Marie-Antoinette, Daughter of the Caesars

by Elena Maria Vidal

  As Jean Chalon points out in his biography Chère Marie-Antoinette, Fersen, who had many mistresses, saw the Queen as an angel, to whom he offered reverent and chaste homage. According to Chalon, Antoinette knew about sex only through conjugal love, where she found her “happiness,” her “bonheur essentiel,” as she wrote to her mother.4 Petitfils, in his biography of Louis XVI, quotes the Queen’s brother Joseph, who said Antoinette was a “font of honesty and virtue.”5 Petitfils asserts that there was no affair but a romantic pact, like a courtly novel, for the Queen was too religious to have an affair.6 If there had been any cause for concern about Count Fersen’s presence at the French court as regards the Queen’s reputation, the Austrian ambassador Count Mercy-Argenteau would surely have mentioned it in one of the reams of letters to Antoinette’s mother Empress Maria Theresa, to whom he passed on every detail of the young Queen’s life. Count Mercy had spies whom he paid well to gather information, but Fersen was not worth mentioning. Neither is he mentioned in a romantic way by other people close to the Queen in their memoirs, such as her maid Madame Campan and the Baron de Besenval.

  Much has also been made of the following passage from a letter from M. Creutz, the Swedish ambassador, to King Gustav III:

  Je dois confier à Votre Majesté que le jeune comte de Fersen a été si bien vu de la Reine que cela a donné des ombrages à plusieurs personnes. J'avoue que je ne puis m'empêcher de croire qu'elle avait du penchant pour lui: j'en ai vu des indices trop sûrs pour endouter. Le jeune comte de Fersen a eu dans cette occasion une conduite admirable par sa modestie et par sa réserve et surtout par le parti qu'il a pris d'aller en Amérique. En s'éloignant il écartait tous les dangers; mais il fallait évidemment une fermeté au-dessus de son âge pour surmonter cette séduction. La Reine ne pouvait le quitter des yeux dans les derniers jours; en le regardant ils étaient remplis de larmes.7

  Here is a translation:

  I must confide to Your Majesty that the young Count Fersen is so well received by the Queen that it has given offence to several persons. I admit that I cannot refrain from thinking that she has a fondness for him: I saw signs of this that were too clear to leave any doubt. The young Count Fersen’s behavior on this occasion was admirable in its modesty and restraint and especially in his decision to go to America. By leaving, he removed all dangers, but of course wisdom and resolve beyond his years were required to overcome this seduction. The Queen could not take her eyes off him these last few days; as she watched him they filled with tears. I beg Your Majesty to keep this a secret for her sake and Senator Fersen’s.

  Although the letter of Creutz is dated 1779 it was in August of 1778 that Fersen returned to Versailles; Antoinette was six months pregnant at the time with her first child. She may have been a bit weepy as are many women with child. It could also be that le beau Fersen did indeed impress her with his charm and masculine beauty, which seemed to be his usual effect on women. She was not made of wood. But what must be remembered here is that the Austrian ambassador Comte de Mercy, who constantly spied on Antoinette, reporting everything to her mother, did not think the incident with Fersen was worth mentioning. He was much more upset about the influence of Madame de Polignac on the young Queen. The Spanish ambassador Count Aranda, who paid servants to inspect the royal sheets so that he knew when the King and Queen had marital relations, also did not think anything of the Queen's friendship with Fersen. Creutz was an adroit minister who knew it would please his king to know that a Swede was in favor at the French court. His probable exaggerations of Fersen’s impact on the Queen need to be viewed in that light.

