Antoine Joseph Barruel-Beauvert – Signed autograph letter to Madame Royale, 1815

  
Antoine Joseph Barruel-Beauvert — “Our last breaths will be for the Bourbons” — Long and eloquent signed autograph letter to the Duchess of Angoulême, Madame Royale — 1815.

Signed autograph letter by Antoine Joseph Barruel-Beauvert, addressed to the Duchess of Angoulême, Madame Royale, dated October 9, 1815, at 26 Rue Montholon, Paris. Written in brown ink on a folded sheet of fine laid paper.

A lengthy and remarkable petition addressed to the daughter of Louis XVI, in which the author solemnly recounts in detail his royalist commitments since the French Revolution. He fervently requests an official position, particularly the directorship of a military or civilian hospital, to provide for his family.

The august daughter of a long line of kings is the natural protector of a gentleman descended from forefathers who, for several centuries, faithfully served the monarchs who were Your Royal Highness’s ancestors. For having himself served the family of his rightful sovereign with zeal and to the utmost of his abilities, he has been spared none of the notorious proscriptions since the beginning of the Revolution.

I have the honour of appealing to Your Royal Highness with complete confidence, as one of the first to offer to bear the chains of the virtuous and magnanimous Louis XVI when he was arrested at Varennes; who did everything in his power at the Tuileries Palace, on June 20 and August 10, 1792, to assist the family of his august master; who did not hesitate, in Vendémiaire, in his capacity as an elector for the Department of Seine-et-Oise, to petition for the release of Madame Royale, then held in the Temple Tower, only to be proscribed himself; who was placed on the list of émigrés and ruined in both France and Saint-Domingue; who, after single-handedly editing the “Journal Royaliste” and likewise continuing the “Actes des Apôtres” alone, was sentenced on 18 Fructidor to deportation to the island of Cayenne, and the following day to execution by firing squad as an émigré; who was eventually arrested and spent fifty-nine months imprisoned in the Temple Tower; who, upon his release, still faced the exile to which he had been sentenced and would probably have perished in the casemates on the island of Elba, but whom the usurper’s government instead contented itself with banishing from Paris, far from his wife and children, for ten consecutive years; who, as a royalist, faced danger during the blockade of Besançon last year; and who, finally, at the beginning of the Revolution, having accepted the post of colonel of the National Guard in the town of Bagnols and taken command of 450 men, succeeded in rescuing twenty-two victims imprisoned in Avignon and condemned to face the fury of the mob.

These, Madame, are some of my claims to Your Royal Highness’s kindness and special protection.

I therefore venture to beg you, Madame, to consider my past services and my present misfortunes.

My family and I are on the verge of lacking even the bare necessities of life; I am not afraid to confide this to Your Royal Highness. I have been patient, postponing this delicate and painful disclosure for as long as I could, but the needs of my little household are growing, and winter is approaching.

My wife and my youngest son, who were honoured with an audience with His Royal Highness the Duke of Angoulême, received a promise that this sublime prince, this true hero, would deign to plead our cause with His Majesty. I have applied for the position of governor of his pages, or for a military appointment as a councillor of state; and finally, through your powerful intercession, Madame, for the Ministry of Police, which in my hands would certainly become the Ministry for the Security of France and the Royal Family. Yet the ambitious, the schemers, and even the anti-royalists seem united in depriving me of so much as the hope of a reward that would make my lot less harsh and less painful.

Unless the King occasionally departs from his practice of never employing any of his subjects unless they have been recommended to His Majesty by a minister, I risk, Madame, failing to obtain not only the directorship of a military or civilian hospital, but perhaps even a bed as a patient in one of those hospitals.

My wife, my children, and I may therefore die in the most dreadful destitution!

Yet the last beats of our hearts and our last breaths will be for the Bourbons.

With respect, I remain Your Royal Highness’s most humble and most obedient servant.

Dimensions: 20.5 × 25.7 cm.

Condition: See photographs and description for further details.
Number of pages: 3 pages.

Antoine Joseph Barruel-Beauvert was a French journalist, born on January 17, 1756, at the Château de Beauvert near Bagnols, and died on January 2, 1817, in Turin.

The Duchess of Angoulême, known as “Madame Royale,” was born on December 19, 1778, in Versailles and died on October 19, 1851, in Frohsdorf, Austria. She was the first child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

After spending her childhood at court, she became the only one of the royal children to survive the French Revolution.

Louis XVI, born Louis-Auguste of France on August 23, 1754, in Versailles, was King of France and Navarre from May 10, 1774, to September 13, 1791, and then King of the French until September 21, 1792. Subsequently known by the civil name Louis Capet, he was guillotined in Paris on January 21, 1793.

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