No wonder many courtiers followed suit, and stank as powerfully as the site. Take one particular high-ranking noble, for instance, the Vicomte de Saint-Aignan, whose malodorousness reached legendary proportions. He was a tall, elegant, enormously amiable man, always fastidiously dressed, loving to show off his jewels and decorations, whose smell was detectable two or three rooms away. Writing to Sweden, I kept searching for similes to describe his stench: he smelled like several dozens of pigs who had just rolled in their excrement, like several dozens of overripe, foot-wide Camembert cheeses stored for months in a warm closet. It was said that even as a child he had refused as much as a monthly bath; and that in his late teens, the day of his presentation at court, when his attendants tried to force him into a tub he fought them off so hard that he broke one valet’s arm and knocked out the other one’s teeth. In his early youth Saint-Aignan’s parents had destined him for the diplomatic corps, but by the time he was eighteen the notion was dropped, since his odorous presence at foreign courts might have led to severe diplomatic disasters.
Saint-Aignan was reported to have had his own singular reasons for choosing to remain malodorous: he believed that every time one washed, a bit of one’s selfhood was lost. The day of his presentation at court, after he had roughed up his valets, a pair of felt boots were superimposed upon his shoes, in hopes that this, at least, would minimize the stink emanating from that part of his body. But upon the approach of the young lord, Louis XVI, ever attempting to be diplomatic, had taken a few steps back and, instead of offering his cheek for the traditional
kiss, had put his hands over his face in a gesture that habitually signaled the onset of a migraine. A virtuoso of denial, Saint-Aignan did not take the hint. He believed that the king did have a genuine headache; and, following protocol, he courteously backed away from the monarch amid dozens of his handkerchief-clutching peers, his status as a high-ranking noble protecting him from being totally excluded from society. There came the moment when the king had to choose a government post for this exotic citizen. He had a brainstorm: he named him keeper of the Royal Zoo, hoping that this establishment’s inmates might be the only ones of God’s creatures who would not be repelled by the vicomte’s stench.
Saint-Aignan was an extreme case—let’s say his malodorousness was two, three times as powerful as that of the average courtier. But you can imagine the reek of several dozen odor-afflicted persons crowded into one salon.
Merci bien!
That asphyxiation which was at the heart of the detestable Versailles had an end-of-the-world quality, that of a world struck with pestilence; close your eyes and you could imagine you were in London in 1348 at the time of the Black Death. This was the impact wrought upon me by the world’s most “brilliant” capital; this was the home of the most delicate, fragrant, refined princess in Europe, Marie Antoinette. How happy I was when she acquired the Petit Trianon! Here, at least, she could start afresh.
I
KEEP REMEMBERING
the sweet sight of her lying on a bed of dried moss that had been set up for her in a little cave a half mile from the Petit Trianon’s “Hamlet,” drinking a glass of milk from one of her own cows, a delicate white haze spread about her sweet and happy mouth. I can’t forget the tinkle of her laughter as we played blind man’s buff with the Princesse de Lamballe and the Comtesse de Polignac in the meadows surrounding the Petit Trianon. Forty years later I am still haunted
by the memory of having her at my side as we rode together in the nearby forests. She had become an exceedingly skilled rider since coming to Versailles, and though I was noted as the best horseman at court, she enjoyed challenging me to a race, betting that she could beat me if I gave her a small handicap. When I slowed down my habitual pace, however, she pouted and chastised me: “I could beat you to the goal without your doing me such favors!” she’d exclaim. Back at the Petit Trianon, in her little blue-and-gold sitting room, we played backgammon, her favorite form of gambling, at which she was so skilled that she had to give
me
a handicap. “Six and one, my favorite throw!” she’d cry out delightedly after tossing the dice onto the board with a smart flick of her wrist. Every few evenings we sang together. Along with arias from Gluck’s
Orpheus and Eurydice
, her favorite verses, which she performed with a sly teasing glance in my direction, were from Piccinni’s
Didon
, “Ah I was well inspired / When I received you at my court.”
Tongues wagged, of course, at the frequency with which we kept company. But you know what? On the whole the courtiers, and the king himself, might have far preferred a foreign cavalier for the queen, rather than a French one. A discreet, often distant admirer such as I, frequently absent in his native land, suited them far better than a native noble who’d have spent his time in intrigues, and in trying to gather all the favors he could for himself and his relatives. So they left us alone, to enjoy a relationship curiously medieval in tone: that of the
chevalier pur et sans reproche
who courts his lady from afar, without a trace of physicality ever tainting the purity of his admiring devotion (so, I’d resigned myself, our relations had to remain for the time being).
