“In view of the care I’ve taken concerning my conduct and my reserve,” I wrote my king, “it is all the more painful to suffer from all these denunciations…. If I were to seek justification, my colleagues—witnesses of my demeanor, about which they’ve often complimented me—would vouch for me.”
In Karlsruhe, where I could easily be apprised of the events in Rastatt, I found a pretty house on the outskirts of the city with a splendid view of the mountains. There I saw few people. I lived solely in the company of my domestics, meditating on my recent griefs and losses, on the glumness of a bachelor’s life in advancing age, and on my longing for a stable home. While there I turned down my king’s offer of an ambassadorship to Vienna. I was now ready to return to Sweden and accept some important post there, in part because my affair with Eleanore Sullivan was finally coming to an end. During my stay at Rastatt I had seen her in nearby Frankfurt, and found her suddenly aged. Her once extraordinary skin had darkened and grown murky, her absurdly curly head of hair resembled a poodle’s, and she was given to wearing too many flamboyant diamonds.
As for Craufurd, too self-involved to respond to anyone else’s needs, he was growing deaf and losing his sight. One evening after I’d left Eleanore and returned to my little country house, he paid me a visit and angrily showed me a letter which alleged that Eleanore was having an affair with a certain man whose initials were A.B. Amused by the thought that both Craufurd and I might have been cuckolded, I commented that anonymous letters should be ignored.
But in the following weeks the drama deepened. Eleanore had given her friend Simolin, the ninety-year-old retired Russian ambassador, two letters to mail, one to me and one to Craufurd. The venerable Simolin had confused the envelopes, sending me the letter destined for Craufurd, and mailing to Craufurd the missive destined for me, thus leading Craufurd to finally learn about my affair with Eleanore. My principal fear, ironically, was not that Eleanore would leave me, but that she’d be left by Craufurd, and would rely on me for support, demanding that I marry her. Seeing her bizarre and flashy conduct, my relatively modest means, and my position as a diplomat, she would hardly make an appropriate wife for me. And what would I do about her daughter, whom I could not abide? The notion that I might be obliged to marry a spendthrift, increasingly vulgar mistress because her letters had been improperly addressed horrified me.
I’d been expecting a furious scene with Craufurd, and I had one. Referring to the time I had arranged for him to be one of Gustavus III’s agents in Paris, Craufurd absurdly accused me of having compromised him during the Revolution, of having put his life on the line to serve my own ambitions; he went on to denounce me for having abused his trust by making advances to his mistress. I rebutted that it was Craufurd, ever self-promoting, who had proposed his services to Gustavus, and that it was Eleanore who had made the first overtures to me. During our quarrel Eleanore sat in a corner, weeping. Simolin, tormented by the notion that he was responsible for the fiasco of misaddressed letters, had an attack of apoplexy that would lead him to die a few weeks later. After the shouting was over I took my leave, and never saw any of them again. My first great love had ended in tragedy. My second little love ended in burlesque.
Eleanore eventually married Craufurd, in 1802. By then they had become favorites of Napoleon and Josephine’s, and the emperor, who had his puritanical side, bade them to marry, not approving of irregular liaisons in his circle of intimates. The Craufurds’ home became one of the two or three most notable salons of the Empire. Craufurd’s next book, a study of French literature, was very well received. Eleanore, now known as “that nice fat Mrs. Craufurd,” had the pleasure of seeing her daughter marry the Comte d’Orsay, and of moving in the highest aristocratic circles. Good-bye to all that!
SOON AFTER MAKING my definitive break with Eleanore I had intended to return to Sweden. But my plans were again countermanded, this time tragically so. Evert Taube, whose health had always been frail, grew very ill, and in July 1799 Sophie and I brought him to Karlsbad to take the waters. “The doctors think he may have a few more days to live,” I wrote Gustav Adolf as I sat by the dying man’s bed. “The painful prospect of losing my only and closest friend, to whom I’m attached by a great conformity of feeling and of action, is most painful. His calm, his resignation, his sangfroid, are admirable; this is the death of a just and honest man; he does not cease to speak of Your Majesty and displays his attachment to you in the most touching manner.”
