The Queen’s Lover

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  A great delight of my stay in Vienna—there were few of them—was a concert at which quartets by Franz Joseph Haydn were played. His Sixth Quartet was especially beautiful. Haydn himself was there, performing on the violin. Not a good violinist, but a marvelous composer, this tiny, very shy man was in the service of Count Esterhazy. I was shocked to hear that this great artist had to take his meals in the kitchen, with the Esterhazys’ domestic staff. Only at the residence of the Russian ambassador, Count Razumovsky, did I find grace and democratic ease. There the custom of an open table was maintained, at which persons of quality could dine every evening without invitation. In fact by the month of March I was practically living at Razumovsky’s home, where his wife showed me nothing but kindness and warmth.

  There was another important encounter in Vienna, one that gave me both joy and sorrow. I was visited several times by Louis XVI’s former valet, the faithful Cléry, who had managed to escape to Vienna a few days after the king’s death, and whom I embraced like a brother. He narrated to me, in the greatest and most painful detail, his master’s last days and hours.

  UPON MY SECOND WEEK IN VIENNA, emotion overcame me when I first caught sight of Marie-Thérèse. It was on a Sunday, as she was returning from Mass. I came close to fainting. I had not seen her since that night of June 20, 1791, when I placed her in the coach in which her parents attempted their ill-fated escape. I could not help but compare her to the queen. She was blond, tall, and well built like her mother, and had grace and nobility of bearing, but her features resembled those of Madame Elisabeth rather than those of the queen; and in comparison with Marie Antoinette, who glided so ethereally when she moved, she walked rather awkwardly, pigeon-toed. I longed to visit with her, but this desire was fraught with foreboding. She had so adored her father, and she must have known of my relationship with her mother, whom she’d disliked since childhood. How could she not have negative feelings toward me? As I saw her on that Sunday morning she gave me an amazed look as she passed by me, and blushed, and turned around to look at me again before entering her apartments. I flattered myself to think that she would have liked to give me some sign of recognition, however she may still have disliked me.

  A few days later I saw her again at a reception. She was looking at the crowd the way her mother used to when she searched for people she knew, and when she saw me she came toward me, and greeted me in an amiable enough manner. “I’m so glad to see that you’re safe,” she said. Those words gave me great pleasure, and tears of sorrow kept springing to my eyes. I could not help but notice that she had inherited her mother’s love of dogs: bouncing about her was Coco, her red-and-white spaniel, which had once belonged to her brother, and had shared Louis XVII’s jail cell. Upon the little king’s death, Cléry had told me, the dog found his way to Marie-Thérèse’s quarters. Not yet knowing that her brother had died—she would not learn of his demise for months—she took the dog in and kept it, believing that it had gotten lost.

  Princess Marie-Thérèse and I saw each other again at a few other social events. Occasionally, to my great emotion, she was affable enough to draw me aside: she wished me to describe her parents when I first knew them, when they were still very young. I told her of her mother’s perennial graciousness; of the many times I brought my spaniel, Odin, to her apartments to play with her dogs; of her father’s abiding amiability and of his confidence in me. Upon another meeting Marie-Thérèse, in turn, gave me some precious details about the trip to Varennes: she told me of the mysterious horseman who had galloped up to her family’s coach and shouted, “You will be stopped!”; of the imbecile Léonard, her mother’s hairdresser, who had taken a wrong turn upon leaving Varennes, and never delivered a crucial message to General Bouillé; of the grocer’s rooms, hung with sausages and hams, in which her parents were arrested.

  Madame’s attitude changed dramatically, alas, when I began my financial quest. A few days after we had had that last conversation about Varennes I wrote her a letter stating my demand for the funds owed by her parents to Madame Korff and me; and as weeks passed I received no reply. I wrote her numerous times, and she never responded. On one occasion she sent me an invitation to come to her apartments, but upon arriving there I found some twenty other guests, and was unable to say a word to her in private.