Sophie:
OUR FAMILY,
THE VON FERSENS
T
HERE WERE MANY
similarities between my brother and our father, Frederick Axel von Fersen, who was the grand marshal of Sweden a few decades before his son rose to that post.
“Père,”
as we called him, was descended from a Scottish clan, the Macphersons, which had settled in Sweden in the sixteenth century. He was our nation’s most influential citizen and its greatest landowner, the proprietor of several superb estates spread throughout the country. He was also the leader of one of Sweden’s two principal political factions, the pro-French Hat party, which represented the upper aristocracy—the other faction, the Caps, tended to be pro-Russian and were identified with the clergy, farmers, and the lower nobility.
Père
was as handsome and prodigal as Axel, like his son was possessed of a golden heart, and was equally revered by members of our four estates—the clergy, the aristocracy, the burgher class, the peasantry.
As for our mother, née de la Gardie, whose large dark eyes my siblings and I had inherited, during our youth she served as principal lady-in-waiting to the queen of Sweden. She was descended from a family of Gascon Calvinists who had sought refuge in Sweden during the Renaissance, and who had been all-powerful since Queen Christina’s reign—her great-grandfather had been Christina’s prime minister and closest
confidant. In a nation that for two generations had been closely allied to France and was even more obsessed with Frenchness than the Russian nobility (let’s not forget that Christina had beckoned the great French thinker Descartes to her court, where he had died, alas, of pneumonia), the Fersens were considerably more French than other families.
Père
had fought on the French side in several conflicts, most notably in the Seven Years’ War. We spoke exclusively French at home and teased each other much about the mistakes we made in our native tongue, which we spoke only to our domestics. As our mother complained, “In our country one can barely manage to think in Swedish.” My brother Axel wrote both his memoirs and his journal (the latter of which he began when he was fourteen) in French. If I live long enough his journals will also be published someday, and its editors might well joke about the fact that a famous Swede’s diary had to be translated into Swedish from its original French!
But our Francophilia was not singular. His Majesty Gustavus III, the greatest king of eighteenth-century Sweden and a close family friend, a man much admired by Voltaire, Condorcet, and other Enlightenment luminaries, spoke his native language with a faint French accent. After being shot by a political enemy, he even spoke French at the moment when he thought he was about to die, uttering the following words:
“Je suis blessé, arrétez le et tirez moi d’ici!”
Would a czar have spoken anything but Russian, in that society noted for its Frenchness, at what he thought was the moment of his death?
F
ORGIVE THE DIGRESSION
. I write these pages, above all, to tell you of Axel’s childhood and youth. For my brother centered his own memories too extravagantly on that Austrian flirt who brought him so much misery, who kept him from ever marrying and having a family; dear God, here’s what he wrote me once when he was approaching the age of
thirty-five: “I’ve made up my mind, I don’t wish to ever get married, it is contrary to my nature…. I can’t belong to the one person I wish to belong to, the only one who truly loves me, so I do not wish to belong to anyone.” In my early years, I cursed that Viennese sorceress every day of my life.
So, back to our family. Axel and I had a younger brother, Fabian, and an older sister, Hedda, but from earliest childhood on we focused so intensely on each other that Hedda and Fabian were almost excluded from our daily life. How close Axel and I were! I was nearly as tall as he, and we looked strikingly alike, almost like twins. Our siblings didn’t partake in our childhood games, of which our favorite was to scare each other with tales of the mythological creatures that crowd our national folklore: each of us tried to upstage the other in the number of eerie visitations we received. There were the
skogsrå
or wood nymphs whose front presents a shimmering, ravishing white-clad creature but whose back is an ugly black hollow plumed with a large tail, and the
Vita Frun,
another malevolent white-garmented lady who haunts palaces, both of whom we often pretended to have seen in our respective rooms. But most especially we lived in the world of trolls, supernatural creatures of small stature and ugly mien—drooping jaws, warty noses, tangled straw for hair—who inhabit caves or the roots of trees, who come into human homes to steal money, which they greedily hoard, who kill any humans who seek them out to recover their lucre. We made much of the fact that trolls only have power over those who are afraid of them, and that they terrified most children. “I’m less afraid of them than you are!” Axel would shout. “No, you boob, I’m less afraid than you,” I’d enjoin. By this time
Père
might have come into our room, annoyed by our din, urging us to grow up and give up on such silly tales—“the folklore of our peasantry,” he’d call them. However much we loved him, we thumbed our nose at
Père
and resumed our dramas of ghostly visitors.
