The Queen’s Lover

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  Williamsburg, May 27, 1782

  We are in great consternation because of a battle between the fleets in the West Indies. According to the first news we received we had won the advantage; but yesterday we heard more through…a New York gazette, which reports that our ship “Ville de Paris,” 110 guns, was captured, with six other vessels, and that we were totally defeated…. We do not bear this reversal well; I see that we are easily depressed…. This defeat…is considerable, and could invalidate our whole campaign; it gives the British the upper hand in the West Indies; they can do us great damage there, and if they get reinforcements from Europe we may well lose our conquests.

  This last letter worried me because my brother had always been such an optimist (I suppose it fueled his courage). He seemed deeply discouraged every time the British scored a victory.

  Philadelphia, August 8, 1782

  My dear Father…I came here with M. de Rochambeau, who had a rendezvous with General Washington to confer on the campaign’s progress. The result of the conference was that I was sent on the 19th to Yorktown, Virginia, with a commission that was then secret; it was to ship as soon as possible our siege artillery, which we had left at West Point, and bring it up the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore. This operation required great secrecy and much promptitude, for we had but one forty-gun ship to escort the convoy, and the English with two frigates could have kept us from leaving the York River, or else have captured some of the convoy. Our army is to leave Baltimore on the 15th to come to Philadelphia, and go hence to the Hudson River….

  This particular missive displays the great confidence Axel’s superiors had in him. The most delicate, sensitive missions were always assigned to him because of his great capacity for tactfulness and discretion.

  During the years Axel was in America my marriage was quickly deteriorating. My husband’s numerous affairs—with scheming courtesans as well as with noted society women—were deeply humiliating to me. And yet I preferred not to divorce Piper, in part for the sake of our children, in part because it would taint the family name.

  And so I found my principal solace in the affection of Evert Taube. Axel’s correspondence also cheered me greatly when it intimated that the war might be drawing to an end, and he would soon come home to us.

  Philadelphia, August 17, 1782

  It appears as though peace were near. England appears to be much inclined if France is modest in her demands. The Americans desire nothing else, now that the King of England has declared them independent….

  The English…have sent all prisoners back from England, without demands for their exchange. General Carleton, who commands New York, has informed General Washington, in a very polite letter, that the King, his master, has granted the independence of America; that he has sent a man to Paris with full powers to negotiate; and he proposes to General Washington an exchange of prisoners. All this seems to indicate peace; we all think that if it is not already signed, it certainly will be in the winter, and that we shall embark in the spring. This causes universal joy; it gives me inexpressible pleasure; I have hopes of seeing you again soon, my dear father.

  We all jumped for joy at the prospect of a peace being signed in the following year. Our Axel would finally be out of danger! His frugality, his indifference to physical comforts, continued to amaze me.

  Camp at Crompond, October 3, 1782

  Though we have not seen the enemy, our recent campaign has been a very rough one. We suffered much from heat, and now the cold weather is making itself keenly felt. I, for one, bear these changes well, and have never been in better health. This year I have a tent and a straw mattress. I’m not that well covered, but my cloak is a help.

  My brother made many other interesting comments on American society that I did not have a chance to include in these excerpts, such as the following: the president of Congress offered him turtle soup for dinner. Axel was amazed to learn that Americans were allowed to do little on Sundays but read the Bible—a Frenchman trying to play his flute on the Sabbath almost caused a riot. He found America boring because of its lack of museums. He was puzzled to observe that everyone washed so often, used soap on their hair instead of powder, drank too much tea and thus lost their teeth early.

  I was happy to hear that during the course of the conflict my brother changed his mind about General de Rochambeau. He ended up admiring him greatly.

