The Queen's Lover (16 page)

I was made happy that winter by the increasingly tender emotions that had developed through the correspondence between the queen and my sister, who asked me for a lock of the queen’s hair, which she wished to set into a ring. “Here is the hair you asked for,” I wrote Sophie; “if there isn’t enough I’ll send you some more. It is
She
who gives it to you, and she was deeply touched by your request. She is so good and so perfect, and I seem to love her even more now that she loves you.”

My father, however, was still grieved and angered by my long absences from Sweden. And I often had to placate him by explaining the royal family’s urgent need of me, and my intense emotional need to remain with them, as I did in the following letter.

I
N APRIL OF 1791
the Comte de Mirabeau died. Many thought that he had been poisoned, and the Duc d’Orléans, who was out to undermine the king’s power by any means he could, was suspected by some. The great orator had made a few pro-royalist speeches in the Assembly that proved highly popular, and his passing ended the king’s chances of restoring order through peaceful means. That spring, the king and queen asked me my advice concerning their situation, and I gave them my opinion in a long missive. I reiterated, as I had numerous times in past months, that it was imperative for them to leave Paris, that their only way of surviving those increasingly monstrous revolutionaries was to flee the country. And I offered to be in charge of planning their escape. I’d already given the project much thought. According to the evasion route I’d devised, the royal family would head toward the town of Montmédy, on the border of the Austrian Netherlands, and there establish a rallying site at which they would be joined by émigré forces and those army regiments that had remained loyal to the king.

General Marquis Louis de Bouillé, the superb military tactician and hero of the Seven Years’ War, would be in charge of the royalist troops. Marie Antoinette’s brother Emperor Leopold was sure to offer all the help he could with his army. So was my king, Gustavus III, who had begun to be appreciated by the French monarchs at the end of his last visit to Paris, and who was one of the few persons, along with the Austrian emperor, to be apprised of this hazardous but imperative venture.

Axel:

THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES

I
DO BELIEVE THAT
the escape plan I devised for the royal family was superbly programmed, and would have been highly successful if I’d had my way. Trace your finger east of Paris on a map of France and you will easily find the route I chose, and the towns I’d designated as the principal relay stations: eastward from Paris, traveling through the department of the Marne, you pass through the towns of Châlons and Pont-de-Somme-Vesle, then on to Sainte-Ménehould, Varennes, and Montmédy, the latter of which I’d decided was the best place for the family to cross into Belgium, part of the Austrian Netherlands, where our allies would rally behind them.

But the king began to sabotage my project—bless my cherished friend, it was as usual with the most benign intentions—by insisting that his entire family travel in one coach. In order for the royals to be less noticeable, I had originally planned for two modest-sized carriages, one for the queen and her daughter, the other for the king and the dauphin, with attendants, governesses, etc., distributed among the vehicles. But Louis, usually so amenable, insisted with most unusual, adamant firmness that he wished his entire family to remain together. Thus I was unfortunately forced to arrange for the kind of coach known as a
“berline,”
a carriage large enough to accommodate six persons inside it and
three on the top box. In order not to awake suspicion, I ordered it in the name of Baronne de Korff, the Swedish-born widow of a Russian general, a family friend of mine who was devoted to the monarchs and eagerly accepted to help with their journey. The coach’s interior fittings, as specified by Marie Antoinette, were of the most luxurious kind: white velvet upholstery, taffeta curtains, two iron cooking stoves, several chamber pots of burnished leather. Moreover, this large, flamboyant green-and-yellow vehicle required six horses, and I feared from the start that it would attract far too much attention along the roads of a nation undergoing a revolution.

There was another major problem: money. This venture needed a lot of it, and like many monarchs of his time, Louis was penniless—he’d never had any private resources, his immediate needs being paid by the French treasury. The queen was equally insolvent: her only valuable possessions were her jewels; just imagine the ruckus the sale of those gems would have caused. So as a first step in the fund-raising I gave up every penny I had and asked my close friend Evert Taube, Sophie’s lover, to borrow all he could against his eventual inheritance. How to play it safe, even within a small circle, when the secret is so huge? I also turned to Madame de Korff and her sister, ardent royalists who donated much of what they had. Without hesitation, Eleanore Sullivan and Quentin Craufurd, both of whom were deeply attached to the king’s cause, also contributed the handsome sum of three hundred thousand pounds. Equally important, they offered to shelter the royal family’s
berline,
which would be far less visible in their stables on the rue de Clichy than at my own lodgings, which were at the corner of rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and avenue Matignon.

