The Queen's Lover (31 page)

Well there was nothing I could do about the funeral rites denied to my beloved: she received the kind of treatment—thrown into a communal grave by Jacobin monsters—that the Greeks would have most feared. But at least I could engage for the rest of my life at the somber task that one might call the labor of grief.

M
Y FATHER HAD
long begged me to return to Sweden. But I refused to leave the continent because I felt that I might still be useful to Marie Antoinette’s children, if and when they would be released from jail. “This child [Louis XVII] still interests me; my worries about his fate increase my grief,” I wrote Sophie about the boy who might be my son. “And this unfortunate girl, Madame, what will become of her? What horrors, what humiliations, will they not put her through—it breaks my heart to think of it.”

Writing about the little king fifteen years after his mother’s death, I am still filled with rage when I think of the fate meted out to my cherished boy. Shortly after his mother’s execution young Louis XVII had been placed in solitary confinement in a jail cell of the Temple Tower, and he would die there a year and a half later, in the spring of 1795, in a heartbreaking state of physical and psychic degradation. His sister, who heard witnesses’s reports, would describe his confinement thus: “He slept in a bed that had not been made for months. It was covered with lice and fleas, as were his clothes and body. His filth was never taken out
of the cell. Since the window was never opened the room was filled with a noxious stench. They gave him no light, but he dared not ask for any although he’d always been terrified of the dark…. Even if he’d lived he might well have become an imbecile.”

What the Jacobin functionaries who visited the ill-fed, rachitic boy in the Temple Tower found most striking is that Louis-Charles would not or could not speak. The ebullient child who a few months earlier had so enjoyed joking with his guards seemed to have become mute. My little friend’s silence could be attributed to his sorrow over his mother’s death, or to the remorse he felt about the terrible testimony he had given against her. Others claimed that the prince had either died in the first weeks of his imprisonment, or that he had been spirited out of the Temple and whisked abroad. In either case, another boy, a mute one, would have replaced him in the jail cell. The mystery of the young king’s fate has not yet been solved, and may never be.

As for the women in the royal family: Madame Elisabeth was guillotined in May of 1794. Marie-Thérèse (or Madame Royale, as she was still called by royalists) was liberated a year and a half later, seven months after her brother’s death. Still as practical and orderly as she was stubborn and prosaic, she had kept her quarters tidy, briskly paced her room for an hour of the day, and was thus in relatively good health when the revolutionary government freed her in December 1795.

For by that time she was of no more use to the National Convention. In the summer of 1794, when Robespierre lost its support, political conditions had changed drastically. The Incorruptible’s end was as dreadful as I would have wished all revolutionaries’ deaths to be: botching a suicide attempt, he had incurred a very grave wound by shooting himself in the jaw; and on July 29 (or Thermidor, as the French call it), he was sent to the scaffold with twenty-two of his acolytes. In order to remove all obstacles from the guillotine’s path, executioner Sanson, who’d done his job on the queen nine months earlier, tore away the bandage that had
been holding together the Incorruptible’s jaw. Dreadful screams of pain issued from him as he was put upon the scaffold, silenced only by the screeching blade.

Power then fell into the hands of the so-called Thermidorians, revolutionary brigands like Barras and Tallien whose hands were by no means unstained, but who put an end to the Reign of Terror. This junta looked on Marie-Thérèse as something of an embarrassment. She had begun to be adulated by many Parisians as an innocent, persecuted martyr, “the Orphan of the Temple.” Fearful that she might become an increasingly inspirational figure for royalists, the new leaders suggested to the Austrian emperor that she be exchanged for those members of the Convention whom Austria still held captive. Madame Royale—the aloof young girl I’d guided out of the Tuileries on the night of the flight to Varennes—was sent to Vienna in December of 1795. There a debate began concerning her marital plans. Wishing her fortune to remain in their hands, the Austrians wanted her to wed Emperor Francis II’s younger brother, Archduke Karl. Her Bourbon relatives wished her to marry her first cousin, the Duc d’Angoulême, son of the Comte d’Artois. I shall return at length to Marie-Thérèse; suffice it to say for now that her French relatives would win out, and she eventually became the Duchesse d’Angoulême.

S
ORROW WAS FOLLOWING
upon sorrow. In May of 1794 I received news of my father’s death. Notwithstanding his frequent pleas for me to come home, and his declining health, I had not seen him for six years because of my attachments to the queen of France and, after her demise, to Eleanore Sullivan. So this particular heartbreak was tinged with a strong sense of guilt. I decided to return to Sweden for a while to deal with issues of inheritance, but I procrastinated throughout the summer: I first had to settle my relations with Eleanore, and also look after my
financial problems. Eleanore was living in Brussels, as I was, and had always refused to visit Sweden with me. Throughout my first months of grieving for the queen, whom she had idolized, Eleanore had grieved with me and been my only consolation. And in my journals I couldn’t help but occasionally compare the two women of my life. “Oh, how I reproach myself for the wrongs I did Her and how deeply I now realize I loved Her,” I wrote in my journal that summer, referring to the queen and to my infidelity. “What kindness, what tenderness, what a fine and loving heart! Eleanore will not replace Her…. She doesn’t have all those qualities, though I love her and she is my sole comfort and without her I would be very miserable.” But I should add that within six months of the queen’s death Eleanore ceased to concentrate on me and resumed her social whirl, attending every possible ball with her daughter (offspring of the Duke of Württemberg), who was now living with her and with whom I did not get along.

There are women who gain dignity, who become more alluring, with the advance of age, but Eleanore was not one of them. A Swedish diplomat who met her in Frankfurt in 1796 praised her beauty, yet added: “Madame Sullivan did not have a pleasant manner. Her gaiety was of the loud Italian kind; she shrieked when she should have spoken, and laughed a full-throated laugh. As long as Count Fersen was with her, she was silent and lost in observation like him. When Craufurd was home, things also proceeded decently; but when both these gentlemen were away, there were games and forfeits, kisses were bestowed, and there was enormous hilarity.”

