Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (43 page)

According to the comtesse de Boigne, “Whether or not [Fersen’s lost looks due to his illness in America] was the reason, those who knew her did not doubt that she now yielded to the passion of M. de Fersen. He indemnified her sacrifice by a boundless devotion and by an affection that was as deep as it was respectful and discreet. He breathed only for her and all his habits of life were calculated to compromise her as little as possible.”

This may be the only surviving account to boldly confirm consummation. The comtesse de Boigne’s connection to the court, however, is only hearsay; her aunt was a lady-in-waiting to the king’s maiden aunt, the tart-tongued princesse Adélaïde, who had not only moved out of Versailles into the Château de Bellevue in 1774, but detested Marie Antoinette. Yet the comtesse’s mention of the event in her memoirs in 1783 indicates that people were discussing it—discreet as the relationship was alleged to have been.

However, in Fersen’s own words that summer, on July 31, barely a month after his return to France, he wrote to Sophie, “No matter how much pleasure I would have in seeing you again I cannot leave Paris without regret. You will find this very natural when I tell you the reason. I will tell you because I don’t want to hide anything from you.” And yet the count does not tell his sister “the reason,” at least not in this letter.

To his father, the count wrote asking for money to remain in Paris. “Your consent is the only thing that could make me happy forever.
There are a thousand reasons for this which I dare not put down on paper.”

Fifteen years after the fact, Fersen mentioned the date of July 15, 1783, in his
Journal intime
, writing, “I remember this day…. I went
chez Elle
for the first time.”
Chez Elle
(meaning “her house/home/place”) was the count’s code phrase for spending the night with a lover. Does the reference to July 15, 1783, give a date certain in Axel von Fersen’s words to the first time he and Marie Antoinette made love?

Unfortunately, there’s no way to be certain that “
chez Elle
” is a euphemism for sex in this context. It could simply mean that Fersen went to see the queen to discuss his potential acquisition of the Royal Suédois. But if that were the case, why not say so? The location of their meeting is not mentioned either, but was likely le Petit Trianon, Marie Antoinette’s favorite place for whiling away the sultry summer days. Yet he had visited both the Château of Versailles and the Petit Trianon countless times, so why did the July 15 meeting merit a coded mention?

With Axel’s father wary of his son’s reasons for lingering around Versailles, the count devised a subterfuge—“to marry an heiress, Mlle. Necker, with her Swiss millions,” he told the old statesman. Fortunately (and unbeknownst to the elder Fersen), Germaine Necker had her eye on fellow Swede Baron Erik Magnus Staël von Holstein. In the letter to Sophie Piper of July 31, only two weeks after he wrote of his rendezvous “
chez Elle
,” Axel confided the truth to his sister. “I have determined never to marry. It would be unnatural…. I cannot belong to the one woman to whom I should like to belong, and who loves me, so I will not belong to anyone.”

The timing of this determination is certainly noteworthy.

Regardless of whether they believe there was a sexual relationship between Fersen and Marie Antoinette, not a single historian disputes the fact that Marie Antoinette was the woman referred to in this letter. And with all the opportunities open to him, the handsome and highly eligible Fersen, only twenty-seven years old at the time, kept his pledge to remain a bachelor.

As word would eventually reach Axel the elder in Sweden that his son had abandoned his quest for a wealthy bride, the count nipped
the matter in the bud himself, writing to his father, “Unless marriage vastly increases my own wealth, it’s hardly worth the trouble, with all its burdens, embarrassments, and deprivations.”

Marie Antoinette worked diligently to obtain Fersen the colonelcy of the Royal Suédois. It came at a hefty price tag—a hundred thousand livres—and the count did not personally have the funds to afford it. Nor would his father bankroll the extravagance, accusing Axel of frivolity. The regiment would never earn back what it cost to buy it. The old senator viewed the Royal Suédois as a vanity purchase that would bankrupt the family at the expense of Axel’s younger siblings, who had yet to make their way in the world and who deserved the same financial support that Axel had received as a youth. And he had more than a sneaking suspicion as to why his son wanted to put down roots in France.

Enduring the same sort of scolding from his father that Marie Antoinette had received from her late mother on countless occasions, Axel reminded the elder statesman that he had in fact quit the pleasures of the French capital for the hardships of the North American winter and had spent three years with Rochambeau. The military was his life.

