The Queen’s Lover Read online

  The National Assembly continues its folly. The provinces are in greater ferment than ever, and the king is a prisoner in Paris. His position—and above all that of the queen, who suffers from their captivity much more keenly than he does—is dreadful. The queen has shown and still shows a courage, character, and conduct that have won her many adherents.

  THE QUEEN HAD TO suffer another great grief in that wretched year of 1790—the death of her beloved brother Joseph II. The emperor’s health had been failing in recent months, but he had continued to do everything possible to help his younger sister. “I’m so cruelly tormented about her fate,” he had written after the march on Versailles of October 5, 1789; “the dangers the Queen faced and still faces make me shudder.” A few months later he had prevented an armed incursion into Provence by the Comte d’Artois and a force of émigré army officers, which would have been a calamity for the royal family. During his final days he had written his sister that one of his most bitter regrets about dying was to leave her in such a cruel position, and not be able to prove the deep love he had always felt for her. He passed away on February 20, 1790, a week after he had sent her that last letter. The queen sequestered herself in her apartments for several days, weeping. Joseph was succeeded by his younger brother Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, whom Marie Antoinette had not seen since she was ten years old; and though he instantly offered her his support, he would prove to be untrustworthy, and would only live for another two years.

  I continued to write my father about the events in France.

  Paris, April 2, 1790

  Little change…. Poverty and discontent are increasing; they are beginning to affect the people, especially Parisians, who now find themselves without resources owing to the diminution and annihilation of fortunes occasioned by the Assembly’s decrees. There are persons who have lost 40,000 to 50,000 francs a year, and others their whole revenue, because of the abolition of feudal rights. Most of the workmen and artisans are reduced to beggary. The best workmen are leaving the Kingdom, and the streets are full of paupers. One and all they blame the Assembly…. The royal treasury is exhausted; there is neither credit nor confidence; money has disappeared, everyone hoards it. That, my dear father, is the present state of things. God knows how it will end. Necker’s state is worse than ever; his health is quite destroyed, and I don’t believe he will live long. He’ll be regretted by very few.

  Paris, June 28, 1790

  You will read about the state of the army in the newspapers; there is no longer any order or discipline. Soldiers form committees, they dismiss, break, judge, and sometimes execute their officers. Every day we hear of new horrors, and there is no longer any pleasure in serving. My regiment [the Royal Swedish] has behaved marvelously well up to now, even though everything has been done to seduce it. There has not been the slightest insubordination, and I hope this may continue.

  Although the queen’s spirits had revived upon moving to Saint-Cloud, she was bound to find the first Feast of the Federation, which commemorated the fall of the Bastille, to be a depressing event. I described the episode to my father.

  Paris, July 16, 1790

  The famous Feast of the Federation, which had inspired such fears and driven so many persons out of Paris, has just been celebrated. The ceremony, which might have been very august, very fine, and very imposing, was made ridiculous by its disorder and indecency. It was held at the Champ de Mars; you will see a description of it in the papers. But what the papers will not tell you is that no one was in his right place; the soldiers, who ought to have guarded the area, obeyed no one; they ran about hither and thither, dancing and singing. Before the arrival of the king and his troops, they took a priest and two monks from the altar, and, putting grenadiers’ caps on their heads and muskets on their shoulders, they marched them around the amphitheater, singing and dancing like savages do before they eat Christians. People also sang and danced during the Mass, and no one knelt at the moment of the elevation of the Host, which led many persons who were present to declare that the Mass was not said at all.

  In order to remain near the queen, I spent the rest of the summer at Auteuil, near Saint-Cloud, in the house lent to me by my friend Valentin Esterhazy. I saw my Toinette nearly every day, and was most unhappy at the end of October when I had to return to Paris (“that vile cesspit,” as I described it to Sophie). But there was a great deal to do; above all I had to urge the king to reassert his authority. For the Assembly had decreed the abolition of the nobility, and nationalized all Crown property; church lands were being sequestered and sold off to speculators; the deficit was still speedily rising, which led the now discredited Jacques Necker to resign. The ministers whom Louis appointed in his place proved to be equally unable to help the nation, and there were violent protests throughout the country. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which wrenched the French church away from Rome, dictating that bishops and other clerics would be directly elected by French citizens and owe their ultimate allegiance to the state rather than the king, had just been decreed, and was sure to be vetoed by Louis XVI. Yet another danger was being caused by the king’s brothers: Comtes d’Artois and de Provence, exiled in Koblenz, were raising an émigré army with the ultimate intention of invading France from the Austrian border and restoring the ancien régime by force, which might well have led to the execution of the royal family.

  Paris, November 5, 1790

  Disorders increase daily [I wrote my father]…. Poverty is felt everywhere; coin has disappeared; “assignats,” the paper money that has replaced it, have little or no credit; in many of the provinces the people will not take them at all. The merchants sell nothing; manufactures are at a standstill; provisions grow dearer. Paris is full of thieves; one hears of nothing but robberies committed, and since there is little law and order they remain unpunished. This state of things can not last, and the growing discontent will slowly lead to some kind of change; when the dissatisfaction will have greatly risen, the new order of things will be as quickly overthrown as the old order was; such is the volatility of the French.

