The Queen’s Lover Read online

  Close to 11 p.m., the queen had to engage in the first hazardous step—leaving the Tuileries. Holding her daughter’s hand, followed by the dauphin and Madame de Tourzel, she managed to make her way safely to the cour des Princes, and saw me in my coachman’s uniform, whistling and smoking as those men do, wearing a wide-brimmed hat that hid most of my face. The plan was for the queen to go back to the palace’s salon, where she habitually played cards at that hour; I was to take the children to the carriage parked at the place du Petit Carousel and watch over them until she managed her second exit from the Tuileries. As Toinette returned to the palace it was 11 p.m., and the Provences were making their farewells; it was time for the king’s coucher. Lafayette was present at the ceremony that night and would later report that although the king was as affable as ever, while chatting with his entourage he glanced often, and in an unusual way, at the sky—clearly, he was checking on whether conditions were propitious for the voyage. They were: the night was dark, the sky overcast. The king then knelt for his prayers, was divested of his clothing by the noblemen of his household, and went to bed.

  As soon as his courtiers and valets had left, the king slipped out of his bed, drawing the thick blue curtains tightly about it so as not to arouse immediate suspicions. Waiting in his dressing room was one of the trusted attendants I had recruited a few days earlier to help the royals get into their disguises and assume their roles. The dauphin’s governess, Madame de Tourzel, was to travel as Baronne de Korff, the Swedish-born aristocrat in whose name the carriage had been ordered; the dauphin and Madame Marie-Thérèse were to pose as Baronne de Korff’s daughters, Amélie and Aglaë, and the queen as their governess, Madame Rochet. The king’s sister, Madame Elisabeth, would play the role of Rosalie, Baronne de Korff’s lady companion. Louis was designated to be Baronne de Korff’s valet, Monsieur Durand; and to get ready for the excursion he put on a plain brown jacket, a green overcoat, and a brown wig topped by a hat.

  His Majesty then walked by the sentinels posted by the Tuileries’ gates without impediment, being taken for one of the retainers who had participated in his coucher earlier that evening. Five minutes later he had joined me at the place du Petit Carousel, where I waited in the hackney coach, watching over the sleeping children. That is when we began to worry: according to my plans the queen should have arrived before the king, at about 11:30, but came midnight and she still had not appeared. We would be increasingly anxious for the next half hour…. She finally swept into view, dressed in the plainest gray dress and a black shawl, and explained her delay. Just as she was going through the main gate of the Tuileries, Lafayette’s carriage, escorted by torchbearers, had driven by her. She had flattened herself against one of the gateposts, terrified. The general’s carriage passed so close to her that its wheels brushed against her skirts. The episode so unnerved her that she took a wrong turn, bearing left where she had been told to take a right, and lost her way in the maze of little streets that crisscross that area of the city. Mishap after mishap continued to plague us. The berline had been hidden so carefully by my aides that we spent a good hour searching for it, finding it much farther on the Metz road than we’d expected. I quickly tucked the family into the vehicle, got on top of the coach, and whipped the horses. Dawn would begin to break in less than half an hour. The size of the king’s berline necessitated six horses, and three more were needed for the attendants’ carriage that followed it; I continued to worry that such a number of animals were also bound to arouse attention.

  I was scheduled to leave the royal family at the first relay stop, Bondy. My apprehensions were boundless. “I shall continue on the road to the Belgian frontier,” I’d written my father the previous day, “and meet the king at Montmédy, if he’s lucky enough to get there.” I don’t wish to presume any supernatural intuition, but I had a strong sense that my presence was needed for the evasion’s success. While the horses were being harnessed I again approached the king for his permission to accompany him, and with great kindness he again refused. So I pondered this nightmare scenario: an indecisive king who, with the sole exception of going to Reims for his coronation, had never in his life proceeded beyond Paris or Versailles, and barely knew a square meter of the country he ruled; an equally sequestered queen with delicate nerves who had never even set foot in a public conveyance. My failure to successfully plead my case would haunt me for the rest of my life.