The doctors had been too optimistic. Taube died just as I was finishing this letter. In his will he left the entirety of his considerable wealth to Sophie, and made me his sole executor. Rumors hence spread, among his relatives, concerning the causes of his death. Taube had confided to me that he had drunk “a suspect glass of Malaga” at the table of our compatriot Engeström, who was of the prorevolutionary party, and would have had every political reason to bring about the demise of a man of the opposite faction. But my sister Sophie was also accused of having poisoned him because of his great fortune. The absurd notion! Sophie, whom I’d seen at Taube’s side for nearly a quarter of a century, nursing him through illnesses, sacrificing the company of her beloved children to be constantly with him, enjoying an intense relationship with her lover! Two days after his death we buried Taube’s ashes in Karlsbad. For the rest of her life, Sophie would wear, in a locket that hung about her neck, the ashes of her lover’s heart.
SOPHIE AND I took a ship to Stockholm. I was aware of all the rumors that were spreading throughout my city concerning the position the king might offer me. Upon my arrival, before even mentioning any post, Gustav Adolf bestowed upon me yet another title, that of Lord of the Realm. The designation had been created by Gustavus III. There were only twenty of us at any one time, and each of us was to be addressed as “Your Excellency.” But notwithstanding the pleasure I took in this honor, upon my return I did not find Sweden agreeable. The brilliance of Gustavus’s reign had much faded, as had the prevailing manners and style. The bourgeoisie, which had long kept its distance from the nobility, played an increasingly important role in society: minor officials, tradesmen, journalists, refugees from Finland and persons of other foreign origins, most of them rootless, were holding more and more powerful positions on city councils and other civic institutions. I readily admit to being a snob. I rigorously shunned members of this newly potent burgher class, finding uncouth their slipshod manners and their constant prattle about money. In recent years, as Sweden’s finances grew strained, they had suffered some economic decline, and this made them all the more hostile to us, the ancient nobility. Foreign diplomats, in their dispatches, often stressed the Stockholm bourgeoisie’s hatred of the aristocracy. A dislike for the rich and powerful prevailed among them far more than among the peasantry or the city’s poor, and they had grown increasingly hostile as they grew literate and politically aware. From the little contact I had with them, I noted that their men tended to drunkenness; that their conversation was dim-witted; that their women dressed horribly and turned fat and wrinkled before their time. At dinner tables they consumed fruit jams with marinated fish, and after the meal the two genders separated into two different drawing rooms. All these factors made Stockholm life far less enjoyable. Moreover, French was spoken notably less well than it had been in my youth, and to my horror French phrases were constantly being admixed with Swedish words.
What did I do, once home, to escape this philistinism? I continued to collect rare books. I spent much time in artists’ studios, buying the work of the younger, poorer painters and sculptors, attempting to revive the tradition of patronage that had flourished under Gustavus III. I often went to the opera, focusing on those works that Toinette and I had most enjoyed together—The Marriage of Figaro; Orpheus and Eurydice, which had been composed by my beloved’s own music teacher, Gluck; Dido and Aeneas, which had been a great favorite of hers. What painful memories and longings filled my heart when I saw these spectacles!
IT WAS WITH some apprehension t
hat I went to see the king, when he summoned me at the end of November, to learn what position he was going to offer me. Chancellor? Grand marshal? Minister of foreign affairs? There was one I was not willing to accept—the governorship of Stockholm—because I knew I was highly unpopular with the citizens of our capital, who would hasten to get rid of me. To my great surprise, he offered me something totally different: the chancellorship of the University of Uppsala.
“But, sire,” I said, “I know nothing about the education of the young!”
“That’s not what I’m looking for,” said the king. “I need a firm, intelligent man to watch over the education of our future leaders.”
