U
PON THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY
of my Toinette’s death, October 16, 1794, I was already on a ship, traversing the Baltic on my way to Sweden. “Today is a dreadful day for me,” I wrote in my journal. “It is the date upon which I lost the person who loved me the most in the world…. I shall mourn Her until the end of my days and whatever I feel for Eleanore can never help me to forget what I have lost.” October 16 would indeed remain a day of mourning for the rest of my life.
I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible when I returned to Stockholm, but that was barely possible. The reappearance of a citizen who was known to have been the lover of Europe’s most glamorous and controversial queen thrust tumult into our provincial Swedish society. Women, women again, my life’s plague and joy! Adolescent belles and ripe older beauties came from all possible corners of Stockholm to seek me out. I was more than aware of the fact that I had greatly aged since my last stay in Sweden, that the griefs I’d suffered had lined my face as if with acid, that I looked far older than my thirty-nine years. But this did not seem to minimize the pandemonium of female attention I incited. To my surprise, I was impelled to take full advantage of these ladies’ advances. It’s as if my need for revenge had suddenly become a kind of aphrodisiac. Never had I allowed my sexual impulses to be so brutally released. I was driven to take to bed every woman who approached me. I made love savagely to each of them, enraged by the fact that she was not my Toinette. I made them lie down on their bellies, thrust at them furiously from behind. When bedded with bolder females, I pressed their breasts together and thrust my penis up and down between those delicious globes, ejaculating on their chests. I’m most attracted to noble, aloof women. My sex acts were tinged with the desire for revenge that had swept over me at the time of Toinette’s death. I tied princesses’, duchesses’, countesses’ hands to the rails of their beds, thrust at them
from a great distance as ferociously as possible, bit their nipples until they bled.
All my captives were startled by my wildness; was I not supposed to be the reserved, proverbially gallant Count von Fersen? I relished their moans of pain or pleasure, and that exquisite shouting that occurs when the two sensations are admixed. Some were terrified by my antics and vowed to never come near me again; others could not have enough of it. I was at it almost every day, sometimes capturing five, six women in one week. I kept thinking of the refrain from Mozart’s
Don Giovanni:
“V’han contesse, baronesse, marchesine, principesse, / Ma in España, son già mille e tre
.”
The only woman I dared not dally with was Charlotte, Duchess of Södermanland, a close friend of Sophie’s. Her husband was the regent for the adolescent king, Gustav IV Adolf, youngest son of Gustavus. Infatuated with me for years, garrulous, indiscreet, her foot constantly seeking mine under the table at official dinners, Charlotte would have been a perilous woman for me to tryst with, and I asked Sophie to calm her down. For the regent, Duke Karl, was all too aware that his wife had been in love with me for decades, and that his duchess,
faute de mieux,
was currently having an affair with my younger brother, Fabian. Another reason for the Duke of Södermanland’s distrust of me was that his sympathies lay with the French Revolution: he was about to officially recognize the Convention, and considered me dangerous because of my notorious association with the French royal family. His suspicion of me was so pronounced, in fact, that he surrounded my house with spies.
There were other reasons for the regent’s animosity: Sweden was rife with political intrigues: a bitter rivalry had arisen between the current regime, headed by the regent, and the Gustavian faction of which I was a leader, along with the late king’s closest adviser, Armfelt. The regent wished to continue his dominance as long as possible; my faction hoped
for the early succession of Gustavus’s son. Armfelt had come to see me in Brussels, and I was particularly alarmed by his report that the Duke of Södermanland was isolating the young king from all those persons who had been devoted to his father, Gustavus III.
