Birth of Marie Adélaïde of France
Marie Adélaïde was a French princess, the sixth child of King Louis XV and his wife Marie Leszczyńska.
As a legitimate daughter of the King, Adélaïde was known as Madame Adélaïde.
Adélaïde was born on 23rd March 1737, and was raised at the Palace of Versaille with her older sisters Louise, Henriette, Marie~Louise and her brother Louis, the Dauphin.
The Royal children were allowed to attend and participate in Court festivities, from a very early age.
Adélaïde and her sister Henriette, accompanied their father to the opera in Paris, and hunted with him five days a week.
As they grew older, she and her sisters became increasingly marginalized at a Court that fluttered around her father and his mistresses, eventually they became figures of pity and objects of fun.
In 1744, the King removed Adélaïde and Henriette from the royal nursery into their household, known as the Household of the Mesdames aînées (‘Elder Mesdames’)
In the late 1740s, when she had reached the age when princesses were typically married, there were no potential Catholic consorts of desired status available.
Adélaïde preferred to remain unmarried, rather than marry someone below the status of a monarch or an heir to a throne.
In her teens, Adélaïde fell in love with a member of the Guard, she sent him her snuffbox with the message,
“You will treasure this, soon you shall be informed from whose hand it comes.”
The guardsman informed his captain, who in turn informed the king.
The King recognized the handwriting as his daughter’s, and granted the guard an annual pension of four thousand, under the express condition that he should
“at once remove to some place far from the Court and remain there for a very long time”.
In 1761, long after she passed the age when 18th-century princesses usually wed, she was reportedly suggested to marry the newly widowed Charles II of Spain.
After she had seen his portrait, she understandably refused the match.
Adélaïde was described as an intelligent beauty.
Her appearance was described as striking, with large dark eyes.
Her personality was extremely haughty, with a dominant and ambitious character.
With Adélaïde’s strong will, she came to dominate her younger siblings.
In the last years of their father’s reign, Adélaïde and her sisters were described as ‘bitter old hags’, who spent their days gossiping and knitting in their rooms.
They seldom dressed properly, merely putting on panniers covered by a coat, when leaving their rooms.
From April 1774, Madame Adélaïde and her sisters attended to their father Louis XV on his deathbed.
They cared for him until his death from smallpox on 10th May.
After the death of Louis XV, he was succeeded by his grandson Louis-Auguste as Louis XVI.
Madame Adélaïde came to play a political role, after the succession of her nephew.
Adélaïde, however did not get on very well with the Kings wife, Queen Marie Antoinette.
At the beginning of his reign, the confidence Louis XVI felt for Madame Adélaïde sometime extended to state affairs, and he thought her intelligent enough to make her his political adviser.
He allowed her to make appointments to the Treasury, and to draw on its funds.
However, her political activity was opposed to such a degree within the court, that the king soon saw himself obliged to exclude her from state affairs.
Madame Adélaïde and her sisters were present at Versailles during the Parisian Woman’s March on Versailles on 6th October 1789.
Leaving the anguish and perils of the Revolution behind them, they left for Italy in a procession of wagons on 20th February 1791, with a large entourage.
They arrived in Rome on 16th April 1791, where the Pope gave them an official welcome with the ringing of bells.
They would stay here for about five years.
Upon the invasion of Italy by Revolutionary France in 1796, Adélaïde left Rome for Naples, where Marie Antoinette’s sister, Maria Carolina was Queen.
Queen Maria Carolina found their presence in Naples difficult:
“I have the awful torment of harboring the two old Princesses of France, with eighty persons in their retinue, and every conceivable impertinence… ”
When Naples was invaded by France in 1799, Adélaïde left for Corfu, and finally settled in Trieste.
Adélaïde died one year later, on 27th February 1800 at the age of sixty-seven.
Her body was returned to France by Louis XVIII at the time of the Bourbon Restoration and buried at the Basilica of Saint~Denis.
? Madame Adélaïde by Jean~Marc Nattier c.1756
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