by John Biggs
He was picky when it came to women, complaining in April 1773, while on the road to Rome, that “the sex at Milan is not at all fair, very ill-dressed, in bad taste, and slovenly, which is common in Italy except in Turin.”15 But in Paris, he reveled in the women, and their husbands knew to be en garde. Axel described one ball in January 1775 with a young man’s ardor but the aplomb of a senator’s son:
I supped with Baron Ahlfeldt, a Dane who is attaché to the embassy, then at midnight went to the opera ball with Bolemany. I met a very pretty masque who said to me in a low voice that she was sorry I wasn’t her husband so that she could sleep with me. I told her that that shouldn’t stop her. I tried to persuade her but she ran away. Another woman that [a friend] was chasing wasn’t so difficult. She sat down in a hallway and we had a long conversation with her. She wore only a light veil over her face, which made it easier to kiss her as we liked and she seemed to do it very well.16
Axel spent many evenings wooing women. Like the best Casanovas he broke the hearts of many women. He saved his own for just one of them.
Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna – Marie-Antoinette to the French — was born in Vienna on November 2, 1755, a year before start of the Seven Years War. Her childhood was overshadowed by that conflict. The war dragged on for nine years, and the girl’s formative years were spent watching her mother live in privation, her brow furrowed in concentration and her beauty sapped by war and worry. While the empress once sold her jewelry to pay for more and better equipment for her army and personally oversaw the tactics used in battle, this fortitude was not passed on to Maria Antonia, and all she knew in the palace was comfort and boredom. The daughter of Emperor Francis and Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and the future queen of France was profoundly unprepared for what awaited her.
She was one of twelve children, all of whom were, if put cynically, political pawns born only to advance royal goals of secession and national growth. Her gravely overstretched mother had to trust the care of her children to men and women who were more afraid to thwart her requests than to teach the children anything beyond good manners and music.
Maria grew into a quiet, demure girl, who despite her beauty had none of the hauteur of her brothers or the rawer aspect of her sister Caroline. The girls were coddled and modest. Her mother forbade make-up or short sleeves and was notoriously puritanical, outlawing love affairs at court and creating a much-ridiculed “chastity commission” to outlaw ribaldry in the capital. She woke daily at five in the morning and worked all day, a practice rarely seen in similar European courts.
Maria’s earliest memories, she would say later, were of being brought before her mother by her governesses and commented upon: Was she eating well? Acting foolishly? Even as guns were trained on Vienna, the children were kept cosseted and controlled.
Her marriage to Louis XVI would be purely a geopolitical maneuver. France, weakened by its colonial losses in the Seven Years War, and Austria, still smarting from the loss of Silesia to Prussia in an earlier conflict, were facing a growing threat. Britain, Prussia, and Russia had formed a defensive alliance, and as riches and resources rolled in from the New World, the alliance began to have designs on larger and larger parts of Europe. This left the Austrian and French Empires open and undefended, and although the Hapsburgs and Bourbons had spent most of the past several centuries as enemies, they had been allies in the most recent war and now found common cause. The French decided that war with Austria was wasteful and foolish, because only the British were serious rivals for control of the seas. The Austrians, for their part, believed that a friend with a long shore would be better than years more of enmity, especially with Prussia at their back. In consequence, Austria and France drafted the Treaty of Versailles, linking the two empires in peace and war.
French and Austrian diplomats sought a deeper, more symbolic union to cement the alliance. For five years, these diplomats maintained back-channel negotiations to connect the two empires via an interfamilial marriage. Maria Theresa finally relented and allowed her daughter to marry into the French royal family, and it was agreed that her husband would be Louis XV’s grandson, the portly and quiet Louis Auguste. Once the matter had been decided, there was little for the girl to do but wait for her betrothal and leave all she knew and loved. She received tutelage in the ballet from the dancer Jean-Georges Noverre – whom one contemporary called the Shakespeare of dance17 — and she received elocution lessons from stage comedians Aufrense and Sainville. Sadly, the French court considered these instructors to be sub-par although only a few of the more fashionable Viennese knew why. Noverre, who left Paris in 1750 and rarely returned, had scandalized the French stage with his naturalist costuming and leanings, culminating in a performance that had dancers capering in tiger skins and tree bark shoes.
