The Queen’s Lover Read online

  How incongruous is it, I ask you, that the Capetian dynasty, the royal descendants of Saint Louis, came to an end in a grocer’s shop in a small village in the Marne?

  WITHIN AN HOUR some 4,500 members of the National Guard arrived from the villages of the surrounding countryside. Choiseul, having finally found his way out of the Argonne Forest, clattered into Varennes and joined the royal family in the room hung with hams. Two couriers arrived, sent by the National Assembly in Paris, bearing a letter signed by Lafayette which stated that the king was not permitted to continue on his journey. Louis read the Assembly’s letter and let it fall upon the bed where his children were sleeping. “There’s no longer a king in France,” he whispered. Marie Antoinette swiftly picked the letter off the bed and threw it to the floor. “I will not have such an object taint my children!” she exclaimed. Meanwhile the crowds in the streets below were growing more inflamed. “The king to Paris!” they roared. “The king to Paris!” “We’ll drag them by their feet if need be!” a voice arose. “To Paris, or we’ll shoot them all!” another cried. The royal family was playing for time, hoping against hope that General de Bouillé and his troops would arrive to rescue them. But by 7 a.m., with no Bouillé in sight, they realized it was time to leave. In single file, they descended the stairs they’d ascended a few hours earlier. Princess Marie-Thérèse, although she never liked me, would much later admit to me that just before leaving the room her mother had taken Choiseul aside and asked: “Do you think Monsieur de Fersen is safe?” I had, in fact, fled to Belgium as soon as I heard of the disaster—that was what the queen had ordered me to do in case the escape failed.

  In the chorus of accusations that arose after the Varennes debacle—Choiseul blamed Bouillé, Bouillé blamed Choiseul, both denounced Léonard, etc.—one voice alone was not heard: the king’s. In his habitually charitable manner, Louis tried, to the contrary, to allay the remorse of those who might feel they had failed him. Nothing more clearly displays the king’s immense kindness than a letter he wrote to General de Bouillé a few weeks after his return to the capital, a letter that absolved him of all responsibility for the debacle. “You must stop accusing yourself, monsieur,” he wrote. “You risked everything for me and you did not succeed. Fate was against your plans and mine. Circumstances paralyzed my will, and your courage and all our preparations came to naught…. Accept my thanks, monsieur, I only wish it were in my power to offer you some token of my gratitude.”

  The return to Paris—this was best described to me by the queen—was the most frightening aspect of the entire Varennes episode. At the beginning of the three-day journey, a terrible heat wave was plaguing northeastern France. The horses dragging the royal coaches were foundering on the road. In every hamlet and town crowds of vociferous citizens jeered at the sight of the carriage. In one pathetic display of royalist devotion, a Comte Val de Dampierre, whose estate was nearby, attempted to ride up to the coach and salute the king. He was dragged away by a group of National Guardsmen and hacked to death. At another stop a man leaned into the carriage window and spat at the king, whose hand trembled visibly as he wiped away this evidence of his citizens’ rancor. When the royal family stopped at an inn to refresh themselves, Marie Antoinette’s dress was badly ripped by the savage crowd, many of whom were drunk. The women were particularly hostile. “Stop, pretty little lady,” one cried out, shoving the queen as she was stepping back into the coach. “Your life’s on the line!”

