The Queen’s Lover Read online

  THE

  QUEEN’S LOVER

  ALSO BY FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY

  Madame de Staël: The First Modern Woman

  Them: A Memoir of Parents

  Simone Weil

  At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life

  Rage and Fire: A Life of Louise Colet—Pioneer Feminist,

  Literary Star, Flaubert’s Muse

  Soviet Women

  Adam and Eve and the City: Selected Nonfiction

  October Blood

  World Without End

  Lovers and Tyrants

  Hawaii: The Sugar-Coated Fortress

  Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism

  The

  QUEEN’S LOVER

  FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  New York

  2012

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2012 by The Penguin Press,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Francine du Plessix Gray, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Portrait of Hans Axel von Fersen by Peter Dreuillon, © Swedish Portrait

  Archives / The National Museum of Fine Arts Stockholm.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Gray, Francine du Plessix.

  The queen’s lover : a novel / Francine du Plessix Gray.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-57232-0

  1. Fersen, Hans Axel von, greve, 1755–1810—Fiction. 2. Marie Antoinette, Queen, consort of Louis XVI, King of France, 1755–1793—Fiction. 3. Statesmen—Sweden—Fiction. 4. France—Court and courtiers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.R294Q83 2012

  813’.54—dc22

  2012000418

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Designed by Marysarah Quinn

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  TO THE MEMORY OF

  GABRIELLE VAN ZUYLEN,

  MUSE, DEAREST FRIEND

  Axel von Fersen

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE BY Sophie von Fersen, Countess Piper

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1: Axel: At the Paris Opera

  CHAPTER 2: Sophie: Our Family, the von Fersens

  CHAPTER 3: Axel: Gustavus III, My King

  CHAPTER 4: Sophie: My Brother at War

  CHAPTER 5: Axel: Loving Josephine

  CHAPTER 6: Axel: The End of the World As We Knew It

  CHAPTER 7: Axel: At the Tuileries

  CHAPTER 8: Axel: The Flight to Varennes

  PART II

  CHAPTER 9: Axel: The Waiting Game

  CHAPTER 10: Axel: War and Death

  CHAPTER 11: Sophie: La Reine de France

  CHAPTER 12: Axel: Love and Grief

  CHAPTER 13: Axel: Diplomacy

  CHAPTER 14: Axel: A King’s and a Prince’s Fall

  CHAPTER 15: Sophie: June 20, 1810

  AUTHOR’S EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PREFACE

  BY Sophie von Fersen, Countess Piper

  MY LATE BROTHER, Count Axel von Fersen, was a notorious seducer, known throughout Europe as “le beau Fersen,” and in our Swedish homeland as “Långe Fersen,” “tall Fersen.” Part of his legendary handsomeness was his majestic stature and the elegance of his long, slender limbs. His auburn hair was thick and wavy; he had a high, oval forehead, a beautifully shaped mouth, and the gaze of his very large, dark brown eyes had a melancholy which women found entrancing. But it is important to note that most men as handsome as my brother have something of the coxcomb about them, a dash of presumption or arrogance. Axel’s demeanor, at the contrary, veered if anything toward too much gravity, too much diffidence. “A heart of fire in a shell of ice” was the way many of his friends described him.

  My brother had an extraordinary life. He fought on the American side in the American War of Independence, serving as General de Rochambeau’s chief aide-de-camp. He was the lover of the most glamorous, controversial Queen of eighteenth-century Europe, Marie Antoinette, who inspired his greatest acts of selflessness and courage. In his later years he served as the Grand Marshal of Sweden, one of the highest positions any citizen could aspire to in our country. In part because of his diffident, somewhat secretive personality, Axel was often misunderstood. His aloofness could often endow him with a hauteur that was perceived as presumption but that served, above all, as a way of retaining his full dignity and independence. He may have been haughty with his aristocratic peers, but was most affable to persons of lower rank. Let me add that notwithstanding his air of detachment he was of immense generosity. He provided all support, for instance, for an old aunt of ours who had been robbed by her domestic, and who would not have survived without him. He was a noted art collector, and a bon vivant of the highest order. He furnished his quarters magnificently, entertained lavishly, and hired some of the greatest chefs in Europe to run his kitchen.

  A few years before his untimely demise at the age of fifty-four, my brother began to write his memoirs, and he continued to write them until the very evening before his death. Having taken on the task of editing and publishing these documents, I had scruples about including their more intimate passages, but decided to retain them in order to offer my brother’s readers a more vivid sense of his generation’s mores. I have also occasionally had to interject chapters that would have been too painful for him to compose, or that he was too modest to commit to paper himself. It is these writings—my remarkable brother’s memoirs—that I wish to share with the world.