  After a few months of similar evasions on Marie-Thérèse’s part, my attitude toward her radically changed. “I’m disgusted with her,” I wrote Taube. “I can now understand why people become democrats. I’ve been unable to see Madame Royale in private and I doubt if I ever shall. It’s yet another disillusionment, and another regret, but I’m used to those by now. I’m not really surprised because everything that has to do with those unfortunate sovereigns [the French royal family] is forgotten here. Predictably, my devotion to them is also forgotten.”

  Marie-Thérèse never invited me again to a private reception; and after a while—this hurt me terribly—she even ceased to recognize me among the courtiers who trailed behind her during her public appearances. It had been clear to me from the start that she had none of her mother’s charm; it was also becoming evident that she did not have a trace of her father’s kindness. On one occasion I managed to have a private conversation with her principal lady-in-waiting, Mademoiselle Chanclos, who told me that Madame Royale was heartless and stingy toward every member of her retinue, and that she hated her Hapsburg relatives as well as the French émigrés. And this led me to recall that her mother had often complained to me about her daughter’s coldness and insensitivity. The lack of generosity or justice in Madame’s behavior outraged me, and the failure of my attempts to visit her wounded me deeply. Might it be that Gustavus, Louis XVI, and Marie Antoinette were among the last royals to have the civility and empathy that had always justified, in my view, the divine right of kings?

  CHAPTER 13

  Axel:

  DIPLOMACY

  IN 1796, a few months after I’d left Vienna and returned to Stockholm, the young king of Sweden, Gustav IV Adolf, reached his majority and began to rule. Tall and thin, with a long neck surmounting narrow shoulders, his face marred by bad teeth and a pendulous lip, he hardly had the charm or winsomeness of his father, Gustavus III. However, there was dignity in his bearing, and without having Gustavus’s oratorical brilliance he was a good enough speaker. Obsessed by the perils wrought by the French Revolution, which in Sweden was called “le mal Francais,” he was highly conservative. He was as stubborn as he was vain; lest he adopt the contrary measure he had to be carefully approached with any request; and his distrust of others led to a brusqueness of manner that was not suitable to a monarch. He was also very stingy: all balls, operas, fetes, celebrations, were banned at his court; a decade into his rule he closed all state theaters, and even ordered the Stockholm Opera House to be razed to the ground, though he was eventually persuaded to keep it intact. His unease and diffidence toward the nobility may well have been caused by the mystery and intrigues that still surrounded his birth (his blood father, Munck, had recently returned to Sweden after a long exile in Italy, threatened to tell all if he was not allowed to recuperate all his possessions, and had to be paid high sums to remain silent). Notwithstanding his distaste for the aristocracy Gustav IV Adolf was well aware of the affection his father had had for the Fersen family, and was particularly well disposed toward me.

  When the young king assumed the throne the issue of his marriage inevitably arose. The pro-Russian faction at the Swedish court had wished him to marry a niece of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, a Princess Mecklenburg, and Gustav Adolf went to Saint Petersburg himself to sign the marriage contract. But at the last minute he had religious scruples concerning the fact that he was Protestant and the Princess was Russian Orthodox, and refused to go through with the wedding. Empress Catherine, who was present when he broke off the engagement, had a stroke shortly thereafter, and died in November of that year.

  Some months later a new bride was found for Gustav Adolf—Fredrika Dorothea, a
beautiful and accomplished Danish princess from Baden. Upon arriving at the Swedish court the young queen was horrified by its relatively relaxed sexual mores, and wrote her mother that the Duchess of Södermanland had “all possible tastes,” hinting that she was having an affair with my sister, Sophie Piper. Because of the youngsters’ total sexual ignorance—the king was nineteen, the queen fifteen—the consummation of their marriage proved to be as problematic as that of Gustavus’s. The inexperienced young king had begun his bridal night reading the first act of Racine’s Esther to his bride, and had then flung himself upon her with such ferocity that she fled, terrified, to her ladies-in-waiting, and refused his advances for weeks. A solution was finally found: the young king asked his bride whether she knew anything about the act of lovemaking; she replied that her mother had only given her one bit of advice—to spread her legs apart. To the relief of the court, whose members had grown much concerned, as I had, about the teenagers’ quandary, this conversation helped the young couple solve their dilemma: until then they’d only tried it with their legs closed. They went on to have a most loving marriage marked by extremely active sexual relations, so much so that the queen had six children in eight years, and I thought it fitting to write a note to the king urging him to spare the queen’s health.

