Desiree

by Annemarie Selinko

  By day we broke our journey in different towns, and we got out each time. The schoolchildren sang each time, and all the mayors made speeches in a language totally incomprehensible to me. On one occasion I sighed, ‘If only I could understand Swedish!’

  ‘But,’ Count Brahe whispered, ‘the mayor is speaking in French, Your Highness!’

  Maybe, I thought, but this French sounded like a very foreign language to me.

  It snowed and snowed and never stopped snowing, and the temperature fell to below zero. Most of the time my new lady-in-waiting, Countess Lewenhaupt, was sitting with me, and this Countess, slim and no longer young, was intent on discussing with me all the French novels of the last twenty years. Sometimes I let my other lady, Miss Koskull, travel in my coach. She is about my age, tall and broad-shouldered like most Swedish women, with healthy red cheeks, thick hair done in an impossible manner and strong healthy teeth. I don’t like her because she always looks at me in such a curious and calculating way.

  I was told all the details of Jean-Baptiste’s arrival in Stockholm. He had won over the King and the Queen immediately. The ailing King had got up from his arm-chair with a great effort when Jean-Baptiste entered and stretched out his trembling hand to him. Jean-Baptiste had bent down and kissed it as tears rolled down the cheeks of the old man. Afterwards Jean-Baptiste had called on Queen Hedvig Elizabeth Charlotte, who had dressed up for his reception. But on her breast she had worn, as usual, the brooch with the portrait of the exiled Gustavus IV. As Jean-Baptiste bent down over her hand I was told that he said quietly, ‘Madame, I understand your feelings. All I ask you is to remember that Sweden’s first King was a soldier too, a soldier who wanted nothing but to serve his people.’

  Jean-Baptiste apparently spends every evening in the Queen’s drawing-room, and the old King shows himself in public only with the Crown Prince by his side. During audiences, during the sessions of the Council of State, everywhere Jean-Baptiste has to be by his side and support him, a tender son to a loving father …

  I tried to visualise the new family idyll. What part was I to play in it? Everybody called the Queen a very intelligent and ambitious woman whom Fate had married to a prematurely senile man and deprived of her only son while still a child. She is in her early fifties, and Jean-Baptiste was to take her son’s place and – no, it was all too difficult for me.

  Someone said: ‘No one but Miss Koskull has managed up till now to make His Majesty listen and even laugh. But now this is no longer the privilege of the beautiful Mariana alone, she has to share it with His Royal Highness.’ Hearing that, I reflected that perhaps His Majesty was not quite so senile after all, perhaps this Miss Koskull was his mistress. I looked at her and she laughed and showed her strong healthy teeth.

  On the afternoon of January 6th we drew near to Stockholm at long last. The roads were so ice-bound that at the slightest rise of the road the horses could not draw us up the incline at all. I had to get out with the others and trot along after our carriages. The icy wind whipped me with such fury that I had to bite my lips in order to stifle a scream. Oscar, however, was not in the least disturbed by the cold. He ran alongside the coachmen leading a horse and talking to the poor creature.

  The landscape around us was all white, like a winding-sheet, I thought, like a winding-sheet, Persson, and not a freshly laundered bed-sheet. Suddenly I remembered Duphot. I hadn’t thought for years of the dead General who had wanted to marry me. He was the first corpse I had ever seen, his the first winding-sheet. How warm it had been in Rome at that time, how warm!

  ‘How long does winter last with you, Baron Adelswärd?’ I asked. The gale drowned my words and I had to repeat my question several times.

  ‘Till April,’ he said.

  In April the mimosas are in flower in Marseilles.

  We got back into our carriage at last. Oscar insisted on riding outside beside the coachman on his box. ‘I can see Stockholm better when we arrive, Mama,’ he said.

  ‘But it’s getting dark, darling,’ I said.

  It was snowing so hard that nothing could be distinguished at all through the curtain of white, and at last dusk and darkness submerged everything. Now and then one of the horses stumbled on the icy road.

  Then, quite unexpectedly, our coach stopped amid the red glare of torches, and the door was torn open.

  ‘Désirée!’

  It was Jean-Baptiste, who had come in a sledge to meet me. ‘We are only a mile from Stockholm now,’ he said. ‘Only another few moments and you are at home, my little girl.’

  ‘Papa, may I ride in a sledge? I have never ridden in a sledge before.’

