The Queen’s Lover

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  For by that time she was of no more use to the National Convention. In the summer of 1794, when Robespierre lost its support, political conditions had changed drastically. The Incorruptible’s end was as dreadful as I would have wished all revolutionaries’ deaths to be: botching a suicide attempt, he had incurred a very grave wound by shooting himself in the jaw; and on July 29 (or Thermidor, as the French call it), he was sent to the scaffold with twenty-two of his acolytes. In order to remove all obstacles from the guillotine’s path, executioner Sanson, who’d done his job on the queen nine months earlier, tore away the bandage that had been holding together the Incorruptible’s jaw. Dreadful screams of pain issued from him as he was put upon the scaffold, silenced only by the screeching blade.

  Power then fell into the hands of the so-called Thermidorians, revolutionary brigands like Barras and Tallien whose hands were by no means unstained, but who put an end to the Reign of Terror. This junta looked on Marie-Thérèse as something of an embarrassment. She had begun to be adulated by many Parisians as an innocent, persecuted martyr, “the Orphan of the Temple.” Fearful that she might become an increasingly inspirational figure for royalists, the new leaders suggested to the Austrian emperor that she be exchanged for those members of the Convention whom Austria still held captive. Madame Royale—the aloof young girl I’d guided out of the Tuileries on the night of the flight to Varennes—was sent to Vienna in December of 1795. There a debate began concerning her marital plans. Wishing her fortune to remain in their hands, the Austrians wanted her to wed Emperor Francis II’s younger brother, Archduke Karl. Her Bourbon relatives wished her to marry her first cousin, the Duc d’Angoulême, son of the Comte d’Artois. I shall return at length to Marie-Thérèse; suffice it to say for now that her French relatives would win out, and she eventually became the Duchesse d’Angoulême.

  SORROW WAS FOLLOWING upon sorrow. In May of 1794 I received news of my father’s death. Notwithstanding his frequent pleas for me to come home, and his declining health, I had not seen him for six years because of my attachments to the queen of France and, after her demise, to Eleanore Sullivan. So this particular heartbreak was tinged with a strong sense of guilt. I decided to return to Sweden for a while to deal with issues of inheritance, but I procrastinated throughout the summer: I first had to settle my relations with Eleanore, and also look after my financial problems. Eleanore was living in Brussels, as I was, and had always refused to visit Sweden with me. Throughout my first months of grieving for the queen, whom she had idolized, Eleanore had grieved with me and been my only consolation. And in my journals I couldn’t help but occasionally compare the two women of my life. “Oh, how I reproach myself for the wrongs I did Her and how deeply I now realize I loved Her,” I wrote in my journal that summer, referring to the queen and to my infidelity. “What kindness, what tenderness, what a fine and loving heart! Eleanore will not replace Her…. She doesn’t have all those qualities, though I love her and she is my sole comfort and without her I would be very miserable.” But I should add that within six months of the queen’s death Eleanore ceased to concentrate on me and resumed her social whirl, attending every possible ball with her daughter (offspring of the Duke of Württemberg), who was now living with her and with whom I did not get along.

  There are women who gain dignity, who become more alluring, with the advance of age, but Eleanore was not one of them. A Swedish diplomat who met her in Frankfurt in 1796 praised her beauty, yet added: “Madame Sullivan did not have a pleasant manner. Her gaiety was of the loud Italian kind; she shrieked when she should have spoken, and laughed a full-throated laugh. As long as Count Fersen was with her, she was silent and lost in observation like him. When Craufurd was home, things also proceeded decently; but when both these gentlemen were away, there were games and forfeits, kisses were bestowed, and there was enormous hilarity.”

  Yet Eleanore and Quentin Craufurd had all along offered generous support and financial aid to the French royal family, and for this reason alone my loyalty to them was unshakable, however complex our relations. Since 1789—the year Eleanore and I became lovers—I had been living in a ménage à trois with her and Craufurd. The situation was hardly ideal. Craufurd was often absent on business, but rumors about me reached him from the servants’ quarters; and there were recurrent scenes of jealousy in which he could become very hostile, and which I found ridiculous: how could he imagine that a woman of Eleanore’s temperament could remain alone for weeks or months at a time? Besides, Craufurd had occasionally needed me. A few years earlier I had arranged for him to be one of Gustavus’s Paris agents, which flattered his vanity. And somewhat like Louis XVI, he seemed to be grateful that I was far more discreet than many other men whom his mistress could have chosen as a second lover. (I sometimes asked myself: Was I predestined to be the ideal rival?)

