The Queen’s Lover Read online

  The king was in bed, sipping on hot chocolate, when I met him at the inn in Rostock where he waited for me. He welcomed me with effusion, laughing and weeping with joy as he murmured endearments. “Ah, my långe Axel! My most beautiful Axel! My beloved Axel!” I was used to the exuberantly affectionate manner he always had toward me, and tempered it as well as I could. This trip to Italy was not an end in itself, Gustavus explained to me when he’d calmed down. It was just a preliminary to his real aim, which was to obtain the French Crown’s support for his “big deal”—the invasion of Norway. The way he was playing his cards, his arrival in France, some months hence, would merely seem to be the last stage of a European journey. He would try to remain incognito on this trip, taking on the nom de voyage of Count de Haga.

  Our first major stops in northern Italy were Turin, Milan, Vincenza. However admirable his knowledge of art history, the king’s pace of travel was utterly exhausting. He had to see every important church, every notable painting, admire every significant bit of architecture. In the Turin Cathedral he spent a long time in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud, the altar of which contains the cloth in which Christ’s body was wrapped after His deposition from the cross. Gustavus displayed a Christian piety, on this trip, of which we had never been aware. He knelt at length before the sacred cloak, frequently making the sign of the cross, occasionally weeping. We went on to Milan, where he was particularly entranced by the church of San Simpliciano, said to be founded by Saint Ambrose in the fourth century, and reputed to be pivotal to the conversion of Saint Augustine. (Gustavus’s big lecture here on the details of Augustine’s conversion, on his hearing a child’s voice singing “Tolle, lege,” instructing him to “Take up and read” the Holy Book.) When visiting the museums with which these Italian cities are studded, we were also struck by the king’s adulation of the Holy Virgin, who is barely mentioned in our Lutheran religion: Gentile da Fabriano’s Madonna with Angels, Tiepolo’s Immaculate Conception in the Museo Civico in Vicenza, Veronese’s Madonna with Child and Saints, incited such reverence in him that he knelt on the floor in front of these paintings, sighing with veneration and whispering to himself. “Is he going to pull a Christina on us?” Taube whispered to me during one of Gustavus’s prostrations. He was referring to our country’s seventeenth-century queen, who had converted to Roman Catholicism early in her reign, resigned her kingdom, and moved to Rome to practice her new religion in peace.

  We went on to Vicenza, Palladio’s city; how could Gustavus not have been enthused by the Olympic Theater, the very first covered theater constructed since Roman times? What plays were performed there, he wished to know, when did this great Palladio die, where is he buried, I want to see his tomb. By this time, in order to better sate Gustavus’s voracious curiosity we had hired a guide to accompany us on our Italian journey. In Piacenza, we admired the vast Gothic portal of the Church of San Antonio; in Parma, the Correggios (more genuflections in front of the Virgins Mary); in Pavia, at San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, the tomb of Saint Augustine (more signs of the cross, more quotes from that great writer, “Oh, save me God, but not quite yet”). We went on to Brescia, where the king spent hours in the exquisite Renaissance cloister in Santa Marie della Grazie; to Cremona, which led the cause of the Holy Roman Emperor in the thirteenth century (lecture here on the struggle between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines). All these treasures were lingered at for hours, commented on at length—what a good professor Gustavus could have been! By this time every member of the king’s retinue was utterly worn out. Limping about, Taube feigned a sprained ankle and stayed in his room throughout our stay in Piacenza. Armfelt remained indoors in Cremona, pretending to have a serious migraine. Sparre took an emetic and vomited in front of the Brescia Cathedral in order to have his proper rest. Only I, as captain of the king’s bodyguard, could not afford to drop out, although I pleaded a headache every few weeks in order to have time to write to my family, and my queen.

  To make things worse, we were all deeply embarrassed by the gaudy costumes our king had imposed on us—canary-yellow culottes, gilt-edged sky-blue jackets, black shako hats topped with blue and yellow plumes—which made Italian citizens stare at us with wonderment. In several of the sites we visited—Cremona, Brescia—we encountered Emperor Joseph II, the brother of my beloved, whose austere dress and simple, forthright courtesy made my king’s gaudy dress and mincing manners all the more outlandish. Joseph II, who in former years had ruled in consort with his mother, the late Maria Theresa, now that was a king! He had instituted many of the same reforms Gustavus had in his youth—freedom of the press, religious tolerance, abolition of serfdom, emancipation of the Jews. His talents included many familial virtues—one remembers that it is he who had enabled France’s royal couple to finally share a bed properly. But alas, he disliked my king because of his preference for men. “Small, miserable, a dandy in front of his mirror,” so he described Gustavus to his sister Marie-Christine. We finally reached Florence, and there I was to meet a beauty who might have sealed my fate….

