The Queen’s Lover Read online

  I wrote the queen in late summer, after I’d finished my consultations with the Austrian emperor and the king of Prussia (whose pledges of support I did not in the least trust). It was a propitious time to write the queen; for in September of 1791 Louis’s decision to accept the constitution, which I now realize to have been essential to the survival, however temporary, of the monarchy, unleashed much indignation among Europe’s royalists. Gustavus was so outraged by Louis’s intention to sign this document that he threatened to entirely withdraw his support of the French Crown. Catherine of Russia was as incensed as Gustavus. Even more vociferous than those sovereigns were the king’s brothers, who were still holding their make-believe alternate court in Koblenz. Their verbal abuse, predictably, was directed at Marie Antoinette, whom they accused of being the one who had convinced the king to ally himself with what was now called the National Constituent Assembly.

  Meanwhile the royal family’s life at the Tuileries, in the aftermath of Varennes, had become a kind of imprisonment. Menacing crowds often swarmed close to the palace, shouting threatening phrases such as “Death to the king!” or “Kill the queen!” Thousands of National Guardsmen camped in tents next to the château. Anyone wishing to enter the Tuileries was searched, and had to present a note signed by Lafayette himself. The king and queen could not even move about freely in their own apartments. Four officers escorted Marie Antoinette when she went to see the dauphin in the boy’s quarters. One of them knocked on the prince’s door and shouted, “The queen!” The sentry on duty at the dauphin’s rooms opened the door for the queen, and her four guards would remain with her while she visited her son. The same procedure was followed when the young prince went to visit his mother. Equally painful, Toinette wrote me, was her lack of privacy at night. National Guardsmen were posted right outside her bedroom door, which she was not allowed to shut, even when she went to sleep. They often entered her room to make sure that she had not fled, and one night a guard even had the temerity to sit himself on her bed to “have a good talk” with her.

  The Tuileries’ aura also remained hostile when the royal couple were alone with Madame Elisabeth, for the king’s sister served as her émigré brothers’ secret agent, fully supporting their belief in counterrevolution. “It’s hell at home,” the queen wrote me. “All conversation is impossible…. My sister-in-law is so indiscreet, and surrounded with so many intriguers, that if we spoke to each other at all we would argue all day.” In her letters to me, the queen gave full vent to her growing resentment of the French, and I fully concurred, calling them, to her delight, “wretches,” “monsters,” “a cursed race.” Our correspondence, as ever, was written in invisible ink, and coded. Our codebook in those years was Paul et Virginie, Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s 1788 novel, and we were careful about our couriers, mostly using the queen’s secretary, Goguelat, or else Eleanore Sullivan’s housekeeper.

  ON SEPTEMBER 13, 1791, the Salle du Manège where the National Constituent Assembly met was packed as the king came to take his oath to the constitution. When Louis stood up, took off his hat, and began speaking the first words of the oath, he noticed that the deputies, breaching all protocol, had sat down and had failed to take off their own hats. Feeling deeply humbled, Louis continued to read the document while sitting down. In spite of the loud cheers that rang out when he had finished speaking, the king was distinctly dismayed by the event. On his return to the Tuileries, he broke down and wept in the arms of the queen. “Why did you come to France to see me so humiliated?” he asked. But the monarchs were heartily cheered again when they went to the theater that night, and indeed the surveillance imposed upon them was somewhat relaxed after the constitution had been signed.

  The threat of counterrevolution, however, continued to menace the Assembly, and it asked the king to sign additional, more contentious decrees. In December 1791 the Assembly voted several ordinances concerning émigrés, and “refractory” priests who had not taken the oath to the constitution. The émigrés, including the king’s brothers, were threatened with the seizure of their assets if they did not return to France within two months; in addition, Louis was to ask all European princes who had welcomed the émigrés to expel them from their domains. As for the refractory priests, they were threatened with deportation if they did not take the oath to the constitution. The king did not mind signing the decrees that concerned his brothers and other émigrés. But his great innate piety, and his deep allegiance to the church of Rome, led him to veto the statutes concerning refractory priests. Although the monarchs placated the Assembly by attending daily masses celebrated by state clergy who had taken the oath, they would secretly make their Easter duties in 1792 at a predawn service celebrated by nonjuring priests. However, the Assembly, suspecting the king’s support of refractory priests, threatened to abolish the right of veto originally granted him by the new constitution. Accusing the queen of having pressured her husband into resisting the Assembly’s ordinances, deputies began to call her “Madame Veto,” and she lost whatever small degree of popularity she had regained in previous months.

  Meanwhile the king was being increasingly pressured by his brothers to take armed action against the new French government. The extent of the king’s opposition to such a civil war is expressed in a letter he wrote to his brothers in Koblenz. “France at this moment is on the verge of total collapse,” he wrote, “and her ruin will only be hastened if violent remedies are added to the ills that already overwhelm her…. The use of force can only come from foreign armies…. Can a king such as I allow himself to take his nation into war? Is the remedy not worse than the disease? Such an idea must be abandoned at once…. I have been greatly grieved by the Comte d’Artois going to the conference at Pillnitz without my consent. I’d like to emphasize that in acting independently of me he undermines my plans.”

