In the mid-1800s I left for another grand tour in the company of Sophie, her daughter, and her son-in-law. Among the domestics who accompanied us was a notoriously fine French chef, Pierre-Felix Berger, who would often write his family about the pride he took in serving a gastronome as reputed as I was. “I can not tell you how affectionate [my master] is with me,” Berger would write about me in a letter to his brother. “He is Sweden’s greatest lord, well known in France…. He loves me as if I were his own child…. [At his home] I am well lodged, well heated, served by my own domestic, who takes care of my clothes, cleans my room, makes my fire…. I cook at least fifteen courses at lunch and at dinner, other times as many as thirty or forty courses.” Both Berger and I, understandably, suffered exceedingly from gout, and exchanged remedies for it in a spirit of great intimacy. I was as popular with my servants as I was unpopular with Stockholm’s bourgeoisie, among whom I had an increasing number of enemies.
LET ME NOTE that amid all these travels, diversions, responsibilities, I never failed to commemorate the death of my cherished Marie Antoinette. “Losing Her remains the greatest grief of my life,” I wrote in my journal a decade or so after the queen’s death, “and my sorrows will only abate when I die. Never have I felt so powerfully the emotions I had for Her, and never have I loved Her as much.”
While traveling with Sophie and her party I continued to pursue this beloved shadow, and took turns visiting all those of Marie Antoinette’s sisters who still survived: Archduchess Elizabeth, the lofty abbess of a convent in Innsbruck; Maria Amalia, Duchess of Parma, who reiterated the gratitude she felt for my devotion to her sister; and Maria Carolina, future queen of Naples, the sibling Toinette had been closest to, and who received me with particular affability. They painfully evoked my great love through their proud, majestic carriage. I found that the towns and principalities over which they reigned, and others I visited, had been devastated by le mal Français. Traveling to Florence, which I’d seen flourishing years earlier under the reign of Marie Antoinette’s brother Grand Duke Leopold, I found it pillaged by Bonaparte’s troops. I proceeded to Rome, where I had an audience with Pope Pius VII, whom I found to be living in a state of great poverty, as were most of Vatican City’s denizens, who foraged for bones and shreds of vegetables thrown out of windows by the privileged few. I was saddened and angered by the way in which Europe had been impoverished by the French Revolution, and continued to be deprived by the devil Bonaparte.
While in Italy love interests continued to take up my time. Marianne La Grua, now delivered of her child, appeared in Rome, and swore to me that I was the only man she held to her heart. I did not believe a word of this, but played along with her delusions until I met Princess Yekaterina Nikolaevna Menshikova, a Russian belle whose qualities matched those of any French woman I’d known. “Ketty,” as I called you, what treasures I encountered in your arms! You were small and as delicately modeled as a Meissen figurine, but oh the softness, the creamy softness of your skin! Your golden hair, when you untied it from its formal braided chignon, cascaded to below your hips. I enjoyed wrapping those satiny strands about my private parts, thus providing an additional layer of silkiness for my exquisite entrances and exits. You put your mouth to my nipples, suckling them like a babe, and that too was a novel sensation I found paradisiacal.
I had seldom witnessed so many qualities—beauty, amiability, sensuality—united in one woman. But our liaison lasted only six months, for Ketty had to return to her husband in Russia. “I’ve always had to be separated from those I love,” I wrote Sophie; “It seems to be part of my destiny to never be happy.”
Returning to Stockholm after my last grand tour with Sophie, I found some consolation in a romance—a platonic one, for once!—with a neighbor of mine at Lövstad, Emelie Aurora De Geer. A few years earlier, when her mother had died, Emelie had renounced her position as lady-in-waiting at court to dedicate herself to her family estate, which adjoined mine. Emelie was a delicate, willowy brunette with huge, pale blue eyes and a waist so tiny that my hands could almost span it. I’d admired her beauty, intelligence, and dedication, and did all I could to help her with her domestic affairs. We were often separated by my frequent trips to Stockholm, and our relationship was close enough that we wrote each other almost daily when I was in the capital. Though I continued my lifelong wariness of marriage, the beautiful, virginal Emelie would consider nothing less. We became even more closely bonded when, upon her father’s death in 1809, I was named one of her guardians. So there we were, vaguely affianced. For a variety of reasons, I kept postponing a definitive offer of marriage—emotional exhaustion, a fear of abandoning the sweet accumulated habits of a lifetime….
