The tale of little Armand’s unwilling joining of the Royal Family is written in the book Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, written by her first lady in waiting, Madame Campan. First, know that the want for a male son was a problem that eluded Marie Antoinette and her husband Louis XVI for many years. They famously didn’t even consummate their marriage for years, and unfortunately, Viagra was centuries away. Marie would eventually give birth to a male heir, but that would be years down the line. All this to say that during a certain day’s carriage ride, Marie almost definitely had all this on her mind.
So it might have seemed like a strange, fateful gift, in the way that the rich tend to view almost anything happening to them that they can take advantage of, when a little boy of 4 or 5 almost got run over by her carriage. Thankfully for most everybody involved, the accident did not end with the boy being turned to child jelly by horse hooves, but his life was about to get a whole lot weirder. His grandmother ran outside to check on her grandson, probably, at that point, assuming he would still be her grandson by the end of the day. This was not the case.
Instead, she was greeted by Marie Antoinette exiting her carriage and informing her and anyone else within earshot that it was actually HER child now, on account of destiny having delivered him to her. She did at least do the small favor of negotiating a parting gift for the grandmother in question, offering to pay her to adopt the child as her own. The grandmother agreed, though it’s hard to say if that was from the power of cold, hard cash combined with a cold, hard heart, or if it was just because, you know, when the Queen has decided your child is hers, there’s not really a playbook for that. You kinda just have to be like “What a blessing upon my house, that you kidnap my child! Praise be!” She did, however, seem to be just about over Jacques, who apparently constantly did annoying things like almost getting hit by a carriage, enough for her to say “Jacques is a bad boy, I hope he will stay with you!” Still, kicking a kid out of the family is a pretty harsh punishment for generally being a little stinker.