I asked the king for twenty-four hours to think about this offer. As I left the palace, I began to see his train of thought: Sweden’s student population had been much radicalized recently by the ascent of Bonaparte. When, the previous year, a false rumor had spread that Napoleon had died in Egypt, thousands of students had gone into mourning. A few weeks later, when his disembarkment in Fréjus was announced, there was dancing in the streets, and partisans of the Directoire government held a great celebration in a Stockholm restaurant. The feast lasted until 6 a.m., and a bust of Napoleon was carried about the room amid shouts of “Vive la République!” Le mal Français was being spread throughout the country by the young…. The king was making sense. He wished to stem the republican tide at Sweden’s most distinguished university.
For the University of Uppsala had been founded in the fifteenth century. It had some six hundred students and employed dozens of the country’s most distinguished professors. In view of the students’ radicalism, my nomination for the post of chancellor, seeing my well-known reactionary views, was an extremely confrontational step for the king to take. Moreover, my long absences from Sweden were highly criticized. I was called “L’Étranger,” “the Stranger.” The students deplored my reputation as a French émigré, and as a personal enemy of Bonaparte. Although some justified my distant manner (“Notwithstanding his deliberately cold, aloof conduct,” one student wrote, “he was never discourteous toward us”), others were more harsh. “He pretended not to recognize any person he met,” an antagonist wrote; “no insult is more offensive or irritating.”
I made my first visit to Uppsala in December 1799, in the company of the king, who introduced me to the faculty. Its members, who could not countermand the king’s wishes, nevertheless pretended to meet apart from us to discuss my fitness for the position Gustav IV Adolf had offered me. After an hour they came out, announcing that they had unanimously decided to accept me as their chancellor. I had to get up and make some kind of declaration to thank them. Oh horrors! I found I had forgotten much of my Swedish! I searched so frantically for words in my native tongue that I made my acceptance speech as short as possible, and was well enough applauded. I spent the rest of the day visiting the city’s highlights: Uppsala’s great Gothic cathedral, the Vasas’ funerary chapel of white marble, and, inside the sacristy, the wooden statue of Thor, Nordic god of storms. As soon as I assumed my functions I concentrated on enriching the natural history collection, which particularly pleased me because it had been created by the great botanist Linnaeus. Before I arrived this collection consisted of some twenty thousand plants; I decided to much increase it. I also offered the university my father’s splendid collection of medals.
In my first months I saw to it that the professors’ salaries, and the scholarship funds for the poorer students, were increased. After two years or so the students not only tolerated me but rather liked me, finding me honest and fair, and looking on me as one of the more accommodating members of the university staff. The faculty were equally sympathetic, and were particularly impressed by the fact that I could converse fluently in Latin.
I should note that I did not have to reside in the very provincial town of Uppsala—I much pitied the inhabitants of that dreary city. My duties only engaged me to visit the university every few months, for two or three days at a time, and at the beginning of my appointment this suited me well, for there was again a romantic interest in my life. I had met, at a dinner in Stockholm, a beautiful Spanish woman, the wife of the Spanish ambassador, Marianne La Grua. She had declared her love for me, but I was perplexed by it, for her husband, a truly jealous and vindictive man, would not have had the relative tolerance of a Quentin Craufurd. I took her to the usual diversions one takes a mistress to—sleigh rides, oyster lunches, operas—but was wary of having relations with her, for she was just beginning a pregnancy.
