The Queen’s Lover

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  CHAPTER 2

  Sophie:

  OUR FAMILY,

  THE VON FERSENS

  THERE WERE MANY similarities between my brother and our father, Frederick Axel von Fersen, who was the grand marshal of Sweden a few decades before his son rose to that post. “Père,” as we called him, was descended from a Scottish clan, the Macphersons, which had settled in Sweden in the sixteenth century. He was our nation’s most influential citizen and its greatest landowner, the proprietor of several superb estates spread throughout the country. He was also the leader of one of Sweden’s two principal political factions, the pro-French Hat party, which represented the upper aristocracy—the other faction, the Caps, tended to be pro-Russian and were identified with the clergy, farmers, and the lower nobility. Père was as handsome and prodigal as Axel, like his son was possessed of a golden heart, and was equally revered by members of our four estates—the clergy, the aristocracy, the burgher class, the peasantry.

  As for our mother, née de la Gardie, whose large dark eyes my siblings and I had inherited, during our youth she served as principal lady-in-waiting to the queen of Sweden. She was descended from a family of Gascon Calvinists who had sought refuge in Sweden during the Renaissance, and who had been all-powerful since Queen Christina’s reign—her great-grandfather had been Christina’s prime minister and closest confidant. In a nation that for two generations had been closely allied to France and was even more obsessed with Frenchness than the Russian nobility (let’s not forget that Christina had beckoned the great French thinker Descartes to her court, where he had died, alas, of pneumonia), the Fersens were considerably more French than other families. Père had fought on the French side in several conflicts, most notably in the Seven Years’ War. We spoke exclusively French at home and teased each other much about the mistakes we made in our native tongue, which we spoke only to our domestics. As our mother complained, “In our country one can barely manage to think in Swedish.” My brother Axel wrote both his memoirs and his journal (the latter of which he began when he was fourteen) in French. If I live long enough his journals will also be published someday, and its editors might well joke about the fact that a famous Swede’s diary had to be translated into Swedish from its original French!

  But our Francophilia was not singular. His Majesty Gustavus III, the greatest king of eighteenth-century Sweden and a close family friend, a man much admired by Voltaire, Condorcet, and other Enlightenment luminaries, spoke his native language with a faint French accent. After being shot by a political enemy, he even spoke French at the moment when he thought he was about to die, uttering the following words: “Je suis blessé, arrétez le et tirez moi d’ici!” Would a czar have spoken anything but Russian, in that society noted for its Frenchness, at what he thought was the moment of his death?

  FORGIVE THE DIGRESSION. I write these pages, above all, to tell you of Axel’s childhood and youth. For my brother centered his own memories too extravagantly on that Austrian flirt who brought him so much misery, who kept him from ever marrying and having a family; dear God, here’s what he wrote me once when he was approaching the age of thirty-five: “I’ve made up my mind, I don’t wish to ever get married, it is contrary to my nature…. I can’t belong to the one person I wish to belong to, the only one who truly loves me, so I do not wish to belong to anyone.” In my early years, I cursed that Viennese sorceress every day of my life.

  So, back to our family. Axel and I had a younger brother, Fabian, and an older sister, Hedda, but from earliest childhood on we focused so intensely on each other that Hedda and Fabian were almost excluded from our daily life. How close Axel and I were! I was nearly as tall as he, and we looked strikingly alike, almost like twins. Our siblings didn’t partake in our childhood games, of which our favorite was to scare each other with tales of the mythological creatures that crowd our national folklore: each of us tried to upstage the other in the number of eerie visitations we received. There were the skogsrå or wood nymphs whose front presents a shimmering, ravishing white-clad creature but whose back is an ugly black hollow plumed with a large tail, and the Vita Frun, another malevolent white-garmented lady who haunts palaces, both of whom we often pretended to have seen in our respective rooms. But most especially we lived in the world of trolls, supernatural creatures of small stature and ugly mien—drooping jaws, warty noses, tangled straw for hair—who inhabit caves or the roots of trees, who come into human homes to steal money, which they greedily hoard, who kill any humans who seek them out to recover their lucre. We made much of the fact that trolls only have power over those who are afraid of them, and that they terrified most children. “I’m less afraid of them than you are!” Axel would shout. “No, you boob, I’m less afraid than you,” I’d enjoin. By this time Père might have come into our room, annoyed by our din, urging us to grow up and give up on such silly tales—“the folklore of our peasantry,” he’d call them. However much we loved him, we thumbed our nose at Père and resumed our dramas of ghostly visitors.