  Moreover, I was a man of few friends, and in my solitude I had long looked on Eleanore as the only person who could console me. I had already written the following to Sophie the month after Louis XVI died: “I often curse the moment I left Sweden; I wish I’d never left our rocks and pines. I would not have had as much joy, but…I would have avoided much pain. I weep very often alone, dear Sophie, and together with E., when we are able to. She herself is too afflicted by what has happened to be able to comfort me. But at least I have the solace of weeping with someone. This good woman is excessively attached to the French royal family; she has made many sacrifices for them, and this is what makes me love her.”

  The following fall again I revealed my dependence on Eleanore as I contemplated the approaching demise of Marie Antoinette. “I shall have then lost three sovereigns, my benefactors and friends,” I wrote. “There only remains one woman, whom I love and who loves me, but her character is very different from mine and she belongs to another.”

  I would be less than honest if I did not admit that I have an urgent, pressing need for women; that I am sexually very driven; that however reclusive I am, I dislike solitude. In sum, I like solitude with another. Thus notwithstanding Eleanore’s and Craufurd’s stormy temperaments, our ménage à trois was an arrangement I had to tolerate. “I must rediscover the kindness of E.’s character,” I wrote in my journal, “behind the thousand brusque acts and the thousand slights that she afflicts me with and that I find hard to endure.”

  So however greater my love had been for my lost queen, between 1794 and 1799 I was very taken up by my attempts to win Eleanore away from Quentin Craufurd. My life was also governed by the need to allay the state of my finances, and that of a few others. I had given a considerable amount of money to the French royal family to implement the Varennes project. I was also contributing large sums—fifteen to twenty thousand pounds—to help numerous émigrés who had fallen into poverty, and were taking on menial tasks to feed their families. (I was having all my shirts made, for instance, by a woman from one of the most prominent noble families in France.) Moreover, I felt it a duty to refund the charitable citizens, particularly Madame de Korff and her mother, who had loaned nearly every penny they had to the royal family at the time of Varennes, and who were now living in dire poverty (I was helping out by paying them, out of my own pocket, the interest on this loan). In the face of such monetary quandaries, how could I possibly compete with the prodigal Craufurd, seeing the luxurious style of life Eleanore was used to? I explained these issues to my dear friend Taube.

  “I have financial problems to take care of for myself and for others. I have to repay Madame de Korff the large sum that she loaned to the late king of France—it was almost her entire fortune. As for myself, their late Majesties bequeathed to me 1,500,000 pounds in 1791, at the time of their departure for Varennes, about which the world knows nothing, and which is in the hands of Count Mercy. I have their note, which I have not yet presented to him.”

  The fact is that I had a letter, signed by Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette on June 20, 1791, the day of their escape from Paris, which bequeathed to me the above amount. I had raised tha
t sum from Madame de Korff and others, and from my own holdings, to cover the expenses that royalist troops would have incurred if the king’s escape had succeeded. The monarchs’ note, forwarded to Mercy along with the money, read thus: “We request that Count Mercy remit to Count Fersen all of our money that is in his [Mercy’s] possession, about 1,500,000 livres, and we ask Count Fersen to accept his share of it as a sincere mark of our gratitude for everything that he has done for us.”

  This note caught Mercy by surprise. He had indeed received a considerable sum from the royal family but, alas, had turned it over to Marie Antoinette’s sister Archduchess Maria Cristina, the regent of the Low Countries, who in turn seems to have handed it over to Emperor Francis II of Austria. Why had I not presented this request at the time I first came to Brussels in 1791? asked Mercy, who would die a short time later in London. I replied that it would have been highly indelicate of me to solicit these funds at a time when the French monarchs were still alive.