  But first, of course, the “Comte de Haga” in Florence: we had to visit Santa Maria Novella, Santa Croce, the Duomo, some ten times apiece. Every stone touched by Brunelleschi was expounded on. At the Duomo, Gustavus asked for a chair and sat for hours in front of the bronze doors of the Baptistry, expounding on every detail of that great work. He lingered an equally long time in the interior of the Duomo, ecstatic before Lucca Della Robbia’s Ascension and Uccello’s heads of the prophets; these incited such fervent enthusiasm in him that he knelt down before them for much of the afternoon. Christina? We worried again. With this man everything was possible.

  As for the Florentine beauty I have mentioned, she was Lady Emily Cowper, a relative of Lord Cowper, a British expatriate who entertained us royally. Ah, Emily, superb green-eyed Emily! Her hair was of the most marvelous reddish blond and, since she was but fifteen, still hung to below her shoulders, a smoldering curtain of gleaming amber silk. Upon one of her brother’s many evening receptions I took her outside to a park bench and kissed her deeply on her mouth—it was the first time the child had been thus embraced, and she responded with fire and ardor, as if it were second nature to her. Upon subsequent caresses in the park, I unlaced her bodice and suckled her breasts at length, biting her tiny pink nipples as she cried out her pleasure…. Oh, what a delicious lover she would later make! I let my hand wander under her vestments, up her leg, to the tiny spot in front of the vagina—it is also called klitoris in Swedish—the fondling of which women are so partial to. Thus with my mouth on her breast and the other on her private parts I was able to bring the child to orgasm without deflowering her, and la petite coquine, the little scoundrel! She ended up stretched out on the park bench, crying out her delight so loudly that I had to put my hand over her mouth lest members of our group might hear her. We repeated our games several evenings in a row, and each time the exquisite little machine that was her body trembled more wildly, more tremulously than ever. Needless to say, I had my own difficulties remaining physically composed. I had experimented with a new kind of sexual play, always a delight for me. (I’d rather not be thought of as a rake, just as an average, venturesome sexual athlete.)

  The dear little girl was very taken with our trysts, and while not admitting to our forbidden games, talked to her brother of her romantic feelings toward me. The duke even broached, ever so amiably, the possibility of marital intentions. I politely deflected his suggestions, saying I was determined to remain a bachelor, and asking him to console his sister with that explanation. Ah women, women, my life’s plague and chief delight!

  TRAVELING FURTHER SOUTH in the Italian peninsula, we reached Rome, where Gustavus had asked for an audience with the pope. Our fears were awakened again: he was the first Swedish ruler since Christina who had asked to see the pontiff! But it was not our shrewd monarch’s newfound piety that drove him to the Vatican—he had ulterior motives of a political nature. Pius VI was an amiable, unimpressive little man wh
o was made notable by his secret fondness for the Jesuits, who were currently seeking refuge in Russia after having been banned from most of Europe by a previous pontiff. Our king was perfection itself at the audience, advancing toward the pope deeply bowed and at a snail’s pace, prostrating himself at all the right times, kissing the papal ring like the earth’s most devout. And he readily charmed the pontiff into trading favors: he obtained Pius VI’s permission to have a Lutheran chapel built in Rome, in return for promising to build a Catholic church in Stockholm. We stayed in the Eternal City for several weeks, the king dallying ecstatically amid its dozens of churches and museums, and refusing to make up his mind whether to go south to Naples or head back north to Paris. From Rome I described my impatience in a letter to my father: “We suffer from an exorbitant principle of disorder and indecision, we change plans twenty times a day, each of them more outlandish than the last. I’m in despair about participating in his trip…. It obliges me to daily witness odd and novel extravagances.”

