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blackswaneuroparedux · 4 years

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L’Histoire! Depuis mon enfance je pourrais dire que je n’ai cessé de trébucher sur elle! Nos aïeux, nos demeures, nos souvenirs, se confondent avec l’Histoire de France.**

- Isabelle, Comtesse de Paris

Isabelle Marie Amelie Louise Victoire Thérése Jeanne of Orléans and Bragança otherwise known as Isabelle, Comtesse of Paris, was a grand dame contemporary France. She was a renowned and stylish beauty, her photograph appeared in magazines throughout the world and she published biographies of ancestors who had been queens of France.

For many French royalists today her name today is still spoken with reverance. In many ways her death in 2003 at the ripe age of 92 years old was an an immeasurable loss to the French royalist cause. Her popularity was due to her character and that appeal was more favourably seen than the aloof haughtiness of its republican leaders from de Gaulle to Chirac.

When I have dinner with my French partner’s family and their circle of close knit friends her name often comes up as a way to lament the current crop of hapless Orléans descendents and how Republican France has lost its way.

I confess I didn’t know too much about her as she died around the time I was just a wee child. But living here in Paris as an adult (and foreign outsider) I have come across her ghost in late night laments over cigars and cognac as to what a wonderful and robust character she was from those who were her friends or knew her well.

In many ways such French royalists (a minority to be sure but still more than one might suppose) often believe that she would have made a worthy monarch than her hapless husband, Henri.

Indeed Isabelle was married for 68 years to the pretender to the French throne, Henri d'Orléans, the Comte de Paris ( who died in June 1999), whom she believed should have been Henri VI, King of France. She too was an Orléans, the great-great grandaughter of Louis-Philippe I, France's last king, who lost his throne in the revolution of 1848.

She was thus sometimes called the Princess of France, but, although tolerant of this indulgence, her loyalty was firmly to the royalist cause and to her husband's work.

Isabelle was born in 1911 at the Chateau d'Eu, in Normandy, where Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had been received in 1843 by Louis-Philippe and the first entente cordiale had been established. She was the eldest daughter of Pierre d'Orléans-Bragance, whose mother was the daughter of the Emperor of Brazil, and Elizabeth Dobrzenski, of an aristocratic Czech family.

She thus had a rich background, linked to the royal families of France, Portugal and Brazil, and to the old Bohemian aristocracy. All her life she cherished these connections, encouraging her own daughter to decorate her chateau of Le Lude, in the Sarthe, with a portrait of her ancestor, the Emperor Pedro II of Brazil.

Isabelle spent much of her childhood at the chateau d'Eu, and was educated by the sisters of Notre-Dame de Sion in Paris. In 1931, at the age of 19, she married her cousin Henri, who, since 1926, had been heir to the French throne.

The wedding had not been easy to arrange. By a law of 1886, those who claimed descent from a French monarch were not allowed to live in France, so the comte, who had been brought up in Morocco, Belgium and elsewhere, could not be married in France. He attempted to arrange the ceremony in Brussels but, apprehensive about royalist demonstrations there, the French persuaded the Belgians to refuse permission. In the end, the wedding took place in Palermo, Siciliy.

It was, none the less, a famous occasion. Many royal families were represented, and French royalists attended in their thousands, led by Charles Maurras and Léon Daudet of Action Francaise; it was widely reported that their cry was "Vive le Roi". The bride wore a dress by Worth, decorated with fleurs de lys.

Isabelle's famed good humour was tested by the complications of exile - for many years she and the comte stayed in Belgium, Brazil, Morocco and Spain, after sharing with relatives. The situation changed dramatically in 1950 when the government in Paris, beset by war in Indochina, repealed the 1866 law, and the comte and comtesse returned to live at Coer-Volant, a manor house in Louveciennes.

But still life had many difficulties. Isabelle's relations with her husband were often problematic, and they began to live apart. Henri was not an easy Pretender - he squandered a fortune, and not too discreetly kept a mistress. He was, after all, an Orleans as Isabelle stoically observed.

Henri was busy publishing news bulletins and negotiating with a wide range of politicians; at one point, he hoped to succeed General de Gaulle as president of France. Then he quarrelled with his eldest son and heir, and spent his money recklessly. But Isabelle never complained: "I'm sorry for my husband," she used to say. "I was never an obedient wife. I was too easily impatient." They separated in 1975; formally in 1986; but never divorced. Madame retained her dignity. When he died in 1999, Henri willed Isabelle any remaining worldly goods.

The saddest moment of her life was the death of her son François in 1960, while serving with the French army in Algeria. She said that his death was in the Orléanist tradition of serving France. Another of her sons, Thibert, died in a hunting accident in central Africa.

Isabelle was usually dressed in large hats, and wore a quadruple necklace of pearls. On special occasions, she also wore a famous sapphire and diamond tiara that had once belonged to the famous Marie-Antoinette. In addition to three volumes of memoirs, she published biographies of Marie-Amélie, the wife of Louis-Philippe I, and Marie-Antoinette.

She died in 2003 at the grand old age of 92. She was survived by nine of her 11 children, and more than 100 descendants. It has been said to me that none of her descendants have ever come close to her populist charisma, fun loving and good humour, quiet intelligence, chic style, genuine humility, and robust sense of noblesse oblige. Some have quietly withered away into bourgeois conformism, others into social obscurity, and a few morphing into spoiled Euro trash brats (the latter is well known to me from my Swiss boarding school days).

Her funeral was a cause of considerable widespread sadness. She had her faults of course but even here she was not lacking in self-awreness. She used to say, “"Cultivez vos défauts, c'est ce que vous avez de mieux." (Cultivate your faults, that’s the ebst you have). And yet even her most anti-royalist detractors noted their admiration for her down to earth good nature and easy charm. She was the nation’s favourite grandmother who stuffed your pockets with bonbons (candy) and told you how much you were loved as someone said in reflection. And that mischievous fun loving laugh, they still hear it today in some homes. As the grandmother of a friend who also was a good friend of Isabelle, Comtesse de Paris, put it, ““C’etait une grande dame....beaucoup de classe et de dignité. Elle aurait fait une bonne reine.”

**History! Since my childhood one could say that one never stopped stumbling on it! Our ancestors, our homes, our memories, merge with the History of France,

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