Catherine’s greatest success was in convincing her subjects that she was as Russian as they were, and not a petty upstart German princess. One day she said to her doctors, “Bleed me to my last drop of German blood so that I may have only Russian blood in my veins.”106 And indeed, of all her many lovers, the greatest, longest-lasting love affair of her life was with Russia.
6. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE: POWER, PASSION, AND POLITICS
With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With mine own hands I give away my crown,
With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,
With mine own breath release all duteous oaths;
All pomp and majesty I do forswear.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY WAS A SEA OF FEMALE DEBAUCHERY dotted with islands of prudery. To avoid tainting her cherished purity, Queen Charlotte of Great Britain banned from court those individuals who had the merest whiff of scandal attached to their names. As a result, the smallness of her court was outdone only by its dullness. This plain-faced German princess gave her husband, George III, fifteen children, and luckily for her, George was equally horrified at the thought of adultery. Many courtiers pointed sadly to this unnatural fidelity to an ugly wife as the cause of the king’s madness; in 1788 George began foaming at the mouth as he shrieked his obscene desires for the queen’s maids of honor.
Empress Maria Theresa of Austria was not so fortunate in the fidelity of her husband. Though Francis of Lorraine, Holy Roman Emperor, regularly did his duty by the empress, giving her sixteen children, he had a proclivity for actresses and ladies-in-waiting. Hoping to dampen her husband’s enthusiasm for other women, in 1747 the empress formed the Chastity Commission to investigate reports of adulterous sexual activity. After six months and a handful of convictions of prostitutes, dancers, and their customers, the commission was laughed out of existence. Francis’s diddling continued unabated.
Russia, first and foremost, was the land where female sovereigns openly enjoyed the sexual prowess of strapping young men. But by the latter part of the eighteenth century, western European queens were following suit.
MARIA LUISA OF PARMA, QUEEN OF SPAIN
“The Earthly Trinity”
When the future Carlos IV of Spain married the fourteen-year-old Maria Luisa of Parma in 1765, she almost immediately began having affairs with courtiers. Her husband seemed unconcerned, but his outraged father, King Carlos III, exiled every man upon whom the princess’s eyes alighted with favor. On one occasion the prince begged his father to bring the young man back because “his wife Luisa was quite unhappy without him, as he used to amuse her amazingly.” “Booby!” the king snapped, turning away in disgust.1 Under his breath he added, “All of them alike—all of them whores!”2
Maria Luisa heaved a sigh of relief when old King Carlos died in 1788; he had been prepared to exile to a remote province her most recent lover, a spirited eighteen-year-old guardsman named Manuel Godoy. The latest object of the queen’s affections was tall and strongly built, with a shock of thick black hair, dreamy dark eyes, and cheeks so naturally rosy that many incorrectly believed he wore rouge. There was a sensual, sleepy look to him that absolutely inflamed women. Now, with such a compliant husband as king, Maria Luisa could keep Godoy by her side and have sex with him whenever she wanted.
At twenty-seven, the newly minted queen had dark auburn hair and large black eyes sparkling with sensuality. She was neither ugly nor beautiful; with her alert expression, thin lips, and long flared nose, she rather looked like an attractive dog. Her sex drive was insatiable, and the only man who ever came close to satisfying her was Manuel Godoy, who was reported to be a roaring lion in bed. As a reward for services rendered to Spain, the queen had her husband make Godoy prime minister and give him the exultant title Prince of the Peace.
Over time, both Godoy and Maria Luisa took other lovers and quarreled heartily about them, yet still maintained their sexual relationship. Once during a procession the favorite actually slapped the queen’s face. The king, walking ahead, turned around to ask what the noise was, and the queen merely murmured that she had dropped a book.