  Père may have been against folklore, but he was a fairly religious man, or as religious as one could be while being an ardent follower of Enlightenment ideals. As Swedes we are all members, by birth, of the Lutheran state church, and at our home religious holidays were strictly observed. We’re the descendants of those Vikings who sacrificed to the sun god to hasten his return; and at the beginning of the winter season we commemorated with particular fanfare the shortest day of the year, Santa Lucia Day, as the harbinger of brighter days to come. A symbol of light—lux, luce, observed on December 13—Lucia is more festively celebrated in Sweden than any other saint in the calendar. Candles are placed in every window to honor her attributes—benevolence, charity, good fortune. The religious service that celebrates her takes place in the early morning, and as children Axel and I ran home as swiftly as we could to devour the sweets traditional to that day, X-shaped saffron buns decorated with raisins. Shortly afterward there came Christmas, which in our country demands particularly strict discipline on the part of children; for the tree is hung with sweets—hard candies, tightly sealed cookies—which we were not allowed to enjoy until the day of Kurtz, January 13, twenty days after Christmas. Then, after dancing around the tree, Axel and Fabian and Hedda and I fell upon it and plundered it of all its goodies, often ending up with terrible bouts of indigestion, before throwing the tree out into the snow.

  Père saw to it that we carefully observed several other traditional holidays: Easter, for instance, which for some reason was associated with witches. To deter their arrival, on Maundy Thursday the sign of the cross was painted on our foreheads, on the walls of houses and public buildings, even on the cattle’s noses, and on Easter Eve Axel and I made huge bonfires to chase any witches away. Our next big holiday was Midsummer’s Eve in the third week of June, the year’s longest day, when everyone in Stockholm watches the sun setting on the horizon at 2 a.m., knowing it will rise again in a half hour, thinking of their compatriots in northern Sweden, where the sun remains in the sky for over a month. Every girl would want to be in love at such a time, I thought to myself as a teenager every Midsummer’s Eve, but I was happy enough to love my brother Axel, and walk with him down Stockholm’s embankments in the full daylight of midnight, our arms around each other’s waist…. At all of these holidays, particularly the winter ones that we spent in one of our country houses, there was much friendly calling from our neighbors. Père was as prodigally hospitable as Axel would later be. Numerous candles were lit at the entrance of our estate, and our servants stood at the gates, handing steaming mugs of glögg—red wine heated with ginger, cinnamon, and other spices—to visitors arriving on their open sleighs.

  One such visitor who arrived on a winter day of my seventeenth year was Count Piper, a tall, powerfully built fellow with a thick red neck and features too coarse to be called handsome whose principal topics of conversations were stag hunting and the yield of wheat crops on his estates. He had a booming, stentorian voice that reminded me of
the Swedish proverb Tomma tunor skramlar mest, “The empty barrel made the loudest noise.” I shied away from him for the simple reason that he seemed particularly drawn to me, and also because throughout my life I would only be attracted to men of Axel’s like—elegant, sensitive men with strong intellectual passions. Within a half dozen of Piper’s visits I realized that my father had chosen him to be my husband. Like innumerable girls have done for thousands of years I wept, I begged, I implored Père to let me wait until a man came along whom I had chosen to love. He would come very soon, I promised (lying through my teeth, since I had never been drawn to any man), I promise you, Papa, I will find some nobleman who will please you, whom you will be honored to have in your family. But Père would not budge. He had settled on Piper—his high rank, his wealth, his large land holdings, made him, in his eyes, the perfect spouse for me. I kept thinking of Santa Lucia, who had preferred to have her eyes gouged out with spears rather than marry the man imposed upon her by her father, and I confided in my tenderhearted brother. He gently made me realize that little could be done: going against a father’s will, in my situation, would tarnish the family name. “You’re a very beautiful woman, and in time,” he said, “you will find another man who will love you purely, selflessly, and you will return his love and know decades of happiness.”