  When two deputies sent by the Assembly to accompany the royals back to Paris arrived, the king and queen welcomed them with joy, hoping they would protect them. One of the deputies, Jérôme Pétion, who would soon become the mayor of Paris, was a dour, militant republican and an outspoken enemy of the king and queen. The other was twenty-eight-year-old Antoine Barnave, known as “the Tiger” because of his ferocious diatribes against the royal couple. He was a notably eloquent speaker, a soulful, idealistic man with chiseled features and beautiful blue eyes who in 1789 had been among the deputies elected to represent his province, Grenoble, at the Estates-General. To make room for the two men in the crowded berline, the queen, who sat between Barnave and her husband, took the dauphin on her lap, while Marie-Thérèse sat on her aunt Elisabeth’s. And within a few hours both republican deputies were conquered by the friendliness and warm simplicity of the royal passengers. The king called his sister “Babette.” The six-year-old dauphin asked his father for his chamber pot, which the king handed him without the least embarrassment. Then my cherished little prince noticed the revolutionary motto on the brass buttons of Barnave’s coat—“Vivre Libre ou Mourir,” “Live Free or Die”—and, showing off his reading skills, pronounced the words. Barnave was impressed, and complimented the royal couple on their son’s precociousness. This pleased the queen no end. Pulling up her veil, she started talking with Barnave about children’s education, and they were soon having an animated conversation. Barnave was awed by the royal prisoners’ familial, unpretentious manners, which appeared to be absolutely similar to those of his own bourgeois milieu. Instead of the aloof, domineering Catherine de Médicis kind of woman Marie Antoinette’s detractors alleged her to be, so Barnave would later write, he found “a pale, shattered woman,” a remarkably gracious human being who was bearing her difficult plight with admirable dignity. Despite her increasingly wasted features, my Marie Antoinette still had a charm, a grace of bearing, that sensitive men such as Barnave and I could find irresistible…. As for Pétion, he started flirting shamelessly with Madame Elisabeth, amusing himself with the notion that she might grow enamored of him; her gaze having softened after an hour of conversation, he would later boast to his colleagues that she had fallen passionately in love with him.

  Outside the berline, however, the crowds grew increasingly malevolent as the royals approached Paris. Many women howled for “the queen’s head” and asked for her intestines to be distributed among them. To appease them Marie Antoinette tried to lift the dauphin to the window, but one woman shouted, “Take him away! We know that fat hog isn’t his father!” In suburban streets bands of enraged citizens defaced or smashed shops and inns that bore the king’s name. Terrified of the mobs’ ire, Barnave ordered the National Guardsmen to better protect his passengers from such insults.

  The royal coaches lumbered into Paris on June 25, three days after their departure, through the Champs-Elysées. Here the avenue was lined by huge, eerily silent crowds. The Assembly had warned Paris citizens that “whoever insults the royal family will be beaten; whoever applauds them will be shot.” This excommunication of silence—the city’s stillness—was broken only by the slow beat of muffled drums. National Guardsmen crossed their rifles in the air as a show of defiance. Citizens had been ordered by the Jacobin Clubs to keep their hats on their heads as a show of disrespect for the royal family. At the Assembly, that very day, the militant thirty-five-year-old deputy Georges-Jacques Danton had described Louis XVI as “a traitor or an imbecile” for having engaged in the escape attempt. But he received little support for his proposal to replace the king with an executive council. Even the Assembly’s most militant figure, Maximilien Robespierre, argued that the new constitution had already given France the best of both worlds, “a republic with a monarch.” Revolutionary leaders were also anxious about the probability that deposing Louis XVI might lead to war with Austria, which most members of the Assembly were still eager to avoid. But it was clear that the king had become an utterly powerless member of the body politic. As the royal family drove up to the Tuileries they saw huge placards placed against its gates that read “Maison à Louer,” “House for Rent.”

  As for Marie Antoinette, when she had rested a bit and had had time to ponder the Varennes catastrophe, she sent for her principal chambermaid, Madame Campan, the first person to whom she would relate details of the piteous voyage. It was Madame Campan who told me that during the three-day ordeal Marie Antoinette’s golden hair had turned snow white, “like that of a woman of seventy.”
/>   “All is lost, dearest father,” I wrote my beloved parent when the news of the debacle reached me in Brussels, “and I am in despair. Just imagine my grief, and pity me.”

  A few days after her return the queen wrote me two hurried notes, which I received in Belgium.

  “I exist,” she wrote, “but how worried I’ve been about you; I know you must be suffering much not to have heard from us! Will Providence allow this to reach you? You must not write me, for that would endanger us. Above all, do not come back here on any pretext. They know it was you who got us out of here and you would be doomed if you were to return. We are watched night and day. But you mustn’t worry. Nothing will harm me. The Assembly wishes to treat us leniently. Adieu…I can write you no more.”

  “I can only tell you that I love you and I barely have the time to do that,” she wrote me a few hours later. “Don’t worry about me…. Send me letters through your valet. Advise me as to whom I should send the few letters I’ll be able to write you, for I can’t live without writing you. Adieu, the most beloved and loving of men. I kiss you with all my heart.”