  Count Brahe and Countess Lewenhaupt went into another sledge and Jean-Baptiste joined me. In the dark of the coach I sat pressed tightly against him. But we were not alone. Miss Koskull sat opposite us.

  I felt his hand in my muff. ‘What cold hands you have, my girl!’

  I wanted to laugh, but all I brought out was a sob. The temperature was below zero, and this climate Jean-Baptiste already called – home!

  ‘Their Majesties expect you for tea in the Queen’s drawing-room. No need to change your dress, they only want to welcome you and Oscar without formalities. To-morrow Her Majesty will give a ball in your honour.’

  He spoke quickly, as if hard pressed by something or somebody.

  ‘Aren’t you well, Jean-Baptiste?’

  ‘Of course I am well. Only a bit of a cold and too much work.’

  ‘Any trouble?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Great trouble?’

  Jean-Baptiste said nothing for a moment and then broke out: ‘Alquier, you know, the French Ambassador in Stockholm, has handed us a new note from the Emperor. He demands that we put two thousand sailors at his disposal. Just like that, two thousand Swedish seamen to prove Sweden’s friendly feelings for France!’

  ‘And your answer?’

  ‘Please, try to see the situation correctly: it is the question of the answer of the Government of His Majesty the King of Sweden, and not that of the Crown Prince. We refused. We told him that we cannot spare these men if France forces us at the same time to declare war on Britain.’

  ‘Perhaps that’ll make Napoleon desist?’

  ‘He desist, when he at the same time concentrates troops in Swedish Pomerania? They are ready to invade Pomerania any moment. Davout is in command of them.’

  Lights were appearing at intervals along both sides of the road. ‘We are almost there, Your Highness,’ said Miss Koskull out of the dark.

  ‘Aren’t you longing for the lights of Paris, Jean-Baptiste?’

  His hand pressed mine inside my muff. I understood: with Swedes present I was not to speak any more about our longing for Paris.

  ‘Are you going to defend Pomerania?’ I asked.

  Jean-Baptiste laughed. ‘Defend? With what? Do you really think that the Swedish Army in its present shape could stand up to our – I mean to a French attack? To an attack by a Marshal of France? Never, never! I myself told the Swedes in Pomerania—’ He interrupted himself, then continued: ‘I have started the reorganisation of the Swedish Army. Every month a different regiment is coming to Stockholm, where I myself take its training in hand. If I had two years, only two years …!’

  The lights along the road grew more frequent. I bent towards the window and tried to look out, but I could see nothing but whirling snowflakes.

  ‘Is that not a new fur you are wearing, Désirée?’

  ‘Yes, just imagine, a farewell present from the Emperor sent after me by courier to Nyborg in Denmark. Strange, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it was difficult to refuse it.’

  ‘Jean-Baptiste, the woman isn’t born yet who would refuse a sable. It’s one of the three furs which the Tsar gave to the Emperor.’

  ‘I don’t know whether you have been made familiar with the court etiquette here. Have you discussed it with my wife, Miss Koskull?’

  She said she had, but I couldn’t remember. />
  ‘It is still a bit like—’Jean-Baptiste cleared his throat, ‘as it was in – in the old days, you know.’

  I put my head against his shoulder. ‘As in the old days? I wasn’t born then, so I don’t know.’

  ‘Darling, I mean as it was at Versailles.’

  ‘I wasn’t at Versailles either,’ I sighed. ‘But I’ll manage it somehow, I’ll pull myself together.’

  Flares appeared on either side, and we drove up a ramp. The coach came to a stop. I was stiff with cold when Jean-Baptiste lifted me down to the ground. Long rows of high, brightly illuminated windows looked down at me. ‘The Mälar Lake, can one see the Mälar Lake from here?’ I asked.

  ‘You will see it to-morrow morning,’ said Jean-Baptiste. ‘The castle is situated on Lake Mälar.’

  The next moment the ground around us was full of people, gentlemen in short jackets and knee-breeches, all in black and red, appeared from nowhere. ‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘this isn’t a masked ball, is it?’ Black masks once murdered a King, I remembered. But then I heard a woman laugh stridently.

  ‘Darling,’ explained Jean-Baptiste to me, ‘these are no fancy-dress costumes but the uniform worn here at court. Come along, Their Majesties are waiting for you.’