How many outstanding minds could I count on to help plan this hazardous escape? Only one, General Marquis de Bouillé, who would bring a dozen or so officers into his confidence, using his intuition as to which of his men could best keep a secret. An alarming amount of
incidents kept delaying the evasion, which had originally been set for May. In the preceding weeks one of the dauphin’s ladies-in-waiting was judged to be untrustworthy because her lover was a National Guardsman. She was discharged but kept postponing her departure, only leaving on the twentieth, forcing various officers scheduled to man relay stations on the road from Paris to Montmédy to keep altering their plans. Last but not least, there was the problem of the sixth place in the royals’ carriage. The fifth was to be occupied by the king’s twenty-seven-year-old sister, Madame Elisabeth, whom he did not have the heart to leave behind. Bouillé had wished the sixth place to be taken by a competent, able-bodied officer who might assume control if trouble arose, and had chosen me for that role. But the week before the departure, Louis started insisting that the dauphin’s governess, Madame de Tourzel, take that place instead. Oh, Louis, had I argued more firmly I might have won you over, and the course of history might have taken a different turn! It would later be said that the king only wanted French citizens to accompany him to safety; it was also intimated that he might not want his wife’s lover to have that honor. Would that I had been bolder, less awed by Your Majesty! No man is more stubborn than a weak-willed one who suddenly wants to show his strength.

As for the second coach in the royals’ cortege, Toinette had demanded that a place be reserved for her hairdresser, Léonard, a kind but emotive fibbertigibbet who would play an important role in the demise of my venture. Dear Toinette, however more frugal you’d become in recent years, how naive and vain you still remained! So assured were you that the escape would be successful, you wished your tresses to be perfectly coiffed when you met your friends and relatives at the Belgian border.

But ultimately it was my dear royals’ passionate devotion to their children that sabotaged my project: bourgeois solicitude undermining their safety, they insisted on traveling together in that one large, ostentatious
berline
. Neither did it help that Toinette entrusted all her jewelry
to the hapless Léonard, who upon being told that he was to leave on this journey lapsed into one of his familiar hysterical fits, sobbing and moaning that the Countess of This and the Duchess of Whom were awaiting him the following day to have sailboats and garden bowers set into their coiffures.

The date finally set for departure—after much haggling, much postponement—was midnight of June 21, the longest day of the year. To allay any suspicions of my collaboration with the royal family, I had taken all of my meals, for the previous week, at Eleanore Sullivan’s, who was scheduled to leave Paris on the same night with Craufurd. On the afternoon of the twenty-first I went to the Tuileries to check on last-minute details. The monarchs received me in the king’s study. The queen’s nerves were threatening to give way—she wept intermittently during our hour’s visit. Dear Louis took my hand in both of his—what warm, cushionlike hands he had—and upon tenderly embracing me said, “Monsieur de Fersen, whatever might happen I shall never forget all that you have done for me.” The principal detail to iron out that afternoon was the handling of the
berline,
which I’d arranged to be parked at Quentin Craufurd’s stables; it would have to be driven out of the Paris gates and reparked in a small street off the road to Metz. I had already arranged for an ordinary hackney cab to be placed at the place du Petit Carousel near the Tuileries; once the royal family had taken their places in it I would drive it myself out of Paris, dressed as a coachman.

Throughout that last day, my friends followed their habitual routines with admirable punctilio. The king received several deputies from the Assembly and gave various commonplace orders to his household staff. In the afternoon the queen took her children for a walk in the public gardens of the Luxembourg. Having been mercifully liberated, upon moving to the Tuileries, from the ritual of dining in public, the family sat down for their evening meal at the habitual 8:45 p.m., in the queen’s salon. There the Comte de Provence and his family, who were scheduled
to leave Paris that very same night, dined with them, as they customarily did one night out of two. (Wisely traveling in two small, inconspicuous carriages, they would make it to the frontier with no trouble whatever.) The queen then began to engage in the riskier preliminaries to the journey. She went into her daughter’s apartments and informed Marie-Thérèse’s lady-in-waiting of the evasion plan. She went on to her son’s room and upon waking him told him that they would be going to a place where “there would be a lot of soldiers.” The dauphin—my beloved little friend—leaped out of bed and grabbed his toy sword. “Quick, quick, let’s hurry!” he exclaimed. “Give me my boots, let’s go!” Great was his grief when his valets swiftly attired him in girls’ clothes, though he calmed down when his mother told him that he was going to “act in a play” and that his stage name would be Aglaë. May I note that the royals had decided to include both the dauphin’s and the princess’s principal attendants in their party. The fugitive family’s retinue now included three maids, a governess, three equerries, a hairdresser—the group was becoming conspicuously large.

Close to 11 p.m., the queen had to engage in the first hazardous step—leaving the Tuileries. Holding her daughter’s hand, followed by the dauphin and Madame de Tourzel, she managed to make her way safely to the cour des Princes, and saw me in my coachman’s uniform, whistling and smoking as those men do, wearing a wide-brimmed hat that hid most of my face. The plan was for the queen to go back to the palace’s salon, where she habitually played cards at that hour; I was to take the children to the carriage parked at the place du Petit Carousel and watch over them until she managed her second exit from the Tuileries. As Toinette returned to the palace it was 11 p.m., and the Provences were making their farewells; it was time for the king’s
coucher
. Lafayette was present at the ceremony that night and would later report that although the king was as affable as ever, while chatting with his entourage he glanced often, and in an unusual way, at the sky—clearly, he
was checking on whether conditions were propitious for the voyage. They were: the night was dark, the sky overcast. The king then knelt for his prayers, was divested of his clothing by the noblemen of his household, and went to bed.