  I was made happy that winter by the increasingly tender emotions that had developed through the correspondence between the queen and my sister, who asked me for a lock of the queen’s hair, which she wished to set into a ring. “Here is the hair you asked for,” I wrote Sophie; “if there isn’t enough I’ll send you some more. It is She who gives it to you, and she was deeply touched by your request. She is so good and so perfect, and I seem to love her even more now that she loves you.”

  My father, however, was still grieved and angered by my long absences from Sweden. And I often had to placate him by explaining the royal family’s urgent need of me, and my intense emotional need to remain with them, as I did in the following letter.

  February 15, 1791

  My position here is different from that of everyone else. I have always been treated with kindness and distinction in this country by the king and queen and by their ministers. Your reputation, my dear father, has been my passport and my recommendation…. My discreet conduct may also have won me approbation and esteem. I’m attached to the king and queen, as I ought to be because of the immensely kind manner with which they always treated me…and I would be vile and ungrateful if I abandoned them now. To all the many kindnesses they’ve offered me, they have now added a flattering new one—that of confidence; and it is all the more flattering because it is limited to four persons, of whom I am the youngest.

  If I can serve them, what pleasure I shall have in returning part of the numerous favors they have done me; what sweet enjoyment to contribute to their welfare! You can not but approve of me, dear Father…. This conduct is the only one that is worthy of your son…. In the course of this coming summer, the situation here must surely change, and decisions be reached: if it evolves badly and all hope is lost, nothing will then prevent me from returning to you.

  IN APRIL OF 1791 the Comte de Mirabeau died. Many thought that he had been poisoned, and the
Duc d’Orléans, who was out to undermine the king’s power by any means he could, was suspected by some. The great orator had made a few pro-royalist speeches in the Assembly that proved highly popular, and his passing ended the king’s chances of restoring order through peaceful means. That spring, the king and queen asked me my advice concerning their situation, and I gave them my opinion in a long missive. I reiterated, as I had numerous times in past months, that it was imperative for them to leave Paris, that their only way of surviving those increasingly monstrous revolutionaries was to flee the country. And I offered to be in charge of planning their escape. I’d already given the project much thought. According to the evasion route I’d devised, the royal family would head toward the town of Montmédy, on the border of the Austrian Netherlands, and there establish a rallying site at which they would be joined by émigré forces and those army regiments that had remained loyal to the king.

  General Marquis Louis de Bouillé, the superb military tactician and hero of the Seven Years’ War, would be in charge of the royalist troops. Marie Antoinette’s brother Emperor Leopold was sure to offer all the help he could with his army. So was my king, Gustavus III, who had begun to be appreciated by the French monarchs at the end of his last visit to Paris, and who was one of the few persons, along with the Austrian emperor, to be apprised of this hazardous but imperative venture.

  CHAPTER 8

  Axel:

  THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES

  I DO BELIEVE THAT the escape plan I devised for the royal family was superbly programmed, and would have been highly successful if I’d had my way. Trace your finger east of Paris on a map of France and you will easily find the route I chose, and the towns I’d designated as the principal relay stations: eastward from Paris, traveling through the department of the Marne, you pass through the towns of Châlons and Pont-de-Somme-Vesle, then on to Sainte-Ménehould, Varennes, and Montmédy, the latter of which I’d decided was the best place for the family to cross into Belgium, part of the Austrian Netherlands, where our allies would rally behind them.

  But the king began to sabotage my project—bless my cherished friend, it was as usual with the most benign intentions—by insisting that his entire family travel in one coach. In order for the royals to be less noticeable, I had originally planned for two modest-sized carriages, one for the queen and her daughter, the other for the king and the dauphin, with attendants, governesses, etc., distributed among the vehicles. But Louis, usually so amenable, insisted with most unusual, adamant firmness that he wished his entire family to remain together. Thus I was unfortunately forced to arrange for the kind of coach known as a “berline,” a carriage large enough to accommodate six persons inside it and three on the top box. In order not to awake suspicion, I ordered it in the name of Baronne de Korff, the Swedish-born widow of a Russian general, a family friend of mine who was devoted to the monarchs and eagerly accepted to help with their journey. The coach’s interior fittings, as specified by Marie Antoinette, were of the most luxurious kind: white velvet upholstery, taffeta curtains, two iron cooking stoves, several chamber pots of burnished leather. Moreover, this large, flamboyant green-and-yellow vehicle required six horses, and I feared from the start that it would attract far too much attention along the roads of a nation undergoing a revolution.

  There was another major problem: money. This venture needed a lot of it, and like many monarchs of his time, Louis was penniless—he’d never had any private resources, his immediate needs being paid by the French treasury. The queen was equally insolvent: her only valuable possessions were her jewels; just imagine the ruckus the sale of those gems would have caused. So as a first step in the fund-raising I gave up every penny I had and asked my close friend Evert Taube, Sophie’s lover, to borrow all he could against his eventual inheritance. How to play it safe, even within a small circle, when the secret is so huge? I also turned to Madame de Korff and her sister, ardent royalists who donated much of what they had. Without hesitation, Eleanore Sullivan and Quentin Craufurd, both of whom were deeply attached to the king’s cause, also contributed the handsome sum of three hundred thousand pounds. Equally important, they offered to shelter the royal family’s berline, which would be far less visible in their stables on the rue de Clichy than at my own lodgings, which were at the corner of rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and avenue Matignon.