  So the money, by that time, was said to be in Vienna, in Emperor Francis II’s treasury. In the spring of 1794, shortly after Mercy’s death, I wrote the Austrian chancellor, the gruff, odious Baron Thugut, about the sum owed me, and did not receive a reply for four months. Thugut’s eventual response was highly elusive, and did not bode well: “It would have been more propitious for you had you decided to make use of the arguments that are the basis of your pretensions during the lifetime of the late monarchs.” I finally realized that I would eventually have to go to Vienna to settle this debt. But this trip would be delayed for many months by the fact that I had to return to Sweden and settle my family affairs in the aftermath of my father’s passing. As the eldest son, I had inherited a large share of his holdings, including the Fersen Palace in Stockholm, the estates of Steninge and Ljung, sizable other lands near the Finnish border, and his shares in the East India Company. My brother, Fabian, inherited the Mälåker manor on Lake Mälaren, and my mother retained the estate in Lövstad, which upon her death in 1800 would pass on to Sophie.

  UPON THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY of my Toinette’s death, October 16, 1794, I was already on a ship, traversing the Baltic on my way to Sweden. “Today is a dreadful day for me,” I wrote in my journal. “It is the date upon which I lost the person who loved me the most in the world…. I shall mourn Her until the end of my days and whatever I feel for Eleanore can never help me to forget what I have lost.” October 16 would indeed remain a day of mourning for the rest of my life.

  I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible when I returned to Stockholm, but that was barely possible. The reappearance of a citizen who was known to have been the lover of Europe’s most glamorous and controversial queen thrust tumult into our provincial Swedish society. Women, women again, my life’s plague and joy! Adolescent belles and ripe older beauties came from all possible corners of Stockholm to seek me out. I was more than aware of the fact that I had greatly aged since my last stay in Sweden, that the griefs I’d suffered had lined my face as if with acid, that I looked far older than my thirty-nine years. But this did not seem to minimize the pandemonium of female attention I incited. To my surprise, I was impelled to take full advantage of these ladies’ advances. It’s as if my need for revenge had suddenly become a kind of aphrodisiac. Never had I allowed my sexual impulses to be so brutally released. I was driven to take to bed every woman who approached me. I made love savagely to each of them, enraged by the fact that she was not my Toinette. I made them lie down on their bellies, thrust at them furiously from behind. When bedded with bolder females, I pressed their breasts together and thrust my penis up and down between those delicious globes, ejaculating on their chests. I’m most attracted to noble, aloof women. My sex acts were tinged with the desire for revenge that had swept over me at the time of Toinette’s death. I tied princesses’, duchesses’, countesses’ hands to the rails of their beds, thrust at them from a great distance as ferociously as possible, bit their nipples until they bled.

  All my captives were startled by my wildness; was I not supposed to be the reserved, proverbially gallant Count von Fersen? I relished their moans of pain or pleasure, and that exquisite shouting that occurs when the two sensations are admixed. Some were terrified by my antics and vowed to never come near me again; others could not have enough of it. I was at it almost every day, sometimes capturing five, six women in one week. I kept thinking of the refrain from Mozart’s Don Giovanni: “V’han contesse, baronesse, marchesine, principesse, / Ma in España, son già mille e tre.”

  The only woman I dared not dally with was Charlotte, Duchess of Södermanland, a close friend of Sophie’s. Her husband was the regent for the adolescent king, Gustav IV Adolf, youngest son of Gustavus. Infatuated with me for years, garrulous, indiscreet, her foot constantly seeking mine under the table at official dinners, Charlotte would have been a perilous woman for me to tryst with, and I asked Sophie to calm her down. For the regent, Duke Karl, was all too aware that his wife had been in love with me for decades, and that his duchess, faute de mieux, was currently having an affair with my younger brother, Fabian. Another reason for the Duke of Södermanland’s distrust of me was that his sympathies lay with the French Revolution: he was about to officially recognize the Convention, and considered me dangerous because of my notorious association with the French royal family. His suspicion of me was so pronounced, in fact, that he surrounded my house with spies.

  There were other reasons for the regent’s animosity: Sweden was rife with political intrigues: a bitter rivalry had arisen between the current regime, headed by the regent, and the Gustavian faction of which I was a leader, along with the late king’s closest adviser, Armfelt. The regent wished to continue his dominance as long as possible; my faction hoped for the early succession of Gustavus’s son. Armfelt had come to see me in Brussels, and I was particularly alarmed by his report that the Duke of Södermanland was isolating the young king from all those persons who had been devoted to his father, Gustavus III.

