Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe

by Leslie Carroll

  As word would eventually reach Axel the elder in Sweden that his son had abandoned his quest for a wealthy bride, the count nipped the matter in the bud himself, writing to his father, “Unless marriage vastly increases my own wealth, it’s hardly worth the trouble, with all its burdens, embarrassments, and deprivations.”

  Marie Antoinette worked diligently to obtain Fersen the colonelcy of the Royal Suédois. It came at a hefty price tag—a hundred thousand livres—and the count did not personally have the funds to afford it. Nor would his father bankroll the extravagance, accusing Axel of frivolity. The regiment would never earn back what it cost to buy it. The old senator viewed the Royal Suédois as a vanity purchase that would bankrupt the family at the expense of Axel’s younger siblings, who had yet to make their way in the world and who deserved the same financial support that Axel had received as a youth. And he had more than a sneaking suspicion as to why his son wanted to put down roots in France.

  Enduring the same sort of scolding from his father that Marie Antoinette had received from her late mother on countless occasions, Axel reminded the elder statesman that he had in fact quit the pleasures of the French capital for the hardships of the North American winter and had spent three years with Rochambeau. The military was his life.

  In the end, in addition to the open purse of Marie Antoinette, it was the king of Sweden, Gustavus III, who supported his countryman’s bid for the colonelcy of the Royal Suédois. In a strong character reference to Louis XVI, his fellow monarch wrote that Fersen had “served with general approval in your armies in America.” Marie Antoinette wrote a similar recommendation, mentioning that Fersen had “greatly distinguished himself in the American War.” A soldier in an age when soldiering was the manly thing to do and the most glamorous profession in the world, Fersen must have seemed exotic to Marie Antoinette when she was surrounded all day by idle courtiers. And she was wedded to an overweight man who (and wisely, for the most part) did not relish going to war, but his reluctance to commit to combat wasn’t considered cool at the time. In an era of perpetual martial conflict, Louis had never even visited the École Militaire, had closed the military training camp at Compiègne (where he preferred to hunt instead), and never reviewed his troops or staged practice drills.

  Axel’s monarch demanded a quid pro quo for his support. He had never made the Grand Tour, and despite the fact that Gustavus was a reigning sovereign, he decided to leave his throne in the hands of a regent and visit the world. He asked (which meant commanded) Fersen to accompany him as his aide-de-camp.

  The count left France on September 20. During the king’s Grand Tour, much of Fersen’s responsibilities fell into the realm of damage control, keeping his boss out of the equivalent of gay bars and his name out of the press. Gustavus was very jealous of any free time his ADC spent out of his company, and Fersen found himself stealing precious moments when he could just to write to Marie Antoinette. He also corresponded with a breeder in Sweden about getting a dog for “Joséphine” (a code name for the queen that turns up several times in his letters). “Not a small dog,” it was to be like his own hound, Odin. But the process was taking much longer than anticipated, and finally, to light a fire under the breeder, Fersen admitted that it was to be a gift for the queen of France.

  Marie Antoinette may have chiefly occupied his thoughts, but she was not the sole obsession of his loins. The count also snagged enough time for romantic dalliances. As with the proverbial sailor, there was a girl in practically every port. He had a fling with Emily Cowper in Florence and enjoyed nookie in Naples with Lady Elizabeth Foster, the best friend of one of Marie Antoinette’s acquaintances, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. But when things with Bess Foster began to get too serious, Fersen backed off. In his letter book, he noted one he wrote to Bess in which “I told her everything,” those words heavily underlined in his own hand. There is such emphasis on the underscoring that one is tempted to wonder exactly what he revealed. Fersen and Lady Elizabeth Foster remained close friends for the rest of their lives, and after Marie Antoinette’s execution, the queen was the chief topic of their conversation.

  Marie Antoinette’s pregnancy of 1783 tragically ended in a miscarriage on November 2, her twenty-eighth birthday. It took her ten days to recover her health. But she and Louis were intent on trying for a second son, conceding that with each passing year the dauphin’s health was not improving. Whatever love the queen bore for Axel von Fersen, she continued to have regular marital relations.