  Boston, November 30, 1782

  We parted with M. de Rochambeau with sorrow; everyone liked to be commanded by him. M. de Rochambeau, with his precious sangfroid, was the only man capable of commanding us here, and of maintaining that perfect harmony which has reigned between two groups of citizens so different in manners, morals, and language, and who, at heart, do not like each other…. Our allies have not always behaved well to us, and our stay on their shores has not led us to like or to esteem them. M. de Rochambeau himself has not always been well treated; but in spite of this his conduct has been perfect…. The stern orders he gave our army…enforced that rare discipline which won the admiration of the Americans and English troops. The wise, prudent, and simple conduct of M. de Rochambeau has done more to conciliate the Americans than the winning of four battles ever could.

  Boston, December 21, 1782

  We are all going on board tonight; the ships are ready, and if the wind is fair we shall sail tomorrow morning. As soon as we reach the West India islands I will send you my news, dear Father, and shall have the pleasure of assuring you of my respectful attachment.

  THAT WAS MY BROTHER’S last letter. Upon leaving Williamsburg in the first months of 1783 his regiment was sent to Porto Caballo, Venezuela, to join Spanish troops in the invasion of some British Caribbean islands. But the attack was canceled upon news of the peace treaty being signed by France and Great Britain. Axel suffered much from the tropical climate, contracting a microbe that led him to suffer recurrent fevers for the rest of his life, and permanently damaged his health.

  “I want your news,” he wrote me. “It’s the only consolation we have in this vile country. We’re dying of boredom here; we’re becoming thin and dried up, growing old and yellow with heat and boredom…. Men are not made to live here, but rather tigers, bears, and caymans.”

  Having no one but the queen in mind, Axel was eager to return to Paris, and had to placate our father because he had no intention of going back to Sweden that year. To appease Père he hinted that he might be ready to settle down. “Despite the little inclination I have for this sacrament,” he wrote him, “I’m at an age when marriage may become a necessary thing.” He wrote Miss Leyel to ask her if she had changed her mind about marrying him, but soon learned that while he was away she had married the Earl De La Warr. He considered another marital prospect, the immensely wealthy Germaine Necker. “This project depends entirely on your wishes,” he wrote our father; “I have no interest in it but yours…. I’ve only seen her once in passing…. I only recall that there was nothing disagreeable about her.” But this notion also came to naught, for he found out that Mademoiselle Necker had been proposed to by his compatriot and old friend Erik de Staël. And so to Axel’s great relief, all talk of marriage ceased for a while.

  I’M PROUD TO LIST ALL the honors my brother was awarded for his fine conduct in the War of Independence.

  Louis XVI named him Chevalier of the Order of Military Merit and appointed him second colonel of the Regiment Deux-Ponts. At the request of King Gustavus, France granted Axel a pension of twenty thousand francs a year; he was also made proprietary colonel of France’s Royal Swedish Regiment.

  King Gustavus promoted him to the ranks of titular colonel in the Swedish army, and made him a Chevalier of the Order of the Sword. (“Young Count Fersen,” Ambassador Creutz had written the king, “was always present at the thickest of the battles, either at the spearhead of the attacking forces, or in the trenches, and displayed the most valiant courage.”)

  CHAPTER 5

  Axel:

  LOVING JOSEPHINE

  C
OULD ANYONE IMAGINE that I would not instantly rush to see the queen upon my return from America? Although she had been militantly opposed to the American Revolution, which in her eyes countered all principles of the Divine Right of Kings, she had resigned herself to the fact that I had joined the French Expeditionary Force because I admired the American cause. And we had corresponded during my absence, but each letter took months, months to arrive, and our separation had been made all the more painful by the long wait between missives.

