Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric

by Buckley, Veronica

  It may have been impulsiveness that underlay this stunning faux pas. It could hardly have been ignorance, for Christina must have been perfectly well aware that the very purpose of the princes’ rebellion, only a few years before, had been to rid France of that same Cardinal once and for all. It was to oust Mazarin that Mademoiselle had committed her energies, her reputation, and her money for two years of civil war; for that cause she had raised her own regiment, and for that cause she had now endured almost four years of exile. A glorious promotion at the Cardinal’s hands was beyond the bounds of any possibility; Mademoiselle was still struggling for permission to show her face at court. As yet, Christina had not even met the Cardinal, or the King. Her extraordinary suggestion revealed a grossly inflated sense of her own influence, or perhaps simple naivety.

  An alarmed Mademoiselle interposed a ‘very humble’ objection. She was grateful, she was honoured, the Queen was so obliging, but there was no need for her to take such trouble – indeed, Mademoiselle begged her not to do so. Christina let the matter drop, and quickly raised a complaint of her own: one of the Duchesse’s servants had been heard, in his cups at a local hostelry, declaring that the Queen of Sweden could go hang – and worse. Mademoiselle was ‘greatly surprised at his impertinence’; she made ‘every imaginable excuse’, and promised to dismiss the man. Christina declared herself satisfied, but at once brought forth a second complaint: someone else had been saying awful things about her. It was none other than their own hero, the Homeric Prince de Condé; during her visit to Brussels, some eighteen months before, and since then as well, he had apparently been making fun of her, telling stories, saying ‘the most outrageous things in the world’. Christina did not want to believe it; it was only his servants talking, surely, though that in itself was bad enough – the Prince should have put a stop to it. The very thought of it made her despair; she had always held him in such high regard, honoured him more than any other man – how could he treat her so? Mademoiselle tried to excuse the Prince, but Christina, she writes, remained ‘very upset’.

  It was well after midnight when the evening meal was served, and Mademoiselle did not stay. She drove back to Petitbourg, where she partook of her own supper, and by the time she was ready for bed it was already broad daylight. Later in the day, she sent her compliments to the Queen, and Christina replied that she was in fact on her way to see her. But a second message shortly afterwards relayed that there would be no rendezvous, after all; the King’s men, who were to drive Christina, had prevented her from visiting Mademoiselle, leaving the Queen apparently ‘very cross’. Doubtful of the Prince de Condé, and annoyed by the King’s interference, she spent the day in a resentful sulk, fuming with frustration.

  The Rising Sun

  In the afternoon of the eighth of September, Christina arrived on the outskirts of Paris, a city she had longed to see for half her life, ‘a place of wonders, the centre of taste, wit, and gallantry’.1 She had still a little way to go before she reached the centre, and a soberer aspect met her where she stopped now, at the vast fortress of Vincennes, where her hero, le Grand Condé, had once been imprisoned by Cardinal Mazarin. The gallantry, however, was already more than apparent in the 22,000 men who stood waiting to greet her, 130 companies of knights and gentlemen, bedecked with swords and feathers, and mounted on gleaming horses. The proud memory of her escort of Roman cardinals on their little grey mules disappeared at once in a mighty flash of French armour, glinting in the sun. Here was a welcome.

  The Governor of Paris came forward to deliver a grand formal greeting to Her Majesty the Queen of Sweden, and the huge company began its progress along the crowded roads. Some two hundred thousand people had come to watch in the fine, late summer weather, a crowd so dense that the six-mile journey was slowed to five bedazzled hours.

