1784, cont'd.
Paris sees the departure of the Comte and Comtesse du Nord (better known as Tsarevich Paul and his wife, Natalia Alexeïevna), who arrive on the French leg of their European tour which included a progress through Poland, Germany, and now France and then Italy, before returning to Russia. During this visit, the French queen’s last child is born, and while the Russian crown princely couple can’t stand as godparents to the child (in spite of Marie Antoinette having been close to the princesses of Hesse-Darmstadt as a girl), it is considered an open secret who she was given the name of Pauline in honor of.
The Comte du Nord, is enthralled with the royal children, and even goes so far to assure the five year old Madame Royal that he would be happy to host her presence in his realms.
A wit at the Tuileries does remark however, that ‘if the Russians come bearing the title of ‘du Nord’, may God help us for the Swedes’.
But, in spite of wagging tongues about the ‘unhandsomeness’ of the tsarevich (an attack of typhoid left him as the none too appealing-looking figure often portrayed in portraits with a snub-nose), the visit comes off as a resounding success, and they depart into Italy, where Savoy is their first stop.
It is at the court of Turin that the tsarevich and his wife are met by the King and Queen of Sardinia, the Princess of Piedmont (the prince is sick in bed for most of the visit, and although he goes hunting once or twice with the Russian party at Stupinigi, he doesn’t feature much in the account of the trip, the later published journal of one of Natalia’s ladies-in-waiting, Princess Ekaterina Strogonova. But it should also be noted that Princess Strogonova becomes the object of the king and queen’s younger son, Maurizio Maria, duke of Monferrato (b.1762).
Princess Strogonova, née Trubetskoi is divorced from her husband, Count Alexander Strogonov (who’s attached to the tsarevich’s suite) since 1779, but clearly holds some allure for the duke of Monferrato as she later gives birth to a son named Pavel Mavrikovich Trubetskoi on her way back to Russia.
The court that receives the Russian party is celebrating the proxy marriage of the Princess Carolina Antonietta of Savoy (b. 1764) to German margrave, Ludwig Georg II of Baden-Baden (b.1757), who will be escorted to Germany by her brother, Monferrato, in the spring.
Ludwig Georg II is the only surviving son of the late margrave of Baden-Baden (Ludwig Georg I (brother-in-law to the duc d’Orléans), born of his second marriage to Maria Anna of Bavaria (sister to the queen of England and the dowager queen of Poland). The production of a surviving heir to the Baden-Baden margraviate meant that the plans that had been on the table for the marriage of Ludwig Georg’s half-sister, Elisabeth Viktoria (b.1727), to the younger brother of her cousin in Baden-Durlach, were scrapped. Instead, a year after her brother’s birth, she married (for love) the Bohemian count, Michael Wenzel von Althann (b.1743). Now while the marriage contract stated that Elisabeth would pass her Schwarzenberg inheritance from her mother to any children, she and Michael’s only child died after a week of gasping for breath.
Thus, the dubious legality of Elisabeth nominating her half-brother and his children as her heirs is up in the air. But considering that his cousins are the Bavarian elector, the future king of England, the king of Poland-elector of Saxony and several princes du sang at the French court (like the duc d’Orléans, the duc d’Enghien and the duchesse de Bourbon), nobody is going to be questioning it at the moment.
Parma has been turning into a whirling dynamo of activity since the arrival of their Austrian duchess in 1768. It is common knowledge that Ferdinando, duke of Parma (cousin to both the kings of France, Spain and Naples) is ruled by his wife, Maria Carolina. However, the marriage is far from harmonious, what with the spouses living largely apart, coming together only for the procreation of children.
This is from both sides, since after their wedding night, Carolina commented that the duke ‘sweats like a pig’ whilst the duke’s response was that she ‘sleeps like the dead’.
Nevertheless, Carolina has been pregnant enough times to fill a football team, and at the moment all eyes are on the young, handsome heir to the duchy, Francesco Filippo Antonio Emanuele ‘Toto’ (b.1772). His older sister, Maria Teresa Sofia ‘Figchen’ (b.1769) is already being sought by the king of France and the king of Poland as a match for their joint cousin, Ludwig, Comte de Saxe-Lausitz (b.1766), eldest son of Prince Xavier.
However, Carolina, on the other hand, believes her daughter can do a whole lot better than the son of a morganatic marriage. True, her husband is pushing for a double marriage between Toto and his sister with the Prince de los Asturias’ son and daughter, Carlos Clemente and Maria Amelia. And Carolina is on board with that idea, or at least, half on board with it. She envisions a French match for her son, but is not averse to the idea of her daughter becoming a queen.
