Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe

by Leslie Carroll

  From then on he kept the date of October 16, “this atrocious day,” as a day of mourning for “the model of queens and women,” as he told Lady Elizabeth Foster. Marie Antoinette represented an ideal in his heart, and he was flooded with memories of her goodness and sweetness, her tenderness, sensibility, and loving nature. He confided to Sophie that Eléanore Sullivan could never replace Marie Antoinette—“Elle”—in his heart, although he eventually asked Eléanore to marry him. But when it came to choosing between Fersen and Craufurd, Eléanore’s allegiance went to the Scot who paid her rent. She finally wed the man who for all intents and purposes had been her common-law husband for years, and settled down to a life of so-called respectability.

  In the years after Marie Antoinette’s execution, Axel von Fersen was heaped with honors in his homeland. He was created a Knight of the Order of the Seraphim, Grand Marshal of the Court of Sweden, and Chancellor of Uppsala University, and he was made Lieutenant Governor of the kingdom in 1800, 1803, 1808, and 1809. Yet he remained haunted by the events of the failed escape of June 20, 1791, and by the death of the queen of France, commemorating the tragic anniversaries with heartrending entries in his Journal intime.

  Seventeen years to the day after the ill-starred flight to Montmédy, Count Axel von Fersen, then Sweden’s highest-ranking official after the king, would meet his own demise. He was torn to pieces by a Swedish mob that believed he had poisoned Crown Prince Christian, the heir to the Danish throne. At Christian’s funeral procession on June 20, 1810, to cries of “Traitor!” and “Murderer!” Fersen was kicked, stomped, and savagely beaten with sticks and stones while a battalion of the royal guard stood by. They would later claim that they hadn’t acted because they’d received no orders to stop the attack. Seriously battered, Fersen was helped to a nearby house, where he was allowed refuge in a small room. But the building’s second story housed a restaurant whose patrons mercilessly attacked him again, ripping the ribbon with the Order of the Seraphim from around his neck and tossing it out of the window. A suggestion was made to similarly eject Fersen. Men began to beat him about the head with their walking sticks, and he lay crumpled on the floor of the small chamber, bleeding profusely, until General Silfversparre, no friend of his, arrived on the scene and established order. Silfversparre convinced Fersen that his only hope lay in placing himself under arrest and allowing himself to be imprisoned for his own security in Stockholm’s Town Hall.

  But the rabble followed Fersen and his escort inside the municipal building and dragged the count back outdoors, where the vicious pummeling continued. The fatal blow was delivered when a young man jumped on his chest, crushing his ribs.

  Count von Fersen was never repaid the massive amounts of money he loaned the French crown in an effort to aid the monarchs’ escape from the talons of the Revolution. His substantial generosity was yet another manifestation of his love for Marie Antoinette. While it can be argued that they were never more than good friends, time after time in her hour of peril, none of her other intimates from her days at Trianon came forward to open their purses. Not one member of her Hapsburg family lifted a finger financially, and the same can be said of the Bourbons. It was Axel von Fersen and his immediate circle of friends, the odd ménage à trois he comprised with Eléanore Sullivan and Quentin Craufurd, who stepped up to the plate.

  It was Axel von Fersen who was there for Marie Antoinette as often as his own king and country and the parameters of decency allowed.

  So, did they or didn’t they enjoy an affair that crossed the boundaries of loyal friendship? It remains one of history’s hotly debated mysteries. Marie Antoinette and Axel von Fersen’s contemporaries were more certain of it than not, although after the French Revolution, to harbor the suspicion of an affair was yet another way to tarnish the late queen’s reputation. A courtier at Versailles who knew them both, the comte de Saint-Priest, was convinced that Fersen and Marie Antoinette were lovers, leveling the accusation in his memoirs. But the academics who vehemently dispute the possibility of a romance between the count and the queen cite Fersen’s affair with Saint-Priest’s wife as the comte’s rationale for flinging mud at the Swede. Fersen did indeed dally with Madame de Saint-Priest, which might, understandably, have angered the comte. But that doesn’t mean the allegation wasn’t true. And we must take care not to ascribe twenty-first-century North American morals to the aristocrats at the court of Versailles, for whom extramarital affairs were a matter of course. Besides, it was the queen’s reputation that would take the bigger hit from the revelation of an affair with Fersen. And what did the comte de Saint-Priest have against Marie Antoinette?