  And so I tied the crown of myrtles around my brow and went to the altar accompanied by my ladies of honor—my sister, Hedda, and my closest friend, Charlotte, Duchess of Södermanland, the pretty girl who’d been hopelessly in love with Axel since her teens. Swedish weddings are three-day-long events; and as my maids, on the second day, buttoned me into my first black dress—symbol of the rite of passage into the marital status—this custom I’d always looked on as inane suddenly seemed fitting: how appropriate to wear black to betoken the gloom of being married to Count Piper! I shall not elaborate on the horrors of my wedding night. Suffice it to say that the count’s sexual habits were as overbearing as his appearance and general demeanor. “I shall ride you,” he said with a coarse laugh, “ride you like a bull.” And so he did. And in the next seven years I had three children with Piper. By that time he had gone through several mistresses; I told Axel I’d had enough, and as he had predicted, I took a lover of my own. His name was Evert Taube, and (wouldn’t you know it?) he was my brother’s closest friend, a man of probity, depth, and tenderness equal to Axel’s. As my brother had foretold, our union lasted many decades; I lost him only a few years before I lost my beloved sibling.

  WHENEVER I LEAVE SWEDEN and feel Hemlängtan—nostalgia for the home country—I think of water, of the constant presence of water in our native land. I dream of Stockholm, the “Venice of the North” as it is often called, built on twenty-two islands, its sherbet-hued buildings shimmering like mirages on the still water of the city’s canals. I think of the marine view I had from my childhood bedroom in our home, which looked out on the bay where hundreds of sailboats were moored, swaying on the water in the gentle breezes that always waft through our city. Walking through the narrow medieval streets of Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s largest island and the site of its earliest settlements, there are few corners from which one can not see the gleam of a canal, the outline of a fishing boat setting off on its daily journey.

  It is with water too, that I associate the buildings of our youth: the Fersen Palace, our winter home in Stockholm, was a jewel of a dwelling directly facing the royal palace, and designed by the same great architect, Carl Harleman, who designed part of the royal residence. Come summer we spent much of our time at Steninge, some thirty-five kilometers north of the capital, a golden yellow mansion of luminous simplicity, overlooking a large stream, which is considered the finest example of Swedish baroque. Or else we went to Löfstad, several hours by coach south of Stockholm, an equally superb dwelling that hovers over a large lake and a wealth of pine forests. Not far from Löfstad we owned yet another great castle, Ljung, which we favored for winter holidays.

  To return to my brother Axel, a few last words: whichever of our palaces he was living in, whatever country he was visiting, he eschewed many pastimes traditional to the nobility: hunting, for instance, which, loving animals as much as he did, he adamantly refused to engage in. His energies were focused on music, for which he had a considerable gift. He played the piano and the flute excellently, and had a powerful, lusty baritone. His portable clavichord accompanied him on most of his voyages. He also painted very beautifully. And only I know him well enough to say this: it is a pity that our family’s high ranking in the Swedish aristocracy disqualified him from choosing an artistic vocation and giving free vent to his great talents.

  CHAPTER 3

  Axel:

  GUSTAVUS III, MY KING

  IT WOULD NOT BE fitting to speak any more about myself without first portraying the king who reigned over our nation during much of my adult life, my dear friend Gustavus III.

  By the time he had reached the age of eighteen, Crown Prince Gustavus was a very slender man with handsome though irregular features and large, penetrating blue eyes. A slight depression on his left temple, caused by a midwife’s ineptness, made the left side of his face appear oblique and a tad eerie. His left hip was a bit higher than his right one, causing a slight limp, which he tried to disguise by graceful motions of his cane. His delicate frame and the hairlessness of his face gave him a somewhat effeminate appearance. Yet I realized early on in our friendship that this delicacy was deceptive—his energy and determination were formidable, and he could work for days on end with little food or sleep without any apparent strain.

