In February 1807, a covered carriage rolled into the small town of Hildburghausen in central Germany. When the door opened, a couple stepped out. The man appeared to be in his late thirties; the woman was somewhat younger, perhaps nearing thirty. They gave few explanations about who they were or where they had come from.
The man introduced himself as Count Vavel de Versay, though he was careful to stress that his female companion was neither his wife nor his partner of any kind. The townspeople were puzzled, but in the years that followed, the mystery only deepened. The couple settled into a modest dwelling in Hildburghausen. Over the next three years, the count offered little information about himself, and the identity of the woman was never revealed.
Most strangely of all, no one could understand why a titled aristocrat and his enigmatic companion would choose to relocate to such a remote and unremarkable region. Some wondered whether they were hiding from something, or from someone. In 1810, the pair moved into Eishausen Castle, a secluded estate near the town. There they remained in what amounted to a self-imposed exile.
They rarely left the castle grounds. On the few occasions when they did venture out, the woman was especially elusive, riding in a carriage with a veil covering her face. As the years passed and the couple remained shrouded in secrecy, the villagers of Hildburghausen and the surrounding countryside began referring to them as the “Dark Count” and the “Dark Countess,” on account of the shadowy nature of their lives. For decades, the identity of these two strangers remained a subject of local speculation.
The woman died on November 28, 1837, recorded under the name Sophie Botta. She was buried on Schur Hill near the castle, in a garden the couple had purchased several years earlier. The man, who had lived on for another eight years, died in 1845 and was laid to rest in the churchyard at Eishausen. The castle itself was torn down in 1873 after standing vacant for years.
With both of them gone, the residents of the region were left to wonder who these people had really been, and what secrets they had carried to their graves. After the count’s death, a striking revelation emerged. The man who had styled himself as a minor aristocrat was not a count at all. He was a Dutchman named Leonardus Cornelius van der Valk, who had served as a secretary at the Dutch Embassy in Paris between the summer of 1798 and the spring of 1799.
This discovery raised more questions than it answered. If he was not a nobleman but a former bureaucrat, how had he and his companion been able to purchase a castle and live there for decades without working or earning an income? The answer, many people increasingly came to believe, lay in the identity of the woman he had spent his life guarding. The theory that captured the imagination of the public was that the Dark Countess was none other than Marie Thérèse Charlotte, the daughter of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette of France.
Both of her parents had been executed by the French Revolutionary government in 1793. Marie Thérèse was born at the Palace of Versailles on December 19, 1778, the eldest of the royal couple’s three children. She was the only one to survive into adulthood. Her brothers, Louis Joseph and Louis Charles, both died of tuberculosis, though their deaths were overshadowed by the brutality of the era.
Louis Charles, in particular, may have had his end hastened by the cruel treatment he suffered at the hands of the revolutionary authorities in Paris. When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, Marie Thérèse and her parents were eventually placed under house arrest in Paris. For a time, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were allowed to remain as figureheads, but their continued secret dealings with foreign governments to intervene in France on their behalf sealed their fate. Both were put on trial, found guilty of treason, and executed in the course of 1793.
After the death of her younger brother two years later, Marie Thérèse was the last surviving member of her immediate family. By 1795, the former princess was no longer seen as a serious threat to the revolutionary government. The monarchy had been abolished, a republic had been established, and French armies had shifted from defending against the British and Austrians to conquering the low countries and setting up the Batavian Republic as a close ally. The possibility that foreign powers might use Marie Thérèse as a figurehead to restore the monarchy seemed remote.
She was allowed to leave France and travel to Vienna, where her mother’s family waited. It was here that the story took its most unusual turn. Marie Thérèse had been deeply traumatized by years of captivity. Some people came to believe that the woman who arrived in Vienna in 1795, claiming to be Marie Thérèse, was in fact her foster sister, Ernestine de Lambriard.
Ernestine was the child of royal servants who had worked at the Palace of Versailles in the 1770s and 1780s. She bore a striking resemblance to the royal children, and rumors circulated that King Louis XVI was her true father. Whatever the truth of that claim, she became a playmate of Marie Thérèse, and when her mother died in 1788, the king and queen adopted her. Ernestine had not been held captive with the royal family during the revolutionary years, but she was frequently mistaken for Marie Thérèse in the streets of Paris, so close was her likeness to the king and queen’s biological daughter.
This resemblance led many to believe that when Marie Thérèse allegedly arrived in Vienna in 1795, it was actually Ernestine de Lambriard pretending to be her. The theory held that the real Marie Thérèse, broken by the horrors she had endured, wanted only to escape from the courts and governments that would use her as a pawn in the wars raging across Europe. The woman who arrived in a carriage at Hildburghausen in 1807 and became known as the Dark Countess was, according to this theory, the French princess herself, hiding from a world that had left her soul shattered. Research by historians and amateur investigators added further fuel to the speculation.
It came to light that the Austrian court had specifically requested that Ernestine de Lambriard, Marie Thérèse’s childhood friend and companion, be allowed to travel with her to Vienna in 1795. However, at the time, it was reported that Ernestine could not be located. Some speculated that this was because she was already in Paris, preparing to assume the identity of Marie Thérèse and head to Vienna in her place. Examination of the party that traveled with Marie Thérèse from Paris to Vienna also revealed unusual anomalies.
Several members of the small group could not be identified, and some were said to have never reached Vienna. None of this proved anything, but it deepened the uncertainty surrounding the entire affair. In time, modern science offered the possibility of finally settling the mystery. In 2013, the grave of Sophie Botta, the Dark Countess, was excavated near Eishausen Castle.
Two small sections of her femur were sent to forensic laboratories in Austria and Germany for analysis. Her mitochondrial DNA was then compared with that of Prince Alexander of Saxe-Altenburg, a contemporary descendant of Queen Marie Antoinette. If the Dark Countess had been Marie Thérèse, the mitochondrial DNA would have been an exact match. The result was disappointing for those who had embraced the romantic theory.
The DNA analysis showed that the Dark Countess was not related to Marie Antoinette, and therefore could not have been Marie Thérèse. The mysterious couple who arrived in Hildburghausen in 1807 and lived there in seclusion for more than thirty years were, in all likelihood, exactly what they had always appeared to be: an independently wealthy pair who simply wanted to live a quiet, reclusive life in a castle in rural Germany.