  Antoinette and Count Fersen first met at the opera ball during Carnival on January 30, 1774, when she chatted with him behind her mask, in the presence of her husband and in-laws, but no eyebrows were raised by this playful incident. Later in 1778 when the Queen was pregnant with her first child, Fersen was admitted to the Queen’s circle of friends. There is no record, in the various records of guest lists and visitors, that Fersen ever visited Petit Trianon.8 He returned in 1783, coming and going over the next few years, and every time he arrived Antoinette was already pregnant, which is an important point for those who try to claim that Fersen fathered Antoinette’s younger children.9 He once asked the Queen to write letters on his behalf to his king, as she did for another Swedish aristocrat as well. Some biographers claim that in March 1780 when the Queen sang the aria, “Ah! Que je fus inspirée...” from the opera Didon by Picinni, she did not take her eyes from the count. However, that opera did not premier until October 1780, while the count was in America, so it is probable that the story is apocryphal. At any rate, it is not evidence of a liaison.10

  Some biographers assert that in the 1780’s Antoinette may have become sexually involved with Count Fersen; other authors see this as ridiculous. As Chalon notes, she had found her bonheur essentiel in her marriage. Also, she was in those years having babies, miscarriages, caring for sick and dying children, and after the death of her daughter Sophie in 1787, becoming more observant of Catholic devotional practices. In 1788, she gave orders that the fasts of the Church be more carefully observed at her table than previously. She also began making public devotions and prayers with her household in the Royal Chapel.11 Acording to Desmond Seward in his biography of Antoinette: “Post-Freudian biographers all tend to ignore Marie-Antoinette’s intensely devout personal religion which, as with her mother, was the real source of her strength.”12 From 1785 onward, she had to deal with the stress of the Diamond Necklace scandal, the growing political crisis, the death of her baby, the long slow death of her oldest son due to tuberculosis, all the while experiencing nervous problems as a result, including dizziness and headaches. Nesta Webster quotes the memoirist Laure Junot, the Duchesse d’Abrantès, who said:

  The Queen was so seriously engaged at the period when she is accused of this liaison with M. de Fersen that it is unbelievable that she could have long hours to consecrate to love. How could one love during the infernal existence this unhappy Princess was then leading?13

  Nesta Webster in Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette during the Revolution shows how the Queen would have found it impossible to have had an affair even if she had been so inclined. At Versailles, she lived in public, and even at Petit Trianon there were servants and family members around. Even when she was alone, she was not really alone; there were people around every corner. Both the Austrian and Spanish ambassadors, and other diplomats as well, wrote meticulous reports to their respective monarchs on the Queen’s private life based on their spy rings, questioning maids and footmen. As Webster writes in her two volume study:

  Yet not once in the vast correspondence of Mercy is Fersen’s name mentioned, nor amidst the malicious gossip of the other ambassadors do we find so much as a hint that he was regarded with particular favor by Marie-Antoinette. After the royal family had been brought to the Tuileries she was even more closely surrounded, with one National Guard sleeping in her antechamber and others keeping watch on her all day. In a letter to her sister… she herself had written on this: ‘I defy the universe to find any real wrong in me; indeed, I can only gain by being guarded and followed so closely.’14

  Some authors claim that not only was Antoinette sleeping with Fersen, but she was also sleeping with the King. To be shared by two men is completely at odds with the modest, prudish, innocent image of Antoinette built by biographers such as Cronin, Delorme, Webster, and Bertière. Antonia Fraser insists that Louis fathered all of his wife’s children because Fersen would have been clever enough to use condoms.15 Nevertheless, she cites an instance when Fersen impregnated one of his mistresses; condoms were not always reliable.16 There are those that have Antoinette throwing Louis out of bed while running off to sleep with Fersen. Indeed, Simone Bertière mentions how Louis and Antoinette refrained from marital relations after the birth of Sophie in 1786.17 Antoinette’s brother Joseph II was scandalized that she wanted to space the birth of her children, which was becoming fashionable among young mother
s, he lamented.18 He was used to the women in the Habsburg clan who would have sixteen, seventeen and eighteen children in as many years. But Antoinette wanted to regain her health so she could devote herself to bringing up the children she already had. Louis and Antoinette’s abstinence was surely due to the Queen’s health and fragile emotional state. For one thing, she was in her thirties which was considered middle aged in those days. The year 1786 was a difficult year for her: Louis-Joseph's health was failing, the baby Sophie was not thriving. Antoinette, aware of the abominable calumnies being spread about her in the wake of the Diamond Necklace scandal, declared to Madame Campan in September of 1786, “I want to die!” When Madame Campan brought her orange flower water for her nerves, she said, “No, do not love me, it is better to give me death!”19 She may have had post-partum depression or even on the verge of a breakdown. Louis himself was also in a state of collapse by 1787, due to the ongoing