  Twenty-five years before, following one of his most spectacular victories, Gustav Adolf the Great had entered Frankfurt in triumph, dressed in a coat of vivid scarlet, and riding a great Spanish charger. For her own triumphal entry, Christina had chosen scarlet, too, a scarlet skirt and bodice, with a great plumed hat. She had no need now to adopt the modest dress of her entry into Rome. No humble grey or penitent black would do, nor even the white garb of rebirth. This was a day of glory for her, more glorious even than her father’s day in Frankfurt, or so at least she felt, and she intended to shine appropriately. She was mounted on a beautiful grey named Unicorn, lent from the stables of the Duc de Guise. The horse was caparisoned in purple and gold, with little pistols fixed to its saddle. It must have been an exceptional animal, or perhaps Christina had her father in mind, for she refused to leave it and mount instead an elaborate dais on which she was supposed to be carried. An unhappy Lord Mayor, who had provided the dais and plenty besides to ensure a handsome spectacle, stammered a few words of welcome and presented the keys to the city, then the procession moved forward, the dais at its head, unexpectedly lighter by one impolitic Queen.

  As they entered the gates, cannon boomed from the Bastille, and the King’s own Hundred Swiss Guards stepped forward to form a closer escort for the Queen. Slowly, they progressed towards the Place Royale, where the ladies of the court stood waiting, at their head, in the absence of the French Queen, the former Queen of England, Henrietta Maria, widow of Charles I, and aunt to the young King Louis. Surrounding her in fabulous finery stood rank upon rank of noble ladies, and behind them, the lesser souls of Church and State and Academe. The satirist Loret described the scene:

  There were thirty or forty duchesses

  Flirty, haughty too-muchesses

  Jostling for rank in their silks and laces

  Smiles affixed to their painted faces

  And baronnes a hundred and twenty or so

  (For here we’ve got plenty of them, you know)

  And abbots and bishops, a hundred at least

  And each with his own humble priest.

  And the scholars and savants were there in droves

  Preferring the court to their leafy groves

  And authors and academic wits

  And critics and similar idiots

  And linguists and chemists and other bright sparks

  And millions and millions of clerks.2

  Night fell, and the vast retinue made its way by the light of a thousand torches along the river to the great palace of the Louvre. Like Fontainebleau, it was the work of François I, but unlike its lovely cousin, it stood as yet unfinished, shunned by its King, with Cardinal Mazarin its willing châtelain. There were sumptuous apartments enough in its vast interior, nonetheless, and, to raise hers to a pinnacle, Christina had been accorded an historic bed – draped in white satin embroidered with gold thread, it had been bequeathed to the dilatory Louis XIII by the determined Cardinal Richelieu. By all accounts, she slept very comfortably in it, while reports of her triumphal arrival drifted through the still September air. They reached the Duchesse de Montpensier at her château of Saint-Fargeau, but Mademoiselle was only partly impressed. It had been a magnificent affair, she admitted, but it was a touch inelegant of the Queen not to have had even a single woman in her entourage, and as for that scarlet outfit, that wasn’t a good choice, either – she had already been seen in it before.

  The day following Christina’s arrival had been reserved for the men of Paris’ learned societies to pay their homage. They came in their dozens, black-robed from the university, red-robed from the parliament, each group armed with a lengthy speech of welcome. To the hapless dignitary in Lyon, Christina had already made clear that discours of this kind were tedious to her, but now, on the whole, she endured them patiently, keeping her countenance even when one theologian, clearly accustomed to less worldly matters, referred to a possible marriage between herself and the young King of France. He then ceded his place to Olivier Patru, ‘Seat Nineteen’ of the Académie Française, whose own speech proved a model of courtly grandiloquence. Monsieur Patru, a celebrated parliamentary advocate, was a master of the art of rhetoric. Only two
years before, a prix d’éloquence had been inaugurated at the Académie, and it may be that he aspired to its laurels, but whatever the reason, he rose to the present occasion splendidly. His harangue to Christina overflows with Baroque extravagance:

  When we consider that a great Queen has deigned to cast Her eyes upon us, and to send to us, from the extremity of the North, illustrious marks of Her esteem, we cannot do less today than to adore those divine hands which have proved so gracious to us…We have come to contemplate Your Majesty, and to render Her that religious devotion which the whole world owes to Her virtue.3

  The ‘illustrious marks’ of Christina’s esteem were a letter and a portrait of herself which she had sent to the Académie from Stockholm. From his rhapsodie de dévot, Monsieur Patru proceeded to a rhapsodie de savant:

  Your Majesty has resisted the sirens’ song, and applied Herself to the study of wisdom…The knowledge of languages, which consumes our days and nights…has for You been but a childish game. No flower of belles-lettres has been left unplucked by Your royal hands. There is nothing in all the sciences that Your mind, so vast a mind, has not encompassed. You have done what very few men have been able to do, and what neither maid nor woman has dared to attempt…Though we scour the pages of history, even the books of the ancients, we shall find nothing to match it.