  At the time of Gustavus’s birth his father, a gentle, mild-tempered man, bore the title of Crown Prince Adolphus Frederick, son of Christian August of Holstein-Gottorp. However, his very brilliant mother, Ulrica, a sister of Frederick the Great, was as meddling, power-hungry, eccentric a woman as ever plagued the planet. Ulrica forbade her son to play boys’ games in fear he would perspire too much. She insisted that he be fed only soups, creams, and vegetables because it was her opinion that solid food dulled the mind. From his childhood on, she kept him up until long after midnight so that he might not “sleep his wits away.” Gustavus greatly desired to learn English, which in addition to French was taught to many young aristocrats, but French was the only language she allowed him to study. Mathematics was not permitted either. Louisa Ulrica’s only wise decision was to choose as Gustavus’s tutor Carl Gustaf Tessin, the son of the great architect who had designed Stockholm’s royal palace.

  Tessin, who deeply regretted not having been an actor, used to illustrate historical feats through grand theatrical gestures, and this may have incited the passion for drama that absorbed Gustavus throughout his life. In Tessin’s reports to Crown Princess Louisa Ulrica, he depicts his pupil as a petulant but industrious and honest boy. Early in his instructions, Tessin also perceived that the precocious young Gustavus, who enjoyed playing with dolls and loathed such traditional male pastimes as hunting or even riding, had a vivid imagination and an amazingly retentive memory. His mastery of the dramatic arts and his grasp of ancient history were particularly notable. Aged ten, he composed a tragedy on the death of Julian the Apostate. Aged eleven, he began to write plays in French. By his midteens there were few French books he had not read; Voltaire shed tears of joy when the Swedish ambassador to France, Creutz, reported that the prince knew the philosopher’s epic poem La Henriade by heart before he was sixteen.

  But it was the stage that most absorbed young Gustavus. Upon seeing a play that enthused him, he committed long portions of its dialogues to memory, especially those recited by beautifully clad female characters. As a young child—I was nine years younger than he—I remember seeing him pace his room for hours after he was supposed to have been in bed, rehearsing his favorite feminine roles, decked out with sheets and towels that served as the trains or headdresses of his dramatic personae. In his adult years he would occasionally remain in disguise all day long, speaking and acting according to role and
demanding that his entourage do the same. As one of the families closest to Prince Gustavus, all the Fersens had to get on stage at some point to act in his theatrical ventures—I took turns playing a jockey, a shepherd, a giant, and a medieval knight, the latter of which caused me to suffer through the day from the weight of a twenty-pound suit of armor.

  In 1751, when Gustavus was five years old, his grandfather died at an advanced age, and his father ascended the Swedish throne under the name of Adolphus Frederick. As crown prince, young Gustavus’s role models were Henry IV of France, Henry V of England, and above all the formidable Gustavus II Adolphus, father of Queen Christina, all monarchs far more authoritarian than his own benign parent. By his teens, Gustavus had assiduously cultivated that innate charm of manner that enticed me when I first met him, and that, he surely realized, made him so winsome to all. “One can not imagine greater ease, gaiety, tact, and politeness,” so the French saloniste Madame du Deffand described the young crown prince upon meeting him during his first visit to Paris.

  Since childhood Gustavus had ardently desired to go to France, and his opportunity came in 1770, when he was twenty-four. Accompanied by his younger brother, he arrived in Paris and instantly won the heart of Louis XV, who received the two princes as if they were his own sons. During their stay at Marly they were lodged in the apartments of the Children of France, a rare privilege. My prudish mother was shocked to hear of the manner in which Gustavus reciprocated the French king’s kindness: he presented Madame du Barry’s poodle with a diamond collar, which pleased Louis XV greatly. Ambassador Creutz also introduced the Swedish princes to all the foremost salons, and Gustavus would maintain a lifetime correspondence with France’s most accomplished blue-stockings—Madame Lespinasse, Madame d’Epinay, and Madame Necker along with Madame du Deffand.