The Queen's Lover (38 page)

Even after my brother’s death, the mob continued to kick and desecrate his corpse. Only when Silfversparre returned on his horse, aghast at the sight of Axel’s body (he had wished to humiliate my brother, but mightn’t have wanted to go further), did the crowd begin to disperse. Shreds of Axel’s hair and clothing were carried away by hundreds of citizens. Of his tattered garments only one sock and a belt remained intact. A few hours later his body was dumped into a wooden coffin and placed in a police watch room, where crowds queued up for hours to see his mutilated corpse. Fragments of his clothing and strands of his hair, so my witnesses reported, were being sold for astronomical prices in Stockholm’s streets.

We were offered one kind gesture. A young man who described himself as a mason brought Axel’s gold watch to Silfversparre, saying that he was “not a thief,” but simply one of the avengers of Karl August’s death. This watch was the very one Marie Antoinette had given my brother in 1792—on its enameled surface were carved their initials, “A and F.” Axel had worn it faithfully ever since. Only when I was told this story did I realize that my brother had died on the nineteenth anniversary, to the day, of the flight to Varennes, a venture undertaken to save the life of his great love.

I
T WAS TEN AT NIGHT.
I, Sophie, was at home in Blasieholmen, in the company of a few friends and of my seven-months-pregnant daughter, when news was brought to me of my adored brother’s death.

I don’t need to linger much on my sorrow, for my passion for my brother has been amply documented in these pages. I shall only say that I was flooded by memories of our shared childhood, our shared youth: the way we raced home from church to devour the X-shaped saffron
buns traditional to that holiday. Painting the sign of the cross on our foreheads and on our cattle’s noses on Maundy Thursday. Walking down the streets of Stockholm’s Gamla Stan in the full daylight of June midnights, our arms around each other’s waist. Standing by Axel as he painted his exquisite watercolors of the lake at our estate in Löfstad.

However, I barely had time to give vent to my grief, or to summon more memories, for those loved ones who surrounded me urged me to seek a safe hiding place. “All Fersens will be persecuted,” so the advice went. “Protect yourself!” I first sought asylum at the residence of our foreign minister. Through tornadoes of rain and wind I then fled, disguised as a peasant woman, to Vaxholm Fortress, a prison in which I sought protective custody. I remained there for many weeks. Queen Charlotte herself was suspected by citizens because of her close friendship with our family, and for a long time was prepared to flee from Haga. The crowd continued to be restive until the following month, when the crown prince was finally buried in Riddarholm Church.

I hardly need to say how much grief and shock there was among our friends and acquaintances. “That His Excellency Fersen was innocent, I am convinced, and for several reasons,” the chief master of ceremonies at the court, L. von Hausswolff, wrote about Axel.
“Primo,
he was a good and honest man.
Secundo,
he was too proud and haughty to involve himself in any plan against the crown prince, which would disgrace himself and his entire family.
Tertio,
he was too indolent to think of anything that might change his way of life. This man was thus the victim of circumstances that only the future will reveal.”

“Our cannibals exceed the Parisian monsters,” exclaimed Axel’s comrade Gustav Armfelt, who had been abroad at the time of my brother’s death, and soon thereafter moved to Russia. “Where were the troops, for heaven’s sake? However haughty he was, that Axel von Fersen, so honest, so amicable, was sacrificed to popular furor—this is an enigma that only time will solve.”

Yes, where were the troops, as the grieving Armfelt put it? The “enigma” was easily resolved by me, and by anyone who was familiar with the nature of Karl XIII’s court. The king’s closest advisers had everything to fear from the Gustavian faction led by my brother, which desired Gustav IV Adolf’s young son, Gustav, to be crown prince. Adlercreutz and Klingspor themselves had participated in the arrest of Gustav IV Adolf, and Silfversparre himself had led him to prison. The king, sick and aged, was much influenced by these acolytes, and they had easily swayed him against all Gustavians, of whom my brother was the most prominent member.