  Nevertheless, I tried to maintain my composure. As the coach was ready to leave Bondy I doffed my hat to Madame de Tourzel, loudly exclaiming, “Adieu, Madame de Korff!” Just before the windows were closed the queen quickly reached for my hand and thrust a gold ring into it. I mounted my horse and galloped back to Paris. After twenty minutes, feeling safely out of sight, I stopped to look at the ring, and read its inscription: “Lâche qui les abandonne,” “He who abandons them is a coward.” Tears in my eyes, I cantered on. Several different parties were speeding toward frontiers that very night: the Provences riding toward Switzerland, Eleanore Sullivan and Quentin Craufurd fleeing to the Netherlands.

  AS THE QUEEN AND Princess Marie-Thérèse would later report—the rest of my account is drawn from both their recollections—an hour or so after I’d left them, when they’d entered the valley of the Marne, the royal family felt far safer, and began to truly relax. They devoured with relish the provisions I’d prepared for them. Louis read aloud from his letter to the National Assembly, scheduled to be delivered that morning, which justified his departure from the capital. What had been the result of all the concessions extorted from him through threats of violence? he asked in his missive. “All authority defied,” he had written, “private property destroyed, anarchy abroad in the kingdom.” The only solution, so his letter summed up, was to purge the kingdom of the intrigues and disputes that were making Paris intolerable. “After he’d read that letter, gotten it off his chest,” Marie-Thérèse later recalled, “Father suddenly seemed much happier. ‘Believe you me,’ he said a few times, ‘once my butt is back in the saddle I’m going to be a new man!’” According to the queen, as his carriage sped eastward from Paris the king also indulged in his passion for geography. He had brought a large map of France with him, and happily ticked off the name of each village through which they passed.

  But then the monarch began to commit some imprudences. By the time the party reached the relay at Fromentières he had grown restless and begun to suffer from the low spirits that always beset him whenever he was denied physical exercise; so he emerged from his coach and fell into conversation with a band of local folk gathered at the relay. Loquacious as he could be only with humble people, he talked to them about their favorite topics—the year’s harvest, the rotation of crops, the kind of cattle being bred in the village. The queen was much upset by the risks he was taking, and his chief attendant, Mourtier, tried to persuade him to return to the carriage and continue to remain anonymous. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about anything,” the king replied, radiant about finally being able to converse with his subjects. “We’re out of danger now; we’re among the good people of France.”

  What a naive optimist my cherished Louis was. By the time the royal coach lumbered eastward to the next posting station, Chaintrix, it was two o’clock in the afternoon; they were awfully late—that was the time they had been expected to reach Pont-de-Somme-Vesle, which was still three hours away. The royals’ insouciance about these delays was caused, in part, by the deep joy this journey was bringing the king, in part by Marie Antoinette’s habit of being late to most of her appointments. And it was at Chaintrix that the king was first recognized. The son-in-law of the posting master had been to Paris the previous year and had seen the king at the Feast of the Federation. With joy and trepidation, he invited the royal family into his house to take refreshments. The children were exhausted, the afternoon was hot, and the family much enjoyed the excellent consommé he offered them. “You see how good our subjects are in the real France,” Marie-Thérèse heard her father whisper to her
mother, “the real France outside of Paris!”

  The posting master insisted that his son drive the royals’ coach to the next relay, and to show off his skills the young man whipped the horses so furiously that a wheel of the carriage flew off the road; another half hour was spent repairing the damage. By the time the party reached the next posting station, Châlons, the flat, dusty town at which Attila, as legend has it, was defeated by the Romans, they were three hours late. And this was the very town that General de Bouillé and I most worried about—an active little commercial town with a sizable garrison of National Guardsmen and a committed Jacobin Club. Yet the royal couple felt so sheltered within the cocoon of their carriage that the king put his head out of the window to once more enjoy the sight of his subjects. “We were looking forward so much to our meeting with the Duc de Choiseul, whose troops were waiting for us, and up to then my mother had kept exclaiming ‘We are saved!’” Marie-Thérèse would relate later. “But it was here that we were openly recognized.”