On March 6, I made my way to Norrköping, the town on our northern coast that the king had chosen for his coronation, at which I was assigned to bear the great “Banner of the Realm” into the cathedral. Looking at myself in the mirror as I was leaving for the ceremony, I was quite pleased. The large white ermine mantle of the Order of the Seraphim, our nation’s highest decoration, awarded to only twelve men at any one time and just recently bestowed on me, covered my jacket, which was encrusted with dozens of medals. A diamond necklace shone on my white lace collar, and my hair, which I wore quite long and was beginning to turn gray, was surmounted by a large feathered hat. I feared that the king, who made a point of dressing plainly, would feel a bit eclipsed by my presence, and indeed he barely said a word to me during the entire ceremony: tensions had already arisen between the monarch and my family over his disdain for protocol, when my brother, Fabian, protested the fact that Gustav Adolf had invited his secretary to an official dinner. Great was my relief when, after I had given the king the ritual bow and kissed his hand, he warmly pressed mine. A few days after the coronation, the Riksdag met. I may be too frivolous in my taste for ceremonial attire, but I was struck by how shoddy the representatives of the nobility looked. In other countries, any one of them would have been taken for a commoner: their filth, their stench, their reek of tobacco, which one could have cut with a knife, conveyed a poor notion of our aristocracy.
IN 1800 MY MOTHER DIED, a loss that I can’t pretend afflicted me deeply, for we were never close. I had been far more sorrowful, earlier that year, about the health of my sister Sophie, who had been very ill with influenza, and whose demise would have killed me. Sophie and I had become even more deeply bonded since Marie Antoinette’s and Taube’s deaths. Since our childhoods we’d had no secrets from one another, had shared all sorrows and joys, and now we lived exclusively for each other. Sophie was my All. Her children, to whom I was devoted, might as well have been my own, and when her daughter Edwig, a maid of honor at court, found herself pregnant, I offered her a handsome wedding and provided the young couple with a good living. “Ah my tender Sophie,” I had written her after Marie Antoinette’s death, “since destiny assails us with its cruelest blows, let us live to recall our joys and console each other for our sorrows.”
Sophie and I had decided to live at Blasieholmen, in the stately Stockholm home, directly across from the Royal Palace, in which we had spent our childhoods. We were much similar to each other physically: known as the handsomest woman in Stockholm, Sophie was almost as tall as I was, and, so it was said, equally haughty. Both of us were fastidious about our domestic surroundings, both of us were lazy about tending to anything that did not totally enthrall us, both of us were indefatigable travelers and not truly at home anywhere in the world. We were twin images of each other. Referred to as “le couple Fersen,” we were looked upon with admiration or animosity, seldom with indifference.
King Gustav Adolf spent several months of 1804 traveling in Germany, and upon returning called me in to offer me the post of Chancellor of the Realm. The position, frankly, scared me. I feared that my assuming it might greatly harm relations between Sweden and the French Republic. After so antagonizing Napoleon, how could I, Fersen, possibly deal with Sweden’s foreign policy? Bonaparte was marching from victory to victory, and Gustav Adolf was planning to draw closer to France. Besides, I wished to preserve my freedom, and the position was too time-consuming; I would only accept one that would allow me sever
al free months a year to travel. The king considered these objections for a few days, and called me back in. The courtiers waiting outside of the king’s apartments fully expected the chancellor of the realm to walk out of the room; but instead they saw…the grand marshal of the kingdom.
I would later learn that the Duchess of Södermanland, who unlike her husband was fond of me, had doubted whether I was up to the job of being chancellor. “He loves his comfort too much to hold a post that demands that much time and application,” she wrote. “Moreover, his clearly French manners would not be suitable.”
I was fairly mortified by the duchess’s words, but started working hard at my new position, which consisted of taking care of every detail of the king’s palaces, down to the supervision of the royal stables and of household supplies. I went at the job with great diligence, as I had at my work at Uppsala, surveying financial accounts, tracking down thieves of royal silver, counting the coffee spoons of the royal dinner service, while dreaming of my next trip abroad. I thus had occasion to observe the king closely. He was growing more erratic, brusque, and rude than ever, most particularly toward the foreign diplomatic corps. I was startled by his indolence, his lack of ability for matters of state, and his refusal to abide by etiquette. Sophie and I were so struck by his uncouthness, in fact, that we had never once invited him to dine at Blasieholmen, which in retrospect might have been a serious mistake.
The Queen’s Lover Page 26