The Queen’s Lover Read online

  Nine months after the necklace episode its chief participants would be brought to court before the Parlement of Paris. The jurors, after a sixteen-hour deliberation, acquitted Rohan by a vote of 26 to 22; La Motte was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. But my cherished Toinette also received a life sentence of sorts. As Rohan emerged from his trial at the Parlement, as huge crowds voiced their support with shouts of “Long live the Cardinal!,” the queen wept bitterly in her apartments. She was shrewd enough to sense that her husband’s reign had been dealt a blow from which it might never recover. However trumped-up the charges against her, the scandal had exposed the feebleness of Louis XVI’s rule, her own former frivolity, the corruption of the entire court. Philanthropy and prison reform being the fashion; it became very chic to visit La Motte in her jail cell. Two years after her conviction, the swindler escaped from prison and fled to England, whence she launched a vituperative propaganda campaign against Marie Antoinette that found an eager audience in France.

  From the summer of 1786 on, the criticism focused on the queen grew barely tolerable. She was being blamed for every ill that plagued France, including the country’s increasingly shaky finances. Shortly after Rohan’s trial, it was learned that Louis’s government had had to borrow over one million pounds from foreign powers. The woman disdainfully referred to as “L’Autrichienne” (it was pronounced with the emphasis on the last syllable, chienne, French for “bitch”) now became known as “Madame Deficit.” The slander was often laced with sexual innuendoes. Score upon score of lampoons published in the following years accused my chastest of friends of having gone to bed with dozens of persons of both sexes, including Cardinal de Rohan; the king’s younger brother Comte d’Artois; her friend Duchesse de Polignac, whom she had appointed to be governess of the royal children; and Jeanne de La Motte herself.

  The first time the queen appeared at the theater after Rohan’s exoneration, she was greeted with such loud hisses that from then on she tried to stay out of public view. She ordered large additional cuts to be made in Versailles’s budget. She stopped buying jewelry and new garments, coming close to sacking Mademoiselle Bertin. In addition, more than 170 courtiers who depended on her financially were sent packing. There was an end to masked balls. Several royal chateaus were put up for auction, or demolished to avoid the cost of maintenance. The queen even banned gambling—a potent symbol of royal frivolity, but also her principal refuge from depression—from the palace.

  WHEN I VISITED Paris in 1786 my beloved friend was still smarting from the opprobrium cast upon her by the odious necklace episode. And her morale was made all the more wretched by the illness of her oldest son, the dauphin. At the age of three he had stopped growing, and had begun to suffer from frequent convulsions. The king and queen, as devoted parents as any royal couple I know of, spent many days together at the child’s bedside. He recovered by year’s end, but these were the first symptoms of the tuberculosis and other ailments that would carry him off a few years later.

  My correspondence with the queen—I traveled back and forth a great deal between Paris and Stockholm in the following years—was made all the more ardent by our frequent separations. Since the French police had a department solely devoted to intercepting all mail, including diplomatic dispatches, secrecy was in order. So we wrote our letters in invisible ink and gave them to trusted couriers who carried them in biscuit boxes, or in the hems of their garments. I cannot quote from them, alas, for a decade’s worth of these missives—those of the 1780’s—were destroyed during the forthcoming Revolution. We had become like old lovers now, or like a married couple—so I liked to think of our relations—made passionate by frequent absences. In our missives, endearments alternated with much fussing over domestic details. I cared deeply for the royal children, and a good part of our correspondence concerned them. Toinette forwarded me designs for jackets she wished me to add to my wardrobe. We sent each other music scores to study for our next reunion. She asked me to buy her a dog in Sweden, and we had long negotiations about what kind of puppy she wished.