When the queen took on a new lover named Manuel Mallo, King Carlos, seeing Mallo in a beautiful carriage pulled by four magnificent horses, wondered aloud how the fellow could afford to keep such a splendid equipage. Godoy replied loudly enough so the queen could hear him, “Sire, Mallo doesn’t have a penny in the world, but everyone knows that he is kept by an old and ugly woman who robs her husband to pay him.” When the king burst out laughing and asked the queen her opinion, she said haltingly, “Oh, well, Carlos, you know how Manuel is always joking.”3
In 1796, after a particularly stormy scene, Maria Luisa reluctantly agreed to appoint Godoy’s new mistress, the sleek and sinuous Josephina Tudo, as her lady-in-waiting. But Godoy, not satisfied with his luscious mistress and powerful queen, had even greater ambitions. He tried to arrange a marriage with Madame Royale, the daughter of the late Marie Antoinette. When Hapsburg laughter at this suggestion echoed all the way from Vienna to Madrid—stopping at every court in between—Godoy had to make do with the king’s cousin Maria Theresa of Bourbon, the countess of Chinchon. Though married to a Bourbon, Godoy brazenly advertised that he was maintaining a ménage à trois and received guests at dinner with his wife sitting on his right and his mistress on his left.
Nor did Godoy limit his amorous adventures to the queen, his wife, and his mistress. He engaged in sex with women who threw themselves at him during his evening receptions. “A girl arriving with her mother always went in to the Minister without her,” reported the French ambassador J. M. Alguier. “Those who went in came out again with heightened color and rumpled dresses, which they would then smooth down in full view of everybody…. Every evening the same scene was enacted in the very palace itself, the Court looking on and the Queen’s apartments being not twenty yards away; the latter would rage and scream and threaten, only in the end to admit herself beaten.”4
Observers at the time and historians ever since have wondered how the king could remain unconcerned about the love affair his wife so openly conducted with Godoy. Some courtiers believed that he was actually unaware of it. The French ambassador reported, “The thing that must strike those most who watch Charles IV in the bosom of his Court is his blindness where the conduct of the Queen is concerned. He knows nothing, sees nothing, suspects nothing…. Neither the warnings he has received in writing nor the intrigues going on all around him, nor the marks of favor lacking both pretext and precedent, nor the attentions which violate all usage and decency, nor even the existence of two children who bear, as is obvious to all, a striking resemblance to the Prince of the Peace—nothing has availed to open the King’s eyes.”5
King Carlos, Queen Maria Luisa, and Godoy called themselves “the earthly trinity.” In 1808 after a palace revolt which made Crown Prince Ferdinand king of Spain, the trinity and the new king raced to France, both sides hoping to get Napoleon’s support. But the emperor promptly put the whole squabbling group in elegant French confinement for several years, while Napoleon’s brother Joseph climbed onto the vacant throne of Spain. After Napoleon’s demise, Ferdinand once again became king. The trinity, meanwhile, had retired to Italy.
The queen’s love affair with Godoy lasted thirty-one years until her death in 1819. When Maria Luisa breathed her last, it was Godoy at her side, not her husband, who was visiting his brother, the king of Naples to go hunting. Within days of her death, Carlos himself gave up the ghost.
Godoy was devastated. He had lost both royal patrons within a fortnight; at fifty-one he was hale and hearty with expensive tastes and no money. Maria Luisa had left him a generous inheritance, but her son, King Ferdinand VII—who had always hated his mother’s lover—forced him to renounce it. However, Ferdinand, bristling at the thought of Godoy holding the title Prince of the Peace, offered him a large sum of money to give it back to the Spanish crown. Godoy agreed.
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In his last years Godoy gravitated to Paris, that magnet for older men with money and an eye for the ladies. The country boy who had conquered a queen and ruled a nation was now an elderly gentleman with white whiskers and a jaunty walk. Only his voluptuous lips and dreamy eyes were the same. He died in 1851 at the age of eighty-four.
