Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (44 page)

Many of the poorer classes had no grasp of the lofty concepts of revolution; their discontent and disillusion were taken advantage of—fired up by pamphlets (mostly lampooning Marie Antoinette) that were financed from the deep pockets of the king’s own cousin, the duc d’Orléans. Philippe d’Orléans hoped that the people would overthrow Louis and reform the kingdom as a constitutional monarchy, placing
him
on the throne as their new king. Oh, how wrong he was, but that’s another story.

Marie Antoinette had been devastated by the most personal sorrows as well. Her daughter princesse Sophie Hélène Béatrix, born several weeks premature on July 9, 1786, never lived to see her first birthday, dying on June 14, 1787. And the dauphin, Louis Joseph, was bravely enduring the physical torments of rickets and a severely curved spine. His declining health and Sophie’s demise brought Marie Antoinette closer to God, and after the mechanical devotions of the daily Masses she had been attending for years, she became more genuinely devout.

This was the emotional state of the woman Axel von Fersen greeted in 1788. It is possible that in a time of such tremendous upheaval, Marie Antoinette needed his love and comfort and his reassuring presence more than ever; that dynamic is very plausible. But it is equally conceivable that what she most desired from the count, having turned her thoughts to her husband and children, God and kingdom, was his unwavering friendship.

Of that she could be certain until she drew her final breath. Count von Fersen remained her champion even when it seemed as though everyone in France was ready to tear her to pieces. In 1789 he wrote to his father, “You cannot fail to applaud the Queen, if you do justice to her desire to do good and the goodness of her own heart.”

If, by the late 1780s, Axel von Fersen was no longer Marie Antoinette’s lover (or, according to some biographers, had never been her lover), it does make sense that he eventually moved on carnally, embarking on other relationships—yet they were invariably with other unattainable women, ensuring the queen’s primacy at the pinnacle of his affections. However, there was one who evidently captured his heart. Eléanore Sullivan, who had arrived in Paris in 1783, was five years their senior. After enjoying a checkered romantic past, she married an Irishman whom she’d first met in Paris, but was living under the protection of a Scot, Quentin Craufurd, who had met her in Manila and brought her back to the French capital. Around April 1789, Eléanore became Fersen’s lover, although she remained involved with Craufurd, who for the next several years would have no inkling of her affair.

Although Craufurd was apparently ignorant of Fersen’s liaison with Eléanore, the rest of Europe learned of it quickly, thanks to the
acid tongue and pen of one of the count’s jilted paramours, the wife of the comte de Saint-Priest. In the crucial days that followed the royal family’s aborted flight to Varennes, during the summer of 1791 Madame de Saint-Priest traveled to England, Germany, and Sweden, spreading the news of Axel von Fersen’s newest conquest. Sophie Piper wrote to her brother, fretting about Marie Antoinette’s reaction should the queen ever find out about the affair.

“I have not spoken to you about this or warned you about it out of respect for Her because She would be mortally wounded should this news reach her ear. Everybody is watching you and talking about you and you must think of Her and spare her this cruelest of blows.”

In addition to his arrangement with Eléanore and Craufurd, the count’s other triangular relationship was with the king and queen of France. As much as he adored Marie Antoinette, Axel was always respectful of Louis, paying tribute to the “goodness, honesty, frankness and loyalty of the king,” and he fervently believed that the French monarchy should prevail at all costs, returning the nation to the influence she had always enjoyed across Europe. Fersen placed his life in jeopardy as much for Louis’ sake as for the queen’s.

He arrived in Versailles on September 27, 1789, to spend the winter in a house he had acquired in town. By that time, Marie Antoinette had buried her older son. The seven-year-old dauphin had died on June 4 during the tumultuous weeks-long convention of the three Estates General. The callous representatives were so eager to push their governmental reforms forward that they were unwilling to begrudge the king the afternoon off to mourn his heir.

Fersen had no way of knowing that just a few days after his arrival in Versailles, the life of his beloved queen would be frighteningly upended. Antonia Fraser posits that he may have passed the day of October 5, the queen’s last full day at Versailles, in her company, while other historians believe he was not there, instead riding hell-for-leather for the palace when he heard the terrifying news, so that he could be with her in her hour of peril. That morning an armed mob more than six thousand strong, comprised purportedly of prostitutes from the Palais Royal and Parisian fishwives, their numbers swelled with men disguised as women, had begun to march in the pouring rain from the capital to Versailles, demanding bread. The
poissardes
later claimed that they were unfairly blamed, and that many amid the throng were in fact disgruntled members of the aristocracy in disguise.

