Two others who shared Fersen’s sympathetic estimation of the queen were his mistress Eléanore Sullivan and her protector, Quentin Craufurd. These fervent royalists played an integral role in the royal family’s escape from the Tuileries in June 1791, personally helping to bankroll their flight.
Fersen was more or less at Marie Antoinette’s side during the royal family’s twenty-month house arrest in the Tuileries, managing to discreetly come and go from the palace, although it bustled with guards and spies. Several times the comte de Saint-Priest states unequivocally that after the monarchs were permitted to journey to the Château de Saint-Cloud during the summer of 1790, Fersen was seen leaving the queen’s room at three a.m. At this time the count was deeply involved in plotting the royal family’s escape from France, and his lengthy visits with Marie Antoinette may have been devoted primarily, if not entirely, to political and strategic, rather than amorous, conversation. Fersen’s journal from this period was burned soon afterward, so the truth will never be known for certain.
It is from Axel von Fersen’s letters to his sister Sophie and her lover, Baron von Taube, that we know how critically and intimately involved he was with the affairs of Marie Antoinette and the French crown. The queen came to rely upon the count’s efforts even more after Louis, overwhelmed by events, suffered a nervous breakdown during the winter of 1790. Confined to the Tuileries by then and denied the daily hunting that had always been his emotional and physical outlet, he collapsed under the strain. With the king inactive, Marie Antoinette assumed control of their destiny. In the past she had been falsely accused of being the power behind the throne; now the allegations became the reality. The storming of Versailles on October 6, 1789, had marked a turning point in her life.
In December 1790, in the name of the baronne de Korff, a Franco-Swede who provided her own passport for the royal family’s flight, Fersen commissioned a berline de voyage, a capacious, heavy traveling coach of the type meant to comfortably transport a fairly large aristocratic party from Paris to St. Petersburg. The conveyance had to carry six adults and two children, and Fersen had participated in all the details involved in securing it. It was he who paid the five thousand or so livres to purchase the carriage, a vehicle “unknown” to the royal family, as it bore no resemblance to their official coaches. After the escape proved ill-fated, Monday-morning quarterbacks would criticize the carriage’s size, bulk, and appearance, but there was in fact nothing unusual about it. It was not bright yellow, as some historians have erroneously stated. It was the undercarriage and wheels that were yellow, which was very common for the era. Built by Monsieur Louis, the finest coachman of his day, the body of the berline was green and black, and the interior was upholstered in white taffeta.
When it came time to decide on the family’s ultimate destination, the king preferred to remain within the borders of France, while Marie Antoinette was in favor of emigrating to Switzerland via Alsace. However, she expected assistance from her homeland, which would mean a mustering of troops on the Austrian frontier. But the emperor, her brother Leopold II, had a vast territory to govern, and with limited resources. Leopold didn’t begrudge his sister the soldiers, but someone else would have to pay them. Louis and Marie Antoinette were short of funds. Money had to be borrowed. In addition to applying to Italian banks, Count von Fersen loaned the French monarchs the money from his own pocket. The other investors included Eléanore Sullivan and Quentin Craufurd, as well as the baronne de Korff and her sister—who happened to be Craufurd’s other mistress.
As the plans were hatched for the royal family’s flight from the Tuileries, Fersen’s role was under debate. He had expected to escort the royals all the way to the frontier town of Montmédy, but Louis forbade it. Fersen’s explanation for this decision was simply that it wasn’t desired. The reasons for the king’s denial have long been the subject of speculation. Did he believe Fersen had already done enough for them and it was not worth risking his life to do more than drive them just a few miles out of Paris? Was he jealous of Fersen and resented the idea of being rescued by his wife’s lover or, at the very least, her special confidant? Was it Gallic snobbery because the Swedish count wasn’t a French nobleman? Or was it because if they got caught being aided by a foreigner things could be dire for all of them? The second possibility can be eliminated. Louis was at this point so mired in inertia and indecision that he surely didn’t have the energy to be jealous of Fersen. It was the queen who at this time found herself suddenly rising to the occasion and discovering a wellspring of resourcefulness, courage, and strength she never knew she had.
