The Queen’s Lover Read online

  AT ABOUT THE time I met the dauphine at that opera ball I was enjoying a liaison with the Marquise de Blacas, a handsomely plump, lusty matron who had been the first to introduce me to the joy of the senses. High time, I was nineteen. I finally felt that I was reaching adulthood, and was also getting to know Europe. Immediately upon my arrival in France, Creutz had taken me to Versailles to present me to that old roué Louis XV (my prim mother would have fainted if she’d known I’d kissed the hand of his paramour, Madame du Barry, whom she referred to as “that vulgar courtesan”). Creutz had also introduced me to the Duc d’Aiguillon, whose esteem I seemed to have readily won, and who invited me to the card parties held every Monday night at the Dauphine Marie Antoinette’s. But until that crucial night at the opera ball, the Marquise de Blacas’s sensual demands, and the additional social schedule she held me to—dinners, balls, supper parties—had kept me too busy to attend the dauphine’s events.

  There was something fateful about the timing of my encounter with Marie Antoinette, as if destiny was trying to keep us apart. Lent began a fortnight after I met her, and all social occasions were discontinued until after Easter. Shortly after that, family business forced me to go to England, where I was to visit with my beloved younger sister, Sophie, one of Stockholm’s most beautiful young women, who was making her first visit to a foreign country.

  The day before I left for London, Louis XV died of the smallpox, a few days after he had ordered his mistress of many years, Madame du Barry, to leave Versailles, and shortly after he had made his first confession in thirty-eight years. The details of his passing had a singular fascination for me: As reported by those who witnessed it, the disease was feared to be so contagious that the king’s doctors refused to embalm the corpse; the entire medical team fled the premises, leaving his devoted servants—lackeys, coachmen—to immerse the royal body in a lead coffin, which upon doctors’ orders was filled with the strongest spirits available. In order to safeguard the royal lineage, the sixteen-year-old dauphine and the eighteen-year-old dauphin (who unlike his wife had not been inoculated, the Bourbons being the only royal family in Europe that had not taken this precaution) had been banned from the king’s room. They stood in a hallway that faced, across a courtyard, his bedchamber. A candle had been lit on the king’s windowsill. The youngsters were told that they would learn of the king’s death when the candle was snuffed out. They stood at the window, staring at the light in the patriarch’s room. As a courtier extinguished it, they fell to their knees, a spontaneous impulse that much moved those who witnessed it. They were said to be both in tears. “Help us, dear God,” the adolescent new king, Louis XVI, was heard to exclaim; “we are too young to rule!”

  Hardly had he spoken those words than, according to the dauphine’s first chambermaid, Madame Campan, a dreadful noise, “absolutely similar to that of thunder,” was suddenly heard heading toward the pitiful young couple. First sounding like a distant rumble, it grew like a furiously approaching storm…. This turbulence, which swelled to a terrifying din, was caused by the stampede of courtiers running from the room of the deceased monarch to salute the new one. The giggling, merry girl who had approached me at the opera ball, and had seduced me upon first sight, had become the queen of France.

  AFTER MY STAYS IN PARIS and London I went back to Sweden for a few years, to be deeply bored. When attending the court of Gustavus III I played second violin to my monarch’s favorite, Baron Armfelt. As captain of the king’s light-horse cavalry all I had to do was put my men through their paces every few months. I took care to gently elude the advances of the king’s adorable sister-in-law, Charlotte, Duchess of Södermanland, who had conceived a passion for me in her adolescence. I spent much of my time in Löfstad, my family’s estate south of Stockholm, where I kept my diary, practiced my singing, played backgammon with Sophie and my parents, and painted watercolors of the lakes and meadows surrounding our palace. I was longing for the military life, yearning to see action, but war was nowhere in sight. When I turned twenty-two the issue of marriage inevitably arose. My father wished me to marry the daughter of a wealthy British banker, a Miss Leyel, and I traveled to London to make her acquaintance. She was pretty and accomplished, and I managed to address her some ritual phrases of affection that might have led to a betrothal; but she feared leaving her family, to whom she was deeply attached, to live in Sweden. There was little to please me in Great Britain. Upon visiting the royal court I was amazed by its drabness: nothing about its inhabitants or its furnishings betokened the grandeur of monarchy. King George III was in the process of going mad, and mumbled unintelligibly to conceal the fact that he spoke the same phrase to everyone he met. He slept in an old bed of frayed red velvet, blackened by smoke and shiny with grease. Even the palace’s chandeliers were made of wood. The queen was ugly and without elegance. London society was equally drab. I tried to make friends with some colleague officers but found them disdainful and small-spirited. In 1778, with what relief I returned to Paris, the city of my dreams!