  financial disaster.20

  While Antoinette might have been in love with Count

  Axel von Fersen at some point, there is no evidence of an extramarital affair, and to over speculate on the Queen’s personal feelings is to violate the sanctuary of the human heart. Whatever her sentiments, they did not interfere with her duties as wife, mother, and Queen. Adultery for a Queen of France was high treason and if any of her many enemies at court discovered such a situation, had it existed, Louis XVI would have been forced to take her children away from her and banish her to a convent. Even the most basic knowledge of her temperament suggests that she was devoted to her children and would never have risked being separated from them. Those who claim that Louis XVI “knew” about his wife’s “affair” with Fersen, but looked the other way, are ignoring the moral scruples and religious principles of le Roi très chrétien. He would never have permitted the mother of his children to carry on with another man.

  A passage written by Lady Elizabeth Foster in her diary, claiming that Antoinette and Fersen were lovers, has sometimes been used as proof of an affair, even in Lady Antonia Fraser’s otherwise worthy biography. It is no proof at all; Bess Foster was not part of the Queen’s inner circle, although she was briefly Fersen’s mistress when they met abroad. Furthermore, according to Amanda Foreman’s acclaimed biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Bess’ version of events in her diary “was more fantasy than truth.”21 Georgiana’s daughter Harriet described Bess thus: “...More perverted than deceitful...I really believe she hardly knows herself the difference between right and wrong now.”22 Bess is not a reliable source concerning Antoinette.

  The myth of Axel von Fersen as Antoinette’s lover evolved after the deaths of both the count and the Queen. The count himself carelessly sowed the seeds of the legend because being “the Queen’s lover” added to his prestige; so much for his reputation for discretion. In 1822 an Irishman named O’Meara published Napoleon in Exile in which he repeated gossip that had been rampant at Bonaparte’s court, about Fersen and the Queen, attributed at the time to the Queen’s maid Madame Campan. 23 The rumor was proved to be false by British historian John Wilson Croker, who in October 1822 wrote in the Quarterly Review that Madame Campan had not been present at court when certain allegations were said to have occurred.24 Madame Campan herself refuted any such stories when she said of Antoinette:

  I who for fifteen years saw her attached to her august consort and her children, kind to her servitors, unfortunately too polite, too simple, too much on an equality with the people of the Court, I cannot bear to see her character reviled. I wish I had a hundred mouths, I wish I had wings and could inspire the same confidence in the truth which is so readily accorded to lies.25

  Other writers allege that Madame Campan fabricated this statement in order to return to the good graces of Antoinette’s daughter, who was annoyed with her for having taught Napoleon’s sisters at her finishing school. But then, if Madame Campan was a liar, of what value would her testimony be at all, for anything? But people more easily believe stories of scandals than they do stories of virtue. If she deliberately softened her portrayal of Antoinette, in order to get back into the good graces of Madame Royale, she did not do a good job. In that case, she would not have been so critical of Louis XVI, since it was well-known that the princess idolized her dead father.

  For many years following, most historians and biographers, including Carlyle, the Goncourts, Imbert de Saint-Amand, Rocheterie, Bimbinet, Lenôtre and Nolhac did not take the Fersen story seriously and ignored it. When the letters of the Queen and Count Fersen were published by his great nephew Baron von Klinckowström in the late nineteenth century, they proved the nature of the Queen and Fersen’s relationship to be principally a diplomatic one. And anyone can read the extant latters now, transcribed by Fersen from the cypher used, and see that they are almost entirely political. His letters to her are particularly cold and business-like. According to Nesta Webster in Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette during the Revolution the Fersen letters were “written in a very difficult cipher to which a particular edition of Paul and Virginie provided the key….In certain of the letters, mainly those from the queen to Fersen, passages have been erased and are indicated by rows of dots in the printed text.”26 The Baron himself wrote that “the Fersen family has retained the greatest veneration for those holy and august martyrs, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, and there is nothing among the papers remaining from the Comte de Fersen which can cast a shadow on the conduct of the Queen.”27 The passages erased were most likely sensitive diplomatic issues, not declarations of love, as some romantics have claimed. They concealed allusions to the Queen’s disagreements with her brothers-in-law Artois and Provence, or references to the Duc d’Orléans and other revolutionaries, or even mentions of spies or persons whose families would have been compromised had the letters fallen into the wrong hands. The original letters are lost; some say the Baron burned them in order to keep the cipher from being imitated and used for forgeries; others say he burned them to keep people from discovering proof of a love affair, but there was no love affair to be found, by his own admission.