  Four years after Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI were guillotined, in 1797, Fersen attended the Second Congress of Rastatt as the Swedish delegate, but Napoleon refused to acknowledge him as an ambassador, pejoratively calling him “monsieur” instead of “Your Excellency,” nor did he addresss him as a count, or a lord of Sweden. Bonaparte insisted that he would have nothing to do with a man who had enjoyed a love affair with the Widow Capet, as Marie Antoinette was called by the revolutionaries after the fall of the monarchy. How ironic that just thirteen years later, Napoleon would be desperately courting the Widow Capet’s grandniece Marie-Louise of Austria, in an effort to solidify his imperial status by allying himself with an ancient and legitimately royal house.

  It strains credulity to believe with unequivocal certainty that Marie Antoinette, so passionately in love with Axel von Fersen that she reportedly trembled in his presence, a woman famous for her lack of impulse control, prudishly kept herself for a husband to whom she had been united for purely political concerns and with whom she had never known sexual pleasure (as Louis didn’t enjoy intercourse), despite her admission to finding her bonheur essential—essential happiness—within her marriage. The possibility exists that the queen and Fersen may have consummated their romance during the summer of 1783, although as the years progressed, they may not have remained lovers as numerous unhappy and stressful events reordered the queen’s outlook on life.

  In 1930, the Finnish archivist Alma Söderhjelm pieced together Fersen’s diaries and correspondence and deduced that the mysterious “Joséphine” he often alluded to was Marie Antoinette. Fersen’s letters to the queen are meticulously numbered, and the dates coincide with his departures from and returns to Versailles. Söderhjelm came to realize, however, that there was another Josephine (Eléanore Sullivan’s maid) who was mentioned in the letters. Some of Fersen’s 1787 correspondence refers to a niche in the wall for a stove. A few scholars have wondered why Fersen would write to the queen of France about such a mundane subject, reducing the import of the count’s secret references to Marie Antoinette by that code name, and insisting that the “Joséphine” in question is Madame Sullivan’s maid.

  Au contraire. Fersen did not know Eléanore Sullivan in 1787. The stove in question was specifically a Swedish stove. And the papers of the Directeur Général des Bâtiments at Versailles (the man in charge of construction, building, and renovation at the palace) show work orders relating to Marie Antoinette’s apartments for the month of October 1787, including one dated October 18, for a set of marble slabs to be delivered to those apartments to be used as a hearth for a Swedish stove. There is also a letter dated October 14 from a man named Loiseleur to the Directeur Général des Bâtiments, regarding the specific renovations and construction that would have to be undertaken for the installation of the Swedish stove.

  Moreover, the room in which the Swedish stove was to be installed was to become part of a suite set aside for Fersen’s use. Like many courtiers at Versailles, the count had a tiny room under the eaves should he wish to avail himself of it, but Marie Antoinette was determined that the Colonel Proprietor of the Royal Suédois should have more spacious accommodations. And so she—scandalously—carved away a couple of rooms in her ground-floor apartments for Count von Fersen.

  Throughout her reign, Marie Antoinette was caricatured in pamphlets known as libelles th
at accused her of sexual indiscretions with both men and women, most often with her brother-in-law the comte d’Artois and her two favorite dames du palais, the princesse de Lamballe and the comtesse (later duchesse) de Polignac. The libelles were written by aristocrats as well as commoners, and while some of the plays, poems, and prints originated in Holland and England, others were of the homegrown variety, tumbling off presses right inside the palace of Versailles, the personal property of courtiers who wished to see the queen disgraced. Yet none of the libelles, as vicious as they were, named Count Axel von Fersen as one of Marie Antoinette’s paramours. And even during her October 1793 trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal, where she was accused of all manner of vice, including that of incest with her eight-year-old son, never once was Fersen’s name introduced, except in connection with his role in aiding the royal family’s escape from the Tuileries by driving their coach out of Paris.