Upon returning to Stockholm I found the king to have grown even more irrational. He kept talking about being visited by the White Lady, a spectral character of Swedish mythology whose appearances bode bad luck to those who saw her. Upon his bouts of foul humor, which could last for days, he lashed out at everyone and sought every pretext to be aroused. He became so enraged, for instance, upon hearing a page coughing in the vestibule that he wanted to send him to jail. Nevertheless, I had to accept a new and important charge from him: that of overlooking the education of his son, a frail child, Gustav, now three years old.
Yet despite this important duty I remained “L’Étranger” to most denizens of Stockholm. Notable citizens were barely civil to me at social gatherings, and even cut me off at dinner parties. I started pondering the fact that I had always tried to impress others, but had never in my life tried to be liked. I had never cared. This was part of the Fersen pride. My father had been the same way, haughty and aloof, and had led a magnificent life…. At times I thought I should try a new tack, be obliging, engaging, prepossessing. Those who had known me long and well, after all, had just that view of me. I took solace in a letter I was shown, written years earlier by the Duchess of Södermanland, who had this to say about me: “He is the most honest and loyal of friends. He’s a true royalist and is ready to do anything for his king; he tried to rescue his benefactor Louis XVI and suffered much as a result. He is too proud to be intriguing, he expresses his opinions frankly and fearlessly, he suffers in silence and never utters a critical word. He is full of tact…. He is not any haughtier than anyone needs to be to inspire respect.”
Amen and much gratitude, I say to a friend who truly understood me.
THE POLITICAL CLIMATE in Sweden was growing increasingly troubled. Gustav IV Adolf was becoming a more and more implacable, tenacious enemy of the French Republic, and one event particularly increased his ire: in early 1804, in revenge against an attempted royalist coup planned by the Comte d’ Artois, Bonaparte masterminded the murder of the Duc d’Enghien. D’Enghien, son of the Duc de Bourbon-Condé, a cousin of Louis XVI, had emigrated with his father at the outbreak of the Revolution and settled in Baden. Upon hearing a false rumor that d’Enghien was preparing a coup to depose him, Bonaparte, then first consul, had him kidnapped by his police and brought to the castle of Vincennes, where a court-martial was hurriedly gathered to try him. D’Enghien was convicted of bearing arms against France, and was shot a few days after his arrest, thus putting an end to the house of Condé. This transgression of Bonaparte’s caused his foreign minister, Talleyrand, who had opposed the prosecution, to make a typically sardonic comment: “It’s worse than a crime, sire, it’s a mistake.”
The indignation provoked by d’Enghien’s murder spread throughout Europe, and few monarchs were more aroused than Gustav Adolf, who swore vengeance against all things French. He ordered all French residents of Stockholm—including diplomats—expelled from the capital; all French books and magazines were burned; no event occurring in France was allowed to be mentioned in the Swedish press. To make things worse, Gustav Adolf had fallen under the influence of a self-styled prophet who, basing himself on the Apocalypse, had persuaded him that Bonaparte was the Antichrist and that he, Gustav Adolf, was the prophet destined to abolish him. When, later
that year, Bonaparte proclaimed himself emperor, the king of Sweden persisted in referring to him as “Monsieur Bonaparte,” refusing to recognize him as monarch of France.
Although wary of such excesses, I kept advising my king to pursue resolutely antirepublican principles. And my own attachment to royalist causes would remain undiminished. In 1805 I began to see more of Louis XVI’s two brothers, who had sought exile in various European countries. The Comte d’Artois received me with the greatest affection. The Comte de Provence, or Louis XVIII, as he called himself, was piqued at me because I’d discouraged him from settling in Sweden, which would have gone against our principles of neutrality; but he continued to flatter me, as he did most people whose help he might eventually need. I dined almost every night at the table of the “King of France,” as Provence also referred to himself, and returned his invitations at my home with a magnificence that was well noticed. I found erudition and wit in Provence, but too weak a character for the kingly role he aspired to, and a tendency to drink too much. I esteemed Artois as somewhat superior to his brother, and found him very matured by his unhappy exile. However great the joy I experienced in visiting these princes, it was troubled by the memory of the tragedies visited upon their brother and sister-in-law.