  PART II

  CHAPTER 9

  Axel:

  THE WAITING GAME

  WHAT WRETCHES THE king’s brothers were! Informed by Bouillé of the royal family’s arrest, the Comte de Provence could hardly conceal his satisfaction. “There wasn’t a tear in those eyes as dry as his heart,” Bouillé would report. “All one could discern was their customary expression of falsity across which darted a few sparks of perfidious satisfaction.”

  By this time Provence had already established his own government at Koblenz, which along with Brussels was the capital of French émigré life. He had settled in a palace given him by one of his uncles, and had appointed his brother Artois lieutenant governor of his realm. He had even had the audacity to draw up a constitution that made him regent of France and stripped Louis XVI of his sovereignty. Meanwhile the Comtesse de Provence, more given than ever to her lesbian amours, was enjoying a passionate liaison with an English woman who was said to be a spy. It was clear that the princes of the blood, perfidious as ever, were as hostile to the French monarchs as the most radical members of the National Assembly.

  As for my own king, Gustavus III, at the time of the Varennes debacle he had been at Aix-la-Chapelle, waiting to celebrate Louis XVI’s deliverance. The news of Louis’s arrest put him into a terrible state of shock. The French monarchy’s most loyal supporter, he had been the only sovereign to grasp the horrendous implications of the French Revolution for the rest of Europe. The events of June 1791 clearly unhinged him: once renowned for his liberalism, he made a radical about-face, shedding all his progressive ideals and pledging to uphold the divine right of kings. He even proposed an armed invasion of France that would involve Russian, Austrian, Prussian, and Swedish troops. An armed venture was also being demanded by Louis XVI’s brothers, though they differed with Gustavus, who wished his coalition to be led by Sweden. Gustavus’s intention was to invade France via Normandy and “throttle the Hydra in its lair.” Put into the paradoxical position of having to curb his zeal, I talked him out of this absurd venture, which equally terrified the queen of France and me: what solely obsessed Gustavus was to uphold the principle of absolute monarchy, and it had not entered his mind that such an invasion would greatly threaten the lives of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. In dearth of wise support, I thought of Quentin Craufurd, and persuaded Gustavus to appoint Craufurd as emissary to the king of England, from whom he would solicit funds for the French Crown.

  As for Marie Antoinette, in the summer of 1791, shortly after the Varennes debacle, she began a complex and duplicitous relationship with Barnave. Soon after her return she contacted the deputy through the mediation of one of her favorites, the Marquis de Jarjayes, who came from the same area of France as Barnave, the Dauphine, and whose wife was one of her ladies-in-waiting. “Tell Barnave,” she said to Jarjayes, “that I was much struck by his character and by the frankness I found in him during those two days we spent together. I should very much like him to advise us as to what we are to do in our present position.” As out of touch as ever with the details of real politics, the queen wished Barnave to intercede with the Assembly on behalf of the royal family. As their correspondence progressed, Barnave—whose moderation I was grateful for, however much I resented his close friendship with the queen—wrote Marie Antoinette long reports on the political situation. Like Mirabeau had before him, he tried to persuade the queen that the king had to accept the constitution, and support it firmly and “with sincerity.” In addition, he advised her that she and Louis had to publicly condemn the counterrevolutionary movement led by the king’s brothers, and also demand the return of those princes and of other émigrés. This ingratiating little dolt, Barnave, had even acquired intolerable influence on the queen’s daily life. “Your Majesty should go to the opera more often,” he’d tell the queen. “I’ll go to the opera tomorrow,” she would meekly reply.

  It should be made clear that Marie Antoinette disliked the constitution even more than the king did, considering it unworkable, and was forthright in stating her disdain for it to Barnave. She was not alone in this regard. Her objections to it were even shared by many revolutionaries, such as Camille Desmoulins, who called the constitution “a veritable Tower of Babel” because of its numerous contradictions. Yet even though she looked on the Constituent Assembly, which had drafted it, as “a heap of blackguards, madmen, and beasts,” she promised Barnave that she and the king would “steadfastly” support it. However, during all this time she was conniving with Barnave, she was also conspiring with me and several allied rulers on an alternative plan—an armed congress. She clearly had taken the keys to the kingdom from her increasingly passive husband, who, deeply depressed by the Varennes episode, spent most of his time reading and sleeping.