  How many outstanding minds could I count on to help plan this hazardous escape? Only one, General Marquis de Bouillé, who would bring a dozen or so officers into his confidence, using his intuition as to which of his men could best keep a secret. An alarming amount of incidents kept delaying the evasion, which had originally been set for May. In the preceding weeks one of the dauphin’s ladies-in-waiting was judged to be untrustworthy because her lover was a National Guardsman. She was discharged but kept postponing her departure, only leaving on the twentieth, forcing various officers scheduled to man relay stations on the road from Paris to Montmédy to keep altering their plans. Last but not least, there was the problem of the sixth place in the royals’ carriage. The fifth was to be occupied by the king’s twenty-seven-year-old sister, Madame Elisabeth, whom he did not have the heart to leave behind. Bouillé had wished the sixth place to be taken by a competent, able-bodied officer who might assume control if trouble arose, and had chosen me for that role. But the week before the departure, Louis started insisting that the dauphin’s governess, Madame de Tourzel, take that place instead. Oh, Louis, had I argued more firmly I might have won you over, and the course of history might have taken a different turn! It would later be said that the king only wanted French citizens to accompany him to safety; it was also intimated that he might not want his wife’s lover to have that honor. Would that I had been bolder, less awed by Your Majesty! No man is more stubborn than a weak-willed one who suddenly wants to show his strength.

  As for the second coach in the royals’ cortege, Toinette had demanded that a place be reserved for her hairdresser, Léonard, a kind but emotive fibbertigibbet who would play an important role in the demise of my venture. Dear Toinette, however more frugal you’d become in recent years, how naive and vain you still remained! So assured were you that the escape would be successful, you wished your tresses to be perfectly coiffed when you met your friends and relatives at the Belgian border.

  But ultimately it was my dear royals’ passionate devotion to their children that sabotaged my project: bourgeois solicitude undermining their safety, they insisted on traveling together in that one large, ostentatious berline. Neither did it help that Toinette entrusted all her jewelry to the hapless Léonard, who upon being told that he was to leave on this journey lapsed into one of his familiar hysterical fits, sobbing and moaning that the Countess of This and the Duchess of Whom were awaiting him the following day to have sailboats and garden bowers set into their coiffures.

  The date finally set for departure—after much haggling, much postponement—was midnight of June 21, the longest day of the year. To allay any suspicions of my collaboration with the royal family, I had taken all of my meals, for the previous week, at Eleanore Sullivan’s, who was scheduled to leave Paris on the same night with Craufurd. On the afternoon of the twenty-first I went to the Tuileries to check on last-minute details. The monarchs received me in the king’s study. The queen’s nerves were threatening to give way—she wept intermittently during our hour’s visit. Dear Louis took my hand in both of his—what warm, cushionlike hands he had—and upon tenderly embracing me said, “Monsieur de Fersen, whatever might happen I shall never forget all that you have done for me.” The principal detail to iron out that afternoon was the handling of the berline, which I’d arranged to be parked at Quentin Craufurd’s stables; it would have to be driven out of the Paris gates and reparked in a small street off the road to Metz. I had already arranged for an ordinary hackney cab to be placed at the place du Petit Carousel near the Tuileries; once the royal family had taken their places in it I would drive it myself out of Paris, dressed as a coachman.
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  Throughout that last day, my friends followed their habitual routines with admirable punctilio. The king received several deputies from the Assembly and gave various commonplace orders to his household staff. In the afternoon the queen took her children for a walk in the public gardens of the Luxembourg. Having been mercifully liberated, upon moving to the Tuileries, from the ritual of dining in public, the family sat down for their evening meal at the habitual 8:45 p.m., in the queen’s salon. There the Comte de Provence and his family, who were scheduled to leave Paris that very same night, dined with them, as they customarily did one night out of two. (Wisely traveling in two small, inconspicuous carriages, they would make it to the frontier with no trouble whatever.) The queen then began to engage in the riskier preliminaries to the journey. She went into her daughter’s apartments and informed Marie-Thérèse’s lady-in-waiting of the evasion plan. She went on to her son’s room and upon waking him told him that they would be going to a place where “there would be a lot of soldiers.” The dauphin—my beloved little friend—leaped out of bed and grabbed his toy sword. “Quick, quick, let’s hurry!” he exclaimed. “Give me my boots, let’s go!” Great was his grief when his valets swiftly attired him in girls’ clothes, though he calmed down when his mother told him that he was going to “act in a play” and that his stage name would be Aglaë. May I note that the royals had decided to include both the dauphin’s and the princess’s principal attendants in their party. The fugitive family’s retinue now included three maids, a governess, three equerries, a hairdresser—the group was becoming conspicuously large.