  The conference at Pillnitz to which the king alluded had to do with his brothers’ habitual deceitfulness. In the summer of 1791 Artois had met with the Austrian and Prussian rulers at Pillnitz, in Saxony, and tried to persuade them to sign a statement that threatened to restore the king of France’s former sovereignty through armed force. The Austrian emperor, Leopold, and the king of Prussia, Frederick William II, both of whom equally disliked Artois, did sign a short, noncommittal statement deploring the “disorders” in France, and stating their hope that other European powers would give such help as might be asked of them. Since Great Britain had adamantly stated its neutrality, this bland declaration would have remained insignificant if the Comte de Provence had not rewritten it. He drew up a long statement of his own, which he described as an “interpretation” of the manifesto signed by the Austrian and Prussian monarchs. This “interpretation” was a bellicose document that bluntly threatened the French nation with armed attack if Louis XVI’s original powers were not restored. The document, read before the outraged Assembly and distributed throughout France, was held up by many as evidence of the queen’s treasonable collusion with her brother the Austrian emperor. I was with the queen when she read Provence’s manifesto. “They have murdered us!” she exclaimed, referring to her brothers-in-law. I then heard her use the following word about the detestable Provence: “Cain!”

  In the late fall of 1791 the National Constituent Assembly was dissolved and was replaced by a new assembly—the Legislative. Those who had sat in the first congress were ineligible for election to the new one, with the result that Barnave, along with the majority of the centrist Constitutional party, lost their offices and were replaced by new, more radical deputies. And by December it was clear that the Constitutionalists as a whole were as threatened as the Crown. Realizing that the situation was rapidly deteriorating, Marie Antoinette decided to once more consult Barnave, who in view of his party’s demise was planning to leave Paris and retire to his native Grenoble. This was a dangerous meeting for both of them, but she managed to see him alone at the Tuileries at the end of January 1791; and Barnave’s parting words to the queen intimate that he had premoni
tions about his eventual fate. “I’m certain to pay with my head for the interest that your misfortunes have inspired in me and for the services I wished to render you,” he quotes himself as telling the queen in his memoir of that meeting. “I only ask you for the honor of kissing your hand.” Marie Antoinette, with tears in her eyes, extended her hand to him. Barnave would go to the scaffold in October of 1793, just two weeks after the queen.

  In order to clarify the quandaries facing France’s royal couple, I must now pause and give the reader a brief glimpse of European dynastic politics in the early 1790s.

  The king of Prussia was then Frederick William II, a nephew of Frederick the Great, the latter of whom had died in 1786. By 1790 the grossly fat Frederick William, a relentless womanizer, had acquired three wives in addition to numerous mistresses. And all these women, along with their husbands and lovers, pressed the voluptuary king for various personal ends, creating a morass of contradictory political policies. However, even this weak-willed leader was very distressed by the Varennes debacle, and its general impact on the French Revolution. He allied himself reluctantly with Prussia’s traditional enemy, Austria, against the new French government, hoping that an anti-French incursion might help him gain some precious territories, suck up a chunk of Flanders.

  As for the ruthless, brilliant Catherine the Great of Russia, she held to one goal throughout her reign: her nation’s territorial aggrandizement. Her ambitions, in that decade, were particularly centered on Turkey and Greece. Shortly after the beginning of the French Revolution, Catherine invaded Turkey with the help of Austria, whose territories also touched upon the Ottoman Empire. In view of their plans for carving up Turkey, the leaders of the two nations were thrilled to witness the collapse of France’s power, knowing that it was now far too unsettled to interfere with their ambitions in the Near East.

  But the Austrian-Prussian alliance was undermined by the craft of Frederick William’s brilliant prime minister, Hertzberg: he stirred up revolts in several Austrian possessions, particularly Hungary, where Magyar nationalist strivings were strong, and Belgium, part of the Austrian Netherlands, where the peasant class allied itself with clergymen eager to weaken the impact of Enlightenment ideals. In March 1790 a great pillage occurred in the Austrian Netherlands, sparing only those houses that displayed a picture of the Virgin Mary. Leopold II, Marie Antoinette’s sibling, who had just acceded to the Austrian throne after the death of their brother Joseph II, had to abandon his invasion of Turkey to quell these revolts.

  Having wrought havoc in Austrian lands, some months later Prussia turned its attention to Russia’s principal possession, Poland, and pledged to support it if it rose against its Russian occupiers. Poland, the country that connected Catherine the Great’s empire to Europe, was pivotal to her foreign policy. Unable to grab much land in her earlier incursion, when she had had to share part of the Polish loot with Austria and France, in her next assault she wished to seize all she could. She hoped that Austria and Prussia would be too involved in their armed actions against France to meddle with her policies. But a council of the Austrian government held in January 1792, at the very time I was in Vienna pleading for Austria’s support for an armed congress, threatened to thwart her plans. It stated that “to sacrifice Austria’s gold and blood to restore the Bourbons’ power would be as great an act of madness as Austria could possibly commit.” So my own mission to Leopold was aborted: he asserted that he would not participate in an armed congress unless all the European powers—Russia, England, Prussia, Spain—agreed to support it.

