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On Sunday 26 March 1854, around 4:00 p.m, Charles left the Riserva Palace to take a walk on the streets of Parma, as he used to do every afternoon. He was accompanied only by an aide-de-camp, Count Bacinetti. During his walk, he saw his wife, Duchess Louise, who was sitting in a carriage, listening to an open-air concert in a square of Parma. They waved to each other politely.

At 5:45 the Duke was returning to his palace; while he was passing by the Church of Santa Lucia, he stopped for a moment to ask about the identity of a pretty girl whom he had just seen in an upper window across the street. He was making the inquiry and saluting two soldiers, who walked by him, when he was attacked from behind by two men who were trailing him.

One of them knocked the Duke violently and stabbed him deep in the stomach with a triangular blade. Everything happened so fast that Charles initially did not realize what had just transpired and seconds later gasping he said, “My God, I’m done for. They have stabbed me”. In the confusion, the two assailants escaped running in opposite directions and mixing with the crowd.

The wounded Duke fell on the ground in a pool of blood with the blade still in his stomach. He was lifted up, and held by his arms and legs. He was carried back to the palace. He made no complaints as his doctors treated his wound, which was deep. He asked if they thought his life was in danger.

They lied assuring him that it was not and he passed out. In moments of lucidity, the Duke, realizing the seriousness of his condition repeated: “I am preparing myself for a long journey”. The Duke received the last rites and was able to see his wife and their children for a last time. After atrocious suffering, which he endured bravely, he died the following evening, March 27 at 5:30 p.m. He was thirty-one years old.

Charles’s body was buried in the Cappella della Macchia near Viareggio. His heart was placed in an urn in the crypt of the Sanctuary of Santa Maria della Steccata in Parma.

When her husband was murdered Louise Marie Thèrésa served as regent for their young son, the new duke, Robert I. Like the other rulers of the Central Italian states, she and her son were ousted during the Franco-Austrian War of 1859, and they retired to Austrian protection in Venice.

Various schemes following the war, either for her and her son’s restoration in Parma, or territorial swaps which might leave them ruling over Tuscany, Modena, or the Romagna, came to nothing, as the whole of central Italy was annexed by Piedmont in March 1860. Louise Marie Thèrésa lived out the remainder of her life in exile.

Death

Louise died on February 1, 1864, aged 44, in the Palazzo Giustinian in Venice. She was buried in her grandfather Charles X’s crypt at the Franciscan monastery Kostanjevica in Görz, Austria (now Nova Gorica, Slovenia).

Other members of the French Royal Family buried there include her brother Henri, Count of Chambord, her aunt Marie Thérèse of France, and her uncle Louis Antoine, Duke of Angoulême.

Louise Marie Thèrésa had been described at that time as a pretty blonde, fair complexioned with golden hair and blue eyes, but not very tall. She was reserved, cold, insensitive and lacked charm.

Her son, Robert I, Duke of Parma, (July 9, 1848 – November 16, 1907): married his cousin Princess Maria Pia of Bourbon-Two Sicilies on April 5, 1869. She was the daughter of King Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies and his wife, Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria, the eldest daughter of Archduke Charles, Duke of Teschen and Princess Henrietta of Nassau-Weilburg.

Her paternal grandparents were Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor and Maria Luisa of Spain. Her maternal grandparents were Friedrich Wilhelm of Nassau-Weilburg and his wife Burgravine Louise Isabelle of Kirchberg.

Robert I, Duke of Parma, and Princess Maria Pia of Bourbon-Two Sicilies had twelve children.

Duke Robert remarried Infanta Maria Antónia of Portugal on October 1884, daughter of the deposed King Miguel I of Portugal and his wife, Adelaide of Löwenstein-Wertheim-Rosenberg. Maria Antonia was his second cousin once removed, as her paternal grandmother (Charlotte of Spain) and Robert’s paternal great-grandmother (Infanta Maria Luisa of Spain) were siblings, both being children of Carlos IV of Spain and Maria Luisa of Parma.

Duke Robert and Infanta Maria Antónia of Portugal also had twelve children.

Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma was the seventeenth child of Robert I, Duke of Parma, and his second wife, Infanta Maria Antonia of Portugal, and thus a granddaughter of Princess Louise Marie Thèrésa d’Artois, Duchess of Parma.

Princess Zita married the then Archduke Charles of Austria in 1911. Charles became heir presumptive to Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary in 1914 after the assassination of his uncle Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and acceded to the throne in 1916 after the elderly emperor’s death.