  It was my good fortune to be immediately reintroduced to the French court by Ambassador Creutz. Upon my first visit I was greeted most amiably by the new queen, who was then undergoing her first pregnancy, and who remembered more than clearly our meeting at the opera ball. “Ah, but it’s an old acquaintance!” she exclaimed as she held her hand out to me. I then began to frequent the court assiduously and to think about you every hour of the day, Dearest Majesty, and I could not help but note some characteristics of yours that particularly struck me, and that in my view were clearly traceable to your childhood. At your mother’s Schönbrunn Palace you’d been the kind of unruly, tomboyish child who is the despair of many parents, the kind who refuses to concentrate on her studies and prefers romping through the forest with her friends, who disrupts social gatherings by giggling behind her fan at the silliness of elders. You were also phenomenally uneducated, poor girl; your ignorance was in part traceable to the fact that you were extremely myopic, and for the rest of your life you preferred to be read to in order to acquire most book knowledge. But this was deceptive: when you truly fancied a literary treasure, such as Italian poetry, you were capable of productive studying, and even translated some verses of Dante’s Inferno.

  As for your guileless, forthright manner: as Maria Theresa’s fifteenth child you’d been brought up at a court known for its dowdy simplicity, a warm, familial court where etiquette was minimal, where intrigues were ill-considered. Compare Schönbrunn to its French counterpart! One marvels at the nonchalance with which your mother launched you, naive, guileless waif, into Europe’s wiliest, most scheming aristocracy. In May 1770, when you signed the register that sealed your marriage to Dauphin Louis-Auguste, you left a large blotch of ink on the page. You were so nearsighted and so awkward with your pen that you could barely sign your name.

  But I intended to write history, not love letters; I must strive to be more objective…. What struck me first about the queen when I began to visit her regularly was her extreme gentleness and civility of manner, which she extended to the most humble of her attendants. “Auriez vous la gentillesse,” “Would you be kind enough,” was the phrase that prefaced all of her demands. Brusqueness or impatience was seldom known to her. She spoke to the women who served her—chambermaids and dressmakers as well as highborn ladies-in-waiting—with a friendliness that bordered on complicity. It was my compatriot’s wife, Germaine de Staël, who might have had one of the last words about Marie Antoinette. Her manner, Staël wrote, “had a kind of affability which did not allow us to forget that she was a queen yet persuaded us that she’d forgotten all about it.” A kindly streak had been part of her character since childhood. When she was eight, little Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who had come to play at Schönbrunn, slipped and fell to the floor upon rising from his piano stool. Marie Antoinette was the first to run over to him and allay his tears. Her amiability of voice, of demeanor, made even more pleasurable the graciousness which marked all that pertained to her
—her furniture, her objets d’art.

  I very soon noticed her preference for small, intimate, crowded spaces—a throwback, perhaps, to her childhood at Schönbrunn, and a reaction against the inane grandeur of Versailles, which she detested. In her warmly elegant private apartments one could, indeed, barely move, so brimming were they with little footstools, richly upholstered poufs, gilded lamps, flowery silk curtains, china braziers in which she burned flower essences to dispel the castle’s reek, and the multitude of bibelots set upon the tables, desks, mantelpieces of her rooms. Further encumbrance was caused by the three or four little white dogs whom she adored, who followed her everywhere and constantly jumped upon any daybeds, chaise longues, armchairs they fancied; and by the retinue of young black boys assigned to carry her umbrellas when she went out, but whom she also beckoned to her quarters much of the time, especially in the early years when she was childless, since they satisfied her deep maternal feelings and she amused herself by fondling and teasing them, lifting them up in her arms, chasing them about the room. Upon my visits, to which I always brought my own beloved spaniel, Odin, all mayhem broke loose. As the kids dressed in gold-trimmed red suits pranced about, and Odin joined the queen’s dogs in jumping upon and down from her sofas and daybeds, I stood protectively close to a table upon which her women always placed a glass of barley-sugar water and a dish of crème fraîche sprinkled with currants. The nourishment these sweets provided was important, for at meals the queen barely ate, the only fare that struck her fancy being small pieces of boneless chicken breast and quantities of water—unlike her husband, she hated wine. When dining she moved her gold fork and knife slowly about her plate, pushing her food around in small circular motions, seldom lifting anything beyond the tiniest morsel to her mouth as she amiably immersed herself in chatting with her guests. But one had to be careful about conversations: they began to displease her when they extended to anything with which she was not familiar—speculative notions such as Voltaire’s concept of justice, say, or Rousseau’s view of mercy; at the mere sound of such high-minded chat she started to vigorously agitate her fan, as if to chase away the mental smog created by such pointless banter. Yet how she brightened at the mention of music! We both had a passion for opera. Gluck had been her beloved music teacher in Vienna, and she remained loyal to him throughout his life, often beckoning him to her apartments, and ever urging musicians to perform his works. She played the clavichord beautifully and had a small but fairly true voice; many were the times when we sang “J’ai perdu mon Eurydice” as she accompanied us on her spinet, her little coloratura nicely enhancing my baritone.