  Gustavus finally decided to go south to Naples, which was ruled by yet another sibling of my beloved’s, Queen Maria Carolina. A large, violently authoritarian woman, she totally dominated her husband, Ferdinand IV, who himself was no delicate chap. Massively built, loudmouthed, with a huge nose that led to his being named “nasone,” he devoted himself entirely to fishing, cleaning and skinning his catches himself. Dressed as a sailor, he sold his produce at the public market, always surrounding himself with companions of the lowest possible provenance. The coarseness of the couple would lead me to be all the more amazed by the refinement and grace of their nearest kin, the French monarchs. Maria Carolina became smitten with Armfelt. There were many gay, puerile entertainments at her court, such as costume parties at which the queen dressed as Ceres, and her ladies-in-waiting as Neapolitan peasant girls who showered the guests with roses, while Armfelt, who loved masquerades, impersonated a bear.

  And then we headed north toward Paris, the true goal of this entire journey that the “Comte de Haga” had so deviously planned. Once arrived, we faced some disappointments. Many of our old friends were gone. Our former ambassador to Paris, Creutz, had been recalled to Stockholm to be minister of foreign affairs. Baron de Staël had replaced him. Moreover, everyone at the French court dreaded Gustavus’s visit because as Louis XVI’s favorite minister, Comte de Vergennes, put it, “This prince will hardly renounce a costume that will expose him to derision everywhere he’ll go.” To make it even more awkward, Gustavus arrived at Versailles unannounced. It was June 7, 1784. Louis XVI was spending the day at Rambouillet and was about to sit down to dinner. Informed of the arrival of his royal visitor, he ordered up his horses and hastily dressed. So hastily, in fact, that to the queen’s despair he greeted his guest wearing totally dissimilar shoes: one had a red heel and a gold buckle, the other a black heel and a silver buckle.

  Once the royal formalities were over, Gustavus set out to explore Parisian culture, and would not allow any member of his retinue to miss one significant event. He saw every play performed at the Comédie Française, heard Gluck’s Armida and a score of other works at the opera, and twice attended The Marriage of Figaro. There were occasions on which we were forced to attend two or three spectacles a day. “We’re constantly occupied and constantly in a hurry,” I wrote my father. “This kind of hassle very much suits the Comte de Haga, but I’m exhausted by it. He’d rather skip food, drink, and sleep than not be at spectacles all day long; it’s an obsession.”

  My king, alas, was not popular with the French. Thirteen years before he had been a slightly effeminate young man, but now he made no bones about being homosexual. Everyone at court joked about his not attending brothels, as most every visiting dignitary did. The queen snubbed him because of his outrageous costumes and his unmistakable sexual orientation. Louis XVI found him pedantic and yawned at his conversation because of its abundance of art historical details. Nevertheless, magnificent parties were given in Gustavus’s honor. Perhaps for my sake, Toinette, always an exquisite hostess, overcame her prejudices against my king and gave him one of the greatest fetes ever held at the Trianon. The supper was served at little tables dispersed among the bushes of the park, which was lit by many hundreds of candles. The queen went from one table to the next, standing at length behind the king of Sweden’s chair, Taube’s, Armfelt’s, and mine, to speak to each of us in turn. “It was an enchantment, truly an Elysian spectacle,” Gustavus wrote home to Sweden.

  My king’s pace was as feverish as usual—he had to see every site of note in the Île-de-France, as he had in Italy. Even I feigned a headache every few days to drop out of his retinue and have my essential moments of tenderness with Toinette. Gustavus would be more than enchanted by his stay in Paris. Over the weeks, the queen grew to appreciate his love of France and his remarkable culture, and ended up being quite fond of him. In exchange for granting France new trading concessions in Sweden, he obtained a colony he had desired for a long time, the island of Saint Barthélemy in the Caribbean, whose capital, I hope, will always remain named Gustavia.

  This time I had to follow my king back to Sweden. It is with the greatest sorrow that I took leave of her again. My father was ill, and I had to spend the winter with him in Stockholm, where I had not been for nearly seven years. I was able to return to Paris very briefly in May, bringing Toinette a portrait of the Swedish crown prince, and we enjoyed a few sweet and passionate encounters.

  IT HAS ALWAYS been a sorrow to me that I was in Sweden in the first months of 1785, when the queen suffered one of her life’s most difficult episodes, the event known as the Diamond Necklace Affair. The greatest royal scandal of the century, it featured Marie Antoinette and a supporting cast of swindlers and charlatans of legendary proportions, and undermined Louis XVI’s reign as no earlier event had. At the center of the imbroglio were the country’s highest prelate, the notoriously frivolous and popular Cardinal de Rohan, grand almoner of France and scion of one of its wealthiest and most venerable families (whom I’d always suspected of being a total cad); a deeply indebted Paris jeweler, Monsieur Böhmer, who had set out to sell the world’s most expensive diamond necklace to Marie Antoinette; and a gang of thieves led by a rapacious adventuress named Jeanne de La Motte, the illegitimate daughter of a member of the ancient Valois family, who was determined to gain fame and fortune at the cadaverous court of Versailles. Quite understandably, the flamboyant Rohan had been detested by Marie Antoinette’s family during his tenure as ambassador to Vienna; the queen shared her relatives’ intense dislike for him; and La Motte’s plan was to capitalize on the cardinal’s ardent desire finally to gain the queen’s favor.

