Sex with the Queen (43 page)

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services General Washington rewarded Fersen with America’s most distinguished decoration, the Cross of the Cincinnatus.

Heaving a tremendous sigh of relief that the American expe-dition was behind him, Fersen arrived in Paris June 23, 1783, to a hero’s welcome from the jubilant queen. It is likely that the two became lovers that summer. During his absence, the queen had finally done her duty by giving the kingdom a prince in October 1781; she could now indulge more freely in a love affair, as spu-rious children would not likely inherit the throne. Tired of her repulsive husband, tired of waiting for the man she truly desired, she must have brought out her substantial arsenal of charms to win over the hesitant lover. Fersen, modest and reserved, as chivalrous as a medieval knight, had resigned himself to wor-shiping an unattainable highborn lady,
une dame belle et cruelle
, a gorgeous stone statue. But like Pygmalion, he found his cold statue turn to warm flesh in his arms and step down from her pedestal.

Outwardly, nothing changed. The queen showed warmth and interest in the Swede, that was all. Fersen remained cool and correct toward her in public. In his diary entry of July 15 he noted for the first time that he had gone to Versailles for an au-dience with the queen and stayed
chez Elle
. Whenever Fersen wrote in his diary the word
chez
followed by the name of a woman, it meant he had spent the night with her. And
Elle
became a secret code name for the woman whose name must not be spoken. They probably met in the private rooms above the queen’s bedcham-ber, reached by a secret staircase, and usually reserved for a lady-in-waiting when the queen was ill or pregnant. Most likely he slept in the
méridienne
, a cozy octagonal room which contained a large sofa set in a curtained alcove. During that long hot summer when most courtiers were away at their country homes, Marie Antoinette had plenty of opportunity to entertain her secret lover.

But even a man as discreet as Axel Fersen needed to unburden his heart to someone, and he chose his discreet sister, Sophie, in Sweden, who began to correspond secretly with the queen her-self. In these letters to Sophie, Fersen refers to the queen either e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y e u r o p e 1 9 7

as
“Her”
or “Josephine.” Marie Antoinette’s third name was Josèphe.

On July 31 he wrote Sophie, “I can hardly believe I’m so happy. I’ve more than one reason for that, which I’ll tell you when we meet.”23 He added, “I never want to tie the conjugal knot. . . . I cannot belong to the only person I want to belong to, the only one who truly loves me, and so I don’t want to belong to anyone.”24

Surely with his burning soul beneath the crust of ice, Fersen made a more passionate lover than clumsy Louis, who never ex-celled at the art of lovemaking. Marie Antoinette, for her part, had been denied sex for the first seven years of marriage and then forced to copulate with a man who repulsed her. Now, for the first time, she found sex and love. We can picture them in her tiny secluded love nest, the pent-up passion exploding in rapture, intertwined arms and legs, warm lips and flesh, a tangle of hair, the aroma of perfume and sweat and sex.

But after the perfect summer, family responsibilities called Fersen home. He eagerly returned to Versailles in June 1784 in the entourage of the king of Sweden. Hearing King Gustavus had arrived, poor Louis dressed so quickly that he put on stock-ings of different colors and only one shoe buckle, then went flapping out, puffing and breathless, to meet his fellow sover-eign. King Gustavus, known for his impeccable dress and re-served demeanor, must have eyed the French king with veiled laughter.

But Fersen had eyes for only one person, the queen. Re-quired to accompany Gustavus every waking moment, Fersen pled illness to be able to meet Marie Antoinette secretly.

Wrenching himself away after a visit of only a few days, Fersen did not know that he had most likely left something of himself to comfort her. Nine months after his visit Marie Antoinette had a son, the future Louis XVII.

Fersen bounced back to Versailles whenever he could. By May 1787 he was with the queen once again, making notes in his diary about lodging “upstairs” with his royal mistress. Despite Fersen’s vaunted discretion, the entire court was well aware of the affair.