In the end, in addition to the open purse of Marie Antoinette, it was the king of Sweden, Gustavus III, who supported his countryman’s bid for the colonelcy of the Royal Suédois. In a strong character reference to Louis XVI, his fellow monarch wrote that Fersen had “served with general approval in your armies in America.” Marie Antoinette wrote a similar recommendation, mentioning that Fersen had “greatly distinguished himself in the American War.” A soldier in an age when soldiering was the manly thing to do and the most glamorous profession in the world, Fersen must have seemed exotic to Marie Antoinette when she was surrounded all day by idle courtiers. And she was wedded to an overweight man who (and wisely, for the most part) did not relish going to war, but his reluctance to commit to combat wasn’t considered cool at the time. In an era of perpetual martial conflict, Louis had never even visited the École Militaire, had closed the military training camp at Compiègne (where he preferred to hunt instead), and never reviewed his troops or staged practice drills.

Axel’s monarch demanded a quid pro quo for his support. He had never made the Grand Tour, and despite the fact that Gustavus was a reigning sovereign, he decided to leave his throne in the hands of a regent and visit the world. He asked (which meant commanded) Fersen to accompany him as his aide-de-camp.

The count left France on September 20. During the king’s Grand Tour, much of Fersen’s responsibilities fell into the realm of damage control, keeping his boss out of the equivalent of gay bars and his name out of the press. Gustavus was very jealous of any free time his ADC spent out of his company, and Fersen found himself stealing precious moments when he could just to write to Marie Antoinette. He also corresponded with a breeder in Sweden about getting a dog for “Joséphine” (a code name for the queen that turns up several times in his letters). “Not a small dog,” it was to be like his own hound, Odin. But the process was taking much longer than anticipated, and finally, to light a fire under the breeder, Fersen admitted that it was to be a gift for the queen of France.

Marie Antoinette may have chiefly occupied his thoughts, but she was not the sole obsession of his loins. The count also snagged enough time for romantic dalliances. As with the proverbial sailor, there was a girl in practically every port. He had a fling with Emily Cowper in Florence and enjoyed nookie in Naples with Lady Elizabeth Foster, the best friend of one of Marie Antoinette’s acquaintances, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. But when things with Bess Foster began to get too serious, Fersen backed off. In his letter book, he noted one he wrote to Bess in which “I told her everything,” those words heavily underlined in his own hand. There is such emphasis on the underscoring that one is tempted to wonder exactly what he revealed. Fersen and Lady Elizabeth Foster remained close friends for the rest of their lives, and after Marie Antoinette’s execution, the queen was the chief topic of their conversation.

Marie Antoinette’s pregnancy of 1783 tragically ended in a miscarriage on November 2, her twenty-eighth birthday. It took her ten days to recover her health. But she and Louis were intent on trying for a second son, conceding that with each passing year the dauphin’s health was not improving. Whatever love the queen bore for Axel von Fersen, she continued to have regular marital relations.

Paris (and Versailles) were destinations on Gustavus’s Grand Tour, and Axel was briefly reunited with Marie Antoinette in the early summer of 1784. He brought her the Swedish hound, which she named Odin, in honor of his own dog.

On August 18, Marie Antoinette reported the confirmation of a new pregnancy; she believed herself two months gone at the time. Rumors swirled even then, which gives credence to the theory that some people believed there was a sexual element to their attachment, and throughout the years historians have debated whether the child could have been Fersen’s. If they were indeed lovers, it is
theoretically
possible for the count to have fathered the boy, who was born on March 27, 1785, and made duc de Normandie, but it is not likely. Little Louis Charles’s paternity was never doubted by the king, and even Marie Antoinette’s fiercest detractors concurred that her pregnancy coincided with her husband’s regular conjugal visits. Although the little duc did not resemble his portly father (nor, for that matter, was he saddled with his mother’s unfortunate Hapsburg jaw and bulging eyes), the beautiful boy looked like the slenderer members of the Bourbon family, including Louis XV in his childhood.

Additionally, if Fersen and the queen were sleeping together during the summer of 1784, he surely would have been careful, so that there would have been no doubts as to the legitimacy of a future heir, should she become pregnant and bear a boy. The count was an experienced lover, well versed in how to avoid pregnancies. He loved the queen, and the last thing he wanted was to compromise her.