Queen Charlotte and I lobbied relentlessly for an inquest that would rehabilitate Axel and prove his innocence. Our wishes were finally granted. An inquisition was begun a few weeks after his death. In November of that year our supreme court formally absolved my brother and all the Fersens of any culpability in the death of the crown prince, ruling that Gustav Adolf had died a natural death.

Queen Charlotte and I were still not satisfied. We wished a ceremony to be held at Riddarholm Church, where members of the royal family and high officials had traditionally had their memorial services. At first Karl XIII hesitated to extend this honor to Axel. But by August 1810 the Riksdag, faithful to the tradition of inviting foreign dignitaries into the Swedish royal family, had elected a new crown prince, the forty-seven-year-old French general Bernadotte. The Riksdag had wished the country to be led by an eminent military leader because of the constant threat of a war with Russia, and Bernadotte fitted the bill perfectly. He was an illustrious hero of Napoleon’s wars who had led his troops with particular valor at Austerlitz. Bernadotte secured Bonaparte’s permission to become crown prince of Sweden. Eager to unify the country, “Karl Johan” Bernadotte—so he was renamed—was all too happy to begin his tenure in the Swedish royal family with a gesture of reconciliation toward a family as distinguished as the
Fersens; and he prevailed upon the king to have Axel’s memorial held at Riddarholm.

T
HE STEWARD OF OUR ESTATE
at Steninge had come to claim Axel’s body the morning after his death. It had been embalmed and placed in a small garden pavilion, with the plan of burying him later in our family vault. But there again Stockholm citizens, constantly doing all they could to oppose the nobility, had run afoul of our wishes. A few days before the scheduled burial two officials arrived from the capital, forbidding our family to proceed because Stockholm’s denizens looked on Axel’s corpse as having been “stolen” from them—the mob at Riddarhus Square had condemned it to the gallows hill. So the body continued to remain in the garden pavilion while Fabian and I, wishing to reemphasize Axel’s innocence, lobbied King Karl to have him buried at Riddarholm with the full ritual due a grand marshal and Knight of the Seraphim. With the continuing support of Queen Charlotte and of Bernadotte, who allayed the king’s fear of further public disturbances, our cause prevailed. And in December Axel was reburied in Riddarholm Church, with the kind of ceremonial pageantry that would have delighted him. In his eulogy at the funeral, Bishop Gustaf Murray spoke of Axel as “the undeserving victim of a misled public’s bloodthirsty frenzy.”

As for the pavilion in Steninge, it was converted into a little brick chapel of Romanesque Gothic style, sheltered by a great oak, which bore the following inscription:

“Here were kept for four months the mortal remains of Count AXEL VON FERSEN, Grand Marshal of the Kingdom of Sweden, while the powers that ended his days refused to let him rest in the tomb of his ancestors. May Truth recalled by time protect in History his memory and render justice to his virtue….”

I wished to pay further tribute to that remarkable man, my brother. So the year after his death I erected a monument in his memory in the park of our estate in Lövstad. Its inscription reads as follows:

Sweden had long had the reputation of being an orderly, law-abiding society, and Fersen’s assassination may have shocked the nation more than any event in nineteenth-century Swedish history. It caused a wave of fear that Sweden stood on the brink of a violent revolution. It occasioned a pronounced swing to the right in the nation’s political life—within two years freedom of the press, for instance, grew extremely limited. Among liberals, Karl XIII was much criticized for his callous indifference to Fersen’s fate; and Fersen’s murder led to a national longing for a monarch who would be far more vigorous and skilled than Karl (such a ruler would readily be found in Bernadotte).

News of Fersen’s end also consternated the rest of Europe. It is Napoleon Bonaparte, this time, who may have had the last word. Upon hearing of Axel’s demise he declared to the Swedish ambassador: “Count von Fersen’s assassination was perpetuated with the acquiescence, might I even say the assent, of your government…Be on your guard!”

Sophie Piper survived her brother by six years, dying in Lövstad in 1816.

Axel’s brother, Fabian, died in 1818. Fabian’s younger son, Gustaf Hans, who died in 1839, would be the last male member of the Fersen clan.