On the afternoon of May 7, 1770, the young Austrian archduchess Maria Antonia, on her way to meet her husband-to-be at Versailles, was taken to a small, wooden pavilion on an island in the Rhine River where she would begin her remise — her handover. Officially becoming the property of France, Maria, henceforth to be known as Marie, was stripped of all of her Hapsburgian finery and belongings. Her little dog, Mops, was left in the care of Austrian handmaidens who were forbidden to follow their lady.
She did, however, sneak one small item past the sharp-eyed court officials who accepted her at the border: a tiny gold watch given to her by her mother, a token of her familial bonds and, in the end, her most prized possession. That she held this watch above all else — even her trousseau valued at 400,000 livres (at least $8 million, in twenty-first-century dollars) — was a testament to the mystery and importance watchmaking and watches held in eighteenth-century court life.
Just fourteen years old, she was torn from her family, thrust into a foreign court whose language she did not speak – she once pleaded with an admirer to refrain from speaking in her mother tongue, saying “Don’t speak to me in German, messieurs, as from now on I only understand French”18 — and forcibly married to a husband who had no more say in the union than she did. Her new life was to be one of constant scrutiny, gossip, luxury, and wealth. She was wed in a white dress caked in diamonds and her husband wore a gold suit similarly bedazzled. After the ceremony she spent the evening in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors playing cards with the old king and Louis Auguste in front of over six thousand surging onlookers, while a planned fireworks display sputtered out thanks to an inopportune thunderstorm.
The scrutiny continued as Marie-Antoinette’s every move was watched and noted. Dinners were a spectacle as “honest folk who, when they had seen the Dauphine take her soup, went to see the princes eat their bouilli and then ran till they were out of breath to behold Mesdames at their dessert.”19 Members of the court fought among themselves to become close to the new royal couple and Marie-Antoinette could do little but react in her own impertinent way by, for example, refusing to speak to the king’s mistress at the advice of her sisters-in-law. Early on, sadly, she could not see the value in playing politics and this was to her early detriment.
Four years later, at mid-day on May 10, 1774, king Louis XV died of smallpox. Marie-Antoinette was, like her husband, jarringly elevated to a position of power for which, despite her long incubation, she was hardly ready.
At first, the citizens of France loved their Dauphine. She was beautiful, with small, pursed lips and blonde hair pulled back away from her small face. Her looks were marred only by the Hapsburg overbite, barely noticeable from the front. She had an “air of nobleness and majesty astonishing for her age.”20
But among the courtiers of Versailles, Marie found herself lost and frustrated. She was naive, and failed to project an image of courtly grace and intelligence. She spoke French with an accent that was mocked, yet could no longer speak accentless German, and so was trapped between two empires.
She received little support from her husband. Louis was intensely shy and preoccupied with his hobbies. He had an obsessive interest in building and engineeri
ng, supervising the construction of more and more wings of the palace and generally stomping about like a bull amid the profusion of delicate statuary and palace decorations. He was partial to climbing up on scaffolds to assist the workmen putting crowning touches on finials and coffer ceilings, and he was often seen dressed much like the workmen themselves, his royal finery abandoned to his earthy pursuits. Louis was a quintessential tinkerer at a time when there was only so much with which to tinker. He was obsessed with locks and even apprenticed as a locksmith, going so far as to build his own workshop at Versailles. He spent hours with the master under whom he apprenticed, working on little mechanical devices. Locks, like watches, were going through a period of rich innovation. A new lock called the Bénardes could be opened from either side, and the introduction to lockmaking of bronze, which was lighter and easier to cast than clunky traditional iron, allowed for smaller and more ornate keys. But not everyone approved of the king’s fascination with “mechanical works.”