  By the time the little white dog I’d bought for her arrived at Versailles, the queen had had another child, Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie. Both of us were aware that the child was born nine months, almost to the day, after the great fete she had offered King Gustavus at the Trianon the previous year, when we had managed to steal a few hours of intimacy with each other. Could it be possible, I would wonder for the rest of my life, that the Duc de Normandie was my son? Never marrying, never having any other illegitimate children, I remained particularly obsessed with the boy for the rest of my days. Immensely gay, bright, and robust, he had none of his older brother’s health problems, or any of his sister’s chilly aloofness. He was undoubtedly the favorite of Marie Antoinette’s children: she called him “chou d’amour,” “fruit of love,” a phrase that might have denoted her own hopes that he was my son. It was also significant that the king displayed less affection for Louis-Charles, at first, than for his other children; Louis’s diary entry concerning Normandie’s birth, which came to light after his death, might intimate that he suspected the boy not to be his child: “The queen was delivered of the Duc de Normandie at half past seven; everything happened as it had with my son, the dauphin.”

  While continually shuttling between France and Sweden, when in Paris I was careful to attend a great many of the queen’s card games, and of her close friends’ supper parties; they bored me immensely but made me appear to be just another member of her entourage. In 1786 I again had to return to Stockholm to fulfill my duties as captain of the king’s bodyguard. My sweet friend was still smarting from the wretched Rohan’s rehabilitation, and from the French citizenry’s growing deprecation of her. Moreover, she was now plagued by the increased power of her old enemy Philippe d’Orléans, the king’s first cousin, who had recently inherited an immense fortune from his father. The Duc d’Orléans had total control over the Palais-Royal, whose numerous pamphlet shops specialized in spreading yet more libelous gossip about the queen. Having never regained the popularity she enjoyed during the first decade of her reign, her kindness and compassion never recognized, she was now more detested than ever. Furthermore, the queen was pregnant again, and this particular pregnancy was one that she had not desired. Soon after my return to Sweden, in June 1786, I was informed of the birth of her fourth and last child, a girl called Sophie (the name was chosen because of my sister, with whom she now had a warm, tender correspondence, but she could readily plead that the child was named after one of the king’s favorite aunts, Madame Sophie).

  As France’s finances plummeted—they had been vastly depleted by the nation’s participation in America’s War of Independence—the queen was increasingly referred to as “Madame Deficit,” even though she had cut her budget by yet another three million. Seventeen eighty-seven brought her more sorrows: Shortly after I returned to France that year, her ten-month-old daughter, Sophie, fell seriously ill. She died in June, and the queen wrote heartbreaking letters to a few of her close friends amid European rulers, including Gustavus. The summer of that year was wretched for both of us. I was stationed with my regiment in the town of Maubeuge, near the Belgian border. King Louis, faced by growing political tensions and deprived of the counsel of his favorite minister, Vergennes, who had recently died, began to suffer from a depression that bordered on a nervous breakdown. The king’s depression led him to depend increasingly on the queen’s advice—“He trusts only the queen,” I wrote Gustavus, “and it is quite clear that she does everything.” It also incited him to indulge more gluttonously than ever in food. “When the king returns from hunting,” Mercy wrote Emperor Joseph II, “he eats such excessive meals that they cause absences of his reason, and a kind of rough carelessness that is very distressing for those who have to witness it.” He was indeed witnessed to have eaten, for breakfast alone, four veal cutlets, a chicken, a plateful of ham, half a dozen eggs, and a bottle and a half of champagne. It is at this
point that the king’s enemies began to refer to him as “the fat pig.”

  In early October of 1787 I wrote my tender friend that I would try to return in a few weeks, and that she should stoke my stove with logs: for I would again be lodging on the top floor of Versailles, in that alcove above her apartments that always brought back such poignant memories. But we shared only a few joyous months together. I was recalled to Sweden again in 1788, to join my king on a disastrous campaign against Russia, which was trying to seize control of Finland. And it was in Stockholm that I was apprised of the worsening conditions in France, of the calamities that would lead up to that demonic event known as the French Revolution.