After a series of glitches, the royal family managed to escape the Tuileries in the middle of the night on June 20, 1791. A disguised Count Axel von Fersen was the coachman on the box. As he waited for the royals to sneak out of the palace he played his role to the hilt, whistling and chewing tobacco. In accordance with Louis’ instructions he surrendered his post at Bondy to another coachman, saddled a horse, and rode for Brussels.
Tragically, the night ended in disaster at the little town of Varennes when the king was recognized. “Do you think Fersen has escaped?” Marie Antoinette whispered to her husband. The family was bundled into their berline and escorted back to Paris. After their arrival, disheveled and demoralized, Marie Antoinette managed to scribble a few lines to the count: “Be reassured about us; we are alive.” A second letter read, “I exist…. How worried I have been about you…. Don’t write to me, that will expose us, and above all don’t come here under any pretext…. We are in view of our guards day and night; I’m indifferent to it…. [B]e calm, nothing will happen to me…. Adieu…I can’t write any more to you….”
One of the two men who accompanied the royal family in the berline from Varennes to Paris was a deputy of the Revolution named Antoine Barnave. During the hot, dusty, and exceedingly cramped three-day journey, the deputies, and particularly Barnave, were charmed by the queen, who was not at all the monster they’d been taught to despise. By the time the carriage reached Paris, the twenty-nine-year-old Barnave had a little crush on Marie Antoinette, and she would soon take advantage of his sympathy to advance the royalist cause. In no time, rumors were spreading that the queen was sleeping with Barnave and had corrupted him. The rumors were absurd, but Fersen was crushed and disgusted, even though he was betraying both the queen and Quentin Craufurd with Eléanore Sullivan. During the summer of 1791, after King Gustavus had dispatched Fersen to Vienna in an effort to secure the support of both Austria and Prussia in his scheme to save the French monarchs, Marie Antoinette heard nothing from the count for two months, although she sent him several letters. It’s possible, however, that the correspondence was intercepted and he never received it.
Following their attempted escape to Montmédy and the debacle in Varennes, the royal family was watched even more closely and guarded more heavily. But Fersen remained among the small, loyal circle of royalists that continued to foment escape plots. The only European sovereign willing to offer his support was Gustavus III, although he suggested that Louis be smuggled out alone. Fersen argued that such a plan would leave Marie Antoinette and the dauphin vulnerable to becoming hostages of the Revolution.
Through her old friend Count Esterházy, she sent Fersen a little gold ring, new and inexpensive. It was engraved with three lilies and bore the inscription, “Lâche qui les abandonne”—“Faint heart he who forsakes her.” Historian Antonia Fraser translates the inscription as “Coward who abandons them.”
The queen told Esterházy “…Should you write HIM tell him that many miles and many countries can never separate hearts. I feel this truth more strongly every day.” Esterházy undoubtedly knew the identity of the “HIM” she referred to in capital letters. Her letter continued. “I am delighted to find this opportunity to send you a little ring which I am sure will give you pleasure. In the past few days they’ve been selling like hot cakes here and they are very hard to come by. The one that is wrapped in paper is for HIM. Send it to H
IM for me. It is exactly his size. I wore it for two days before wrapping it. Tell him it comes from me. I don’t know where he is. It is dreadful to have no news of those one loves and not even to know where they are living….”
Scholars who insist that the relationship between Marie Antoinette and Fersen was strictly platonic are quick to point out that the sending of a ring is a common token of affection in the chivalric manner of sovereigns and their devoted servants. But this was not the Middle Ages. It was Revolutionary France with life-and-death stakes; and with both parties already under suspicion and the queen’s every movement spied upon, to believe that she took the enormous risk of dispatching such a personal item (and a cover letter revealing intimate details about it) to a man who was no more important to her than any other friend or royalist (and potentially compromising Esterházy as well, were he to be apprehended) is somewhat disingenuous. The unengraved ring she sent as a gift to Esterházy may even have served as a deliberate cover for the engraved one she included in the package to be forwarded to Fersen. And the fact that she wore Fersen’s ring herself for two days places it far above an ordinary token.