In 1795 I spent a happy summer with my sister Sophie and our friend Taube, who were now living together more openly than ever, Sophie’s husband having died in May of that year. The three of us went to a spa on the shores of Lake Vättern, where Taube, whose health was frail, took a cure. How I envied them the perfect life they shared! When in their company I often wondered whether I would ever enjoy a happiness similar to theirs. Sated with the winter’s sexual exploits, that summer I also spent serene days at my estate of Steninge, where the strawberries were just fruiting and the peas were abundant. I was happy with the condition of my farm, most satisfied with the work of my overseer. For the first time in many years I felt a deep attachment to the lands I’d inherited from my father, and began to long for a more leisurely pace of life that would allow me to spend more time at my country estates. My happiness at Steninge was deeply marred, however, by the news of young Louis XVII’s death. My handsome, brilliant little friend, possibly my own son! “He was the last and only interest retaining me in France,” I wrote Sophie; “the news is unbearably painful, and brings back heartrending memories.” I grieved much for the child, bitterly remembering the few happy times we had played together, the vigor with which he would kick a ball in my direction, his sparkling laugh, the joy he had taken at playing blindman’s buff.
My departure from Sweden was incited by the news that Louis-Charles’s sister, Marie-Thérèse, now eighteen years old, had been released from her prison at the Temple and sent to Vienna. I would be in lifelong mourning for her mother, the love of my life, and I felt very emotional about the prospect of once more seeing her daughter, Madame Royale.
There was also the unresolved issue of the legacy left me by her parents. I confess to having a patrician disdain for fiscal matters, and the effort to seek reimbursement—for myself or for others—was repugnant to me. My own finances had been improved by my father’s inheritance; so were it not for my yearning to indemnify Eleanor and Craufurd, and Madame de Korff and her mother, the latter of whom remained in dire financial straits, I would have let the whole matter drop. But I was truly obsessed by the Korffs’ dilemma. I had been informed by the Austrian emperor that the money I was soliciting belonged to Marie-Thérèse, so it was only by seeking her out in Vienna that I could hope to resolve the Korffs’ plight.
A
RRIVING IN
V
IENNA
in January of 1796, the month after Madame’s release, I was immediately informed by French refugees about the virtual imprisonment that had been imposed on the princess. Her Hapsburg relatives had apparently decided that she should have minimal contact with the world around her, and most especially no communication with her Bourbon relatives. Her entire French retinue had been dismissed, and replaced by titled Austrian women who were being employed as spies and informers. All her correspondence with her uncle the Comte de Provence was opened and censored; even the Prince de Condé, whom her uncle had sent to greet his niece upon her arrival, was forbidden to visit her. And French émigrés, who all longed to see her, could only get a glimpse of her on Sundays when she went to Mass at the Hofburg Palace.
My impressions of Vienna as a whole were mostly negative. I became caught up in a social whirl little suited to my tastes or habits. I gravitated to the company of the higher nobility, in which the most beautiful women and the greatest gallantry prevailed. In this circle I was again mobbed, and gave full sway, as in Stockholm, to my sexual appetites, finding
Viennese women singularly more naive than my female compatriots. Thrusting my tongue into the ravishing Princess Metternich, I learned to my surprise that she had never yet engaged in this delightful practice. Where in heaven’s name had Viennese men been for all these centuries?
I blamed Vienna’s lack of sophistication—sexual and otherwise—on the mediocrity of the imperial court. When I went to the theater, which I found very poor, I saw the Emperor Francis II and his Empress in their loge, looking like a couple of bourgeois. “How awkward of them at a time when royalty should try to impress!” I wrote in my journal. In the Prater, the emperor’s carriage was like that of a greengrocer compared with the magnificent vehicles of the aristocracy. As for his sons, the five archdukes, none of them had any bearing, or manners, or talent for conversation. I was equally baffled by the Viennese’s insouciance concerning the war against the French. “The whole day I heard nothing but talk of balls, celebrations, and divertissements,” I wrote Sophie shortly after my arrival. “I’m struck by how little they think of the war.” It was against this staid and dowdy couple, surrounded by a scatterbrained, constantly intriguing nobility, that France’s revolutionary armies were scoring their greatest victories. As much as I hated their principles, it was clear that the revolutionaries’ efficiency, drive, and convictions were bound to overwhelm the old order’s apathy and frivolity.