  I was trained to be a soldier, not a diplomat, and I must pause and admit to the pathetically naive, trusting attitude with which I addressed these intricacies of European diplomacy. It was not in my nature to comprehend Frederick William’s and Catherine the Great’s Machiavellian machinations. Neither was it in my nature to have predicted Emperor Leopold’s crass indifference to his sister’s fate. I told the queen that her brother was “a real Italian,” by which I meant a duplicitous liar.

  In contrast to the heartless and hypocritical heads of state I’ve just referred to was Gustavus III, who had conceived yet another escape plan, which he asked me to propose to the French monarchs. According to this new rescue strategy the French royal family, occupying separate coaches, would travel from Paris to Normandy, whence they would escape across the Channel to England with the help of twelve thousand Swedish soldiers. And in January of 1792 I wrote the queen that I was coming to Paris to speak to her and Louis XVI about this “affair of state.” However much she missed me (we had not seen each other for seven months, since the evening before the flight to Varennes), Marie Antoinette, concerned as ever for my safety, ordered me to remain in Brussels, the capital of the Austrian Netherlands. I would face certain death if I was caught in France, she warned me. Upon my insistence she finally relented, and in February, telling me that conditions were somewhat safer, she wrote to say she would welcome my arrival. I immediately began to plan my departure, acquiring false credentials—I feigned that I was a Swedish diplomat who was making a brief stop in Paris on his way to Portugal.

  I reached Paris on the evening of February 13 with my orderly and dropped off my baggage at the Hotel des Princes, on the rue de Richelieu. From there I took a cab to the home of the Baron de Goguelat, the queen’s secretary, who, though under surveillance since the Varennes venture, was able to move freely about the Tuileries. He took me to the queen’s apartments shortly after 9 p.m. I would not leave her until 6 p.m. the following evening, when I was planning to visit the king in his own quarters.

  How can I—how can any man—write with serenity, even fifteen, twenty years later, about his very last night of intimacy with the love of his life? I’m emotionally incapable of sharing the details of our final hours. I also would rather not speak of my dark premonitions—I seem to have had them about many crucial events of that decade. But on this occasion I felt that my beloved too strongly sensed that this was to be our last meeting. I can only say that we spoke to each other as ardently, as nostalgically, as we made love. We recalled all of the happy times we had shared over the years: our silly, youthful conversation on the night we first met at the Paris Opera; our secretive horseback rides in the forest of Saint-Cloud, the way she got annoyed when I gave her a handicap for racing our horses to the finish line; our backgammon games, which she always won; the way we used to dodge Ambassador Mercy to minimize his intrusion into our lives; our first trysts, in the little alcove over her Versailles apartment.

  In between bouts of lovemaking we also talked, of course, about Varennes—it was from her that I first received a detailed narrative of that episode: the king’s naive enthusiasm about seeing his country for the first time; the absurd flirtation, on the way back to Paris, between Princess Elisabeth and Deputy Pétion; the decency and humaneness (by this time I had ceased resenting him) of Barnave; the poor nobleman who, during the monarchs’ return to Paris, was put to death for saluting the king. We recalled the books and plays we had read aloud to each other—Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses, Voltaire’s Candide. We spoke too of our merrier moments, of the operas we’d enjoyed together—Gluck’s Iphigenia, Rameau’s Les Indes galantes, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. Sitting there in bed, we even sang “Là ci darem la mano.” We were together for twenty-one hours. A few hours before we parted, Toinette gave me a gold watch, precisely similar to one she had, on whose surface were carved our initials, A and F.

  The day after my arrival, when the clock in Toinette’s drawing room rang the hour of 6 p.m., I knew I had to move on and see the king: for I had come, ostensibly, to offer him the new escape plan devised by Gustavus. As we exchanged a last embrace she controlled her tears, perhaps to allay mine. “Sois toi-même,” she whispered to me. “Be true to yourself,” she repeated gently as she gave me one last kiss. It was the first time she had spoken that phrase to me.

  Louis XVI, his eyes dreadfully sad and resigned, grown even fatter by the bouts of overeating he
indulged in during his deepest depressions, welcomed me with his habitual warmth and affability. But he refused to so much as discuss the evasion plan proposed by Gustavus. After Varennes, the king explained to me, he had promised the Assembly that he would never again try to leave Paris. “His scruples restrained him,” I would jot down in my journal the following day, “because he is an honorable man.” Louis, with his habitual humility and candor, was forthright about the mistakes he had made, the possibilities he had wasted. “I know now that I missed the moment,” he said. “I should have left on July 14 and I wanted to; Monsieur himself begged me to leave. I missed the moment and I’ve never found it since.” The king buried his face in his hands and remained silent for a minute; then he raised his head again, and added: “I’ve been abandoned by everyone.” The sorrow in his eyes, as he spoke that phrase, was barely tolerable. Shortly afterward the king took his leave. He had made it impossible for me to do anything more for him.