Père
may have been against folklore, but he was a fairly religious
man, or as religious as one could be while being an ardent follower of Enlightenment ideals. As Swedes we are all members, by birth, of the Lutheran state church, and at our home religious holidays were strictly observed. We’re the descendants of those Vikings who sacrificed to the sun god to hasten his return; and at the beginning of the winter season we commemorated with particular fanfare the shortest day of the year, Santa Lucia Day, as the harbinger of brighter days to come. A symbol of light—
lux, luce
, observed on December 13—Lucia is more festively celebrated in Sweden than any other saint in the calendar. Candles are placed in every window to honor her attributes—benevolence, charity, good fortune. The religious service that celebrates her takes place in the early morning, and as children Axel and I ran home as swiftly as we could to devour the sweets traditional to that day, X-shaped saffron buns decorated with raisins. Shortly afterward there came Christmas, which in our country demands particularly strict discipline on the part of children; for the tree is hung with sweets—hard candies, tightly sealed cookies—which we were not allowed to enjoy until the day of Kurtz, January 13, twenty days after Christmas. Then, after dancing around the tree, Axel and Fabian and Hedda and I fell upon it and plundered it of all its goodies, often ending up with terrible bouts of indigestion, before throwing the tree out into the snow.
Père
saw to it that we carefully observed several other traditional holidays: Easter, for instance, which for some reason was associated with witches. To deter their arrival, on Maundy Thursday the sign of the cross was painted on our foreheads, on the walls of houses and public buildings, even on the cattle’s noses, and on Easter Eve Axel and I made huge bonfires to chase any witches away. Our next big holiday was Midsummer’s Eve in the third week of June, the year’s longest day, when everyone in Stockholm watches the sun setting on the horizon at 2 a.m., knowing it will rise again in a half hour, thinking of their compatriots in northern Sweden, where the sun remains in the sky for over
a month. Every girl would want to be in love at such a time, I thought to myself as a teenager every Midsummer’s Eve, but I was happy enough to love my brother Axel, and walk with him down Stockholm’s embankments in the full daylight of midnight, our arms around each other’s waist…. At all of these holidays, particularly the winter ones that we spent in one of our country houses, there was much friendly calling from our neighbors.
Père
was as prodigally hospitable as Axel would later be. Numerous candles were lit at the entrance of our estate, and our servants stood at the gates, handing steaming mugs of
glögg
—red wine heated with ginger, cinnamon, and other spices—to visitors arriving on their open sleighs.
One such visitor who arrived on a winter day of my seventeenth year was Count Piper, a tall, powerfully built fellow with a thick red neck and features too coarse to be called handsome whose principal topics of conversations were stag hunting and the yield of wheat crops on his estates. He had a booming, stentorian voice that reminded me of the Swedish proverb
Tomma tunor skramlar mest,
“The empty barrel made the loudest noise.” I shied away from him for the simple reason that he seemed particularly drawn to me, and also because throughout my life I would only be attracted to men of Axel’s like—elegant, sensitive men with strong intellectual passions. Within a half dozen of Piper’s visits I realized that my father had chosen him to be my husband. Like innumerable girls have done for thousands of years I wept, I begged, I implored
Père
to let me wait until a man came along whom I had chosen to love. He would come very soon, I promised (lying through my teeth, since I had never been drawn to any man), I promise you, Papa, I will find some nobleman who will please you, whom you will be honored to have in your family. But
Père
would not budge. He had settled on Piper—his high rank, his wealth, his large land holdings, made him, in his eyes, the perfect spouse for me. I kept thinking of Santa Lucia, who had preferred to have her eyes gouged out with spears rather than marry
the man imposed upon her by her father, and I confided in my tenderhearted brother. He gently made me realize that little could be done: going against a father’s will, in my situation, would tarnish the family name. “You’re a very beautiful woman, and in time,” he said, “you will find another man who will love you purely, selflessly, and you will return his love and know decades of happiness.”