In April 1780 the Swedish ambassador Gustaf Creutz wrote to King Gustavus III of Sweden, “I must confide to Your Majesty that young Count Fersen has been so well treated by the Queen that several people have taken umbrage at it….Young Count Fersen conducted himself admirably in these circumstances by his modesty and reserve, and above all by the decision he took to go to America….The Queen couldn’t take her eyes off him during the final days; when she looked at him they were filled with tears….”20
On October 17, 1781, Fersen was present when the British commanding general, Lord Charles Cornwallis, surrendered to General George Washington at Yorktown. As the only English-speaking aide to the French commanding general, Comte Jean de Rochambeau, he served as interpreter for Washington and his French allies. But Fersen found his duties uninspiring and believed that France was wrong to help the Americans rebel against their lawful king. To his horror, he realized that Americans were not even gentlemen. “Money is their god,” he wrote, scandalized. “Virtue, honor, these are nothing to them beside the precious metal.”21 Worse, after the glories of Versailles, he found himself stewing in the Virginia capital of Williamsburg for several months, “a wretched hole.”22 Nonetheless, for his invaluable services General Washington rewarded Fersen with America’s most distinguished decoration, the Cross of the Cincinnatus.
Heaving a tremendous sigh of relief that the American expedition was behind him, Fersen arrived in Paris June 23, 1783, to a hero’s welcome from the jubilant queen. It is likely that the two became lovers that summer. During his absence, the queen had finally done her duty by giving the kingdom a prince in October 1781; she could now indulge more freely in a love affair, as spurious children would not likely inherit the throne. Tired of her repulsive husband, tired of waiting for the man she truly desired, she must have brought out her substantial arsenal of charms to win over the hesitant lover. Fersen, modest and reserved, as chivalrous as a medieval knight, had resigned himself to worshiping an unattainable highborn lady, une dame belle et cruelle, a gorgeous stone statue. But like Pygmalion, he found his cold statue turn to warm flesh in his arms and step down from her pedestal.
Outwardly, nothing changed. The queen showed warmth and interest in the Swede, that was all. Fersen remained cool and correct toward her in public. In his diary entry of July 15 he noted for the first time that he had gone to Versailles for an audience with the queen and stayed chez Elle. Whenever Fersen wrote in his diary the word chez followed by the name of a woman, it meant he had spent the night with her. And Elle became a secret code name for the woman whose name must not be spoken. They probably met in the private rooms above the queen’s bedchamber, reached by a secret staircase, and usually reserved for a lady-in-waiting when the queen was ill or pregnant. Most likely he slept in the méridienne, a cozy octagonal room which contained a large sofa set in a curtained alcove. During that long hot summer when most courtiers were away at their country homes, Marie Antoinette had plenty of opportunity to entertain her secret lover.
But even a man as discreet as Axel Fersen needed to unburden his heart to someone, and he chose his discreet sister, Sophie, in Sweden, who began to correspond secretly with the queen herself. In these letters to Sophie, Fersen refers to the queen either as “Her” or “Josephine.” Marie Antoinette’s third name was Josèphe.
On July 31 he wrote Sophie, “I can hardly believe I’m so happy. I’ve more than one reason for that, which I’ll tell you when we meet.”23 He added, “I never want to tie the conjugal knot….I cannot belong to the only person I want to belong to, the only one who truly loves me, and so I don’t want to belong to anyone.”24
Surely with his burning soul beneath the crust of ice, Fersen made a more passionate lover than clumsy Louis, who never excelled at the art of lovemaking. Marie Antoinette, for her part, had been denied sex for the first seven years of marriage and then forced to copulate with a man who repulsed her. Now, for the first time, she found sex and love. We can picture them in her tiny secluded love nest, the pent-up passion exploding in rapture, intertwined arms and legs, warm lips and flesh, a tangle of hair, the aroma of perfume and sweat and sex.