  Paris (and Versailles) were destinations on Gustavus’s Grand Tour, and Axel was briefly reunited with Marie Antoinette in the early summer of 1784. He brought her the Swedish hound, which she named Odin, in honor of his own dog.

  On August 18, Marie Antoinette reported the confirmation of a new pregnancy; she believed herself two months gone at the time. Rumors swirled even then, which gives credence to the theory that some people believed there was a sexual element to their attachment, and throughout the years historians have debated whether the child could have been Fersen’s. If they were indeed lovers, it is theoretically possible for the count to have fathered the boy, who was born on March 27, 1785, and made duc de Normandie, but it is not likely. Little Louis Charles’s paternity was never doubted by the king, and even Marie Antoinette’s fiercest detractors concurred that her pregnancy coincided with her husband’s regular conjugal visits. Although the little duc did not resemble his portly father (nor, for that matter, was he saddled with his mother’s unfortunate Hapsburg jaw and bulging eyes), the beautiful boy looked like the slenderer members of the Bourbon family, including Louis XV in his childhood.

  Additionally, if Fersen and the queen were sleeping together during the summer of 1784, he surely would have been careful, so that there would have been no doubts as to the legitimacy of a future heir, should she become pregnant and bear a boy. The count was an experienced lover, well versed in how to avoid pregnancies. He loved the queen, and the last thing he wanted was to compromise her.

  After their charming visit to Versailles, Fersen and Gustavus resumed their Grand Tour. Marie Antoinette turned thirty on November 2, 1785, the age she had mocked when, as the newly minted eighteen-year-old queen of France, she wondered why anyone over thirty dared to show their face at court. She had become demoralized over the scandal regarding the “Affair of the Diamond Necklace,” in which a female con artist descended from the Valois dynasty claimed that the queen intended to purchase an ostentatious bauble for 1.6 million livres, using the Cardinal de Rohan (whom Marie Antoinette had detested all her life) as an intermediary. Unfortunately, people believed that the covetous queen with a taste for expensive jewelry and no understanding of economy had swindled the court jewelers out of their investment, fooled the cardinal, and taken advantage of poor, tragic comtesse Jeanne de Lamotte-Valois, the impoverished aristocrat who had dared to befriend her. (Jeanne later went so far as to claim that they were lovers.)

  Not a word of it was true. Before the scandal broke, Marie Antoinette had never even heard of the so-called comtesse, so she had certainly never met Madame de Lamotte-Valois, let alone bedded her! The theft of the necklace was the brainchild of Jeanne, her husband, and Jeanne’s lover. The comtesse was also sleeping with the cardinal, who was their arch-dupe; they tricked him into fronting the money for the necklace, which they then pocketed and dismantled, selling the loose stones in London.

  And yet, even though she was sentenced to be flogged, branded, and imprisoned (the cardinal was ultimately exonerated), Jeanne de Lamotte-Valois was a martyr in the eyes of the people, while their queen was tarred as a spendthrift foreign whore. Mortally wounded by the trial verdict, which came at a time when she was enduring her most difficult pregnancy, Marie Antoinette retreated like a wounded lioness to le Petit Trianon, sorely in need of the comfort of genuine friends.

  Fersen had returned to France in 1785. Witness to the character assassinations the queen had endured during the investigations regarding the Affair of the Diamond
Necklace, he wrote to his sister Sophie, “She is most unhappy, and her courage, which is admirable beyond compare, makes her yet more attractive. My only trouble is that I cannot compensate her for her sufferings and that I shall never make her as happy as she deserves.” The more unfortunate Marie Antoinette became, the more she was forsaken.

  When he was in France, the count visited le Petit Trianon unattended three to four times a week. He and the queen snatched what fleeting hours they could, giving rise to gossip, as would the arrival of any handsome, unchaperoned caller. A campaign of concealment was undertaken. Count von Fersen kept a meticulous diary, but he never indicated why he went to the palace, nor who had summoned him.

