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Merci beaucoup to Marie-Thérèse de France, Duchesse d'Angoulême for engineering one of the worst matches in modern royal history: that of the Comte de Chambord and Maria Teresa of Modena.

Not only was Maria Teresa older than Chambord, she also suffered from gynaecological problems which rendered child-bearing difficult to well nigh impossible (depending on the source consulted), depression and was hardly the sort of person to capture a Bourbon male's attention. She was aware of these difficulties herself, since she commented to one: "Any Frenchman who is a royalist should wish for my death, since I can bear no children". Also, she was rumored to be hard of hearing, and her overbearing piety made the French court in exile dislike her. So much so, that one day when one of the ladies was to be her companion for their stroll, the girl bewailed her fate calling her queen a disagreeable old hag, and Maria Teresa with a sorrowful look, said to her: "For that I am truly sorry, my child".

Now, what I also discovered while reading up on Mgr le Comte de Chambord, was that he originally had a far different lady in mind - the only woman he reportedly ever fell in love with: Grand Duchess Elizabeth Mikhailovna (OTL duchess of Nassau). Naturally, Marie Thérèse was incensed by this, she regarded the Romanovs as parvenu, as evinced by the fact that the Bourbons snubbed the Romanovs during the 1815 summer in Paris; Alexander I bought the parting gifts of malachite jewelry for the duchesse d'Angoulême (who deemed them unsuitable) and fobbed them off to one of her femmes de chambre; not to mention that they refused to concede an armchair with arms to Alexander, only deigning to give him a stool/tabouret.

That aside, Nikolai I was all for the match; and was willing to give his permission, even waiving the prior Orthodox wedding (which had been one of the causes of the failure of Anna Pavlovna's marriage negotiations to the duc de Berri), as long as the pope would agree. Madame Royal, meanwhile wrote to the pope explaining why such a marriage was not in the Church's interests, and as we all know, the marriage never came off, with Henri marrying Maria Teresa and Elizabeth marrying the duke of Nassau and dying in childbed shortly thereafter.

However, what if the marriage had taken place - Henri gets an attractive, fertile bride, and Maria Teresa gets to go to the convent as she always wanted. How might this affect French history?
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