But after the perfect summer, family responsibilities called Fersen home. He eagerly returned to Versailles in June 1784 in the entourage of the king of Sweden. Hearing King Gustavus had arrived, poor Louis dressed so quickly that he put on stockings of different colors and only one shoe buckle, then went flapping out, puffing and breathless, to meet his fellow sovereign. King Gustavus, known for his impeccable dress and reserved demeanor, must have eyed the French king with veiled laughter.
But Fersen had eyes for only one person, the queen. Required to accompany Gustavus every waking moment, Fersen pled illness to be able to meet Marie Antoinette secretly. Wrenching himself away after a visit of only a few days, Fersen did not know that he had most likely left something of himself to comfort her. Nine months after his visit Marie Antoinette had a son, the future Louis XVII.
Fersen bounced back to Versailles whenever he could. By May 1787 he was with the queen once again, making notes in his diary about lodging “upstairs” with his royal mistress. Despite Fersen’s vaunted discretion, the entire court was well aware of the affair.
The comte de Saint-Priest wrote, “Fersen proceeded on horseback to the park, beside the Trianon, two or three times a week; the Queen, alone, did the same, and these rendezvous caused a public scandal, despite the modesty and reserve of the favorite, who never revealed anything by his outward appearance.”25
On September 27, 1788, the king was seen receiving a packet of mysterious letters while he was out hunting. One courtier reported, “He went into a copse to read them and soon he was seen sitting on the ground, his face held in his hands and his hands resting on his knees.”26 An equerry rushed forward and saw the king crying. Louis ordered him to go away and sat sobbing miserably as tears rolled down his cheeks. He announced that he was ill and needed help in mounting his horse. But by the time he arrived at the palace, he had composed himself. No one knew what documents had upset him so terribly, but it is possible they were intercepted love letters of Marie Antoinette and Axel Fersen. Worse, at this time the dauphin was dying slowly of tuberculosis, and Louis would have been deeply upset to receive evidence that the duc de Normandie, the next king of France, was the son of the Swedish count.
June 3, 1789, the dauphin died. Fersen hastened to Versailles to comfort the queen. Swathed in black, she was still grieving on July 14 when a howling mob stormed the Bastille prison twenty miles away in Paris. It was a hot, uneasy summer, with revolutionary politics heating up to a rolling boil. Louis wanted to agree to a new constitution ensuring greater rights to his people; his wife insisted on the divine right of kings and vowed never to cede an inch.
On October 5 a mob surrounded Versailles with cannons, and Fersen personally stood guard outside the queen’s rooms. At six the next morning, the shrieking rabble raced into the palace hard on the scent of blood, the queen’s blood, the hated Austrian woman who had danced in diamonds while they starved. Fersen escorted the queen to the comparative safety of the king’s apartments, while the mob, furious at not finding her, tore her guards to pieces. Brandishing the severed heads on pikes, the angry crowd forced the royal family to ride to Paris. Even then Fersen would not leave the queen but trailed behind her.
In Paris the royal family lived under house arrest at the Tuileries Palace. Fersen closed his Versailles apartment and rented one close to the queen. It was no longer easy to see each other. On December 29, 1789, Marie Antoinette wrote to her friend Madame de Polignac, “I have seen him; for, after three months of grief and separation, although we were in the same place, the person and I managed to see each other safely once. You know us both, so you can imagine our happiness.”27 On December 27 he wrote to his sister, Sophie, “At last on the 24th I spent the whole day with Her. It was the first; imagine my joy—only you can feel it.”28
Marie Antoinette and Fersen made great efforts to conceal
their relationship from Louis to avoid hurting him. But Louis was not as stupid as he seemed. Though jealous of the charming Swede and painfully aware of the romance, he decided to pretend their relationship was platonic. Perhaps it was his way of saying he was sorry for being a terrible king and a terrible husband, that he loved her enough to ensure her happiness at the expense of his own.
In 1790 Fersen began making careful plans for the royal family’s escape. He borrowed money from friends, much of it to secure men and horses to stand guard just over the French border and train their guns on any pursuers.