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  Axel von Fersen:

  AT THE PARIS OPERA

  HERE’S HOW IT BEGAN, the central passion of my life:

  It all began some three decades ago, in 1774, at one of the weekly balls given at the Paris Opera during the winter months. I’d recently arrived in France from my native Sweden, Louis XV was still king, and this was the first time I was attending such an event. I stood in midroom, dazed by the radiance of the women’s diamonds, the glare of the chandeliers, the flouncing of courtiers’ plumed hats, the twinkling of minuets, the courtiers’ sibilant whisperings, the smart clicking of valets’ heels
as they passed ices and wines. I, Count Axel von Fersen, brought up in the relative frugality of Sweden’s aristocracy, was then barely nineteen years old: I was dazzled, and felt a bit lost. Experiencing this Parisian assault on the senses was akin to traveling from my country’s pristine pine forests to some opulent Oriental bazaar…. Yes, that’s how Paris struck me, downright Oriental! Its lustrous affluence, its denseness, its stench.

  I tried to allay my unease by pacing about the shuffling crowd, every member of which wore a mask, a protocol of Paris opera balls. Some masks, enormous and surreal, covering the wearer’s entire face, were surmounted by the beaks of birds or the snouts of mammals; others, like mine, were simpler slips of black satin, allowing the sight of a smooth or wrinkled forehead, of a stubbly or dimpled chin. Because they’d already been pointed out to me at an earlier event, I recognized the leading nabobs of the French court. Over there, lightly masked, was Comte d’Artois, the Dauphin Louis-Auguste’s dandyish youngest brother, slender and mincing, a disdainful, teasing smile ever playing about his malicious mouth; the court’s fashion icon, he owned 365 pairs of shoes so that he might wear a new pair every day, and was so manically fastidious about his dress that four valets held him aloft so that his trousers could remain wrinkle-free as he slipped into them. I duly noted his wife, a red-faced, loutish Savoyarde princess who consoled herself for her husband’s legendary philandering with numerous guardsmen. Strutting about a few dozen yards away was the dauphin’s other brother, Comte de Provence, known officially as Monsieur, and less officially as Gros Monsieur, an obese hunk of a prince compared to whom his older sibling, the corpulent dauphin, looked downright svelte, and who always seemed to be eavesdropping on conversations, accumulating shards of information with which to fuel his intrigues. Whereas Artois was looked on as a relatively harmless carouser, too busy unbuttoning himself to every passing beauty to have time for plotting mischief, Provence, obsessively jealous of his older brother the dauphin, was mostly focused on consolidating his power and influence. He chased the girls too, however, and his wife, Comtesse d’Artois’s equally ugly sister, took solace in persons of her own gender; she was always attended by her paramour, a wan little countess with a beak nose who sought refuge in Comtesse de Provence’s arms because of her husband’s predilection for sodomy (my informer on court matters, our Swedish ambassador, Count Creutz, relished such details). Gode Gud, what a crew! I said to myself as I continued to scrutinize the crowd. I’d been in Paris for three months, completing a grand tour; and I was already beginning to miss the more respectable aura of my little Stockholm—seventy thousand citizens versus Paris’s half million!—and of its court, that of my beloved monarch Gustavus III.

  Whom else did I recognize at that opera ball? Mercy d’Argenteau, Austria’s ambassador to France, whose baptismal name—Florimond—was well suited to his mincing, tiny-footed gait; another elegant rascal, the Comte de Vaudreuil, baptized with an equally botanical name—Joseph Hyacinthe—who was spending his fortune in a manner as ostentatious as possible, having taken on as mistress Yolande de Polignac, a favorite of Dauphine Marie Antoinette; the dauphin’s cousin Duc de Chartres, later to be Duc d’Orléans, a zealous real estate speculator who was currently restoring the Palais-Royal, a site renowned for having the greatest density of streetwalkers in Paris. These were only a few of the more eminent persons in this teeming crowd. The particular earmark of opera balls was that anyone properly masked could attend them for the modest fee of two livres; butchers and bakers’ wives, merchants of all kinds, could mingle here with counts and duchesses, and this democratic blending—slumming without danger—seemed to offer many eminences something akin to an erotic thrill.

  Another of my Swedish traits—a certain priggishness—flared up as I began noticing the outlandish hairdos sported by the more daring women. Although I jot down these recollections in my advanced age, recalling events of over thirty years ago, I still have a precise memory of those inane coiffures, some of them so high—two or three feet high—that they required their wearers to kneel in their carriages, or sit with their heads thrusting out of their coaches’ windows: there were hairdos that replicated ships, complete with sails, anchors, tiny lifeboats; others that pretended to be garden bowers, depicting trees, little grottoes, and lakes simulated by sparkling mirrors; yet others, powered by clockwork mechanisms, that featured whirling windmills edged with jewels. Such atrocities, I’d heard, came from the diseased imagination of one Monsieur Léonard, personal coiffeur to the Dauphine Marie Antoinette, considered so indispensable to Her Highness that she had given him an apartment of his own at Versailles, a floor above hers, in order that he might ever be on call.