By late afternoon on October 5, Louis was prepared to capitulate to the (now drunken) mob’s demands, but rumors were spread among them that he had no intentions of honoring his pledge. The following day, they stormed the Château de Versailles, destroying priceless treasures and beheading two of Marie Antoinette’s bodyguards in their frenzied search for the queen. Bursting into her bedroom, they stabbed at her mattress with pikestaffs, and would have done the same to her had she not slipped through a secret door in the nick of time and fled to Louis’ apartments.

The royal family was lucky to escape with their lives, but they would be denied their freedom as they had always known it. From that moment the mob took them hostage, and they were conveyed to Paris in a slow-moving procession that afforded every citizen the opportunity to ogle and jeer at the “Baker,” the “Baker’s wife,” and the “Baker’s boy.” When the Bourbons reached the disused Tuileries Palace, where they would remain essentially under house arrest, among the loyal friends waiting to meet them was Axel von Fersen. “I was witness to it all,” he wrote to his father a few days later. “I returned to Paris in one of the carriages that followed the King. We were six and a half hours on the road. May God preserve me from ever again seeing so heartbreaking a spectacle as that of the last two days.”

He sold the house and horses he’d bought in Versailles and purchased a house in Paris in order to visit Marie Antoinette more easily, although his official cover was as the
un
official observer of the unrest on behalf of the king of Sweden. Gustavus III worried about the effects of French revolutionary violence on the rest of Europe.

As early as January 1790, Fersen wrote that only a war, be it “exterior” or “interior,” could reestablish the royal authority in France. But how could that be achieved “when the king is a prisoner in Paris?” the count asked. The solution seemed clear: Get the king out of Paris.

During the summer of 1790, the royals’ energy was focused on whether they should remain in the capital or flee. Fersen was an early advocate of escape. If he was not the queen’s lover, then or ever, he
was certainly her closest confidant at the time, and, as he admitted to Sophie, her most zealous admirer. The count saw in Marie Antoinette a sensitive and suffering heroine who had been both misused and misjudged, a woman full of goodness at a time when any positive opinion of her was rare.

Two others who shared Fersen’s sympathetic estimation of the queen were his mistress Eléanore Sullivan and her protector, Quentin Craufurd. These fervent royalists played an integral role in the royal family’s escape from the Tuileries in June 1791, personally helping to bankroll their flight.

Fersen was more or less at Marie Antoinette’s side during the royal family’s twenty-month house arrest in the Tuileries, managing to discreetly come and go from the palace, although it bustled with guards and spies. Several times the comte de Saint-Priest states unequivocally that after the monarchs were permitted to journey to the Château de Saint-Cloud during the summer of 1790, Fersen was seen leaving the queen’s room at three a.m. At this time the count was deeply involved in plotting the royal family’s escape from France, and his lengthy visits with Marie Antoinette may have been devoted primarily, if not entirely, to political and strategic, rather than amorous, conversation. Fersen’s journal from this period was burned soon afterward, so the truth will never be known for certain.

It is from Axel von Fersen’s letters to his sister Sophie and her lover, Baron von Taube, that we know how critically and intimately involved he was with the affairs of Marie Antoinette and the French crown. The queen came to rely upon the count’s efforts even more after Louis, overwhelmed by events, suffered a nervous breakdown during the winter of 1790. Confined to the Tuileries by then and denied the daily hunting that had always been his emotional and physical outlet, he collapsed under the strain. With the king inactive, Marie Antoinette assumed control of their destiny. In the past she had been falsely accused of being the power behind the throne; now the allegations became the reality. The storming of Versailles on October 6, 1789, had marked a turning point in her life.