  But it may surprise those who did not know the queen well to learn that she was essentially of a melancholy nature; she was terrified of solitude, and prone to fits of great depression. And since I too was often plagued with bouts of melancholy, these mutual traits would only deepen our eventual friendship. How often did I come to her apartments and find her seated at a table, her head down, her hands wrapping her face as if in a gesture of mourning! As soon as she heard me enter she straightened up into her good little soldier posture and put on a shining smile, but I came to know the nuances of her expressions so well that I knew the smile was forced. This chaste, ingenuous girl was incapable of deceit, and not that good an actress. She did, however, have a considerable instinct for self-preservation: the fetes, galas, balls, gambling parties into which she threw herself so feverishly, and that did such harm to her reputation, were palliatives—gambling in particular much raised her spirits—with which she tried to keep her depressions at bay. Early on in her reign, she started raising her morale by keeping company with the Comte and Comtesse de Polignac, a high-living, insolvent couple who milked her for every cent they could—she gave the count the post of equerry, which made him a wealthy man. And she immensely enjoyed the company of her fellow cardsharps. (One of her favorite partners at the gaming table, Abbé Quelquechose, was so addicted that he kept playing until dawn, and went straight from the royal gambling den to the altar of his church to say his first morning Mass.)

  I’m the first to concede that the queen committed many imprudences. For instance, she was given to riding in a gilded sled, made all the more noticeable by the ringing of its one hundred little bells, without an escort or mounted guard or any other outward sign of ceremony. Citizens were aghast at such a lack of decorum. I shall also admit that the queen was truly vain, though if you wished to excuse her for even that weakness you might see her passion for apparel as another way of keeping the saturnine demons away. She had daily meetings with Mademoiselle Rose Bertin, her dressmaker. Great swaths of satin, velvet, and silk were brought into her rooms, and the two women hovered at length over these materials, deciding which of them would be used for the next design. The queen did not wish her costumes to be seen until the first time she wore them; so any new outfits that arrived at the palace were heavily veiled with white linen sheets and traveled throughout the public corridors of Versailles like great ghosts, their porters avoiding the smaller, more private routes because of the queen’s dread that the garments might be damaged. The only other person allowed to see her dresses at their inception was her favorite friend, Princesse de Lamballe, the widow of a noted rake, an adorably round-faced, dimpled little creature whose manner and tone of voice were as gracious as the queen’s, but far more self-effacing. She provided, at all moments, a kind of sounding board for her sovereign’s every whim and desire, never contradicting or criticizing, smiling through every crisis. And during the queen’s childless years Lamballe was the only being with whom she could satisfy her considerable need for physical affection: to come into the queen’s quarters and see the two women sitting on a sofa, tenderly embracing, kissing each other’s cheeks, shoulders, hands, was as sweet and disturbing a sight as I had during my visits to the palace—it caused her enemies to make inane accusations of sapphism, but led me to sense the full weight of my friend’s solitude and frustration, her poignant need for friendship and intimacy.