  Indeed, Châlons’s citizens, alerted to the identity of the berline’s passengers by the proud young posting master’s son, were in a state of turmoil, arguing the pros and cons of reporting the king’s identity to ensure his arrest, or else to ensure his safety by keeping quiet. They chose the latter option. But it was then that the most ominous apparition of this trip appeared. As the royal family left Châlons a solitary rider, swathed in a flowing cape, a hat drawn over his eyes, galloped up to their carriage, drew close to its window, and shouted the following phrase: “Your plans have gone awry! You will be stopped!” And he sped away ahead of them. Was this mysterious adventurer an emissary of the last town, Châlons, sent ahead to forewarn the passengers? Or was it a republican militant sadistically predicting the turmoil that lay ahead of them? “A joker!” the king exclaimed. “A hapless joker!” But Marie-Thérèse did not look upon him as lightly as her father. For the rest of her days, she later told me, she would remember him as a sinister harbinger of fate.

  I ASK YOU NOW to put yourself in the place of the Duc de Choiseul, a committed young nobleman of deep royalist convictions who’d recently received his regiment by birthright, and who, unlike his father or General Bouillé, had neither the temperament nor the training to take on a risky assignment. He had been instructed to provide a military escort when the royal coach reached Pont-de-Somme-Vesle, the first in a series of escorts that would accompany the king and his family on their way to safety in Montmédy. Having to inform one of his subalterns of the purpose of his mission, Choiseul had shared the secret with one Aubriot. Aubriot too would later relate his impressions of the royals’ flight. And his words attest to the deep mystical awe with which the French monarch was still held by his subjects.

  “My whole body began to tremble,” Aubriot said, recalling his emotions upon learning that he would help to save the king. “My legs gave way under the weight of my body. Sparks of fire began to flash through my veins. In short, the secret threw me into such a state of disorder that I was momentarily unable to answer Monsieur le Duc…. When my senses were at last calm I swore with all my heart that I would defend my king and his august family and that I was ready to sacrifice myself for their sacred persons.”

  So Choiseul and Aubriot, accompanied by forty hussars, had gathered since noon at Pont-de-Somme-Vesle, where the royal coach was expected to arrive at 2:30 in the afternoon; how could they know that the king, who was gauchely referred to by many officers as “the Treasure,” was still many hours away? Assembled before the posting station, Choiseul’s party anxiously scanned the horizon for the cloud of dust that would presage the king’s arrival. As they waited the town’s peasants began to assemble angrily about them. By one of those many accidents of fate that foiled my escape plan, they were convinced that members of the Choiseul party were emissaries from a local absentee landowner, the Duchesse d’Elbeuf, who had been trying to collect tithes from her delinquent tenants. Certain that Choiseul’s soldiers were her men, come to get their money, they brandished muskets and pitchforks as they gathered about the royal party, growing increasingly menacing by the hour. Choiseul kept explaining that his troops were meant to escort “a treasure” that was arriving at any moment from Paris.

  This explanation was equally awkward. I’d disliked that word and had vetoed it all along, for one of the most persistent rumors that plagued Marie Antoinette concerned the possibility that she often shipped French gold to her brother in Austria. The word “treasure” was another factor that could have fueled the hostility of the local crowds: here was proof that she’d been robbing the nation! The inexperienced young Choiseul, threatened by bands of enraged peasants, now made a disastrous mistake. He scribbled notes for the leaders of the detachments stationed farther ahead on the escape route, on the road between Pont-de-Somme-Vesle, Sainte-Ménehoud, and Montmédy. The success of the entire venture had depended on all of these detachments falling in behind the king. But in his notes, Choiseul wrote that the “treasure” was not expected to pass that day, and that he would send fresh orders on the morrow. And whom did he entrust with this already calamitous message? None other than the queen’s hairdresser, Léonard, one of the few royal retainers sent ahead to meet Choiseul. Léonard had barely stopped weeping and deploring his fate since he had left Paris. As the master coiffeur tearfully trotted eastward toward the next stations of the escape route, Choiseul himself, after waiting yet another hour for that chimerical cloud of dust, abandoned his post. It was then 5:30 p.m. He guided his men onto a path that he thought was a shortcut to Varennes, but the route led him instead into the depths of the Argonne Forest. By nightfall his group was hopelessly lost—they would not find their way out of the woods for another twenty-four hours. The angry farmers of Pont-de-Somme-Vesle had dispersed when they had seen Choiseul disappear. Thus the town was empty when, half an hour after Choiseul’s defection, a cloud of dust down the Châlons road finally appeared, presaging the long-awaited arrival of the king’s coaches.

