vidal’s description of the Comte d’Artois, later King Charles X, is equally accurate: an aging dandy of great intellectual mediocrity, whom even the ordeals of the Revolution could not turn into a statesman.

Thérèse alone lends dignity, and legitimacy, to these surviving Bourbons. Her allegiance to her uncle Louis XVIII silences those who raise questions about the fate of her brother, who may, or may not, have died in the grim embrace of the Temple prison. But this does not quell the demands of her conscience nor her the longings of her heart. She is racked by doubt and never abandons her quest for her lost brother.

We see Thérèse from the inside, and also as her contemporaries perceived her: a handsome, majestic woman, but also one whose demeanor is outwardly aloof, whose voice is hoarse and croaky, maybe from her long silence during her years at the Temple.

Some passages in the novel make an unforgettable impression, in particular Thérèse’s meeting with Jeanne Simon, the widow of the cobbler Simon, who had been appointed “tutor” to Louis XVII at the Temple. One could have expected a hateful description of the old lady, but Vidal, in addition to doing impeccable research, never lets us forget that revolutionaries too are human. In Mère Simon, she shows us an outwardly harsh, but uncannily perceptive woman. She and Thérèse, across the chasm that sets them apart, are united by their love of the lost child.

There are other highlights, in particular Thérèse’s almost nightmarish return to Versailles after the Restoration, when she finds the ghosts of her loved ones haunting the gilded palace of her childhood.

The novel is a work of utmost subtlety, a quality that is nowhere more apparent than in the evocation of Thérèse’s union to her cousin, the Duc d’Angoulême, heir to the throne. Like every marriage, this one is a mystery to outsiders, but we feel Thérèse’s ongoing struggle to breathe life and love into it. Readers looking for romance or lurid bedroom scenes will be disappointed, but I found the complexity of the couple’s relationship entrancing.

“The heart of the novel is the mystery of suffering; not the dramatic agony of martyrdom and death, but the long travail of years amid duties and disappointments, the suffering of living,” writes Elena Maria Vidal. There is no better description of the book.

[Will Ecoff · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found Madame Royale to be actually more tragic that its prequel, if thats possible, as the little princess, Marie-Therese, deals with the loss of her family, the stress of not living up to her people's expectations of her as the daughter of one of history's most celebrated charmers, Marie-Antoinette, the impending threat of revolution, and her desperate and heartbreaking search for her lost little brother. Therese's struggles and tragedy are finally given their proper place in the public eye thanks to this simply written and beautiful book.

[Theresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extremely excellent book. The material contained in the book is excellent, the style is pretty readable (provided you have a good memory for the arsenal of characters/names within the story). The only issue that I had with this book is that it is written so well that I had to take a break from reading it because you can't but help to feel at least a small measure of what Marie Antoinette's daughter must have gone through in her life.

[Ramie Wolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Madame Royale


Breathtaking and brilliant.
Sadness and joy, heart wrenching and real.
5 stars simply isn't enough. This book is a must read.

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nobody wants to talk about this side of history, but this book provides a stunning view into the world and struggles of Mme. Royal.

[Madame Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was far inferior than the first book, Trianon.