Historical story

Rosalie Lamorliére, Marie Antoinette's Last Maid

Tony Robert-Fleury's painting entitled "Marie Antoinette on the morning of her execution". The girl on the right is Rosalie Lamorliére imagined by the author

The name Rosalie Lamorliére certainly says little to most, and is probably known only by those who, as a child, like me, did not miss an episode of the Japanese cartoon Lady Oscar , which while romanticizing it, tells the historical period between the end of the reign of Louis XV and the outbreak of the French Revolution.

Rosalie is one of the main protagonists of the lucky anime: she good, sweet and generous, raised in the slums of Paris, after becoming close friends with Oscar, the girl will discover that she is noble and eventually she will marry a Jacobin journalist.

Well, the character is invented, but it is inspired by a woman who really lived and who was really, as also happens in the cartoon, the last maid by Marie Antoinette , in the sense that she assisted the now ex queen of France during her imprisonment at the Conciergerie , before the gallows.

The Rosalie of “Lady Oscar”

Very few biographical information about the girl:the “real” Rosalie Lamorliére (1768-1848), she was surely the daughter of a shoemaker, she had six brothers and had a daughter whose father remained unknown.

Until her death on February 2, 1848 in Paris, the woman was paid a pension by Maria Teresa Carlotta, eldest daughter of Marie Antoinette, who never wanted to meet her.

The meager information received on Rosalie's account refers to a girl who was kind and caring towards the illustrious prisoner, to whom she prepared food, kept her clothes in order, also helping her to put them on and who, above all, always tried to comfort in every way .

Lamorliére's only portrait has been lost, so we don't know anything about her outward appearance; the nineteenth-century painter Tony Robert-Fleury he imagines and paints her young, pretty and modestly dressed, in the painting entitled Marie Antoinette on the morning of her execution .