  To this end La Motte, who had been Rohan’s mistress, persuaded the prelate that she was a close friend of Marie Antoinette (upon whom, in reality, she had never laid eyes) and that she could help him secure the queen’s esteem. Pretending to hand Rohan’s missives to her “dear friend” Marie Antoinette, forging letters that promised the cardinal an eventual audience, and emptying his pockets at every turn, La Motte arranged a trumped-up encounter between Rohan and the queen: she hired a cocotte who, shrouded with thick veils, successfully impersonated my poor beloved queen, and offered the deliriously happy prelate a brief evening meeting in the gardens of Versailles.

  Enter August Böhmer, a prominent jeweler, often employed by the French court, who at a time of deepening financial crisis was more desperate than ever to unload a certain necklace: it was a “rivière” of 579 diamonds, 2,800 carats’ worth of them, which he had originally designed for Madame du Barry (due to Louis XV’s sudden death, she had never been able to buy it). Böhmer had turned to La Motte for help. Couldn’t she persuade her “dear friend” the queen to buy the trinket? La Motte was shrewd enough to know that a national debt of unprecedented proportions, and the country’s increasing alienation from Louis XVI, would deter the king from spending 1.6 million pounds on yet another trifle for his wife. But La Motte circumvented that difficulty: she persuaded Roh
an to consolidate his new friendship with the queen by offering her the necklace himself. She produced a supposed letter from the queen—La Motte’s forgery of my beloved’s handwriting—that authorized him to make the purchase. The shimmering trinket was then brought to the cardinal; besotted by the prospect of finally gaining the queen’s good graces, he handed it to a minion of La Motte’s who pretended to be the queen’s own messenger; whence it passed, of course, into the adventuress’s own hands. She had the necklace dismantled, sold its component stones in London, and for a few months lived like a multimillionaire, acquiring a grand chateau and so many luxurious furnishings that it took forty-two coaches to carry them.

  But La Motte eventually faltered because she had underestimated the jeweler’s diligence. Böhmer went to visit Marie Antoinette to deliver some far more modest items she had ordered from him—in view of the public opinion mounting against her, my darling friend was trying hard to be less ostentatious. During their meeting, Böhmer asked the queen about the diamond necklace she was purchasing with Cardinal de Rohan’s help. “What necklace?” Marie Antoinette asked, immediately suspicious of the detested prelate. The queen and the jeweler did not take long to realize that they had both been the victims of a staggering swindle.

  The denouement of “the Diamond Necklace Affair,” as it came to be known throughout Europe, was as extravagant a coup de théâtre as any event of the century. My poor Toinette, not realizing that Rohan had been as duped by La Motte as she, begged her husband to arrest the cardinal. I need not tell you how subservient Louis was to his wife’s wishes. On August 15, 1785, which was the queen’s name day as well as the Feast of the Assumption, Rohan was scheduled to say High Mass in front of the assembled court. The royal couple called for the cardinal to come first to their private apartments. They were in the company of their favorite minister and adviser, my friend Baron de Breteuil, an avowed enemy of Rohan’s. The detestable cardinal admitted that he had been a pathetic dupe. The king replied that since the prelate had defamed the queen’s name, he must be arrested. The four luminaries then went into the Hall of Mirrors, where thousands of courtiers were waiting for Mass to begin. Breteuil stood next to Rohan, who was dressed in scarlet cardinal’s regalia. “Arrest the cardinal!” the minister ordered the captain of the guards, his eyes sparkling with pleasure. The crowd was stunned. No Mass was said that day at Versailles. The hugely popular cardinal was hauled off to the Bastille like a common pickpocket. Once there, he enjoyed such a profusion of luxuries and privileges—a large retinue of servants attended him, oysters and champagne were brought him daily—that for reasons of security the daily walks allowed the occupant of the neighboring jail cell, the Marquis de Sade, were suspended for the duration of the prelate’s stay.