[1][2][3] Marie-Thérèse Charlotte was born at the Palace of Versailles on 19 December 1778, the first child (after eight years of her parents' marriage) and eldest daughter of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette.

[4] As a result of the horrible experience, Louis XVI banned public viewing, allowing only close family members and a handful of trusted courtiers to witness the birth of the next royal children.

Marie-Thérèse's household was headed by her governess, Princess Victoire of Rohan-Guéméné, who later had to resign due to her husband's bankruptcy and was replaced by one of the queen's closest friends, Yolande de Polastron, Duchess of Polignac.

As a young girl, Marie-Thérèse was noted to be quite attractive, with beautiful blue eyes, inheriting the good looks of her mother and maternal grandmother.

Her unpopularity with certain powerful members of the court, including the Duke of Orléans, led to the printing and distribution of scurrilous pamphlets which accused her of a range of sexual depravities as well as of spending the country into financial ruin.

While it is now generally agreed that the queen's actions did little to provoke such animosity, the damage these pamphlets inflicted upon the monarchy proved to be a catalyst for the upheaval to come.

On 5 October, a mixed cortège of mainly working women from Paris marched to Versailles, intent on acquiring food believed to be stored there, and to advance political demands.

[13] As the political situation deteriorated, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette realized that their lives were in danger, and went along with the plan of escape organised with the help of Count Axel von Fersen.

Three months later, in the evening of 3 July 1793,[16] guards entered the royal family's apartment, forcibly took away the eight-year-old Louis Charles, and entrusted him to the care of Antoine Simon, a cobbler and Temple commissioner.

When Marie Antoinette was taken to the Conciergerie one month later, in the night of 2 August, Marie-Thérèse was left in the care of her aunt Élisabeth who, in turn, was taken away on 9 May 1794 and executed the following day.

But her appeal for more books was denied by government officials, and many other requests were frequently refused, while she often had to endure listening to her brother's cries and screams whenever he was beaten.

[19]In late August 1795, Marie-Thérèse was finally told what had happened to her family, by Madame Renée de Chanterenne, her female companion.

She was liberated on 18 December 1795, on the eve of her seventeenth birthday,[20] exchanged for prominent French prisoners (Pierre Riel de Beurnonville, Jean-Baptiste Drouet, Hugues-Bernard Maret, Armand-Gaston Camus, Nicolas Marie Quinette, and Charles-Louis Huguet de Sémonville) and taken to Vienna, the capital city of her cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, and also her mother's birthplace.

[21] She later moved to Mitau, Courland (now Jelgava, Latvia), where her father's eldest surviving brother, the Count of Provence, lived as a guest of Tsar Paul I of Russia.

[22] The royal family moved to Great Britain, where they settled at Hartwell House, Buckinghamshire,[23] while her father-in-law spent most of his time in Edinburgh, where he had been given apartments at Holyrood Palace.

In March 1815, Napoleon returned to France and rapidly began to gain supporters and raised an army in the period known as the Hundred Days.

On 13 February 1820, tragedy struck when the Count of Artois' younger son, the Duke of Berry, was assassinated by the anti-Bourbon and Bonapartist sympathiser Louis Pierre Louvel, a saddler.

On 29 September 1820, she gave birth to a son, Henry, Duke of Bordeaux, the so-called "Miracle child", who later, as the Bourbon pretender to the French throne, assumed the title of Count of Chambord.

[26] Louis XVIII died on 16 September 1824, and was succeeded by his younger brother, the Count of Artois, as Charles X. Marie-Thérèse's husband was now heir to the throne, and she was addressed as Madame la Dauphine.

[27] On 4 August, in a long cortège, Marie-Thérèse left Rambouillet for a new exile with her uncle, her husband, her young nephew, as well as his mother, the Duchess of Berry, and his sister Louise Marie Thérèse d'Artois.

[28] The royal family lived in what is now 22 (then 21) Regent Terrace in Edinburgh[29][30] until 1833 when the former king chose to move to Prague as a guest of Marie-Thérèse's cousin, Emperor Francis I of Austria.

Marie-Thérèse then moved to Schloss Frohsdorf, a baroque castle just outside Vienna, where she spent her days taking walks, reading, sewing and praying.

She was buried next to her father-in-law and her husband, in the crypt of the Franciscan monastery church of Castagnavizza in Görz, then in Austria, now Kostanjevica in the Slovenian city of Nova Gorica.

Later, her nephew Henri, the Count of Chambord, last male of the senior line of the House of Bourbon; his wife, the Countess of Chambord (formerly the Archduchess Marie-Thérèse of Austria-Este, daughter of Francis IV, Duke of Modena and his wife, Princess Maria Beatrice of Savoy); and the count's only sister, Louise, Duchess of Parma, were also laid to rest in the crypt in Görz.

[31] She was accompanied by Leonardus Cornelius van der Valck, a secretary in the Dutch embassy in Paris from July 1798 to April 1799,[citation needed] and together they were known as the Dark Counts.

[33] Some German historians believe she was the real Marie-Thérèse,[32] who had swapped places with her adoptive-sister, and possible half-sister, Ernestine Lambriquet, following the revolution.

[31] Possibly as she was too traumatised to resume a role in society,[31] but also as a result of a pregnancy, after abuse by her captors, which was referred to in a letter from a family friend, at the Spanish Court, in 1795.