  YET AS THE MONTHS WORE ON, as my visits to the royal couple multiplied, it was upon the king, Louis XVI, that I began to focus my attention, quite as much as on Her adorable Majesty. For what a man, Louis XVI, what a man! I’m only too aware of the extent to which he’s been disdained and ridiculed for his timid, awkward manner. But may I say that immediately upon meeting him I felt we were soul brothers: both diffident, studious, reclusive, not easily given to words, utterly incapable of the vain swift chatter that passed at the court for conversation. Certainly he was even shier than I, because of his all too evident ungainliness: his large gauche body; his clumsy way of moving about a room; his sloppy table manners—loving his food and wine, he ate swiftly and greedily, crumbs and gravy spilling about his huge chest, a glaring contrast to his wife’s delicate frugality. Moreover, he had an uncomely habit of keeping his mouth a tad open at all times, as if he were aware that it could take him a painfully long time to prepare a sentence. The king, indeed, had little reason for self-assurance beyond the pleasure he took in his legendary physical strength; he enjoyed demonstrating it by seating one of his adolescent pages on the end of a shovel, and lifting him off the ground to shoulder height. He could be rougher in displaying his vigor. Upon the first of the queen’s confinements, on a warm July day, she fainted from lack of air after her doctor had ordered all windows closed. In a passion of good sense Louis thrust his arm violently through a pane of glass, and was joyful to see the burst of air return his wife to consciousness.

  Louis’s principal problem was that he had not wanted to be king. He had been brought up in the shadow of his older brother, a brilliant, charming, domineering child, much beloved by all, who had died at the age of ten. So Louis, as retiring and insecure as his brother had been self-confident, never got over the sense that destiny had unfairly snatched the monarchy from his more qualified, competent sibling, and that he, Louis, was no more fit for it than the workmen repairing the roofs of his palace. (Upon his coronation in Reims, when
the archbishop daubed him with unguents held in the same vial that had been used 1,300 years earlier to anoint Clovis, the first king of France, and the emerald-and-ruby-studded crown of Charlemagne was set upon his head, he grumbled, “Ca me gêne,” “It bothers me.”) As for his gaucheness, Louis often tried to remedy it by resorting to his childlike sense of humor, which many found highly disconcerting. He would often back one of his courtiers across the room, for instance, forcing the poor fellow to lean against a wall as he strove to say something witty, and then, the words not coming to him, he would burst into a brusque laugh, turn on his heels, and walk away. Or else, at his coucher, as whatever fop assigned the great privilege of proffering the king his nightshirt tried to hand him the vestment, the royal prankster tried to tickle the courtier and started running about the room in great circles, giggling like a child as he taunted the poor man and chased him all about the bedchamber.

  Moreover, there was Louis’s notorious indifference to his own appearance. Wigs were often slipping off his head; wig powder was ever sprinkled about his shoulders; his shoes grew muddy as soon as he stepped outside; he had a habit of toying with the edges of his jacket to allay his social anxiety, and buttons were constantly popping off his clothes. Our attitude to vestments—that may have been our principal difference. Even taller than the king and very slender, I was aware that I was referred to as “le beau Fersen,” and I admit that I attempted to live up to that designation by remaining as fastidiously dressed as the fanciest courtiers. How content I would have been to offer a touch of my dandyism to the French monarch! But his sloppy mien and his childlike pranks made me love him all the more. As soon as he spoke to me, in his slightly high-pitched, well-modulated voice, I was entranced. Certainly not by his words, which were of singular plainness, devoid of the flourishes and embellishments of courtly talk, but by the kindness and the warmth of his eyes, which looked at you with the most benign gaze imaginable, and above all by his utter simplicity and common touch. It is well known that Louis XVI was one of the most skilled horseback riders of his day, that he loved hunting and other physical occupations such as welding and blacksmithing, and specialized in the making of keys. He went far further in his rustic pursuits. Whenever he glimpsed workers repairing a roof or a wall at Versailles, for instance, he would run toward them, cast off his jackets, pull up his sleeves, and join them at their work. Overlooking appointments with ministers, counselors, ambassadors, what have you, he would labor alongside them until they left at day’s end. While his courtiers denoted him, a tad disdainfully, as “Louis le Vertueux,” “Louis the Virtuous,” because of his utter lack of interest in womanizing, the simple citizens he so enjoyed working with referred to him lovingly as “le roi travailleur,” “the worker king,” or “le bon papa,” “the good daddy.” Never have I known of a ruler more at ease with his humbler subjects, better able to make them feel equally at ease in his presence. One should note that the queen was a bit miffed by her husband’s democratic predilections. As soon as he came back from his physical labors, grimy, disheveled, reeking of sweat, beaming with happiness, she would ring for his valets and cry out, “Bon Dieu, nettoyez et habillez le roi! Nettoyez le!”