  CHAPTER 6

  Axel:

  THE END OF THE WORLD

  AS WE KNEW IT

  EVEN THE WEATHER in the year 1788 was a disaster. In July a hailstorm flailed through much of France, ravaging wheat crops and causing the price of bread to soar. The winter of 1788–1789 was the coldest in decades. After I returned to Paris from Sweden that January the city remained covered with many inches of snow, and the icy ground was so treacherous to horses that I preferred to cross the frozen Seine on skates rather than traverse its bridges by coach. The frozen river hampered the provisioning of Paris, and there was great fear of a famine. The year’s political events had been equally unfortunate: conflicts between parliamentarians and the Crown had already come to a head in the spring of 1788. Attempting to resolve the nation’s dire financial crisis, Louis XVI had tried to force the Paris Parlement to levy a new tax stamp. The Parlement had replied that only the Estates-General—a representative assembly that had not met since 1614 and represented the three societal orders of clergy, nobility, and commoners, the latter of which was known as the “Third Estate”—had the right to levy new taxes. Increasingly desperate, Louis was reported to have gone to the queen’s apartments every day to weep at the critical state of the kingdom. I knew all too well that the tenderhearted king was easily given to tears, but his recent bouts of grief seem to have been more pronounced than usual. Having failed to convince Parlement on the issue of the stamp tax, he irately ordered that assembly recessed and arrested two of its dissenting leaders.

  All of the nation’s regional parlements declared solidarity with their Parisian counterpart, and antiroyalist demonstrations began to spread throughout the kingdom’s major cities. They drew from all classes of society, from peasantry to nobility. In July 1788, the demonstrations grew particularly violent in Grenoble, whose royal governor resigned after his men were assaulted by rioting mobs; Grenoble’s regional parlement hence called for a meeting of the Estates-General, a demand soon echoed by every parlement in the nation and ultimately, resentfully, agreed to by the king. Brittany’s uprisings were equally fierce: when a delegation of Breton gentry came to present their grievances, Louis could think of nothing better to do than to jail them in the Bastille. Even graver tumults occurred in Paris in April of 1789, a few days before the opening of the Estates-General. On the twenty-seventh of that month a mob attacked the factories of Charles Réveillon, a wealthy paper manufacturer who had recently infuriated the working class by advocating lower wages as a means of reducing the national debt. Réveillon’s headquarters were in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, a few blocks from the Bastille, a traditional area for demonstrations of popular dissent.

  On the first day of the riot a band of rebels paraded the millionaire’s effigy through the city’s streets, then ceremoniously burned it in front of the Hotel de Ville. The anti-Réveillon mob announced that it would continue its protests the following day. But the Paris police, though fully informed, took utterly pathetic measures: it sent thirty men to deal with the riots, a pitiful number with which to confront a thousand pillagers. On the twenty-eighth, Réveillon’s own home was sacked, and the holdings of its famous wine cellars were drunk to the last drop, along with bottles of house paint, which made some of the rioters extremely ill. Meanwhile the Paris police, finally alarmed, had sent two thousand Swiss Guards. The rioters, armed solely with stones, killed a few of the soldiers, and government troops responded with a fusillade that killed close to a hundred rebels. The Réveillon incident infuriated Paris’s citizens, and led them to center their hopes all the more ardently on the event they had been looking forward to for the past year—the opening of the Estates-General.

  On May 3, 1789, on the eve of their first meeting—I had just returned to Paris from Stockholm—I stood at a window overlooking the avenue de Versailles watching the 1,200 deputies to the Estates-General make their solemn procession toward the palace. Most of Paris had come to watch the spectacle. Thousands of women dressed in their most sumptuous finery stood on the balconies of the avenue’s houses; windows, even roofs, were filled with citizens. The king led the procession, followed by the queen, followed by the Swiss Guard and a group of mounted royal falconers, each with a hooded falcon attached to his wrist. Next in line were the deputies to the three estates: the blackclothed priests of the common clergy and three hundred prelates in their sumptuous scarlet robes; three hundred nobles bristling with plumes and swords; the heralds who accompanied the nobles, dressed in purple velvet, mounted on white steeds, and blowing silver trumpets. I was particularly struck by the dignity of the Third Estate’s five hundred members, who followed the nobles: merchants, men of letters, a great number of lawyers, whose simple black coats contrasted starkly with the satins and gold lace of the nobility. Observing these delegates, one could not help but be struck by the leonine, heavily pockmarked features of the Comte de Mirabeau, the greatest orator of the time: one of the few nobles to have been elected as a deputy from the Third Estate, this aristocratic radical was considered by many to be a traitor to his class, and was particularly hated by Marie Antoinette. “Mirabeau’s huge head of hair distinguished him from everyone else,” Madame de Staël would note in her description of the Estates-General’s opening. “It was as if his strength derived from it, like Samson’s; his face gained in expressiveness from its very ugliness, and his whole person suggested a strange power.”