Axel had been collaborating with the king of Sweden on another escape plan and needed to speak with the French monarchs, but he had been banned from entering Paris. Essentially, there was a bounty on his head were he to be discovered there. Nevertheless, on February 13, 1792, heavily disguised, he managed not only to enter the capital, but to sneak through a side door of the palace. Marie Antoinette had not seen him since they had said farewell at Bondy in the middle of the night on June 20–21, 1791. Fersen had much to say to both sovereigns about his plans, but the notation about the night of February 13 in his Journal intime has been the source of vehement debate for generations of historians. Because the king and queen were so heavily guarded inside the palace as well as from without, it was just as risky for Fersen to try to sneak back out of the Tuileries, and so he remained the night. His journal does indicate that he did not see or meet with the king until six p.m. the following evening—many hours after his arrival—and did not leave the palace until nine thirty that night. The words he wrote were “À 9:30 je la quittai”—“At 9:30 I left her.” As the French word for “palace” is masculine, the intimation in Fersen’s diary is that he left her—Marie Antoinette—and all the unwritten subtext their relationship and the extremity of the monarchs’ circumstances implies.
Exactly where he slept, or was hidden, on the night of February 13 remains a mystery. Fersen seems to have written two words that he, or someone else, subsequently tried to erase, so that they remain barely discernible. The two words are “resté là,” which was his usual shorthand for spending the night with a lover. Translated literally, the words simply mean “stayed there.” And that’s all that might have happened. The count sneaked into the Tuileries and found himself stuck, so he had to stay the night.
Or perhaps resté là does mean that on the eve of Valentine’s Day, which would be almost too perfect, the royal lovers enjoyed one final night of passion with guards stationed everywhere. There are no references to the nature of Fersen’s disguise. He must have dressed in a manner that fooled the guards into believing that he could plausibly visit the sovereigns for a considerable amount of time, because he was able to remain inside the Tuileries for nearly twenty-four hours and eventually meet with both of them long enough to thoroughly discuss the details of the latest escape plot.
At the Tuileries, the monarchs had separate apartments; Louis’ was upstairs from Marie Antoinette’s, and they were connected by a staircase. The king always retired early, his customary bedtime undisturbed by such nuisances as a revolution. And he was a heavy slumberer. Exceedingly deferential with his wife, he wasn’t likely to come barging downstairs and into her room in the middle of the night; he was too solicitous of her privacy.
But even if Marie Antoinette and Fersen somehow managed to distract her maid, and the sentry outside her door, long enough to enjoy a furtive embrace, this scenario remains highly speculative, perhaps better suited to the genres of fiction or film. Were they to be caught—literally under the king’s nose—the humiliation for the queen would be too great, and the price for Fersen would likely be death.
After Fersen was able to slink out of the Tuileries, he remained in Paris for another week, hiding in Eléanore Sullivan’s attic, although Marie Antoinette thought he had left for Spain. He departed France for Brussels on February 21.
They lost their greatest ally on March 16, 1792, when Gustavus III was assassinated by a disgruntled Swedish nobleman, dying thirteen days later. Although Fersen’s role as the king’s emissary to Louis and Marie Antoinette was mooted by Gustavus’s death, he never stopped trying to rescue the French royal family.
On April 22, 1792, the French Republic declared war on Marie Antoinette’s native Austria.
On June 23, three days after the Tuileries were stormed on the first anniversary of the flight to Varennes, Marie Antoinette wrote to Fersen in code, “Your friend [meaning Louis] is in the gravest danger.” In a metaphor for their increasingly dire situation as the wheels of the Revolution turned apace, she added, “His illness is moving with terrifying speed…. The doctors no longer recognize him. If you wish to see him again you must make haste. Tell his relations about his dangerous condition.”
In the wake of Marie Antoinette’s desperate letters to Fersen, written both in cipher and “in clear,” (pretending to be the lady friend of a French émigré named Rignon whose business affairs she managed in his absence), the count became more determined than ever to rescue her.
