I love the idea of historical figures in a modern world. It’s been seen in many movies and books, but there is something so magical about imagining a character of another era finding their way in our high tech, industrial present. I read about Marie Antoinette’s daughter, Marie Thérèse, and felt inspired by her strength. She was the only on of her 4 siblings to survive into adulthood, she was imprisoned along with her family and didn’t learn of their deaths until much later.
During her imprisonment, Marie-Thérèse was never told what had happened to her family. All she knew was that her father was dead. The following words were scratched on the wall of her room in the tower:
"Marie-Thérèse Charlotte is the most unhappy person in the world. She can obtain no news of her mother; nor be reunited to her, though she has asked it a thousand times. Live, my good mother! whom I love well, but of whom I can hear no tidings. O my father! watch over me from Heaven above. O my God! forgive those who have made my parents suffer."
She was not liberated until the age of 17. What bravery it would take to survive such a life.
I wanted to give her a modern moment, on her own today free and traveling. I pictured her waking up at the Bowery, having gin martinis for breakfast, reading the paper, taking the subway to shop in Brooklyn, and then after lunch to the Upper East Side to visit some museums. She might stay at a friend’s apartment there, climb to the roof and listen to sound of taxi cabs rushing by, watch the people walk below, and feeling the rush of freedom and independence rip off her clothes, take a breath and cry out to the world!
shot by Kimberley Gordon
Muse Jennifer Pugh
Hair by John Ruidant
Make by Colleen Runne
In December 1795, at midnight on her seventeenth birthday, Marie-Thérèse, the only surviving child of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, escaped from Paris's notorious Temple Prison. To this day many believe that the real Marie-Thérèse, traumatized following her family's brutal execution during the Reign of Terror, switched identities with an illegitimate half sister who was often mistaken for her twin. Was the real Marie-Thérèse spirited away to a remote castle to live her life as the woman called "the Dark Countess," while an imposter played her role on the political stage of Europe? Now, two hundred years later, using handwriting samples, DNA testing, and an undiscovered cache of Bourbon family letters, Nagel finally solves this mystery. She tells the remarkable story in full and draws a vivid portrait of an astonishing woman who both defined and shaped an era. Marie-Thérèse's deliberate choice of husbands determined the map of nineteenth-century Europe. Even Napoleon was in awe and called her "the only man in the family." Nagel's gripping narrative captures the events of her fascinating life from her very public birth in front of the rowdy crowds and her precocious childhood to her hideous time in prison and her later reincarnation in the public eye as a saint, and, above all, her fierce loyalty to France throughout.