IN THOSE YEARS Gustav Adolf’s personal conduct continued to grow increasingly bizarre. He threw away his sword and his uniform, donned a bourgeois frock coat and gray trousers, and grew a mustache, which none of our kings had ever done before. He alienated the emperor of Prussia when he returned the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle on the grounds that the emperor had accepted the Legion of Honor from the French government. (“It is impossible to calculate the consequences of this insult,” I wrote a friend, “which is in fact a harsh criticism of other nations.”) Aware of the fact that he was greatly disliked in his capital, Gustav spoke of retiring to Moravia, or to the southern province of Scania. He began by seeking refuge in the royal castle of Gripsholm, where he kept total silence, not even speaking to his wife, and communicating with his aides solely by writing. He exclusively bonded with Gripsholm’s inept, boorish caretaker, another self-styled psychic who spoke solely of ghosts and specters. Upon spending a few days at Gripsholm, I was dismayed by the funereal atmosphere of the court. Dinner was announced as a battle might have been, by a guard with a saber at his side. The dishes were few and poor, the women dressed in severe gray dresses; I recognized only one or two courtiers of Gustavus’s time. How I missed my dear friend, that king! Even though he’d made some political mistakes, how nostalgically I recalled his intellect, his grace and polish, his faultless aesthetic, his charm and warmth and wit!
Like Gustavus III and unlike his son, Gustav Adolf, I insisted on great elegance at my homes. I owned some fourteen carriages and sleighs and, when moving from one summer residence to another—from Lövstad to Ljung, for instance—used no fewer than twenty-six horses. A staff of twenty-four domestics ran the house Sophie and I inhabited in Stockholm, and I took pleasure in being reputed to have Sweden’s most magnificent table. I enjoyed entertaining groups of our most ancient nobility, continuing to shun the new burgher class that had gained much power in the last decade. As my chef Felix Berger has testified, notwithstanding my severe case of gout, fifteen courses were an absolute minimum at my dinners. I was perfectly capable of having a hundred persons for a lunch of oysters, and was admired by all for the excellence of my chef’s inventions. This did not at all please my king. Stingy by nature and abstemious for political reasons, he was beginning to dislike me for entertaining so much more luxuriously than he, and for advising him to remain calm and prudent toward the beast Napoleon.
So here I was at the age of fifty, grand marshal of the kingdom: heading the regents’ council whenever the king went abroad; attending the Riksdag attired in the ermine cape worn only by the twelve men anointed with Sweden’s highest distinction, the Order of the Seraphim; as eagerly sought out by women as ever, equally pursued by noble ladies looking for wealthy son-in-laws; mildly flirting with the lovely Emelie De Geer; so heavily covered with medals that I had trouble, at times, rising from my chair; inhabiting my magnificent family palaces; listening to my beloved music; living with my handsome loving sister, whose attachment to me was as deep as mine to her. And yet notwithstanding all these honors, accolades, loyalties, I felt empty, utterly empty…with no purpose in mind beyond continuing to live an existence that I felt would grow increasingly vacuous, seeing that I was vain, self-centered, and morose.
On March 31, 1808, I discontinued keeping my dagbok, the journal I had begun to write at the tender age of fourteen. Could it be that I had lost much of my taste for life? I determined to devote myself all the more energetically to the memoir of my past times, my often glorious past loves, which I’m presenting in these pages.