  Fersen was in England in 1786, where he was nicknamed “the Picture” for his striking looks. By 1787, he was back on French soil. Informally, he was Marie Antoinette’s admirer; officially, he was the emissary of the Swedish sovereign, couriering correspondence between Gustavus III’s court and the Bourbons. In time, Fersen’s role as Gustavus’s liaison would prove invaluable. The count continued to travel, notching numerous voyages between France and Sweden, and his letter book dutifully noted his absences from “Joséphine.”

  In the spring of 1788, Fersen returned to his homeland to participate in Gustavus’s Finnish campaign against Russia. But by November 6, four days after Marie Antoinette’s thirty-third birthday, he was back in Paris. Twenty-two letters mark the six-month absence from her. In the period that followed, Fersen most certainly visited Versailles, because he meticulously recorded the tips he gave to the servants in his account books.

  But by this time the nature of his rendezvous was more likely political than sexual. Much had changed since the idyllic days of 1783. The May 31, 1786, verdict in the trial of the Diamond Necklace Affair had sent Marie Antoinette into paroxysms of rage, followed by a profound depression. The political landscape of France had changed as well. No one was happy with the status quo. The clergy and nobility were angry about the progressive measures Louis’ ministers had proposed, because it meant they would have to pay taxes. The bourgeoisie and the poor, having been inspired by the success of the American Revolution, decided it was time for them to have a voice in their governance. The common denominator for everything was their scapegoat: the outsider; the foreign-born queen, l’Autrichienne [sometimes spelled l’Autruchienne], a pun on “the Austrian woman” and the word for a female dog. Marie Antoinette was even blamed for acts of nature such as crop failure and bad harvests.

  Many of the poorer classes had no grasp of the lofty concepts of revolution; their discontent and disillusion were taken advantage of—fired up by pamphlets (mostly lampooning Marie Antoinette) that were financed from the deep pockets of the king’s own cousin, the duc d’Orléans. Philippe d’Orléans hoped that the people would overthrow Louis and reform the kingdom as a constitutional monarchy, placing him on the throne as their new king. Oh, how wrong he was, but that’s another story.

  Marie Antoinette had been devastated by the most personal sorrows as well. Her daughter princesse Sophie Hélène Béatrix, born several weeks premature on July 9, 1786, never lived to see her first birthday, dying on June 14, 1787. And the dauphin, Louis Joseph, was bravely enduring the physical torments of rickets and a severely curved spine. His declining health and Sophie’s demise brought Marie Antoinette closer to God, and after the mechanical devotions of the daily Masses she had been attending for years, she became more genuinely devout.

  This was the emotional state of the woman Axel von Fersen greeted in 1788. It is possible that in a time of such tremendous upheaval, Marie Antoinette needed his love and comfort and his reassuring presence more than ever; that dynamic is very plausible. But it is equally conceivable that what she most desired from the count, having turned her thoughts to her husband and children, God and kingdom, was his unwavering friendship.

  Of that she could be certain until she drew her final breath. Count von Fersen remained her champion even when it seemed as though everyone in France was ready to tear her to pieces. In 1789 he wrote to his father, “You cannot fail to applaud the Queen, if you do justice to her desire to do good and the goodness of her own heart.”

  If, by the late 1780s, Axel von Fersen was no longer Marie Antoinette’s lover (or, according to some biographers, had never been her lover), it does make sense that he eventually moved on carnally, embarking on other relationships—yet they were invariably with other unattainable women, ensuring the queen’s primacy at the pinnacle of his affections. However, there was one who evidently captured his heart. Eléanore Sullivan, who had arrived in Paris in 1783, was five years their senior. After enjoying a checkered romantic past, she married an Irishman whom she’d first met in Paris, but was living under the protection of a Scot, Quentin Craufurd, who had met her in Manila and brought her back to the French capital. Around April 1789, Eléanore became Fersen’s lover, although she remained involved with Craufurd, who for the next several years would have no inkling of her affair.

  Although Craufurd was apparently ignorant of Fersen’s liaison with Eléanore, the rest of Europe learned of it quickly, thanks to the acid tongue and pen of one of the count’s jilted paramours, the wife of the comte de Saint-Priest. In the crucial days that followed the royal family’s aborted flight to Varennes, during the summer of 1791 Madame de Saint-Priest traveled to England, Germany, and Sweden, spreading the news of Axel von Fersen’s newest conquest. Sophie Piper wrote to her brother, fretting about Marie Antoinette’s reaction should the queen ever find out about the affair.