  No, Jean-Baptiste didn’t want to keep his dear adoptive parents waiting. Oscar and I were chased up the marble staircases and hardly had time to take off our coats. I looked awful, I thought, with my white face, red nose, squashed hat and untidy hair, and there was no Yvette anywhere near to help me. But at any rate I could rely on La Flotte, who gave me a comb to tidy my hair. My feet were wet in my shoes from walking behind our coaches on the snow and ice-bound roads, but that couldn’t be helped now. A door opened before me, a blinding brightness crushed down on me and I found myself in a white salon.

  ‘My wife Desideria, who wishes to be a good daughter to Your Majesty. And my son Oscar!’

  At first I didn’t believe my eyes, for the Queen wore her hair powdered as they did many years ago in France. ‘I must tell Julie,’ I thought. She had a black velvet ribbon round her neck and her light-coloured eyes were screwed up as if she were short-sighted. I bowed to her.

  The stare of her eyes drilled into me like gimlets. She smiled, but it was not a smile of gladness. She was far taller than I, and in her old-fashioned pale blue velvet robes she had a royal air about her. Holding out her hand to me, probably for me to kiss, she said in measured tones: ‘My dear daughter Desideria, I welcome you.’

  I touched her hand with the tip of my nose, I didn’t feel like kissing it. Then I found myself in front of an old man with watery eyes and a few strands of thin white hair on a pink skull. ‘Dear daughter, dear daughter …’ this old man whimpered. Jean-Baptiste stood by his side supporting him.

  The Queen came to me a moment later and said: ‘I should like to introduce you to the Dowager Queen.’ She took me to a pale thin woman in black. The theatrical black widow’s hood on her powdered hair seemed to float above a completely lifeless face. ‘Her Majesty Queen Sophia Magdalena,’ said the cold measured voice.

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ I thought, ‘who is that? How many Queens are there at this court? The Dowager Queen, that must be the wife of the murdered Gustavus III, the mother of the exiled Gustavus IV, the grandmother of the boy whose place Oscar is taking …’ I bowed deeply to her, deeper even than to the Queen.

  ‘I hope you will be happy at our court, Your Highness,’ the old woman said in a very low voice, hardly opening her mouth as she spoke. Perhaps she didn’t think it worth her while.

  ‘And this is Her Royal Highness, Princess Sofia Albertina, His Majesty’s sister.’

  I saw a woman with the face of a goat, a face of quite indeterminable age, her long teeth bared in a sweetish smile. I bowed again and then made my way towards the big, white china stove, the kind of stove they have here, high and round, against which I loved to lean during the breaks in my journey.

  My hands and feet were still like ice. It was marvellous to lean against the hot stove. A lackey served me a glass of mulled wine. I folded my hands round the warm glass and felt a bit better. Count Brahe was standing near me, but where was Jean-Baptiste? There he was, bending down towards the trembling King, who was sitting in his arm-chair now, patting Oscar’s cheek with a hand twisted by gout.

  Suddenly I felt everybody’s eyes turned on me. What did they expect of me? Through the whole of my being I felt a wave of disappointment lapping up at me. I didn’t look a Queen, I was no striking beauty, no grande dame. No, I was propping myself against the stove, I felt and looked cold, I had a turned-up nose and my short hair stuck to my head in wet curls.

  ‘Will you not take a seat, Madame?’ The Queen sat down in an arm-chair in a beautifully trained, beautifully studied rustle of clothes and pointed to an empty chair by her side.

  ‘I am sorry, but my feet are so wet. Jean-Baptiste, couldn’t you take my shoes off? Or ask Villatte to do it?’

  At that everybody looked horrified.

  Did I say something wrong? As I was holding the warm glass in my hands I couldn’t very well at the same time take off my shoes. Jean-Baptiste or Villatte have done it hundreds of times for—

  I looked round the faces in the room. Silence had closed round me like an iron band. It was broken by a loud unrestrained giggle which came from Mariana Koskull. The Queen turned to her sharply, and at once the giggle changed into a cough.

  Jean-Baptiste came and offered me his arm. ‘May I ask Your Majesties to excuse my wife? She is wet and tired out from the journey and would like to retire.’

  The Queen nodded. The King’s mouth gaped half open as if he were still pondering on what he had heard.

  I kept my eyes fixed on the floor. When I looked up again I met the bitter, sarcastic smile of the Dowager Queen. Later I was told that this was the first time she had smiled for years. Her smile seemed to say, ‘How have the Vasas fallen!’

  By the door I turned round to call Oscar. But he was busy examining the buttons on His Majesty’s tunic. The old gentleman looked very happy. Seeing that, I said no more and left on Jean-Baptiste’s arm.