  At the time of Gustav IV Adolf’s marriage I was living quietly in Frankfurt, still smarting from the painful fiasco I’d experienced with Marie-Thérèse in Vienna, and dallying, as usual, in a ménage à trois with Eleanore Sullivan and Quentin Craufurd. But I was suddenly thrust into public life again when Gustav Adolf assigned me to be his minister plenipotentiary at the Congress of Rastatt, which had been called to negotiate a peace treaty between the German principalities and France in the wake of the armistice recently enacted between France and Austria. (Rastatt had been the site of an earlier peace conference between France and Germany, in 1714.) The mission I was assigned perplexed me for several reasons: The king of Sweden had not been officially invited to send a representative to this council. He was imposing himself under the pretext that Sweden, some decades earlier, had initiated the Treaty of Westphalia, through which it had acquired the German principality of Pomerania. Moreover, I had never yet performed this kind of diplomatic function, and had to ask for an aide who was specialized in issues of German foreign policy.

  I was only too aware that the rest of Europe was puzzled by Gustav Adolf’s choice of me as a delegate to Rastatt. I was seen throughout Europe as a living symbol of antirevolutionary—thus anti-French—principles. This did not affect my daily life, since I lived in Frankfurt. But there were ugly rumors of nepotism, suggestions that my post had been suggested to Gustav Adolf by his close confidant Evert Taube, my sister’s lover. Talleyrand, France’s foreign minister, complained to the Swedish consul that he was shocked to see, negotiating with ministers of the French Republic, “a man well known for his hatred of us, and for his efforts to serve the enemies of liberty.” He went on to suggest that Staël be sent in my place (it should be noted that Talleyrand owed his post as foreign minister to the machinations of Madame de Staël). But Gustav Adolf stubbornly held his own and persisted in his decision to send me to Rastatt.

  When the Congress of Rastatt opened in December 1797, my own stupid vanity brought me yet more problems. Having learned that Russia was sending an ambassador to Rastatt, I persuaded my king to give me the same title. But shortly afterward Russia recalled its representative, and I found myself to be the only delegate with that designation, which some other delegates derided as pretentious. Seldom has my vainglory so tainted my reputation.

  A WORD IS needed here about the political situation in France. The elections of April 1797, which resulted in a royalist majority, had raised my hopes. But shortly after the elections, a young republican military star, General Napoleon Bonaparte, defeated a group of royalists who had staged a rebellion against the National Convention in an attempt to restore the monarchy. Notwithstanding our totally opposite ideologies, Bonaparte had struck me as a brilliant, ambitious young man, one with whom it would be interesting to deal diplomatically. Eager to dissipate the tensions that had recently arisen between France and Sweden because of my king’s loathing of republicanism, I called upon Bonaparte the day after I arrived in Rastatt. I knew that he wished Sweden to remain neutral, and dreaded any possibility of our alliance with Great Britain. Wishing to impress him with the splendor of Swedish style (another stupid mistake on my part) I arrived in a coach drawn by six white horses, in the company of domestics in full livery. Bonaparte’s aides-de-camp accompanied me to the salon, where the general was pacing up and down the room, as was his custom, in front of the fireplace. At his side was Berthier, one of my acquaintances from the American Revolutionary War. Bonaparte was a small, slender, dark-haired man who coughed a lot and seemed to suffer from a chest condition. He bade me sit down and our conversation began. I was immediately annoyed by the fact that he addressed me as “Monsieur” or, only occasionally, “Your Excellency” instead of the properly ceremonial “Monsieur L’Ambassadeur.”