After their charming visit to Versailles, Fersen and Gustavus resumed their Grand Tour. Marie Antoinette turned thirty on November 2, 1785, the age she had mocked when, as the newly minted eighteen-year-old queen of France, she wondered why anyone over thirty dared to show their face at court. She had become demoralized over the scandal regarding the “Affair of the Diamond Necklace,” in which a female con artist descended from the Valois dynasty claimed that the queen intended to purchase an ostentatious bauble for 1.6 million livres, using the Cardinal de Rohan (whom Marie Antoinette had detested all her life) as an intermediary. Unfortunately, people believed that the covetous queen with a taste for expensive jewelry and no understanding of economy had swindled the court jewelers
out of their investment, fooled the cardinal, and taken advantage of poor, tragic comtesse Jeanne de Lamotte-Valois, the impoverished aristocrat who had dared to befriend her. (Jeanne later went so far as to claim that they were lovers.)

Not a word of it was true. Before the scandal broke, Marie Antoinette had never even heard of the so-called comtesse, so she had certainly never met Madame de Lamotte-Valois, let alone bedded her! The theft of the necklace was the brainchild of Jeanne, her husband, and Jeanne’s lover. The comtesse was also sleeping with the cardinal, who was their arch-dupe; they tricked him into fronting the money for the necklace, which they then pocketed and dismantled, selling the loose stones in London.

And yet, even though she was sentenced to be flogged, branded, and imprisoned (the cardinal was ultimately exonerated), Jeanne de Lamotte-Valois was a martyr in the eyes of the people, while their queen was tarred as a spendthrift foreign whore. Mortally wounded by the trial verdict, which came at a time when she was enduring her most difficult pregnancy, Marie Antoinette retreated like a wounded lioness to le Petit Trianon, sorely in need of the comfort of genuine friends.

Fersen had returned to France in 1785. Witness to the character assassinations the queen had endured during the investigations regarding the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, he wrote to his sister Sophie, “She is most unhappy, and her courage, which is admirable beyond compare, makes her yet more attractive. My only trouble is that I cannot compensate her for her sufferings and that I shall never make her as happy as she deserves.” The more unfortunate Marie Antoinette became, the more she was forsaken.

When he was in France, the count visited le Petit Trianon unattended three to four times a week. He and the queen snatched what fleeting hours they could, giving rise to gossip, as would the arrival of any handsome, unchaperoned caller. A campaign of concealment was undertaken. Count von Fersen kept a meticulous diary, but he never indicated why he went to the palace, nor who had summoned him.

Fersen was in England in 1786, where he was nicknamed “the Picture” for his striking looks. By 1787, he was back on French soil.
Informally, he was Marie Antoinette’s admirer; officially, he was the emissary of the Swedish sovereign, couriering correspondence between Gustavus III’s court and the Bourbons. In time, Fersen’s role as Gustavus’s liaison would prove invaluable. The count continued to travel, notching numerous voyages between France and Sweden, and his letter book dutifully noted his absences from “Joséphine.”

In the spring of 1788, Fersen returned to his homeland to participate in Gustavus’s Finnish campaign against Russia. But by November 6, four days after Marie Antoinette’s thirty-third birthday, he was back in Paris. Twenty-two letters mark the six-month absence from her. In the period that followed, Fersen most certainly visited Versailles, because he meticulously recorded the tips he gave to the servants in his account books.

But by this time the nature of his rendezvous was more likely political than sexual. Much had changed since the idyllic days of 1783. The May 31, 1786, verdict in the trial of the Diamond Necklace Affair had sent Marie Antoinette into paroxysms of rage, followed by a profound depression. The political landscape of France had changed as well. No one was happy with the status quo. The clergy and nobility were angry about the progressive measures Louis’ ministers had proposed, because it meant they would have to pay taxes. The bourgeoisie and the poor, having been inspired by the success of the American Revolution, decided it was time for them to have a voice in their governance. The common denominator for everything was their scapegoat: the outsider; the foreign-born queen,
l’Autrichienne
[sometimes spelled
l’Autruchienne
], a pun on “the Austrian woman” and the word for a female dog. Marie Antoinette was even blamed for acts of nature such as crop failure and bad harvests.