  Advancing from scholarship to politics, Monsieur Patru then voiced a reference to the Peace of Westphalia, and in doing so managed to include a doubtful compliment:

  In the eyes of all Europe, You have brought peace to Your enemies…And, though the common herd may imagine other reasons for it, that memorable event was brought about solely by the force of Your counsel. It was not the experience of Your captains, nor the valour of Your soldiers, but Your wisdom alone, that brought terror to the Roman Eagle…Your Majesty has done alone what all Her armies could not do.

  It may have been at this point that Christina got up from her seat and turned away from the speaker. At any rate, Monsieur Patru was interrupted for some moments while Christina sought a more comfortable chair. Then, undaunted, the gentleman continued in heroic vein:

  We of the Académie have wished for nothing so ardently as to see You, heavenly princess, whose life, so full of wonders, is the embellishment of our days. And now, we see You at last, we feast our eyes upon You, but alas! our joy is tinged with bitterness, when we consider that in a moment we are to lose – perhaps for ever! – Your august presence…However, in our misfortune, Your picture will console us, if anything can.

  Monsieur Patru further assured the visitor that he and his confrères would find in her picture ‘the dearest object of our eyes’. They would ‘pay their respects’ to it, ‘render it homage’ – indeed, ‘offer it sacrifices’. Christina thanked the learned gentlemen, got up from her chair, and made her escape to a different kind of theatre.

  She went now to the Palais-Royal, whose theatre had been built at the command of Richelieu himself. The Cardinal’s enthusiasm had made play-going respectable, and by the time of Christina’s visit, Paris had a large and discriminating theatre public from the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, and the clergy, too. Private theatres existed in the houses of the great, but most were open to all comers, though by the standards of the day it was not cheap entertainment – even a standing place would have cost the better part of a day’s wage for a labouring man. Soldiers and liveried servants provided an alternative boisterous element, and generally forced their way in without paying anything at all. Most of the plays were still in the traditional style of the Italian commedia dell’arte, with stock characters acting out familiar themes, more or less extemporized, often bawdy or satirical. Christina loved them, and may even have seen Fiorillo in the most famous of all commedia roles, the engaging, intriguing servant Scaramouche, the archetype of all the more or less lovable rogues she chose to have about her in her own life. She was a little too early, or a little too late, to see the French theatre’s own rising star, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, dit Molière. A recent stint in prison for debt had persuaded him to seek a slower fortune touring in the provinces; he did not return to Paris for a year or more.

  Regardless of the show, in any case, the audience had an excellent spectacle in Christina’s own eccentric behaviour. Rather than seating herself in a noble loge, as expected, she had chosen instead a small chair in the gradins, the shallow stone steps at the far end of the theatre. From here, instead of looking out at the fans and jewels of the people on the other side, she had a direct view of the stage, a fair compensation for her uncomfortable position in one of the ‘cheaper’ seats. Presumably in an attempt to make herself more comfortable, she propped her legs up on a second chair, adopting a posture ‘so indecent’, according to one shocked Parisian, that ‘one glimpsed what even the least modest woman should keep hidden’.4

  Christina added to the scandal by similarly unconventional behaviour during a mass at Notre Dame a day or two later. She had not intended to go at all, but the King’s own abbé-confessor had suggested that it might be politic to do so; it would be to the edification of all Parisians, mighty and humble, he said, to see so recent a convert as Her Majesty in an act of public devotion to the faith. Christina agreed, but declined to make her confession to the abbé, requesting a bishop instead. As to what the Queen confessed, His Grace’s lips were naturally sealed, but he did let slip that Her Majesty had not seemed overly penitent, having stared him full in the face throughout the proceedings. A similar lack of piety was only too evident during the mass. Christina chattered audibly to the disconcerted bishops on either side of her, and remained standing throughout the service, only once or twice kneeling to pray. A little more devotion might have been expected, it was felt. Really speaking, or so thought la Grande Mademoiselle on hearing of it, she should still have been ‘in the grip of a convert’s zeal’.5