  My ship having arrived in Brest on July 17, 1783, I reached Paris on the twenty-third. I dropped off my satchels at my flat; and by the time it took me to ready my coach and have new horses harnessed—a matter of hours—I was off to Versailles. I’d had no time to warn the queen of my arrival. Her guards remembered me well. I ran up the stairs alone to her apartments and cracked the door to her salon, hoping to surprise her. She was alone, as I’d hoped she’d be, and she was playing the harp. Three years! We were now both twenty-eight years old. My domestics in Paris had told me that I’d aged a great deal during my time at war, and indeed I found her quite altered also. She had had two pregnancies since I’d last seen her, and had grown plumper; her arms were rounder, her breasts more prominent. I felt a pang of regret: I’d left a lovely girl, and was now looking at a handsome, imposing woman. But as she sat there on her little gilt stool before her harp, plucking an air of Gluck’s, I was again carried away by the graceful carriage of her head, by the beauty of her abundant dark blond hair—she was in morning dress, attired in a vaporous white chiffon gown. I stood there for several moments, contemplating her, before speaking those words so unrelated to the tender intimacy of my emotions. “Votre Majesté!” I exclaimed. I’d indeed managed to surprise her. She stopped abruptly in the middle of a chord, sprang up, and rushed to me, grasping both my hands in hers. “Vous, c’est vous,” she whispered. “Toi, c’est toi!” I murmured inwardly, my heart aching from our formalities. We stood there, holding hands. She simply stared at me, her eyes, those uniquely deep blue eyes, looking at me with immense affection and excitement, and then started questioning me, in that same girlish, impulsive way she’d queried me when we had first met nine years earlier at the opera ball. “Comment est-il, ce George Washington,” she asked. “Is it true that his teeth are made of ivory tusks?” Had I met any peaux-rouges, red-skinned people? Is it true that they’re cannibals? She interrogated me thus for a few minutes, shaking my hands at each query. She had grown so womanly, so statuesque, and yet retained her girlish spontaneity. Her little white dogs suddenly invaded the room, barking at my heels, sniffing the traces of my own spaniel Odin. She drew me to a sofa, and we sat down to speak further, our hands still in each other’s. I asked her in turn about her family. Her older child, Marie-Thérèse, I learned, had recently been very ill, and she had been at her bedside all the while, allowing no one else to nurse her; the death of her mother, Empress Maria Theresa, had caused such deep depression that she had locked herself into her apartments in total seclusion for several weeks; this loss had left her more isolated and lonelier than ever; she now found her chief solace in her second child, the dauphin, who was now a year and a half, and in the bloom of health; as for the king, “ce pauvre homme,” doctors had counseled him to lose weight so as to avoid major cardiac problems, but alas (this with a resigned smile), he was as much of a glutton as ever….

  In the following weeks we saw each other as often as we possibly could. We played backgammon, at which she continued to beat me. We brought our dogs together, as of old. I gave her Saint Augustine’s Confessions, one of my favorite books, to read, and we discussed it at length. Toinette loved to act, and I attended the plays she staged at the Petit Trianon’s little white-and-gold theater, where she charmingly played Colette in Rousseau’s The Village Soothsayer, and Rosine in Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro. The amount of time we could afford to spend together, even riding horseback, was limited; in growing older we had become more prudent, more wary of gossip and possible opprobrium. We settled for seeing each other a great deal at the opera—the queen had a loge into which she was in the habit of inviting half a dozen friends; I could easily be there as one of her chums, bantering with the Duchesse de Polignac or Madame de Fitz-James. We smiled slyly at each other when we heard Dido sing to Aeneas, “Ah I was well inspired / When I received you at my court.”

  One evening, while sitting alone with me in her opera box—her other guests had left to consume ices—she confessed her love for me. She slipped her finger into my hand and spoke in a low whisper while vigorously agitating her fan. “I love you, Axel, I love you, what else can I say?” She quickly withdrew her hand, and continued to whisper: “What else can I tell you, what else can I say?” I responded by scribbling her a tiny note on one of my visiting cards. “I too,” I wrote, “I love you desperately.” She read the card gravely, and then tore it into tiny bits—fourths, eighths, sixteenths—dropping the shreds of paper into her purse. What opera were we seeing that night? Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes, I believe. That summer, as we walked the footpaths in the woods near the Petit Trianon, we often sat down on park benches, by the side of brooks or under heavy trees, to exchange embraces. Our mutual desire was throbbing, urgent, desperate. We talked a lot about opera, about how it reflected our relationship, about the impossible loves that were the central themes of most operas, about those operatic passions that led to tragedy and death.