  On the other hand, the libelles depicted Marie Antoinette’s carnal depravity with a number of people, none of whom were her lovers. So should the libelles be relied upon as a trusted source to get it right because they didn’t accuse the queen of fornicating with Fersen? Perhaps the anonymous authors of the libelles missed the romance because they weren’t looking for it. Or because the Swede was often out of the country, they lacked the opportunities to observe him as frequently with Her Majesty. Or because his renowned discretion kept whatever relationship they enjoyed very quietly under wraps. The only one who truly seemed to know the count’s heart was his beloved sister Sophie Piper.

  The story of Marie Antoinette and Axel von Fersen raises far more questions than it answers. Deprived of irrefutable and conclusive evidence of a sexual relationship, or even of a romantic affair of the heart, academics and historians can only theorize, basing their analyses on the extant letters and memoirs of the parties themselves, and of their contemporaries (courtiers, friends, attendants, ambassadors, lovers, relatives), some of whom were only children during the period of a purported romance, or who had good reason to sanitize the characters of the principals.

  This argument continues to be waged online and inflames the passion of readers and academics; few royal romances still excite as much spirited debate. The discussion seems deeply personal at times, because, in the absence of tangible, irrefutable proof either way, those scholars on both sides of the dispute cannot help but color their arguments with their own life experience. For example, Antonia Fraser, Vincent Cronin, Stanley Loomis, André Castelot, and Evelyne Lever all allow for the possibility that Marie Antoinette and Axel von Fersen did enjoy a romance that eventually became sexual. Fraser and Loomis give credence to the contemporary references dating its consummation to sometime during the summer of 1783. After evaluating everything about the character of both parties and the circumstances of their lives up until that point, Fraser credits human nature with the couple’s ultimate inability to resist each other. Some believe (or know from experience) that it is possible to fully love, or be in love with, more than one person simultaneously, or to love two people very completely, but in two different ways. Marie Antoinette was a woman, not an icon. There were parts of her heart touched by Count von Fersen that no one else had ever reached. In time, Marie Antoinette came to love her husband very deeply, and there was never a question that she would not stand beside Louis no matter what befell them. But that does not preclude the possibility of a deep and abiding passion for someone else as well.

  And it does not discredit the work of the fine biographers whose interpretation of the extant material related to Marie Antoinette’s life as it pertained to her connection with Axel von Fersen led them to conclude that where there was smoke, it might be prudent to install a fire alarm.

  Nor, however, is it an indication that the legion of historians, including two Brits—the eminent Simon Schama, and the Fascist party member/conspiracy theorist/anti-Semitic journalist Nesta Webster—as well as the two late-twentieth-century French biographers Simone Bertière and Philippe Delorme, whose work has not been translated into English, are off the mark when they deny the probability of a physical romance between Fersen and the queen. Their interpretation of the same material and their own life experiences shade their theories differently from those of their colleagues who are less unequivocal.

  On the subject of a romance with Axel von Fersen, the memoirs of Madame Campan, an attendant of Marie Antoinette after she became queen, are often relied upon, as she was an eyewitness to history. The problem with Campan’s memoirs is that they were written several years after the events took place, and she often had no personal knowledge of many of them. Madame Campan also embellished her memoirs. Not only were they larded with fictional detail, but they were slanted in order to sanitize, and therefore protect, her beloved beheaded queen’s reputation. The most famous Campanism, repeated from pen to pen down through the decades, is her description of Marie Antoinette and Louis Auguste’s reaction upon learning of the death of his grandfather Louis XV. She wrote in her memoirs that they knelt and prayed, “Dear God, guide us and protect us, for we are too young to reign.” Historians in nearly every biography attribute this exclamation to the new king and queen. The only problem is, they never said it. Henriette Campan, who wasn’t there, made it up years after the fact. So if Madame Campan could freely fictionalize that most salient historical event, it stands to reason that she liberally embroidered other aspects of her memoirs in order to create a certain portrait of Marie Antoinette, the one she wished posterity to view, and not necessarily the warts-and-frailties version of her.