  Christina was much more zealous making her social rounds, and she visited every illustrious Parisian who was not likely to bore her with a lengthy hymn of praise. She saw Georges de Scudéry and his sister Madeleine, leading light of the précieuses, and the poet Saint-Amant, ‘big Saint-Amansky’, whom she had met in Stockholm, and the melancholic Duc de La Rochefoucauld. The Duc’s famous Maximes were still gestating, but he was on the point of publishing a little ‘portrait of himself’,6 and Christina shortly afterwards tried to emulate it – not in French, her preferred language, but, perhaps rather too confidently, in Italian. Like so many of her projects, it did not get very far, perhaps because she lost interest in it, or perhaps simply, as she said herself, ‘because my Italian wasn’t good enough’ – for the moment, she did not think to try again in a different language. The Duc was ‘very reserved with people I don’t know’, and by his own admission told few jokes, nobly preferring those subjects that ‘fortified the soul’, but if Christina found him a trifle stodgy, she was certainly interested in what he wrote. He was a fastidious man, ‘and most particular with the ladies’, and he claimed that he had never in his life spoken a doubtful word in a lady’s presence. What he made of Christina’s colourful language the Duc did not record.

  Paris delighted and impressed Christina. She liked being fêted, and she enjoyed her grand surroundings, but she was happiest of all when left to make her own smaller, more personal discoveries. Declining any retinue, she set off for a few hours every day to do some exploring by herself. Paris was burgeoning. Despite being shunned by its sovereign, who preferred to spend his time and his money elsewhere, it was gradually transforming into the brilliant capital of a brilliant state, a city of light for the rising Sun King. The first of the great boulevards and the first fine public squares had already been laid down. The river was alive with commerce, and its banks were alive, too, with people bustling and jostling, tough Parisians shouting out their business, awkward newcomers from the provinces – the disdained ‘little people’ – foraging between boats and boxes for an honest day’s work. It was by far the largest city that Christina had seen, three or four times the size o
f Rome, thirty or forty times that of Stockholm.

  Though the building had begun, the medieval city was still very much in evidence. Narrow, crooked streets made the going hard for carts and carriages, and the rich were carried about in practical litter chairs, with a hardy ‘baptized mule’ hoisting the poles at either end. Large signs of painted wood dangled perilously from shops and workmen’s quarters, picturing the goods and services available inside. Posters stuck to the walls advertised everything from theatrical productions to remedies for venereal disease. Town criers wandered from corner to corner, and abandoned children cried, too, beneath the eaves of closed doors. The new postboxes drew more attention, and the mail fed to them went three times daily off to the corners of Western Europe and, less successfully, to addresses in Paris itself, with its hundreds of unnamed streets. In the middle of them stood Les Halles, ‘the stomach of Paris’,7 a great sprawl of markets, open and covered, selling every kind of food and artefact. Christina saw it all herself from the windows of her own litter chair, and when something took her fancy, she stepped out confidently in her sturdy boots, ready to retreat again if the going became too rugged. ‘It’s true there’s a bit of shit in the streets,’ one famous Parisian noted shortly afterwards, ‘but we have our chairs.’8

  If Christina found Paris memorable, Paris found her equally so. She was not at all what the city was accustomed to in a personnage royale, hopping down from her chair to chat with the local people, popping into a shop to watch cakes being baked or a book being printed, rummaging in the market stalls, teasing the street children, stopping to sniff the flowers on a wander through the public parks. When the mood for familiarity left her, she walked in haughty, almost sculptural mode, head to the right, chin up, gaze fixed, until the next thing took her fancy, and she broke into a laugh, or clapped her hands, or swore.