  In 1795 I spent a happy summer with my sister Sophie and our friend Taube, who were now living together more openly than ever, Sophie’s husband having died in May of that year. The three of us went to a spa on the shores of Lake Vättern, where Taube, whose health was frail, took a cure. How I envied them the perfect life they shared! When in their company I often wondered whether I would ever enjoy a happiness similar to theirs. Sated with the winter’s sexual exploits, that summer I also spent serene days at my estate of Steninge, where the strawberries were just fruiting and the peas were abundant. I was happy with the condition of my farm, most satisfied with the work of my overseer. For the first time in many years I felt a deep attachment to the lands I’d inherited from my father, and began to long for a more leisurely pace of life that would allow me to spend more time at my country estates. My happiness at Steninge was deeply marred, however, by the news of young Louis XVII’s death. My handsome, brilliant little friend, possibly my own son! “He was the last and only interest retaining me in France,” I wrote Sophie; “the news is unbearably painful, and brings back heartrending memories.” I grieved much for the child, bitterly remembering the few happy times we had played together, the vigor with which he would kick a ball in my direction, his sparkling laugh, the joy he had taken at playing blindman’s buff.

  My departure from Sweden was incited by the news that Louis-Charles’s sister, Marie-Thérèse, now eighteen years old, had been released from her prison at the Temple and sent to Vienna. I would be in lifelong mourning for her mother, the love of my life, and I felt very emotional about the prospect of once more seeing her daughter, Madame Royale.

  There was also the unresolved issue of the legacy left me by her parents. I confess to having a patrician disdain for fiscal matters, and the effort to seek reimbursement—for myself or for others—was repugnant to me. My own finances had been improved by my father’s inheritance; so were it not for my yearning to indemnify Eleanor and Craufurd, and Madame de Korff and her mother, the latter of whom remained in
dire financial straits, I would have let the whole matter drop. But I was truly obsessed by the Korffs’ dilemma. I had been informed by the Austrian emperor that the money I was soliciting belonged to Marie-Thérèse, so it was only by seeking her out in Vienna that I could hope to resolve the Korffs’ plight.

  ARRIVING IN VIENNA in January of 1796, the month after Madame’s release, I was immediately informed by French refugees about the virtual imprisonment that had been imposed on the princess. Her Hapsburg relatives had apparently decided that she should have minimal contact with the world around her, and most especially no communication with her Bourbon relatives. Her entire French retinue had been dismissed, and replaced by titled Austrian women who were being employed as spies and informers. All her correspondence with her uncle the Comte de Provence was opened and censored; even the Prince de Condé, whom her uncle had sent to greet his niece upon her arrival, was forbidden to visit her. And French émigrés, who all longed to see her, could only get a glimpse of her on Sundays when she went to Mass at the Hofburg Palace.

  My impressions of Vienna as a whole were mostly negative. I became caught up in a social whirl little suited to my tastes or habits. I gravitated to the company of the higher nobility, in which the most beautiful women and the greatest gallantry prevailed. In this circle I was again mobbed, and gave full sway, as in Stockholm, to my sexual appetites, finding Viennese women singularly more naive than my female compatriots. Thrusting my tongue into the ravishing Princess Metternich, I learned to my surprise that she had never yet engaged in this delightful practice. Where in heaven’s name had Viennese men been for all these centuries?

  I blamed Vienna’s lack of sophistication—sexual and otherwise—on the mediocrity of the imperial court. When I went to the theater, which I found very poor, I saw the Emperor Francis II and his Empress in their loge, looking like a couple of bourgeois. “How awkward of them at a time when royalty should try to impress!” I wrote in my journal. In the Prater, the emperor’s carriage was like that of a greengrocer compared with the magnificent vehicles of the aristocracy. As for his sons, the five archdukes, none of them had any bearing, or manners, or talent for conversation. I was equally baffled by the Viennese’s insouciance concerning the war against the French. “The whole day I heard nothing but talk of balls, celebrations, and divertissements,” I wrote Sophie shortly after my arrival. “I’m struck by how little they think of the war.” It was against this staid and dowdy couple, surrounded by a scatterbrained, constantly intriguing nobility, that France’s revolutionary armies were scoring their greatest victories. As much as I hated their principles, it was clear that the revolutionaries’ efficiency, drive, and convictions were bound to overwhelm the old order’s apathy and frivolity.