  THE FOLLOWING EVENTS are so painful to relate that however calmly the queen and Marie-Thérèse, a very cold-blooded girl, reported them, I still suffer pain at every word.

  That wretched Léonard again! Carrying the messages Choiseul had given him to bring to General Bouillé, he arrives in Varennes. Bouillé is stationed at the first relay stop on the escape route beyond Varennes, Stenay, waiting for the king with a complement of troops. Idiot Léonard! Upon leaving Varennes for Stenay he takes a wrong turn. He heads east rather than north, toward Verdun, and never reaches Bouillé, who if he’d received the message might well have saved the day by moving his militia back to Varennes. So Bouillé and his aides, having received no directives, decide to await developments in Stenay and get some rest. They retire to their rooms at the Hotel du Grand Monarque and go to sleep. They are wakened two hours later by the clanging of the tocsin, and shouts of “Aux armes, aux armes!”

  For while they were slumbering the king’s coaches had arrived in Varennes. To the royal party’s discomfiture, the sleeping town was empty. General Bouillé and his troops, who were supposed to accompany them to the second-to-last relay on the road to safety, were nowhere in sight. The passengers got out of their coaches and started walking through the town, looking for Bouillé. The search was futile; they returned to their carriage and tried to convince the postilion to take them to the next relay station, Stenay, where they suspected Bouillé might be waiting for them. The postilion, emphasizing his horses’ exhaustion, adamantly refused, turning down bribes and all possible modes of persuasion. By then an important citizen of Varennes, postmaster Jean-Baptiste Drouet, had been wakened by the din of coaches, and now he galloped up to the royal carriage. He had seen the queen at Versailles some years ago while serving in the Royal Cavalry, and he had no doubt whatsoever that the woman in the plain gray dress sitting in the carriage was Marie Antoinette. As for the big hulking man dressed as a valet by her side, Drouet furtively took a fifty-pound bill from his pocket and checked out the image of t
he king’s face printed on it: its similarity to the passenger’s face removed all possible doubt.

  Arrives the deputy mayor of Varennes, a grocer named Jean-Baptiste Sauce. He asks to check the passengers’ documents, and finds them in order. But Drouet, dazzled by his epiphany, tries to convince Sauce that this is indeed the royal party. The town is now wide awake; armed guardsmen and angry crowds carrying torches fill the cobbled streets. Sauce, still apprehensive, not totally trusting Drouet but aware that he could be accused of treason for not stopping the royals, invites the family to rest at his house, where he sells candles and other provisions. He crowds the six passengers—the royal foursome, Madame Elisabeth, and governess de Tourzel—into a tiny second-floor room hung with sausages and hams; and he helps the queen, alias governess of Madame de Korff’s children, put the exhausted youngsters to sleep. Madame de Tourzel, alias Baronne de Korff, sits on a chair beside the sleeping children. The king, introducing himself as Durand, valet to Madame de Korff, paces the room, chatting with his habitual amiability with whatever citizens or officials wander into the room. But around midnight an elderly retired judge name Jacques Destez, who had once lived at Versailles, is led in and recognizes the monarch. Overwhelmed by the king’s presence, he falls to his knees, uttering the fatal words, “Oh, sire!” “Eh bien,” says Louis, “I am indeed your king.” Louis then goes about the room, tears in his eyes, embracing Destez, Drouet, Sauce, and whatever other local citizens surround him, most of whom are also awash in tears of emotion and awe.

  This is the kind of scene that also makes me, Axel von Fersen, still weep. These were the people with whom Louis had always felt most at ease, with whom he would always be at his warmest and most outspoken…. Such public tenderness, however, was not Marie Antoinette’s style, and she sat more morosely than ever by her sleeping children as she watched her husband weeping in the arms of butchers, grocers, and candlestick makers.