MARIA CAROLINA OF AUSTRIA, QUEEN OF NAPLES
The White Glove Trick
Oddly similar to his brother, King Carlos of Spain, King Ferdinand of Naples cared little about his wife’s lovers as long as he could chase stags. His wife, Maria Carolina, an Austrian archduchess and sister of Marie Antoinette, had dark blue eyes, chestnut hair, and an unquenchable thirst for politics. In her quest for political power, she was fortunate that her husband had a strange sexual fetish for her arms. She could convince him to do anything she wanted by slowly removing her long white gloves. According to Count Roger de Damas, “His brain becomes exalted when he sees a glove well stretched over a beautifully shaped arm. It is a mania he has always had and which has never varied. How many affairs of the greatest importance have I seen settled by the Queen’s care to pull her gloves over her pretty arms while discussing the question which engrossed her! I have seen the king take notice of this, smile, and grant her wish.”6
Once, when she did not get her way despite cajoling, threatening, storming, imploring, and the white-glove trick, she bit her husband’s hand so hard he had a scar for quite some time.
Realizing her own political wisdom was not sufficient to run a nation, in 1779 she nominated an English visitor, the ex-naval officer Sir John Acton, as chief adviser. Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador, reported, “He was forty-two, an experienced man of the world, enterprising, cosmopolitan and a bachelor. After a few conversations with him, Maria Carolina was convinced that she had found a perfect collaborator….She regarded him as her own discovery. Together they would create a really independent kingdom. Acton set to work with cool thoroughness, patience and a systematic energy almost unknown in Naples.”7
She also fell head over heels in love with him. Tall, lean, with an intelligent face and dignified bearing, the very proper Sir John seemed oblivious to the queen’s charms, which made her passion burn more brightly. She finally conquered him, however, and rewarded him with the war department and, soon after, the finance ministry, where he became prime minister in all but name. Last, he became a field marshal and general of the Neapolitan armed forces. The right foil to the queen’s melodrama, the taciturn Sir John ruled Naples with calm strength.
But the queen’s long white arms had ceased to pull Acton’s puppet strings by the late 1780s, when he began to work openly against her cockamamie political ideas. He was in the possession of steamy titillating letters she had written him and checked her scheming by threatening to release them. To punish him, she took countless young lovers. Unconcerned with her sexual escapades, Acton intervened only when he saw a young man delving into politics. Acton would inform the king of his wife’s love affair, and the lover would be exiled. Ironically, Acton became the king’s best friend and the queen’s greatest enemy. The former lovers studiously avoided each other.
The queen fumed against Acton as the man “whose wickedness has altogether surpassed what I could have imagined, and I admit that this black ingratitude is deeply distressing to me and disgusts me more and more with this world.”8
Throughout the tumult caused by the Napoleonic wars, Acton stood by the royal family. He arranged their escape from revolutionary forces and lived with them in their Sicilian exile while Napoleon’s sister and her husband, the Murats, ruled Naples. But finally, plagued by old age, poor health, and the queen’s temper tantrums, he retired and the lethargic king permitted his wife to rule once more. We can assume she went right to her glove drawer.
MARIE ANTOINETTE OF AUSTRIA, QUEEN OF FRANCE
“Adieu, My Heart Is All Yours”
When seventeen-year-old Marie Antoinette of Austria, for three years the wife of the heir to the French throne, made her first official entrance into Paris in 1773, she was met by the thunderous applause of wildly cheering crowds. “Madame, you have here a hundred thousand lovers,” a city official told her.9 But they would, over time, dwindle down to one.
On a glittering cold January night in 1774 she met him at a masked ball in Paris. Such balls had been the rage for over a century because masked women could flirt outrageously without being recognized. Incognito, even the noblest women teased unknown men and sometimes had sex with them in carriages or gardens, willingly raising their skirts but never their black velvet masks. There were reports that some men had sex with their own wives at masked balls and never knew it.
Eighteen-year-old Count Axel Fersen of Sweden, sent by his powerful father on a European tour to polish him up, was enchanted when a lovely masked girl approached him, placed her hand ever so gently upon his sleeve, and began to flirt. After a time, she raised her mask and others gasped to see the dauphine, or crown princess, Marie Antoinette. The dauphine should have been presiding over her elegant court at Versailles, not attending a shocking masked ball in Paris. But she had been forced to marry a man she found repulsive, a man who after five years of marriage was still unable to consummate it. She vented her frustrations in dancing, gambling, and shopping.