  I never knew that my Toinette, usually so guileless, was capable of such double-dealing! Under Barnave’s guidance, for instance, she wrote a letter to her brother Leopold II, asking him to support the new French nation, and to renounce all military ventures against it. Yet soon after mailing him that missive she wrote a second one to the Austrian ambassador, Mercy, telling him that her letter to Leopold had been extorted from her by Barnave. She concluded this message, however, with a kindly report on Barnave and his disciples. “Although they’re tenacious in their opinions I have never seen anything but the greatest decency in them…and a genuine wish to restore order and…the authority of the Crown.”

  The remaining months of 1791 were equally steeped in duplicity. Toinette was deceiving me through her secret relationship with Barnave; I was hoodwinking Gustavus by assuring him that the queen shared his enthusiasm for an armed congress. Barnave, of course, was double-crossing the Assembly through his dealings with the royal family; while Leopold of Austria, though saying yes yes yes to his little sister, had no intention whatever of coming to the French royal family’s rescue in the event they needed it. Neither did the king of Prussia have any similar intent, even though he too had pledged his support of the French Crown. Meanwhile Provence and Artois, who could barely conceal their elation over the Varennes debacle, were duping the Assembly by expressing hypocritical concerns over their brother’s fate.

  In the midst of all these double-dealings, how did I react, one might well ask, to Toinette’s relationship with Barnave? Although it was rumored that she was sleeping with him I did not believe a word of it. Only I knew the extent to which the French tended to sully her reputation through loathsome gossip; only I knew that she was not that sexually driven, that she could only be aroused by someone with whom she was deeply in love. However, I was concerned enough about her relationship with the blackguard to write her the following words of caution: “Do not open your heart to those madmen; they’re all scoundrels who will do nothing for you…. The nobility whom you would thus abandon would no longer feel it owes you anything. You would debase yourself in the eyes of the powers of Europe, who woul
d accuse you of cowardice.” “Set your mind at rest,” she replied to me; “I’m hardly joining the enragés. If I see them or have relations with some of them, it is only to utilize them. They inspire too much horror in me; I would never go over to them.”

  But the immense correspondence the queen was maintaining with diverse factions in her effort to save the Crown—with Barnave, with me, with her brother Emperor Leopold, with several other allied sovereigns whose support she was seeking—was clearly draining her. The young woman who had once exasperated her mother with her frivolity and laziness was often at work until 2 a.m. “I’m exhausted from writing,” she wrote me in one of her letters, which she sent to me in food tins, or in the hems of clothes. “I’ve never done work such as this before and I’m always afraid of forgetting something or making some stupid mistake.” And in another letter she phrased her weariness in the following manner: “Please understand my position, and the role I’m obliged to play all day long. Sometimes I barely recognize myself and I have to pause to realize that this person is really me…. When I’m at my saddest, I take my little boy in my arms, I kiss him with all my heart, and that momentarily consoles me.”

  IN JULY AND AUGUST OF 1791 I considered it more prudent to not write the queen at all. For I spent those months in Vienna, trying to convince the Austrian and Prussian monarchs to join an armed venture that would restore Louis XVI to his former power. Yet if I’d anticipated the anguish my silence would cause poor Toinette I might have reconsidered my prudence. It appears that several of her letters, including the one in which she called me “the most loving and beloved of men,” were intercepted, and they reached me only years later, after her death. Not aware of these interceptions, she was hurt by my muteness. “My heart is full of grief,” she wrote our mutual friend Valentin Esterhazy, “for I have no real friends here in whom I might confide my sorrows…. To have no news of him is unbearable. Should you write HIM tell him that many miles and many countries can never separate hearts.” A few days later she sent Esterhazy another note, in which, he reported, she enclosed two rings. “The one that’s wrapped in paper is for HIM,” she wrote him. “Send it to HIM for me. It is exactly his size. I wore it for two days before wrapping it…. I don’t know where he is. It is dreadful to have no news of those one loves and not even know where they are.” Alas, I never received the ring.