“Sire,” the king’s valet de chambre, Intendant Thierry, was said to have commented, “when kings occupy themselves with the works of the common people, the common people will assume the functions of kings.”21
Louis XVI’s teacher in engineering was Francois Gamain, a lockmaker at Versailles whose father, Nicolas, had installed most of the locks at the palace during the rule of the Sun king. Louis XVI “employed a thousand strategies,” Gamain later wrote, to hide from the court and work at his tiny workshop with the master lockmaker. His equipment included vises and a guilloché engine, a specialized engraving tool, and he even tried his hand at blacksmithing inside the palace, creating a mini-forge that threatened more than once to set the whole building ablaze. Later, on the advice of his court horologers, he would establish a school for watchmaking near Paris.
With all his tinkering, Louis largely neglected his wife, who called her husband le pauvre homme — the poor man — and pitied him more than loved him. Marie’s day was full of formalities, and she rarely saw her husband outside of her assigned duties. Even their bedtime was a codified affair, and the young king would leave as soon as he was put to bed with his wife, escaping through secret passages behind the bedroom walls.
Their increasingly rare efforts to conceive a child always ended in disaster. The king seemed to have a physical condition that made the enterprise painful, and year after year, Marie failed to become pregnant. Under intense pressure to give France an heir, she had to endure constant scrutiny. Seen riding her horse once, an old woman warned the girl that she could lose a pregnancy riding about like a hunter. “In God’s name,” Marie yelled. “Leave me in peace, and be assured I am not compromising any heir.” A moment’s reaction from a girl barely out of her teens became, under the microscope of court life and popular discontent, an example of her supposed hauteur.
No expense was spared in an effort to keep the wine flowing. Marie held extravagant masked balls, gambling parties, and theater productions — all at a time when the masses were drowning in poverty. She travelled nightly the thirteen miles from Versailles to Paris to spend hours talking, laughing, drinking, and wagering. At balls, she usually discussed only popular music or commentary — or, as Fersen soon discovered, the season’s dirty jokes — and in those early years she annually spent over 300,000 livres on diamonds and pearls, not to mention thousands more on watches.
In 1775 Louis XVI gave his wife the Petit Trianon, a Neoclassical white-stone palace which had previously served as a refuge for his grandfather’s mistresses. Marie-Antoinette immediately launched an expensive renovation of the palace, in a more elegant and austere style than the rococo of previous regimes.
She treasured the palace as her place of privacy, where she could escape the intrigues of the court. She was the sovereign ruler in this small domain, and even the king needed an invitation to visit. She had mechanical mirrors installed that slid over the windows, ensuring privacy from peeping courtiers, and because the queen herself owned the little palace, she could deny entry to courtiers whose historical prerogatives had for generations given them access.
In the absence of a close relationship with her husband, Marie was left to the mercy of a petty and vindictive court. Not knowing where to turn, she quickly entangled herself in the web of gossip at Versailles. She was free-spirited, and found refuge in a circle of admirers and fun-loving courtiers. In particular, she befriended a coterie of young ladies including the Duchesse de Polignac and the Princess Lamballe, and Maria Teresa Luisa of Savoy. The Duchesse was almost a copy of the young queen with her slim, roughed face and striking grey eyes, while the princess was a blonde, carefree spirit who was most at home playing milkmaid in Marie-Antoinette’s charming faux-village, the Hameau.
Her social habits, too, provoked jealousy. As a girl, she had spent much time in the company of other women — her sisters, her governesses — and it was in small, close-knit circles of women, along with her husband and his intimates, that she felt most comfortable. This predilection for small, exclusive groups inadvertently insulted a court that had previously had ready access to, if not Louis XV, then his power-hungry mistress.