He was instrumental in the drafting of an ill-advised proclamation issued to the people of Paris on July 25 by the Duke of Brunswick, commander of the Allied Army, comprised primarily of Prussian and Austrian forces. Known as the Brunswick Manifesto, it declared that if the French royal family were to be harmed, then the Allies would retaliate with force against the Parisian civilians. The intention of the Brunswick Manifesto was to intimidate the Parisians, but it had the opposite effect. Instead of frightening them, it fired up their revolutionary zeal all the more.
After the January 21, 1793, execution of Louis XVI, Fersen heard a rumor that the entire royal family had been put to death. Devastated over the purported loss of Marie Antoinette, he wrote to his sister Sophie, “She was once all my happiness, for whom I lived—yes, my tender Sophie, for I have never ceased loving her—the one I loved so much, for whom I would have sacrificed a thousand lives, is no more. Never will her adored image be erased from my memory. Why, oh why didn’t I die by her side—for her and for them—on June 20. It would have been better so than to have to drag out my days in sorrow and remorse….”
When he learned that the queen still lived, his concern for her fate remained palpable. “Sometimes I have hopes, sometimes I despair, and my compulsory inaction, the limited means there are of serving her, add even more to my sorrow. In my social circle, we speak only of her, of ways of saving her, and do nothing but grieve and cry over her fate.”
At the end of March 1793, Marie Antoinette dispatched a trusted emissary, the Chevalier de Jarjayes, on two missions: He was to deliver Louis’ seal and wedding ring to the late king’s brother the comte de Provence in Brussels, and then Jarjayes was to bring an impression of her seal, taken from a little gold signet ring she had made up, adorned with Fersen’s arms, to someone else. The queen told Jarjayes, “Toulan will give you the things that are to go to the princes. The wax impress which I include here is something else again. When you are in a safe place, I would very much appreciate it if you took it to my great friend who came to see me last winter from Brussels and you are to tell him when you give it to him that its motto has never been more true.”
Fersen explained the device in his Journal intime. “This motto was from a seal showing a pigeon in flight with the motto Tutto a te mi guida. [“All things lead me to you.”] Her idea, in those days, had been to take my emblem and we had taken the flying fish for a bird.
The impression was on a piece of paper. Unfortunately, it had been completely erased in the heat. In spite of that I keep it carefully in my casket with the note and the drawing of the seal.”
For some reason, Count von Fersen did not receive Marie Antoinette’s letter until January 21, 1794, a year to the day from Louis XVI’s execution, a tragic memory for Fersen that would “never be effaced.”
Fersen was sickened by the report of Marie Antoinette’s much-altered appearance during her trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal in October 1793. Still only thirty-seven, she had evidently become old and sunken-looking. Something must be done to save her! He met with Craufurd, the comte de la Marck, and the Russian minister Jean Simolin, a royalist. Fersen asked: As a private individual, rather than in his capacity as a sovereign, shouldn’t the new Austrian emperor, Francis II, Marie Antoinette’s nephew, demand her release? Ultimately, the men chose not to pursue this avenue for fear of further provoking her antagonists.
Fersen was frustrated by the foot draggers and the cowards. Those who counseled caution drove him crazy. He was all in favor of riding in from the frontier at the head of the cavalry and snatching Marie Antoinette out of the Conciergerie.
She was guillotined on October 16, 1793. Fersen was in Brussels and did not hear the news until October 23. For a long while he felt utterly numb. He would see her face in his mind’s eye. “It follows me wherever I go. Her suffering and death and all my feelings never leave me for a moment. I can think of nothing else…. That she was alone in her last moments with no one to comfort her or talk to her, with no one to whom she could give her last wishes, fills me with horror.”
In the privacy of his diary he compared his devotion to Marie Antoinette to his passion for Eléanore Sullivan. “Oh, how I reproach myself for the wrongs I did Her and how deeply I now realize how much I loved Her. What kindness, what sweetness, and tenderness, what a fine and loving, sensitive and delicate heart! The other [Eléanore Sullivan] isn’t like that, although I love her and she is my only comfort and without her I should be very unhappy.”
Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe Page 34