  We finally consummated our love some two months after my return from America, on a July night when Versailles was relatively emptied of courtiers, and the king had gone for a two-day hunting trip to Saint-Cloud. There was a small octagonal chamber above the queen’s apartments that had been built just the year before, in which a few of her favorites—Lamballe, Polignac—had already stayed. It contained a large sofa set into a curtained alcove, and was reached by a secret staircase.

  I am wary of disclosing too many details of those blessed hours. Let me just say this: I’d never felt truly loved before. I ask male readers to answer the following questions: Have you ever felt totally consumed by the intensity of a woman’s love? Have you ever had the sense—it is sublime—that you were the first to fulfill her sensual needs? All this and heaven too I experienced. But the sweetest of all was to feel Toinette’s purity, the guilelessness of her virginity. For a woman to be penetrated does not necessarily alter her chastity, which I look upon as a state of mind, and in her case, a state of grace. As she lay below me, her dark gold hair undone, looking at me with tenderness, but also with a never-before wonder caused by the novel sensations that washed over her; as all restraints fled and her body unfurled as into a sail that transported her to regions she’d never before traveled; as I mouthed her large erect nipples, as she finally moaned her pleasure with a kind of desperation, I finally knew the delight other men have experienced when deflowering a very young girl. For chasteness is a condition of the psyche that would always remain hers, that no man, not even I, could alter. And the greatest marvel of it was her ability to retain her purity while communicating her passion: by the manner in which her arms wandered over my nakedness, by the endearments she whispered, with an almost sisterly tenderness—“Mon ami, mon âme, mon adoré.”

  The following morning I wrote a note to Sophie, ending it with this phrase: “I’ve more than one reason to be happy.” I commemorated that day—July 15—for the rest of my life. I find the following phrase in a diary note written decades later, many years after the royal family’s tragedies, on July 15 of 1798: “I recall the day when I came to her privately for the first time,” “Je me rappelle le jour ou je suis allé chez Elle la premiere fois.” For “Elle,” with a capital E, was one of the two code names I gave her from then on, to hide her identity from the eyes of curious valets or other possible foragers of my papers. The other code name was “Josephine,” Josepha being one of her middle names.

  A few weeks later that summer—I was trying to gather the courage to inform Elle about my imminent departure for Sweden
, where I had not been for seven years—I wrote the following words in a note to Sophie: “I’m very pleased Miss Leyel is married. I’ve made up my mind. If I can’t belong to the only person I wish to belong to, the only one who truly loves me, I do not want to belong to anyone.” How else could I put it? Elle was not only my lover, she had become my closest friend, my confidante, the very texture of my life. One can imagine how much I dreaded to tell her of my return to Sweden. But how charming and generous she was, even about that. “Of course, of course you must go,” she said, weeping gently, clutching my hands as ever, “of course you must see your family, you must see your father.” She was somewhat assuaged by my promise of returning in the spring, and spending the entire following year with her.

  AND SO I SET FORTH IN September on my way to Stockholm, traveling my usual route, through Germany. But the unpredictable happened: a few days into my journey I received word that I should remain in Germany in order to join Gustavus III, who had just started on a long trip to Europe. I was to meet him in Rostock, on the Baltic, and accompany him on a voyage that would wind southward through Europe and continue on through Italy. What could I do? He’d appointed me captain of his bodyguard.

  I had to write to Père, again dreading his grief at my many years’ absence.

  I myself was furious at the king’s imposition. It is not as if he had chosen me alone for his company. Gustavus was to be escorted by a whole retinue of courtiers, all of them tall and handsome, like most men with whom he enjoyed traveling. They included Baron Armfelt, his chief chamberlain; Baron Sparre; my sister’s lover, Evert Taube; and a sizable group of Swedish sculptors and painters.