In December the queen bought for her escape a huge lumbering coach that held seven people; painted green and yellow, it boasted white velvet upholstery and green taffeta blinds. A courtier sniffed, “It was an abridged edition of the Chateau of Versailles, only the chapel and the musicians’ balcony were lacking.”29
Luxury aside, it would have attracted attention by its sheer size. Fersen had proposed two small swift traveling carriages, but the queen refused to travel in a vehicle so unworthy of her exalted station. He wanted to hire real drivers, men who knew the routes and the lingo and, unaware of the identities of their passengers, would not attract attention. But the queen haughtily demanded that she be served only by gentlemen.
Worse, she insisted on bringing along a wardrobe fit for a queen. Her lady-in-waiting Jeanne-Louise Campan recalled, “It was with distress that I saw her occupied with details that seemed to me useless and even dangerous, and I pointed out to her that the Queen of France could find chemises and dresses wherever she went. My remarks were fruitless; she wanted to have a complete outfit not only for herself, but for her children. I went out alone and in disguise to buy and have made this trousseau.”30
Worst of all, the queen refused to leave until her hairdresser from happier days, Monsieur Leonard, dressed her hair for the voyage. The little man was kidnapped for this purpose, taken to the palace in his bedroom slippers, forced to dress her hair, and returned to his home. For this, he was later guillotined.
Fersen intended to accompany the royal family, but Louis refused to have his wife’s lover along on the ride. On May 29 Fersen wrote sadly to a friend aware of the plot, “I shall not accompany the King, he didn’t want me to.”31 The Swede would leave France via another route.
On the evening of June 20, Fersen, dressed as a coachman, waited next to his coach outside the palace, chatting to other coachmen and offering them snuff. One by one the members of the royal family arrived. Early in the morning of June 21 he drove them to a staging post outside of Paris, where he took his leave and set off alone. Traveling lightly and swiftly, Fersen soon arrived in safety.
But the heavy coach of the royal family broke down, and repairs went so slowly that the troops waiting for them at the border assumed the escape had been abandoned and left. In need of fresh horses, lost on the country roads, the coach finally reached a staging post where a cavalryman named Drouet looked into the carriage and recognized the king. In hot pursuit, revolutionary soldiers captured the royal family at the town of Varennes and took them back to Paris as prisoners. When Madame Campan saw the queen two days later, “She took off her nightcap and told me to see the effect grief had had on her hair. In a single night it had turned as white as that of a woman of seventy.”32
On June 23 Fersen wrote in his diary, “Learned that the King was captured. Details not very clear; the troops didn’t do their duty, the King lacked firmness and will.” That night he wrote his father, “Everything is lost, my dear father, and I am desperate. The King was arrested at Varennes, 16 leagues from the frontier. Think of my misery and pity me….”33
Because of their flight, members of the royal family had lost all their privileges. Guards remained in their rooms day and night, even when the queen was on the chamber pot. On July 4 she sent a coded letter to Fersen. “I can tell you I love you and I have only time for that,” she scribbled. “Adieu, most loved and loving of men. I embrace you with all my heart.”34
In April 1792 the guillotine was set up in the Place de Grève, its first victim a thief. But soon afterward enemies of the state and aristocrats were forced to kneel before this altar to a bloodthirsty new god. The courtiers of Versailles remained haughty to the end. One day when entering the cart that would take them to the guillotine, an aristocrat bowed and allowed a lady to pass before him. The jailer yelled at him for wasting time. “You can kill us when you like,” replied the nobleman disdainfully, “but you cannot make us forget our manners.”35
Puffed up with pride in her political genius despite the prison cell where her genius had landed her, Marie Antoinette was up to her elbows in intrigue, sending secret letters to foreign courts asking for forces to invade France. Contemptuous of her captors, she wrote letters in code and in invisible ink, then handed them to helpful friends or servants who smuggled them out of prison. But Louis refused to ask foreign governments to cross French frontiers and shed French blood. “God’s will be done,” he often sighed. “I would rather pass for weak than for wicked.”36