In December 1790, in the name of the baronne de Korff, a Franco-Swede who provided her own passport for the royal family’s flight, Fersen commissioned a
berline de voyage
, a capacious, heavy traveling
coach of the type meant to comfortably transport a fairly large aristocratic party from Paris to St. Petersburg. The conveyance had to carry six adults and two children, and Fersen had participated in all the details involved in securing it. It was he who paid the five thousand or so livres to purchase the carriage, a vehicle “unknown” to the royal family, as it bore no resemblance to their official coaches. After the escape proved ill-fated, Monday-morning quarterbacks would criticize the carriage’s size, bulk, and appearance, but there was in fact nothing unusual about it. It was not bright yellow, as some historians have erroneously stated. It was the undercarriage and wheels that were yellow, which was very common for the era. Built by Monsieur Louis, the finest coachman of his day, the body of the
berline
was green and black, and the interior was upholstered in white taffeta.

When it came time to decide on the family’s ultimate destination, the king preferred to remain within the borders of France, while Marie Antoinette was in favor of emigrating to Switzerland via Alsace. However, she expected assistance from her homeland, which would mean a mustering of troops on the Austrian frontier. But the emperor, her brother Leopold II, had a vast territory to govern, and with limited resources. Leopold didn’t begrudge his sister the soldiers, but someone else would have to pay them. Louis and Marie Antoinette were short of funds. Money had to be borrowed. In addition to applying to Italian banks, Count von Fersen loaned the French monarchs the money from his own pocket. The other investors included Eléanore Sullivan and Quentin Craufurd, as well as the baronne de Korff and her sister—who happened to be Craufurd’s other mistress.

As the plans were hatched for the royal family’s flight from the Tuileries, Fersen’s role was under debate. He had expected to escort the royals all the way to the frontier town of Montmédy, but Louis forbade it. Fersen’s explanation for this decision was simply that it wasn’t desired. The reasons for the king’s denial have long been the subject of speculation. Did he believe Fersen had already done enough for them and it was not worth risking his life to do more than drive them just a few miles out of Paris? Was he jealous of Fersen and resented the idea of being rescued by his wife’s lover or, at the very
least, her special confidant? Was it Gallic snobbery because the Swedish count wasn’t a French nobleman? Or was it because if they got caught being aided by a foreigner things could be dire for all of them? The second possibility can be eliminated. Louis was at this point so mired in inertia and indecision that he surely didn’t have the energy to be jealous of Fersen. It was the queen who at this time found herself suddenly rising to the occasion and discovering a wellspring of resourcefulness, courage, and strength she never knew she had.

After a series of glitches, the royal family managed to escape the Tuileries in the middle of the night on June 20, 1791. A disguised Count Axel von Fersen was the coachman on the box. As he waited for the royals to sneak out of the palace he played his role to the hilt, whistling and chewing tobacco. In accordance with Louis’ instructions he surrendered his post at Bondy to another coachman, saddled a horse, and rode for Brussels.

Tragically, the night ended in disaster at the little town of Varennes when the king was recognized. “Do you think Fersen has escaped?” Marie Antoinette whispered to her husband. The family was bundled into their
berline
and escorted back to Paris. After their arrival, disheveled and demoralized, Marie Antoinette managed to scribble a few lines to the count: “Be reassured about us; we are alive.” A second letter read, “I exist…. How worried I have been about you…. Don’t write to me, that will expose us, and above all don’t come here under any pretext…. We are in view of our guards day and night; I’m indifferent to it…. [B]e calm, nothing will happen to me…. Adieu…I can’t write any more to you….”

One of the two men who accompanied the royal family in the
berline
from Varennes to Paris was a deputy of the Revolution named Antoine Barnave. During the hot, dusty, and exceedingly cramped three-day journey, the deputies, and particularly Barnave, were charmed by the queen, who was not at all the monster they’d been taught to despise. By the time the carriage reached Paris, the twenty-nine-year-old Barnave had a little crush on Marie Antoinette, and she would soon take advantage of his sympathy to advance the royalist cause. In no time, rumors were spreading that the queen was sleeping with Barnave and had corrupted him. The rumors were
absurd, but Fersen was crushed and disgusted, even though he was betraying both the queen and Quentin Craufurd with Eléanore Sullivan. During the summer of 1791, after King Gustavus had dispatched Fersen to Vienna in an effort to secure the support of both Austria and Prussia in his scheme to save the French monarchs, Marie Antoinette heard nothing from the count for two months, although she sent him several letters. It’s possible, however, that the correspondence was intercepted and he never received it.