  Just as I was observing these vapid creations a tall, slender young woman with dark golden hair, more heavily masked than others, came to my side and stared at me with a warm, bemused gaze. “Bonjour, Beau Masque,” she said caressingly, her words marked by a faint trace of foreignness I could not quite identify. I greeted the lady in reply, and had a few moments to study her features before she spoke again. The first thing that struck me was the extraordinary incandescence of her skin. Pick a tea rose, and look deep into that innermost place of the flower where the petal begins, a very pale pink at its most tender and delicate—that’s what her face was like, an oval expanse of the most luminous skin I’d ever seen. But as soon as you’d finished being dazzled by that face’s surface you encountered the eyes, fringed by sumptuously thick lashes, and were conquered anew by their singular dark-blueness, akin to that deep blue the sky takes on in the predusk hours of a brilliant day. And their expression, you will ask, what was their expression? That’s harder to describe, for her moods seemed to change at mercurial speed. One second the eyes were merry, vivacious, mocking; the next moment they were most melancholy, revealing a very great solitude and anxiety. The young woman’s moods seemed akin to a sky over which clouds are blown by a very swift wind, creating different weather patterns in a matter of minutes…. Yet I should admit that notwithstanding all the attributes I’ve noted—the splendor of the eyes, that astonishing skin—you couldn’t have called her beautiful, because of the curious set of her mouth, the slightly pendulous lower lip, which could emanate an aura of disdain and hauteur. On the night I met her, however, all haughtiness was absent as she addressed me again, in the same tone of warm playfulness.

  “Do you like forests?” she asked.

  “Well, yes, I do,” I answered, taken aback by the humdrum topic. “There are many splendid forests on my family’s estates.”

  “And where is that country where your family has estates?”

  “Sweden,” I said, with a small bow. “I am Count Axel von Fersen, from Sweden.”

  “Ah, la Suède!” she exclaimed. “La Suède,” she repeated, the foreign intonation sharpening the d. “I’ve never met anyone from there except for that very boring Monsieur Creutz, your ambassador!”

  And she burst into laughter, a pealing, very girlish laughter, accompanied by a mocking flutter of her hands that revealed the wedding band gleaming on her ring finger. She laughed again. “Oh, surely you know your ambassador, Mr. Creutz, the most boring man to be found in any European court!”

  “He is like a parent to me,” I said stiffly. I’m aware of my tendency to be overly formal, if not starchy, but this time the stiffness was intended—Creutz was indeed a humorless old bugger, but he was my father’s closest friend and was masterminding with extreme kindness my introductions to European courts.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” she exclaimed, putting her hand impulsively on my sleeve. “Please forgive my…my indiscretion! It’s one of my greatest faults. You see, I’m surrounded by so many old people, I yearn, very much yearn, for friends of my age, and they can be hard to find at our court.” And so the conversation went. She asked many questions, on matters totally unrelated, her mind darting here and there like a child skipping at varied angles down a street. Do you like horses? How many siblings do you have? Describe the lakes in your country.
Do you like opera? Ah, you’re fond of singing yourself? How lovely! Well, perhaps someday…

  The young woman was so deliciously pretty and amiable, the conversation so delightfully erratic that it would have been my pleasure to continue it indefinitely. But I suddenly realized that a circle of courtiers—a dozen or so—had gathered about her; that their attention was centered on me, which made me sense that this was a young woman of some importance, that scrutiny would inevitably focus on any person upon whom she lavished such attention. My new friend also had grown aware, quite suddenly, of the band that had gathered about her; and without saying good-bye, as impulsively as she had begun our conversation, she wheeled around and swiftly walked away, briefly lifting the gray velvet mask off her face with an exasperated gesture, as if it were smothering her and she needed to inhale a deep breath of air. It was in that split second that I realized who she was—that I recognized her as Marie Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria-Hungary, beloved daughter of the mighty Empress Maria Theresa, and now the wife of the notoriously timid, reclusive Dauphin Louis-Auguste, who might at any moment become the king of France.

  And so I watched my new friend leave the room, surrounded by the acolytes who had gathered about her. And as I observed her making her exit I was captivated by yet other attributes—her carriage and her walk. But wait, “walking” is a wrong word for her style of motion. When she moved through a room she glided or floated rather than strode, reminding one of those music box figurines that waltz about a skating rink, sliding silently, serenely across the make-believe ice. And her carriage! Erect like a little soldier—no, that’s too stiff a term, erect like a ballet dancer who’s just made some wondrously perilous series of tours jetés and walks toward the exit amid bursts of applause, head held triumphantly high and slightly to one side, proud and regal yet not arrogant…. Her grandfather-in-law, Louis XV, who appreciated female charms as did few rulers of his time and was particularly enchanted with Marie Antoinette, was said to have described her as “a dainty little morsel.”