‘Ah!’ said the fortune teller, ‘the tennis ball of fortune! A wife yet not a mother. Always near a throne, yet doomed not to ascend it. The daughter of Kings – yet much more truly the daughter of misfortune.

‘I see before you restoration to the Country and Palace of your fathers. Again the banners of royalty wave over you, and you advance a step nearer to a crown…’

She is Marie Thérèse, daughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and this is her story.