  Jean-Baptiste kept silent till we reached my bedroom. ‘I have had your suite done up completely, with Parisian wallpapers and Parisian carpets. Do you like it?’

  ‘I want a bath, a hot bath, Jean-Baptiste.’

  ‘That is impossible. It is the only wish I cannot grant you yet.’

  ‘How do you mean? Don’t people have baths in Stockholm?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. I’m the only one, I believe.’

  ‘What? The Queens, the lords and ladies, no one has a bath here?’

  ‘No one. I told you, everything is here still as it was at Versailles in the time of the Bourbons. One does not have a bath here. I had an idea that it would be like that and therefore took my bath tub along with me, but it is only during the last week that I have managed to get hot water. The kitchen is too far away from my rooms. Now they have put up a stove somewhere near my bedroom where Fernand can heat water for my bath. I shall get you a stove like that too and try and find a tub. But you must be patient for a bit, patient in every respect.’

  ‘Couldn’t I have a bath in your tub to-night?’

  ‘Are you mad? Have a bath and then run in your dressing-gown from my rooms to yours! The whole court would talk of nothing else for weeks.’

  ‘Does that mean that I could never go in my dressing-gown – I mean, that I could never go into your bedroom, that I—’ Stupefied, I added: ‘Jean-Baptiste, does etiquette at the Swedish court forbid us—’ I faltered again. ‘You know what I mean.’

  Jean-Baptiste broke into a burst of laughter. ‘Come here, my girl, come here. You are marvellous, you are unique! I have not laughed like this since I left Paris.’ He threw himself into an arm-chair and roared with laughter. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Next to my bedroom there is another room occupied day and night by a gentleman-in-waiting. That is part of the etiquette. Naturally
I have Fernand in this room as well. We are careful, darling. We receive no men in black masks and tolerate no plots among the colonnades like Gustavus IV. So, as there is always someone in the adjoining room, I prefer, shall we say, for certain conversations of a more intimate kind with my little girl, to visit the rooms of Her Royal Highness. Do you understand?’

  I nodded. ‘Jean-Baptiste, tell me, did I behave very badly? Was it a real crime against etiquette that I wanted Villatte to take off my shoes?’

  He stopped laughing and looked at me gravely, almost sadly. ‘It was bad, my little girl, really bad. But,’ he said, getting to his feet, ‘how were you to know that? And the court ought to have prepared against something like that. I warned the emissaries of the King that night when they offered us the crown.’

  ‘Offered you the crown, Jean-Baptiste, not us.’

  Marie took me to bed. She put hot-water-bottles under my feet and the Emperor’s sable fur over my blanket. ‘All wives maintain that their mothers-in-law are terrible. But, Marie, mine really is.’

  The next evening we danced in the ballroom of the King and Queen till late into the night, and two days later the citizens of Stockholm gave a ball in my honour in the ballroom of the Exchange. I wore my white robes and a golden veil over my hair and shoulders. The Swedish court ladies possessed marvellous jewellery, big diamonds and dark blue sapphires and magnificent diadems. Never before had I seen such precious gems.

  On the day after the ball in the Exchange Countess Lewenhaupt brought me a pair of ear-rings made of diamonds and emeralds.

  ‘A present from the Queen?’ Perhaps she thought I had looked too poverty-stricken?

  ‘No, a present from the Dowager Queen,’ said Countess Lewenhaupt imperturbably. ‘She used to wear them often. Now she wears mourning only and never any jewellery.’

  I wore these ear-rings on January 26th, Jean-Baptiste’s birthday. The Queen gave a party in his honour, during which a kind of pageant was acted, but unfortunately not by proper actors and actresses but by Sweden’s young aristocrats. They danced a quadrille in the different regional costumes of the country, and ended up by forming a circle into which tripped so-called Valkyries, Nordic goddesses of the battlefield or whatever they are. The ladies acting them wore a kind of nightgown made of tiny pieces of metal which jingled and clanked as they moved, and they each carried a shield and a spear. Miss Koskull in golden armour was the central figure, and she smiled victoriously. The others danced around her singing, ‘Oh Brynhild, oh Brynhild!’ Miss Koskull inclined her shield and her head and looked deeply into Jean-Baptiste’s eyes. During the last figure of the dance all the Valkyries danced towards us with dainty steps in minuet rhythm, bowed before Oscar, and before we realised what was happening they had lifted him into the air and amidst the applause of the spectators carried him out of the ballroom.