Yet Eleanore and Quentin Craufurd had all along offered generous support and financial aid to the French royal family, and for this reason alone my loyalty to them was unshakable, however complex our relations. Since 1789—the year Eleanore and I became lovers—I had been living in a ménage à trois with her and Craufurd. The situation was hardly ideal. Craufurd was often absent on business, but rumors about
me reached him from the servants’ quarters; and there were recurrent scenes of jealousy in which he could become very hostile, and which I found ridiculous: how could he imagine that a woman of Eleanore’s temperament could remain alone for weeks or months at a time? Besides, Craufurd had occasionally needed me. A few years earlier I had arranged for him to be one of Gustavus’s Paris agents, which flattered his vanity. And somewhat like Louis XVI, he seemed to be grateful that I was far more discreet than many other men whom his mistress could have chosen as a second lover. (I sometimes asked myself: Was I predestined to be the ideal rival?)

Moreover, I was a man of few friends, and in my solitude I had long looked on Eleanore as the only person who could console me. I had already written the following to Sophie the month after Louis XVI died: “I often curse the moment I left Sweden; I wish I’d never left our rocks and pines. I would not have had as much joy, but…I would have avoided much pain. I weep very often alone, dear Sophie, and together with E., when we are able to. She herself is too afflicted by what has happened to be able to comfort me. But at least I have the solace of weeping
with
someone. This good woman is excessively attached to the French royal family; she has made many sacrifices for them, and this is what makes me love her.”

The following fall again I revealed my dependence on Eleanore as I contemplated the approaching demise of Marie Antoinette. “I shall have then lost three sovereigns, my benefactors and friends,” I wrote. “There only remains one woman, whom I love and who loves me, but her character is very different from mine and she belongs to another.”

I would be less than honest if I did not admit that I have an urgent, pressing need for women; that I am sexually very driven; that however reclusive I am, I dislike solitude. In sum, I like solitude
with another
. Thus notwithstanding Eleanore’s and Craufurd’s stormy temperaments, our ménage à trois was an arrangement I had to tolerate. “I must rediscover
the kindness of E.’s character,” I wrote in my journal, “behind the thousand brusque acts and the thousand slights that she afflicts me with and that I find hard to endure.”

So however greater my love had been for my lost queen, between 1794 and 1799 I was very taken up by my attempts to win Eleanore away from Quentin Craufurd. My life was also governed by the need to allay the state of my finances, and that of a few others. I had given a considerable amount of money to the French royal family to implement the Varennes project. I was also contributing large sums—fifteen to twenty thousand pounds—to help numerous émigrés who had fallen into poverty, and were taking on menial tasks to feed their families. (I was having all my shirts made, for instance, by a woman from one of the most prominent noble families in France.) Moreover, I felt it a duty to refund the charitable citizens, particularly Madame de Korff and her mother, who had loaned nearly every penny they had to the royal family at the time of Varennes, and who were now living in dire poverty (I was helping out by paying them, out of my own pocket, the interest on this loan). In the face of such monetary quandaries, how could I possibly compete with the prodigal Craufurd, seeing the luxurious style of life Eleanore was used to? I explained these issues to my dear friend Taube.

“I have financial problems to take care of for myself and for others. I have to repay Madame de Korff the large sum that she loaned to the late king of France—it was almost her entire fortune. As for myself, their late Majesties bequeathed to me 1,500,000 pounds in 1791, at the time of their departure for Varennes, about which the world knows nothing, and which is in the hands of Count Mercy. I have their note, which I have not yet presented to him.”

The fact is that I had a letter, signed by Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette on June 20, 1791, the day of their escape from Paris, which bequeathed to me the above amount. I had raised that sum from Madame de Korff and others, and from my own holdings, to cover the expenses
that royalist troops would have incurred if the king’s escape had succeeded. The monarchs’ note, forwarded to Mercy along with the money, read thus: “We request that Count Mercy remit to Count Fersen all of our money that is in his [Mercy’s] possession, about 1,500,000 livres, and we ask Count Fersen to accept his share of it as a sincere mark of our gratitude for everything that he has done for us.”

This note caught Mercy by surprise. He had indeed received a considerable sum from the royal family but, alas, had turned it over to Marie Antoinette’s sister Archduchess Maria Cristina, the regent of the Low Countries, who in turn seems to have handed it over to Emperor Francis II of Austria. Why had I not presented this request at the time I first came to Brussels in 1791? asked Mercy, who would die a short time later in London. I replied that it would have been highly indelicate of me to solicit these funds at a time when the French monarchs were still alive.

So the money, by that time, was said to be in Vienna, in Emperor Francis II’s treasury. In the spring of 1794, shortly after Mercy’s death, I wrote the Austrian chancellor, the gruff, odious Baron Thugut, about the sum owed me, and did not receive a reply for four months. Thugut’s eventual response was highly elusive, and did not bode well: “It would have been more propitious for you had you decided to make use of the arguments that are the basis of your pretensions during the lifetime of the late monarchs.” I finally realized that I would eventually have to go to Vienna to settle this debt. But this trip would be delayed for many months by the fact that I had to return to Sweden and settle my family affairs in the aftermath of my father’s passing. As the eldest son, I had inherited a large share of his holdings, including the Fersen Palace in Stockholm, the estates of Steninge and Ljung, sizable other lands near the Finnish border, and his shares in the East India Company. My brother, Fabian, inherited the Mälåker manor on Lake Mälaren, and my mother retained the estate in Lövstad, which upon her death in 1800 would pass on to Sophie.