Her husband’s neglect made Marie susceptible to the attentions of older men. Intriguing courtiers laid traps for her to cheat on her husband, and rumors spread that she had many love affairs. Almost certainly, the rumors were false. At first, as a young Dauphine, Marie was too naive to even understand these men’s intentions, let alone react to them. She was too virginal and intent on fun to have attempted anything so untoward as an affair, and she was almost completely ignorant of passion and lovemaking.
Later, there would be other rumors, about one particular man, which would prove more substantial. She loved escape, and those moments at the masked ball in late January 1774, speaking with Count Axel von Fersen, gave her what she craved. Her strange, closed world grew brighter for a moment.
Two weeks after the opera ball, she saw Fersen again. The occasion was another masked ball, this time at Versailles, to celebrate Mardi Gras. Fersen arrived toward the end of the evening, and watched Marie and Louis, along with their entourage, dancing. The couple was dressed in the Old French style of Henri IV — their masks frilled with feathers and pale lace. Fersen snickered to his diary, that night, that the king and his brother, the Comte de Provence, were poor dancers, but overall he found that “the coup d’oeil was charming.”
Perhaps Axel and Marie felt some connection to each other, because both were foreigners and neither was naturally given to the pomp and preening of Versailles. He thought her beautiful, and he had a penchant for befriending the daughters of powerful men; she, in turn, was drawn to his beauty and high-mindedness. But they wouldn’t see each other again for another four years.
He spent most of the time back in Sweden, before once more setting out for adventure abroad. He lived a privileged life. His father supplied him with a not insubstantial allowance, and he was also in the guard of Swedish King Gustav III, a young, fun-loving, enlightened despot whose flashing dark eyes and high forehead, with hair puffed into a powdered confection, was even more popular with the ladies than the laconic Swede. During this period, Fersen spent three months in London courting a rich heiress, who ultimately spurned his entreaties to marry him.
While Fersen was away from Paris, Marie and Louis became king and queen and, at last, had a child, a girl named Madame Royale. But when Fersen returned to the city in 1778, and was presented to the queen at Versailles just two days after his arrival, she exclaimed: “Ah! Here is an old acquaintance.” Even in the intervening few years she remembered the handsome Swede in his dashing uniform.
She was already pregnant with another child, but Marie and Fersen developed a growing affection for one another that year. They took to walking around opera balls together, and once were observed alone in a private box, talking at length. He was frequently at Trianon and became well-known in Paris as part of the queen’s small, tightly knit entourage of nobles, hangers-on, and foreigners. When Fersen’s a
pplication to join the Prussian army was rejected, Marie interceded to secure a place for him in the French Expeditionary Force heading to America. At her request, he visited her private apartments wearing military regalia designed by King Gustav. The uniform included a blue doublet with a white, Hungarian-style tunic, tight-fitting chamois breeches, and a black shako topped by an egret feather. Marie was said to be fascinated by Fersen’s dress, and she examined each of his buttons, one by one.22
Fersen confided to his diary that Marie was “the prettiest and most amiable princess that I know,” and she inquired after him often, asking Count Creutz why her young friend hadn’t been attending her Sunday card games. Fersen grew increasingly animated in his correspondence, and a duchess at court suggested to Fersen that the queen was his conquest, a suggestion that he quickly and angrily denied. Creutz likewise became convinced that Marie was infatuated with his young fellow countryman but he was careful to broach the subject diplomatically. He, of course, noticed that when Axel and Marie were in the same room, she couldn’t take her eyes off him, and as he prepared to leave on the expedition to North America, her eyes filled with tears whenever she looked at him.
Fersen wrote of most of his affairs in code, jotting down “spent the night” in his diary when he succeeded in a romantic interlude. That summer, he wrote in a cryptic letter to his sister Sophie that he “breathed only for her”:23
I have taken my stand. I don’t want to form any conjugal ties. Since I cannot belong to the person to whom I want to belong, to the only woman who really loves me, I don’t want to belong to anybody.24