  The denials of Count von Fersen’s descendants, his great-niece the duchesse de Fitz-James and Baron R. M. de Klinckowström, the great-nephew who published Axel’s Journal intime and heavily censored copies of his letters as Le Comte de Fersen Et La Cour de France in 1877, should also not be accepted at face value merely because they were related to one of the parties. Their relationship gives them an even greater reason to remove anything they deemed to be morally repugnant. By the time Baron de Klinckowström published his substantially edited text, Marie Antoinette’s replies had long since vanished, and readers were presented with only a fraction of the puzzle. It is true that Count von Fersen acted as the emissary between the Swedish court and the imprisoned Bourbon sovereigns, and that sensitive political subjects were discussed. And it is true that if the correspondence were to fall into the wrong hands, it could prove extremely compromising, if not fatal. A good deal of this political intrigue was undoubtedly contained within the letters. And it has been argued that Baron de Klinckowström judiciously pruned the text before publication, although he insisted, “The Fersen family has retained the greatest veneration for those holy and august martyrs, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and that there is nothing among the papers remaining from the Comte de Fersen which can throw a shadow on the conduct of the Queen.” But what did the baron need to edit nearly eighty years after the queen’s demise, if not compromising material of another nature entirely? The political information would have long since been mooted by 1877, and all the pertinent parties were dead. What else would still be so much of an anathema to Victorian sensibilities that the good baron felt it had to be redacted with such a heavy hand? His only rationale for editing with a machete is the removal of specific passages that damaged or embarrassed the reputations of important persons—either certain figures discussed in some of the documents, or that of Count von Fersen himself.

  The original letters no longer exist, so they cannot be analyzed with spectrometry or other methods. On his deathbed the baron ordered a servant to burn the correspondence in his presence. Klinckowström’s willful destruction of such valuable historical material at his moment of reckoning seems curious, if not downright suspicious, leading some scholars to conclude that where there was literal smoke, there most certainly could have been romantic fire, and that the baron indeed believed Fersen’s descendants had something to be ashamed of. If not, then why destroy the only evidence that could prove there was no l
ove affair between Axel von Fersen and Marie Antoinette?

  The duchesse de Fitz-James’s vehement negation of a royal romance was printed in La Vie Contemporaine, a French periodical, in 1893, a full century after Marie Antoinette’s death.

  I desire first of all to do away with the lying legend, based on a calumny, which distorted the relations between Marie Antoinette and Fersen, relations consisting in absolute devotion, in complete abnegation on one side, and on the other in friendship, profound, trusting and grateful. People have wished to degrade to the vulgarities of a love novel, facts which were otherwise terrible, sentiments which were otherwise lofty.

  It is precisely because of their connection to the count that these Victorian-era descendants may protest too much. Or perhaps not, but the possibility remains that they had every reason to whitewash their ancestor’s adulterous passion for a once-unpopular queen. It was certainly not to be discussed during an age when her reputation was about to be rehabilitated, or in an era of unmitigated primness.

  What is undeniable is that Marie Antoinette and Axel von Fersen loved each other, and that he risked his own life on more than one occasion in an effort to save hers, personally financed her rescue attempts, and never stopped devising plans to free her. He mourned the date of June 20 every year, because he had obeyed Louis and left Marie Antoinette to journey toward Montmédy without him. She was the woman who came first in his heart, and whose existence was more precious than his own. After her death, Fersen wrote to his sister Sophie, “I have never ceased to love her…how I long to have died at her side…the sole object of my interest has ceased to exist; she alone meant everything to me; and now for the first time do I fully grasp how passionately I was devoted to her. I can think of nothing but her…. I have arranged for agents in Paris to buy anything of hers which may be obtainable, for whatever I can get of this sort will be sacred to me.”