  “Have you come to Rastatt to arrange for King Gustav Adolf’s marriage to Princess Fredrika of Baden?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, “I’ve nothing to do with this detail. Baron Taube is taking care of that. My king sent me here as ambassador to the congress.”

  Bonaparte seemed not to have heard, and asked: “Has Monsieur spent some time here?”

  “No, I’ve been staying in Frankfurt.”

  “And have you a chargé d’affaires in Paris?” he queried.

  “No, General, since the little misunderstandings that occurred between our nations we’ve had no one in Paris, but everything seems to be settling down now and we’ll surely send someone soon.”

  This response seemed to annoy the general, who launched into a polemic against me.

  “Sweden seems to take pleasure in choosing to be represented by individuals disagreeable to all French citizens…. The king of Sweden would not be indifferent to a minister who had tried to incite the people of Stockholm to revolt…. In the same manner, monsieur, the French Republic will not suffer seeing men who are only too well known to have had close links to the ancient court of France, men perhaps listed as émigrés, come to defy the ministers of the world’s most evolved people. The French nation, before consulting its political interests, will above all consult the sense of its dignity.”

  I sat there, fuming, increasingly furious at this parvenu. How did this arrogant little upstart who thought it distinguished to be insolent dare lecture me this way? It took all of my patience and self-control to not respond to him as crudely as he deserved. He was clearly treating me as an émigré. (I later heard him to have remarked that Sweden should be ashamed to have sent to the congress “a courtier from the old order who had been Marie Antoinette’s lover,” and that I had struck him as a man “steeped in all the fatuities” of the Bourbon court.) I rose and took my leave, commenting that I would discuss our meeting with my king, who, I said, surely wished to conserve the most harmonious relations between our two countries. “After my visit with this so-called great man so small in his manners,” I wrote in my journal, “I’ll heartily say ‘Amen’ to whatever may befall him.”

  But I soon realized that the general’s rebuff had ruined my standing at Rastatt. All of Bonaparte’s public comments about persons disagreeable to the French regime seemed to have referred directly to me. Some delegates pretended not to recognize me at the theater. Metternich’s door was closed to me. I was as if quarantined. Bonaparte stayed only five days at Rastatt, and after leaving the congress, sent as his representatives two Jacobin deputies named Bonnier and Treilhard. The delegates to the congress awaited them with curiosity, and were startled to see the two men unwashed, uncombed, and in every way uncouth, or as Metternich put it, “like bears come out of a forest.” “One would die of fright if one met the best dressed of these riffraff in a wood,” Metternich commented. Going to visit Treilhard to present my king’s
good wishes, I was met by a very drunk lackey; he led me to see his master, who was still in his bathrobe. I tried to clear my record, stating that I could not possibly have been an émigré or an enemy of the French Republic, since it had been established in September 1792, many months after my departure from France. But my appeal to Treilhard went nowhere: Talleyrand confirmed to all that the Directory had fully approved the general’s rebuff of me.

  Even during my absence, news of the incident could not help but spread to Sweden—all the more so because Gustav IV Adolf had reestablished the freedom of the press abolished by his father. The king was again criticized for having chosen me to attend Rastatt. After having been lionized much of my life, I suddenly found myself ostracized, and harassed by rumors aimed to discredit me. The French chargé d’affaires in Stockholm, for instance, who kept pressing for Staël’s appointment as Sweden’s ambassador to Paris, spread the word that my sister Sophie was scheming to have me appointed as chancellor of Sweden. The king finally consented to send Staël to Paris, on the condition that I could remain in Rastatt. But Talleyrand wanted me out. So the king asked me to retire to Karlsruhe, a town a few miles from Rastatt, under the pretext that I was to arrange the details of my king’s marriage to the Princess of Baden. I was furious to lose face before Talleyrand and the Jacobins, who had always spread outrageous calumnies concerning me. And nothing was more odious to me than to be accused of plotting with the émigrés, who, in my opinion, had greatly contributed to the fall of the French throne.