A great delight of my stay in Vienna—there were few of them—was a concert at which quartets by Franz Joseph Haydn were played. His Sixth Quartet was especially beautiful. Haydn himself was there, performing on the violin. Not a good violinist, but a marvelous composer, this tiny, very shy man was in the service of Count Esterhazy. I was shocked to hear that this great artist had to take his meals in the kitchen, with the Esterhazys’ domestic staff. Only at the residence of the Russian ambassador, Count Razumovsky, did I find grace and democratic ease. There the custom of an open table was maintained, at which persons of quality could dine every evening without invitation. In fact by the
month of March I was practically living at Razumovsky’s home, where his wife showed me nothing but kindness and warmth.
There was another important encounter in Vienna, one that gave me both joy and sorrow. I was visited several times by Louis XVI’s former valet, the faithful Cléry, who had managed to escape to Vienna a few days after the king’s death, and whom I embraced like a brother. He narrated to me, in the greatest and most painful detail, his master’s last days and hours.
U
PON MY SECOND WEEK IN
V
IENNA
, emotion overcame me when I first caught sight of Marie-Thérèse. It was on a Sunday, as she was returning from Mass. I came close to fainting. I had not seen her since that night of June 20, 1791, when I placed her in the coach in which her parents attempted their ill-fated escape. I could not help but compare her to the queen. She was blond, tall, and well built like her mother, and had grace and nobility of bearing, but her features resembled those of Madame Elisabeth rather than those of the queen; and in comparison with Marie Antoinette, who glided so ethereally when she moved, she walked rather awkwardly, pigeon-toed. I longed to visit with her, but this desire was fraught with foreboding. She had so adored her father, and she must have known of my relationship with her mother, whom she’d disliked since childhood. How could she not have negative feelings toward me? As I saw her on that Sunday morning she gave me an amazed look as she passed by me, and blushed, and turned around to look at me again before entering her apartments. I flattered myself to think that she would have liked to give me some sign of recognition, however she may still have disliked me.
A few days later I saw her again at a reception. She was looking at the crowd the way her mother used to when she searched for people she knew, and when she saw me she came toward me, and greeted me in an
amiable enough manner. “I’m so glad to see that you’re safe,” she said. Those words gave me great pleasure, and tears of sorrow kept springing to my eyes. I could not help but notice that she had inherited her mother’s love of dogs: bouncing about her was Coco, her red-and-white spaniel, which had once belonged to her brother, and had shared Louis XVII’s jail cell. Upon the little king’s death, Cléry had told me, the dog found his way to Marie-Thérèse’s quarters. Not yet knowing that her brother had died—she would not learn of his demise for months—she took the dog in and kept it, believing that it had gotten lost.
Princess Marie-Thérèse and I saw each other again at a few other social events. Occasionally, to my great emotion, she was affable enough to draw me aside: she wished me to describe her parents when I first knew them, when they were still very young. I told her of her mother’s perennial graciousness; of the many times I brought my spaniel, Odin, to her apartments to play with her dogs; of her father’s abiding amiability and of his confidence in me. Upon another meeting Marie-Thérèse, in turn, gave me some precious details about the trip to Varennes: she told me of the mysterious horseman who had galloped up to her family’s coach and shouted, “You will be stopped!”; of the imbecile Léonard, her mother’s hairdresser, who had taken a wrong turn upon leaving Varennes, and never delivered a crucial message to General Bouillé; of the grocer’s rooms, hung with sausages and hams, in which her parents were arrested.
Madame’s attitude changed dramatically, alas, when I began my financial quest. A few days after we had had that last conversation about Varennes I wrote her a letter stating my demand for the funds owed by her parents to Madame Korff and me; and as weeks passed I received no reply. I wrote her numerous times, and she never responded. On one occasion she sent me an invitation to come to her apartments, but upon arriving there I found some twenty other guests, and was unable to say a word to her in private.
After a few months of similar evasions on Marie-Thérèse’s part, my attitude toward her radically changed. “I’m disgusted with her,” I wrote Taube. “I can now understand why people become democrats. I’ve been unable to see Madame Royale in private and I doubt if I ever shall. It’s yet another disillusionment, and another regret, but I’m used to those by now. I’m not really surprised because everything that has to do with those unfortunate sovereigns [the French royal family] is forgotten here. Predictably, my devotion to them is also forgotten.”