But while she’s negotiating the marriages of her eldest two children, Carolina is doing a better job of running the duchy than her husband. Carolina has been entitled to a seat on the Council of State since the birth of her son (according to the terms of her marriage contract), and the appearance of his wife at these meetings suddenly terminated the duke’s attendance of them. Ferdinando instead spends his time hunting and shagging his mistress, the Contessa della Regina.
Thus, in a way, by default, Carolina ends up making and breaking Parmese policy. In fact, one incident records her assembling the Council of State for an emergency during an illness of the duke – not in the ducal palace at Colorno, as would be expected, but rather at her “private” home at Sala Baganza. And yet, surprisingly enough, despite the fact that Carolina dominates her husband, and her husband prefers other women – prettier (for one), more voluptuous for another – the couple seem to make a good pairing.
Although not much has been written on Carolina’s life in Parma, a comment used by many biographers is that she found her husband “immature” (a description from one of her letters). True, Ferdinando was six-years-old when his mother died and became duke of Parma at the age of fourteen, being placed in political leading strings by first France and then Spain, but he is also insolent, indolent and complicated.
However, in addition to Josef’s waspish letters about his sisters – the only ones he spares usually being Josefa in Naples and Antoinette in France – another contemporary (but not necessarily unbiased) account comes from “tattle-tale” Mimi. She wrote to her mother in 1775 during her Italian tour with her husband and daughter, that Carolina ‘was less gay than formerly, and also, has lost much of what beauty she had’.
While having eleven children would certainly cause a woman to be less gay and lose much beauty, the fact of the matter, is that Mimi’s horror at not only Carolina’s provincialization from being an Austrian archduchess to being a sort of mater populae, going from powders and paints, silks and brocades, gleaming with jewels as if armour-plated, to this sort of countrified way of dress, and being proud of it, doing her own shopping in the market and mingling with the common women there.
And while the Parmese aristocracy don’t take too kindly to their duchess’ domineering attitude – after all, barely had she got a seat on the State Council than she sent the French employed Du Tillot and the Spaniard Del Llano packing, reshuffling the cabinet by appointing Parmese loyal to her and her husband (who essentially seemed to become a mere cipher on state documents) – the non-aristocracy seem to adore her, calling her by names of ‘La Signora’ (the lady) or ‘La Mata’ (the mother).
Likewise, in Mimi’s complaint of Carolina being ‘less discriminating’ there is a grain of truth. Carolina is the woman responsible for ending the ducal family’s isolation from the public by throwing open the gala parties (a ball on Tuesdays and a banquet on Saturdays) at the Palazzo Ducale and the Palazzo della Pilotta to commoners and aristocrats alike. Something the masses love her for and the aristocracy despise.
Another step she has taken is following the example of Madame de Maintenon in France in the previous century, and her cousin in Baden-Baden (and it will be copied after a fashion in her sisters’ kingdoms of Naples and Poland, as well as far afield as St. Petersburg), is to take an interest in the education of young girls. Carolina (alongside her sisters) was put through a rigorous education at Vienna that was far more than the knitting and netting purses that George III’s daughters are being given in London (since to ‘educate a woman is to place an axe in the hands of a madman’ as one English gentleman puts it). At Carolina’s behest, a curriculum is drawn up consisting of teaching reading, writing, Latin, foreign languages, history, geography, land surveying, military architecture, mathematics, music, dancing and gymnastics, as well as religion, to children.
But the school – La Scuola Duchessina – has another trick up its sleeve – half of the students are to be drawn from the poorer classes (who receive their education free), whilst the other half is to be made up of students from the aristocracy and gentry (who will of course be able to, and expected to pay).
And slowly, the Caroline Schools as they are known, spread from the campus at Parma, to another at Piacenza, then others at Sala Baganza, Pianore and Guastalla, before spreading into the neighboring Republicca de Lucca, the duchy of Milan and the grand duchy of Tuscany.
Likewise, Carolina has set up a hospital in the former abbey of San Sepolcro at Piacenza for the poor and homeless of the streets, that she supports out of her own allowance. The statue of Saint Zenaida erected in front of the convent in the 19th century has the duchess’ face. Nowadays, San Sepolcro is famous as a teaching hospital, but back then it set a new standard for hospitals and the care of patients.
Despite her politicking (which she engaged in, to the fury of her mother and brother and the Spanish king) one of Carolina’s lasting legacies is that she fought for the independence of Parma from Austrian, French and Spanish domination. She did not see Parma as being merely exchangeable with some or other piece of land elsewhere for some poor disenfranchised second or third son. True, her methods were not necessarily conventional, and the French king often referred to her in conversations to ‘the queen’s devilish sister’ and even compared her to Messalina, but she could safely say, that despite despising her husband, despite being jealous of the fact that she was relegated to a mere duchy in Italy while sisters both older and younger saw royal crowns placed on their heads, that she did what she did (although not always visibly) for the good of Parma, not Austria, nor Spain nor France.