  In the 1930’s Alma Söderhjelm published the letters of Count Fersen to his sister Sophie, hoping to prove from those letters that the Count and the Queen had had a love affair. It is upon Söderhjelm’s book that most of the modern romances about Antoinette are based. Now in the spring of 1790, Fersen was having a passionate affair with an Italian lady named Eleonore Sullivan, who had been the mistress of several aristocrats, including Antoinette’s brother Joseph II. She was married to an Irishman but as of 1790 she was the mistress of a Scotsman named Quintin Crawford. She was kept by Monsieur Crawford in an elegant house in Paris, where she had a maid named Josephine, and a hideaway for Fersen in the attic. Later authors would claim that when Fersen mentioned “Josephine” in his letters, it was always a code name for Antoinette, forgetting the Fersen knew sat least three women with that name.28 It cannot be ignored that Fersen gave “Josephine” menial instructions about a stove; in that instance he was more than likely referring to Mrs. Sullivan’s maid and the cold room in the attic. Likewise, the woman Fersen writes ardently about to his sister at this time, who is honored by Sophie’s attentions, is most likely Mrs. Sullivan, whom he refers to as “El” or “elle.” Some try to make the Queen the subject of his ecstatic passages, but why would the Queen of France, in the midst of so many political intrigues, threatened by death, have wanted to ingratiate herself to Fersen’s sister? "Elle” (capitalized), however, is what Fersen uses when referring reverently to the Queen, la Reine, whom he usually mentions in conjunction with the King. Baron Klinckowström quotes Fersen’s letter to his father in Feb 1791, in which he writes of his service to Louis XVI and Antoinette: “I am attached to the King and the Queen and I owe it to them for the kindness they showed me when they were able, and I should be vile and ungrateful if I deserted them now that they can do nothing for me….”29 As the Duchesse de FitzJames, a great-niece of Fersen, is quoted by Webster from a 1893 French periodical
La Vie Contemporaine:

  I desire first of all to do away with the lying legend, based on a calumny, which distorted the relations between Marie-Antoinette and Fersen, relations consisting in absolute devotion, in complete abnegation on one side, and on the other in friendship, profound, trusting and grateful. People have wished to degrade to the vulgarities of a love novel, facts which were otherwise terrible, sentiments which were otherwise lofty.30

  Much has been made of the letters Antoinette wrote to her friend Count Esterhazy, and the ring which she sent to Fersen via Esterhazy. In August 1791, after the failure of the escape to Montmédy the royal couple were isolated and cut off from news about relatives and friends since Fersen, the principle channel for conveying the news, had been silent for almost two months. The Swedish count was in Vienna at King Gustavus’ request on a secret mission, consulting with the Emperor about the possible rescue of the French royal family. The Queen wrote to Esterhazy: “If you write to him [Fersen] be sure to tell him that many leagues and many countries can never separate hearts: I feel this truth more everyday.”31 In September 1791, the Queen sent Esterhazy two gold rings which, according to Webster, bore the motto: Domine, salve fac regem et regina. (God save the King and the Queen.) Other authors say the motto was Lâche qui les abandonne. (Coward be the one who lets them down.) She wrote:

  I am delighted to find this opportunity to send you a little ring which will surely give you pleasure. They have been sold in prodigious quantities during the last three days and one has all the difficulty in the world to find them. The one surrounded with paper is for him [Fersen], it will just fit him; I wore it for two days before packing it. Tell him it is from me. I do not know where he is; it is a dreadful torment to have no news and not even know where the people one is fond of [qu’on aime] are living.32