Ernestine Lambriquet

She was born at Versailles as the daughter of Jacque Lambriquet (d. 1794) and Marie-Philippine Noiret (d. 1788). Her father began his career at court as a servant to the Comte de Provence. Her mother was a chambermaid at the Palace of Versailles.

She was said to have a physical resemblance to Louis XVI and to his daughter Marie Thérèse of France, and because of this, she has sometimes been speculated to be the secret illegitimate daughter of the king.[1] She was the second eldest of her parents' four children, but she was the only one of her siblings to be adopted by the royal family. There is, however, nothing to indicate that she was the biological daughter of the king, a rumour which occurred merely because of her physical resemblance to Marie Thérèse.[1]

When she was a small child, she was chosen by the queen to be the playmate and daily companion of Princess Marie Thérèse, and spend her days with Marie Thérèse from their early childhood onward, although she returned home to her biological family at night.[1] To informally allow a royal child a common playmate in this way was not an uncommon custom in early modern Europe, and Marie Antoinette considered it good for Marie Thérèse, since her daughter was known to be of a very proud disposition, in need of humility.[1]

Marie Thérèse of France with Ernestine Lambriquet at Petit Trianon (c. 1789)

Having been an intimate of the royal family for years, she was formally adopted by the royal couple on 9 November 1788, after the death of her mother, and awarded a pension of 12,000 livres by the king.[1] Marie Antoinette called her "Ernestine" from a character in a novel by Marie Jeanne Riccoboni.[1]

She slept in the same room as Marie Thérèse, dressed the same way, ate the same food, was educated with her by the royal governesses and treated the same way materially.[1] The royal couple did not merely allow Ernestine to share Marie Thérèse's things, but are noted to have paid high bills for Ernestine's personal expenses, such when Ernestine needed extra lessons in Italian and geography.[1] Marie Antoinette instructed the royal governesses to treat Ernestine and Marie Thérèse the same way in private, and made sure that the two girls took turns waiting upon each other as Marie Thérèse would have done with a biological sister, since Marie Thérèse was proud and Marie Antoinette thought it would be a lesson in humility to have a sister whom she was expected to treat as an equal.[1] The adoption was however purely a private matter: Ernestine was not formally given the rank of royal princess, or treated as a royal princess in public.[1] She was known at court simply as "the girl who was always in the company of Marie Thérèse".[1] This was in fact not an uncommon thing in Europe in this time period, when royal children were sometimes given foster siblings as playmates, which were in no way acknowledged in public life.

The royal couple adopted three other children: "Armand" Francois-Michel Gagné, an orphan adopted along with his three older siblings in 1776; Jean Amilcar, a Senegalese slave boy given to the queen as a present by Chevalier de Boufflers in 1787, whom she freed and placed in a pension; and the orphan "Zoe" Jeanne Louise Victoire, daughter of an usher in service of the king, who was adopted along with her two older sisters after the death of her parents in 1790, and chosen to be the playmate of the Dauphin just as Ernestine had been the playmate of Marie Thérèse.[2] Among the eight adopted children, however, only three (Ernestine, Armand and Zoe) actually lived with the royal family, and the rest simply lived on the queen's expense.[2] Armand left the royal family after the outbreak of the revolution because of his republican sympathies, and Zoe was sent away to her sisters in a convent boarding school before the Flight to Varennes.[2]

During the French Revolution, Ernestine accompanied the royal family from Versailles to the Tuileries in Paris in 1789. Her biological father and her two biological siblings also accompanied the royal court to Paris, but she lived with the royal family and her biological family were still members of staff. On 4 April 1790, Ernestine and Marie Thérèse went to their Confirmation together at the Saint Germain-l'Auxerrois in Paris, which was a public event.[1]

Ernestine did not accompany the royal family on the Flight to Varennes in June 1791; she was sent to her biological father in the country, and returned to the Tuileries when the flight failed and the royal family was brought back to Paris.[1]

On the 10 August 1792, Marie Antoinette ordered the royal sub-governess Renée Suzanne de Soucy to bring Ernestine to safety.[1] Passing the Carousel square in front of the palace, de Soucy left Lambriquet to fetch a coach. When she was away, a rebel mistook Ernestine for Marie Thérèse and threw the corpse of a member of the Swiss Guard in front of her feet, but a shop-keeper defended her, also believing she was Marie Thérèse.[1]

During the reign of Maximilien Robespierre, she was taken care of by the family of de Soucy's father, the Mackau family.[1] Her biological father, Jacques Lambriquet, was arrested in March and executed in 9 July 1794 for his connection to Louis XVI.

On September 2nd, 1796, Ernestine Lambriquet was released from legal guardianship and declared competent to manage her own affairs.[1]

Ernestine Lambriquet, under the name of Marie Philippine Lambriquet, married a widower called Jean-Charles-Germain Prempain, a proprietor in Paris on 7 December 1810.

She died on 30 December 1813, in Saint Denis Arrondissement, Paris, aged 35. The death certificate records her parents as Jacques Lambriquet and Marie Philippine Noirot. She had no children.

DNA analysis conducted in 2013[3] has disproved the conjecture that the Dark Countess was the true Princess Marie-Thérèse Charlotte of France.

The remains of the Dark Countess were exhumed, and bone fragments were analyzed at independent laboratories in Innsbruck, Austria and Freiburg, Germany. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome was sequenced. MtDNA is solely maternally inherited (mother to child) and there are numerous copies of the mtDNA genome in each human cell, making this DNA type useful for the analysis of ancient tissue samples.

Maternal genealogical lines showing relationship between Marie Therese Charlotte (daughter of Marie Antoinette) and Alexander, Prince of Saxe-Gessaphe

Princess Marie Thérèse (the presumed identity of the Dark Countess) and the living reference, Alexander, Prince of Saxe-Gessaphe, a maternal descendant of Marie Antoinette’s sister, Archduchess Maria Carolina of Austria, were compared. Although separated by six generations, the maternal inheritance of mtDNA means that there is no recombination at each generation; hence it remains the same. If the Dark Countess was truly Marie-Thérèse, the bone fragments would have had the same mtDNA profile as Alexander (whose maternal line crosses with Marie Antoinette’s mother, Maria Theresa of Austria).

However, the analysis indicated that was not the case. The mtDNA profile from the Dark Countess differed significantly from Prince Alexander. Furthermore, the mtDNA of Marie Thérèse’s brother (Louis-Charles) determined in a previous study[4] matched that of Prince Alexander, as expected, but differed from the Dark Countess.