  “I have not spoken to you about this or warned you about it out of respect for Her because She would be mortally wounded should this news reach her ear. Everybody is watching you and talking about you and you must think of Her and spare her this cruelest of blows.”

  In addition to his arrangement with Eléanore and Craufurd, the count’s other triangular relationship was with the king and queen of France. As much as he adored Marie Antoinette, Axel was always respectful of Louis, paying tribute to the “goodness, honesty, frankness and loyalty of the king,” and he fervently believed that the French monarchy should prevail at all costs, returning the nation to the influence she had always enjoyed across Europe. Fersen placed his life in jeopardy as much for Louis’ sake as for the queen’s.

  He arrived in Versailles on September 27, 1789, to spend the winter in a house he had acquired in town. By that time, Marie Antoinette had buried her older son. The seven-year-old dauphin had died on June 4 during the tumultuous weeks-long convention of the three Estates General. The callous representatives were so eager to push their governmental reforms forward that they were unwilling to begrudge the king the afternoon off to mourn his heir.

  Fersen had no way of knowing that just a few days after his arrival in Versailles, the life of his beloved queen would be frighteningly upended. Antonia Fraser posits that he may have passed the day of October 5, the queen’s last full day at Versailles, in her company, while other historians believe he was not there, instead riding hell-for-leather for the palace when he heard the terrifying news, so that he could be with her in her hour of peril. That morning an armed mob more than six thousand strong, comprised purportedly of prostitutes from the Palais Royal and Parisian fishwives, their numbers swelled with men disguised as women, had begun to march in the pouring rain from the capital to Versailles, demanding bread. The poissardes later claimed that they were unfairly blamed, and that many amid the throng were in fact disgruntled members of the aristocracy in disguise.

  By late afternoon on October 5, Louis was prepared to capitulate to the (now drunken) mob’s demands, but rumors were spread among them that he had no intentions of honoring his pledge. The following day, they stormed the Château de Versailles, destroying priceless treasures and beheading two of Marie Antoinette’s bodyguards in their frenzied search for the queen. Bursting into her bedroom, they stabbed at her mattress with pikestaffs, and would have done the same to her had she not slipped through a secret door in t
he nick of time and fled to Louis’ apartments.

  The royal family was lucky to escape with their lives, but they would be denied their freedom as they had always known it. From that moment the mob took them hostage, and they were conveyed to Paris in a slow-moving procession that afforded every citizen the opportunity to ogle and jeer at the “Baker,” the “Baker’s wife,” and the “Baker’s boy.” When the Bourbons reached the disused Tuileries Palace, where they would remain essentially under house arrest, among the loyal friends waiting to meet them was Axel von Fersen. “I was witness to it all,” he wrote to his father a few days later. “I returned to Paris in one of the carriages that followed the King. We were six and a half hours on the road. May God preserve me from ever again seeing so heartbreaking a spectacle as that of the last two days.”

  He sold the house and horses he’d bought in Versailles and purchased a house in Paris in order to visit Marie Antoinette more easily, although his official cover was as the unofficial observer of the unrest on behalf of the king of Sweden. Gustavus III worried about the effects of French revolutionary violence on the rest of Europe.

  As early as January 1790, Fersen wrote that only a war, be it “exterior” or “interior,” could reestablish the royal authority in France. But how could that be achieved “when the king is a prisoner in Paris?” the count asked. The solution seemed clear: Get the king out of Paris.

  During the summer of 1790, the royals’ energy was focused on whether they should remain in the capital or flee. Fersen was an early advocate of escape. If he was not the queen’s lover, then or ever, he was certainly her closest confidant at the time, and, as he admitted to Sophie, her most zealous admirer. The count saw in Marie Antoinette a sensitive and suffering heroine who had been both misused and misjudged, a woman full of goodness at a time when any positive opinion of her was rare.