Madame Royale Cared for by Doctor Brunier, January 24, 1793

Mallet here depicts a poignant scene of the incarceration of the royal family during the Terror. The king, Louis XVI had been guillotined 3 days earlier. The doctor who took care of the children of the royal family, Pierre Edouard Brunier, visits the prison to care for the swollen foot of Marie-Thérèse, called ‘Madame Royale.’ The fourteen-year-old girl sits at the center, clad in white, with a portrait miniature of her father hanging from a chain around her neck. Just alongside sits her mother, the Austrian-born queen, Marie-Antoinette, who would be executed later that year. The cold gray stone of the walls and ceiling and the simple wooden furniture stand in stark contrast to the sumptuous furnishings of Versailles that the family had been forced to leave behind.