It was Marie Antoinette’s misfortune that her powerful mother, Empress Maria Theresa, had died in 1780 and her favorite brother, Emperor Joseph II, in 1790. If her mother or Joseph had still been alive, they would have used horrifying threats, backed by the substantial firepower of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to rescue her. But now her younger brother, Leopold, who had never been close to her, was emperor. More ambitious than loyal, Leopold hoped to use the chaos in France to his political advantage, perhaps taking chunks of France for himself. Fersen was aware of this, writing her, “He is deceiving you. He will do nothing for you… he will abandon you to your fate and let the whole kingdom fall to complete ruin.”37
The European powers had already begun to devour Poland, and they now turned to fresh meat—France, historically the strongest, richest, and most populated country in Europe. Now France was weak and fractured; now was the time to circle in for the kill. Britain, salivating at the thought of grabbing the French colonies in North America, demanded that France be flattened to “a veritable political nonentity.” Leopold, baring his fangs and snarling, claimed Flanders, Artois, and Picardy for Austria, and, indifferent to his sister’s fate, insisted that France be “crushed by terror.” Frederick William II of Prussia claimed Alsace Lorraine, and Catherine the Great of Russia complacently advised everyone to take what they wanted, leaving France “a second-class power which need no longer be feared by anybody.”38
It is ironic that European nations tied to France by centuries of marriages and treaties were so eager for its destruction and unconcerned about the welfare of the royal family, and the one country truly interested in a rescue attempt was the United States. Perhaps the new nation wanted to express its gratitude to the king and queen for providing invaluable aid in the war for independence.
The American ambassador to France, Gouverneur Morris, carefully arranged an escape attempt. But Louis, who had given his word of honor to his captors that he would not try to escape again, hesitated. Morris later explained, “The measures were so well arranged that success was almost certain, but the King (for reasons which it is pointless to detail here) gave up the plan on the very morning fixed for his departure, when the Swiss Guards had already left Courbevoie to cover his retreat. His ministers, who found themselves gravely compromised, all tendered their resignation.”39
It was Louis’s last chance. In December 1792 he was on trial for his life. The American ambassador wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “It is strange that the mildest monarch who ever filled the French throne, one who is precipitated from it precisely because he would not adopt the harsh measures of his predecessors, a man whom none can charge with a criminal or cruel act, should be prosecuted as one of the most nefarious tyrants who ever disgraced the annals of human nature.”40
Knowing the king would be condemned and executed, Fersen wrote Sophie, “Poor, unfortunate family, poor Queen—why can’t I save her with my blood! It would be the greatest happiness
for me, the sweetest joy for my soul.”41
As expected, Louis XVI was condemned to die on the guillotine for crimes against the people of France. On the evening of January 20, 1793, he was allowed to spend ninety minutes with his family and broke the news. As his wife and children sobbed uncontrollably, Louis remained strong. He sat the dauphin on his lap and made him promise not to seek revenge on those who had condemned him. To blunt the pain of the final parting, Louis promised he would return to say good-bye at seven A.M. the next day, knowing full well that he would not come.
The next morning, before he left the prison, he said, “Crimes have been imputed to me, but I am innocent, and I shall die without fear. I desire that my death may bring happiness to the people of France, and may preserve them from the misfortunes that I foresee.”42
Accompanied by sixteen hundred soldiers, Louis was rolled through Paris on a cart to what is now the Place de la Concorde. The crowds were strangely quiet. Most doors were closed, the windows shuttered. The king who could not rule well at least insisted upon dying well and, as he approached the scaffold, refused the indignity of having his hands bound. The executioner argued and Louis finally allowed him to use his own handkerchief instead of the rope. He next had to climb a six-foot ladder without the use of his hands and wobbled unsteadily. Some spectators, ashamed for him, believed it was out of fear, but the king, despite the rigors of prison, still had an ungainly bulk. Fat Louis. Louis the Pig. Once on the scaffold he marched resolutely to the front and began to speak, but the drummers intensified their staccato beat, drowning out the king’s last words.
He took his place, laying his head on the guillotine. With the noise of gathering thunder the heavy blade came hurtling down and severed it. There was some cheering but also much grief among the French for the murder of their king. In her prison Marie Antoinette heard the cheers and held her son closer to her.
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