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The comte de Saint-Priest wrote, “Fersen proceeded on horseback to the park, beside the Trianon, two or three times a week; the Queen, alone, did the same, and these rendezvous caused a public scandal, despite the modesty and reserve of the favorite, who never revealed anything by his outward appear-ance.”25

On September 27, 1788, the king was seen receiving a packet of mysterious letters while he was out hunting. One courtier re-ported, “He went into a copse to read them and soon he was seen sitting on the ground, his face held in his hands and his hands resting on his knees.”26 An equerry rushed forward and saw the king crying. Louis ordered him to go away and sat sobbing mis-erably as tears rolled down his cheeks. He announced that he was ill and needed help in mounting his horse. But by the time he arrived at the palace, he had composed himself. No one knew what documents had upset him so terribly, but it is possible they were intercepted love letters of Marie Antoinette and Axel Fersen. Worse, at this time the dauphin was dying slowly of tu-berculosis, and Louis would have been deeply upset to receive evidence that the duc de Normandie, the next king of France, was the son of the Swedish count.

June 3, 1789, the dauphin died. Fersen hastened to Versailles to comfort the queen. Swathed in black, she was still grieving on July 14 when a howling mob stormed the Bastille prison twenty miles away in Paris. It was a hot, uneasy summer, with revolu-tionary politics heating up to a rolling boil. Louis wanted to agree to a new constitution ensuring greater rights to his people; his wife insisted on the divine right of kings and vowed never to cede an inch.

On October 5 a mob surrounded Versailles with cannons, and Fersen personally stood guard outside the queen’s rooms. At six the next morning, the shrieking rabble raced into the palace hard on the scent of blood, the queen’s blood, the hated Aus-trian woman who had danced in diamonds while they starved.

Fersen escorted the queen to the comparative safety of the king’s apartments, while the mob, furious at not finding her, tore her guards to pieces. Brandishing the severed heads on pikes, the e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y e u r o p e 1 9 9

angry crowd forced the royal family to ride to Paris. Even then Fersen would not leave the queen but trailed behind her.

In Paris the royal family lived under house arrest at the Tui-leries Palace. Fersen closed his Versailles apartment and rented one close to the queen. It was no longer easy to see each other.

On December 29, 1789, Marie Antoinette wrote to her friend Madame de Polignac, “I have seen him; for, after three months of grief and separation, although we were in the same place, the person and I managed to see each other safely once. You know us both, so you can imagine our happiness.”27 On December 27

he wrote to his sister, Sophie, “At last on the 24th I spent the whole day with
Her.
It was the first; imagine my joy—only you can feel it.”28

Marie Antoinette and Fersen made great efforts to conceal their relationship from Louis to avoid hurting him. But Louis was not as stupid as he seemed. Though jealous of the charming Swede and painfully aware of the romance, he decided to pre-tend their relationship was platonic. Perhaps it was his way of saying he was sorry for being a terrible king and a terrible hus-band, that he loved her enough to ensure her happiness at the expense of his own.

In 1790 Fersen began making careful plans for the royal fam-ily’s escape. He borrowed money from friends, much of it to se-cure men and horses to stand guard just over the French border and train their guns on any pursuers.

In December the queen bought for her escape a huge lum-bering coach that held seven people; painted green and yellow, it boasted white velvet upholstery and green taffeta blinds. A courtier sniffed, “It was an abridged edition of the Chateau of Versailles, only the chapel and the musicians’ balcony were lacking.”29

Luxury aside, it would have attracted attention by its sheer size. Fersen had proposed two small swift traveling carriages, but the queen refused to travel in a vehicle so unworthy of her ex-alted station. He wanted to hire real drivers, men who knew the routes and the lingo and, unaware of the identities of their pas-2 0 0

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sengers, would not attract attention. But the queen haughtily demanded that she be served only by gentlemen.

Worse, she insisted on bringing along a wardrobe fit for a queen. Her lady-in-waiting Jeanne-Louise Campan recalled,

“It was with distress that I saw her occupied with details that seemed to me useless and even dangerous, and I pointed out to her that the Queen of France could find chemises and dresses wherever she went. My remarks were fruitless; she wanted to have a complete outfit not only for herself, but for her children. I went out alone and in disguise to buy and have made this trousseau.”30