Marie Antoinette looked straight into the grave blue eyes of young Count Axel Fersen and laughed out loud before disappearing into the crowd. The following day Fersen attended a ball at Versailles where he danced continuously for five hours, the eagle eyes of the dauphine watching his graceful movements. A few days later he reported in his diary, “I go only to the balls given by Madame la Dauphine.”10 Possibly he had already fallen in love. For four months he stayed at Versailles, and it is likely that he saw her often at court events.
Slender gallant Fersen must have contrasted favorably to Marie Antoinette’s husband, Louis. The baron de Frénilly wrote of the dauphin, “He was a good man, a good husband, pious, chaste, virtuous, just, humane, but without wit, without character, without will, without experience, a heavy mass badly carved, stout, lumbering, brusque, coarse, common in speech and trivial in manner; it was necessary to take thought, and to close one’s eyes, to do him justice.”11
Shortly after Fersen reluctantly left Versailles to visit London, old King Louis XV succumbed to smallpox. The dull-witted dauphin was now King Louis XVI of France. Louis was miserable in the knowledge that just as he made a terrible husband, he would make an awful king. Iron strength, unrelenting ego, and unquenchable thirst for glory were the qualities required by a king. Poor Louis was kindhearted, moral, modest, and indecisive. When asked what adjective he would like to see attached to his name, Louis replied with a heavy sigh, “I would like to be known as Louis the Severe.”12
The queen, for her part, said that her goal was not to be a great queen; she wanted to be the most fashionable woman in France. Marie Antoinette, though beautiful and sparkling enough to fill a decorative role at the French court, boasted even less intelligence than her plodding husband. Unlike him, she was not smart enough to realize her own limitations. Decisive and confident, Marie Antoinette prided herself on her political genius, easily swaying her weak husband.
In August 1778 Axel Fersen returned to Versailles. At twenty-two he was an experienced lover and sophisticated courtier. In a crowd of clucking favor seekers, Fersen alone was reserved, discreet, thoughtful. A French nobleman, the duc de Lévis, reported, “His manners were noble and unaffected. His conversation was not very animated, and he showed more judgment than wit. He was circumspect with men and reserved with women, serious without being sad. His face and his manner were perfectly suited to the hero of a novel, though not of a French novel, for he had neither the brilliance nor the frivolity.”13
The queen’s page Alexandre de Tilly said that Axel was “one of the handsomest men I ever saw, though with an icy countenance, which women do not dislike if they can hope to give it animation.”14 One of his spurned lovers wrote th
at “he had a burning soul beneath a layer of ice.”15
As for Marie Antoinette, much had changed since she had last seen Fersen. In the intervening four years Louis had finally conquered his impotence and the queen was pregnant. But she was still not in love with her husband. Upon seeing her former admirer, the queen’s face lit up. Smiling broadly, she cried, “Ah! But here is an old acquaintance!”16
Fersen wrote his father, “The Queen, who is the most beautiful and amiable princess I know, has had the kindness to ask often about me….”17 Hearing that as a captain of the Swedish king’s light horse he owned a gorgeous pale blue and white uniform, she made him promise to wear it. When Fersen walked toward her one day resplendent in his military attire, she was leaning on the arm of her first equerry, the comte de Tessé, who “was made aware, by a movement of her hand, of the strong emotion caused by that sight.”18
By autumn she was seen to be giving Fersen more attention than any other courtier. She played the harpsichord for him and sang. She often invited him to her private apartments where, in a small group, she would play cards with him, or perhaps draw him aside for a private chat. “My stay here becomes more agreeable by the day,” he wrote his father gleefully in December. “It’s a charming place!”19
On December 19, 1778, Marie Antoinette gave birth to a daughter. Though a girl could not inherit the French throne, and Louis was eager to try for a boy, the queen spurned his attentions and focused on her devoted Swede. It is likely that the burgeoning love affair was not yet physical; it consisted of bright eyes and slow smiles, the inexpressible delight of being together.
But after a time, Fersen looked about him and realized his love was futile, even dangerous. Hoping a change of scene would ease his pain, he volunteered to serve France in the American Revolutionary War. Perhaps, with an ocean between them, he could forget her.
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