  I should note that I was happy not to be in the queen’s company that day. She had been relentlessly hostile to the convocation of the Estates-General. Whereas I, coming from a nation in which a parliament, the Swedish Riksdag, had held powerful sway since the Middle Ages, saw the estates as potentially helpful to the peaceful survival of the French monarchy. And our discussions of that issue had verged on the acrimonious. But notwithstanding our differences I was shocked and grieved by the crowd’s reaction to the deputies’ procession. Understandably, the greatest enthusiasm was granted to the deputies of the Third Estate. Of the nobles, only the shrewd Duc d’Orléans, fourth in line for the throne, who with typical deviousness had walked close to the Third Estate’s ranks in order to be identified with them, was enthusiastically cheered. As for the queen, she had been met early on by shouts of “Vive le Duc d’Orléans!,” as if the populace expressly wished to offend her by acclaiming her greatest enemy. The insult indeed affected her deeply; she was already greatly weakened by the grief caused by her older son, the dauphin, who would die the following month. Her steps faltered and she came close to fainting; her ladies-in-waiting had to hold on to her with all their strength. But with the help of the Princesse de Lamballe she soon recovered, and stared at the crowd with a firm, disdainful gaze. Oh, Toinette, whatever your sorrows, how out of touch you were with your adopted country, with its most urgent needs!

  That was May. The most significant event of the following month was the clergy’s decision to ally itself with the Third Estate, which represented 98 percent of the population. It had renamed itself “National Assembly,” and had already won the support of many liberal nobles. In response to these new alliances, and against the advice of his minister of finances, the progressive Jacques Necker (whose daughter I’d once thought of marrying), Louis XVI had ordered the Estates-General’s meeting place closed. On June 20, finding the doors of their assembly hall locked, the deputies move
d on to the royal tennis courts nearby, the Jeu de Paume. There, led by France’s greatest astronomer, Jean-Sylvain Bailly—whose specialty, I’d heard, was the moons of Jupiter—the delegates swore not to adjourn until they had drafted a constitution for France. In another misguided response, the king ordered the royal guard to disband the Estates-General. But a group of aristocratic deputies that included Mirabeau and France’s most popular military leader, General Lafayette, placed their hands on their swords to signal their support of the Estates. “We shall only leave our places under the threat of bayonets,” Mirabeau announced. My poor friend Louis had to back down once more, and made yet another faulty decision. Wishing to intimidate the National Assembly, and facing growing insubordination from his own troops, Louis secretly assigned sixteen extra regiments—most of them Swiss and German mercenaries—to surround Paris and Versailles. On July 10, in response to Mirabeau’s protest against this massing of foreign troops, the king stated that they were merely meant to maintain public order. The following day, having markedly disagreed with Necker’s advice to show greater support for the National Assembly, Louis sent the minister a letter of dismissal. Necker was idolized by the French people, and Parisians’ reaction to his downfall was tumultuous. Green cockades, the color that traditionally symbolized the concept of liberty, immediately appeared on citizens’ hats. Mobs assailed the Hotel de Ville, grabbing ammunition. Out of curiosity, I followed the crowds as tens of thousands of citizens marched through the city parading busts of their heroes, Necker and the Duc d’Orléans.