Bernadotte ascended the Swedish throne in 1818, upon the death of
Karl XIII, and took on the name Karl XIV Johan. He proved to be a most popular and effective monarch, and reigned until his death in 1848.

After being exiled, Gustav IV Adolf traveled restlessly throughout Europe for some decades and died in Saint Gallen, Switzerland, in 1837.

The Comte de Provence ruled France as Louis XVIII from 1814 until his death in 1824, except for the interruption of Bonaparte’s Hundred Days (1815), during which the former emperor attempted to regain control over the nation.

Provence’s younger brother, Comte d’ Artois, reigned as Charles X from 1824 to 1830, and became increasingly hated for his ultra reactionary politics. The last Bourbon king of France, he was deposed in 1830, sought exile in London and then in Prague, and died in 1836 during a trip to Italy. He was succeeded by the far more liberal Duc d’Orléans, who ruled as King Louis-Philippe.

Fersen’s friend Gustav Armfelt expired in 1814 in Tsarkoye Selo, having moved to Russia and taken on Russian nationality a year after his friend’s death.

Fersen’s hopes that Marie Antoinette’s son Louis-Charles, the last dauphin of France, was his child, came to naught. Recent DNA studies have proved that Louis-Charles was the son of Louis XVI.

M
ARIE
A
NTOINETTE’S CORRESPONDENCE
with Fersen has its own dramatic history. After Fersen’s death, all of his archives were preserved by Sophie’s progeny—his nephews and grand-nephews. One of them, Baron Klinckowström, published the whole of his correspondence with the queen in 1877. This edition provoked great consternation among historians, for many passages of these letters had been censored, replaced by rows of dotted lines. Baron Klinckowström refused to publish the originals, pretending that the obliterated passages revealed political
secrets that would displease the king of Sweden. This explanation was manifestly disingenuous, for the obliterated passages mostly occurred at the very beginnings and ends of the letters, intimating that they concerned the expression of tender, intimate emotions. Continuing to refuse communicating the original letters, Fersen’s grand-nephew, Klinckowström, pretended that he had burned them.

More than a century later, in 1982, Marie Antoinette scholars were surprised and relieved to hear that the letters that had been believed destroyed in fact existed. The Klinckowström family had put them up at auction at Christie’s, in London, and they were bought by France’s National Archives, where they remain to this day. However, the most sophisticated current techniques of decoding the originals, or bringing to light the phrases written in invisible ink, have failed. One single missive of Marie Antoinette’s escaped the prudish Baron Klinckowström’s vandalism. It is the one dated June 29, 1791, written shortly after her return from the Varennes venture, which begins with the phrase “I can only tell you that I love you,” and ends with the words “Adieu, the most beloved and loving of men. I kiss you with all my heart.”

This is a historical novel. The major events and personages cited in it are authentic. All correspondence between Axel von Fersen and his lovers, relatives, and friends, and all of Fersen’s journal entries, are directly quoted from manuscripts—many of them published—that are preserved in French and Swedish institutions.

My foremost debt is to Ann Godoff, my cherished editor and publisher, who has given me invaluable guidance throughout the writing of this book. Gratitude also to my treasured agent, Lynn Nesbit, whose enthusiasm has ever been a source of inspiration and encouragement. And my thanks to Lindsay Whalen of The Penguin Press for her precious help in the manuscript’s editing.

I am most grateful to Gary Tinterow for introducing me to the former Swedish Consul General in New York, the Honorable Ulf Hjertonsson; he generously presented me to those friends of his in Stockholm who could help me with my Fersen project. My appreciation to Sigrid and Kai Falkman, to Goran Berg, and to Christina Oldfelt Ekéus and Rolf Ekéus for their warm hospitality. My particular gratitude to Michael Sohlman, who found me the best possible guide to all places and issues relating to Axel von Fersen—the esteemed author Malte Persson, whom I also thank from the bottom of my heart. And my appreciation to the staff of Stockholm’s Royal Archives, where Fersen’s journals are kept, for their unfailing amiability and thoughtfulness.