CHAPTER 14
Axel:
A KING’S AND
A PRINCE’S FALL
I HAD INDEED lost much taste for life. My increasing melancholia, an innate trait, might well have incited me to cease writing my diary; and my depressions were aggravated by the terrible condition of my country. Gustav IV Adolf—moody, impetuous, inconsistent, constantly countermanding his own orders—had dealt great blows to Sweden through his idiotic foreign policy. When France and Russia made peace through the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807, Gustav Adolf stubbornly continued his war against both France and Russia. Denmark, an ally of France’s, declared war on Sweden in 1808. Our king had earlier hoped for assistance from England, but it was then at war with Spain and could offer little help. When England finally did send a regiment of ten thousand men to Göteborg (I was there, attending a shareholders’ meeting of the East India Company), Gustav quarreled with the British general and refused his aid. Sweden thus became totally isolated, with enemies in the east, south, and west. By the end of 1808, Finland, which had been occupied by Sweden for decades, would be lost to Russia, which would also conquer the Swedish fortress of Sveaborg, Sweden’s largest military base. The Russian army advanced as far as Umeå, in northern Sweden. A bitter peace would be signed in 1809 at Frederikshavn, through which Sweden lost a third of her territory and a quarter of her population, forfeiting to Russia not only Finland, but also the Åland Islands northeast of Stockholm.
The winter of 1808 was in every way catastrophic. It was the coldest in many decades, and wood was barely available, since it had habitually come from Finland. The extreme cold, and the pulmonary epidemics it caused, killed several dozen persons a day; thousands of workmen stayed home to avoid the freezing temperatures. Moreover, the king refused to call a meeting of the Riksdag, which his uncle, the Duke of Södermanland, and others of his closest aides had repeatedly asked him to do. Instead, to the dismay of the nation, he ordered a war tax five times larger than the previous taxation and decreed a large levying of troops. And although he had no military talent or experience whatever, he announced that he would henceforth be commander in chief of Sweden’s army. He did not have a chance to exercise these duties: in previous months a rebellion had been brewing among army officers; and in March 1809 Lieutenant Colonel Georg Adlersparre, the aggressively ambitious commander-in-chief of our troops on the Norwegian border, signed a private armistice with the Danish commander of southern Norway, and marched on Stockholm with the intent of forcing the king to sign an official peace treaty and call a Riksdag.
When the king heard of Adlersparre’s plans he hurriedly left the castle of Haga, some three miles from Stockholm, where I’d been visiting that day to celebrate the queen’s birthday. Leaving his wife and children in my care, he rushed to the capital with the intent of traveling on south to Scania, Sweden’s southernmost province, in hopes of rallying troops there. Arriving in Stockholm, he found menacing crowds in the courtyard that faced his palace. Two of the nation’s leading military men, Marshal Klingspor and General Adlercreutz, had assembled at the palace with other officials to convince the king to remain in Stockholm, and to convoke the Riksdag. Their pressure so exasperated G
ustav Adolf that upon one particular argument with his dissenters he raised his sword threateningly against the aging Count von Stedingk, one of his father’s closest friends, and had to be restrained.
The morning after the king’s return, Marshal Klingspor, delegated by his peers, went to see Gustav Adolf and again exhorted him to remain in the capital. The king, furious, shouted insults at him, and upon hearing the imprecations General Adlercreutz and yet another esteemed military leader, the aggressively ambitious Colonel Silfversparre, rushed into the room. When he saw them enter, the king accused them of treason and brandished his sword again. Silfversparre managed to restrain him, but the king’s personal guards arrived; while Adlercreutz conferred with them the king managed to escape, and was only caught after an antic chase through the palace corridors.
Upon more discussions with the monarch, who was now detained in his apartments and still adamantly refused to put an end to his war with Denmark, Adlercreutz and other high-ranking notables realized that their only recourse was to suggest that he resign. Silfversparre, who had been appointed to be the king’s guardian, took the situation in hand, and asked him to abdicate. Gustav Adolf accepted with surprising ease, and soon went into exile abroad with his wife and children. But who could take his place? The notables settled on Karl, Duke of Södermanland, Gustav Adolf’s uncle, and elected him provisional head of state. Even though this indolent, aging prince enjoyed living in his various country estates, lacked any political insight, and had no ambition whatever to rule, a few months later he was crowned as King Karl XIII. I played my habitual, preeminent part at the coronation ritual, and upon this occasion the king promoted me to the rank of general.
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