Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (42 page)

Fersen returned to Sweden at the end of his Grand Tour in May 1774, around the same time Marie Antoinette became queen of France. He expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, pleasing him by entering the military and finding a rich woman to wed.

In April 1778, the count courted an English ironworks heiress, Mademoiselle Catherine Lyell, whom he’d met on his Grand Tour,
traveling to London to pursue his suit, but she rejected him. Disillusioned and defeated in the marital mart, he decided to focus on his martial career instead. Fersen applied to be a mercenary in the army of Frederick the Great, king of Prussia. Later that year he returned to France to await Frederick’s answer.

“It’s an old friend!” Marie Antoinette exclaimed when he presented himself at the Bourbon court. Now queen, and pregnant for the first time, she welcomed him back, inviting him to her parties and making a point of honoring the count by speaking to him on each occasion. Having more experience of the world, and of the opposite sex, Fersen recognized that they were beginning to develop a
tendre
for each other.

After she learned that he had graced one of the celebrated Parisian salons in his “snappy” (according to the hostess) new military uniform, an ensemble designed by the king of Sweden himself, Marie Antoinette insisted on a personal fashion show—not at her
lever
, but in her private apartments. Fersen arrived in his “blue doublet over which was a white tunic, tight-fitting chamois breeches and a black shako topped by a blue and yellow plume.” The command performance was the talk of the court, as the gossip spread throughout the palace. “All Versailles can only talk of a certain Count Fersen who came to court wearing the Swedish national outfit which the Queen examined very carefully,” noted the future Bishop Lindholm.

Marie Antoinette would blush and tremble when he entered a room. Her not-so-secret nickname for him was “
le bel
Axel” (the handsome Axel). Although even her detractors admitted that charm was one of the queen’s strongest assets, she was not a natural flirt, unskilled in the coquetry that came so naturally to the ladies of the court. Marie Antoinette had been married for reasons of duty and dynasty at the age of fourteen, too young to know anything of the world or understand the ways of human behavior, no matter what her mother had taught her. She had never been in love. By the time she met Axel von Fersen her only previous sexual awakening had been her crush on the duc de Choiseul’s nephew, the rakish duc de Lauzun. The story goes that when he misunderstood her intentions and took her seriously, her propriety was shocked. Where Fersen was concerned, however, the queen was evidently unable to conceal the
emotions he stirred inside her, and was far more ambivalent about how to handle them.

To avoid compromising the queen and endangering her situation by embarking on an illicit love affair, the count became determined to put distance between them, jumping out of the fire before it burned the pair of them. Equally ambitious for advancement in his military career, and eager to participate in France’s support of America’s bid for independence, with Marie Antoinette’s aid, Fersen secured the brevet of colonel in the Royal Deux-Ponts regiment. He was “in a state of joy that cannot be expressed” about the position. It would be only a matter of time before his regiment would sail for North America.

Marie Antoinette’s fondness for Axel von Fersen had not escaped notice at the French court, and the news was rapidly transmitted to those at the highest levels in his homeland. Fersen’s bosom friend, Baron von Taube, his sister Sophie’s extramarital lover, informed King Gustavus III about the pair’s behavior during the early months of 1779, confiding that the queen “often walked about with Count Fersen, even entered a box alone with him and remained there talking for a long time.” French courtiers soon saw what the baron had. “People spoke of meetings, of prolonged
têtes-à-têtes
at the Opéra balls, of looks exchanged in place of conversation at intimate parties at Trianon.” Taube is a reliable source. He and Sophie were the only people to whom Fersen poured out the details of his travels and the contents of his heart. Sophie Fersen Piper was unhappily married, and her older brother fully supported her emotionally and enabled her adulterous romance with Baron von Taube. And when Fersen was in Sweden, he lived with the two of them.

Count Creutz, the Swedish ambassador to France, and a dispassionate witness with nothing to gain or lose politically by sharing this intelligence, wrote to King Gustavus, “I must inform Your Majesty in confidence that young Count Fersen has been so warmly received by the Queen that a number of people here have taken umbrage. I must admit that I cannot help believing that she has an inclination for him. I have seen signs that are too clear to be doubted. Young Count Fersen’s behavior on this occasion was admirable in his modesty and reserve…. By deciding to go to America he has avoided all
danger, but assuredly this decision must have taken strength of character beyond his years. During the last days the Queen has hardly been able to take her eyes from him. Whenever she looked at him her eyes would fill with tears.”

The ambassador pointedly requested Gustavus not to share this intelligence with anyone other than Axel’s father, Senator Fersen.

But the regiment’s departure was unavoidably delayed, allowing Fersen and the besotted sovereign several more months of quality time together. In January 1780, as he still awaited orders to depart for North America, Axel wrote to his father that Marie Antoinette was “the most amiable princess I have ever met,” informing the senator, “She has always treated me very kindly.” The French ambassador at Vienna, the middle-aged baron de Breteuil, had also been highly influential vis-à-vis his reception at court. Axel informed his father, “Since the Baron spoke to her, she singles me out even more. She almost always walks with me at opera balls….” He then added, “Her kindness has aroused the jealousy of the younger courtiers who cannot understand a foreigner being better treated than they are.” Indeed, many young Frenchmen resented the promotion of a Swede to colonel of the Royal Deux-Ponts.

It was strategically intelligent for the queen to favor a foreigner, because it eliminated some of the potential for infighting among the factions at court and reduced the influence of powerful members of Marie Antoinette’s coterie.

In the weeks leading up to Fersen’s departure, the queen invited him to several of her supper parties. At one soiree, the duchesse de Saint-James teased, “Are you abandoning your conquest so easily?” referring to Her Majesty’s
tendre
for him. The count, who was the soul of discretion, and the antithesis of the frivolous French courtiers, soberly replied, “If I had made one, I would not abandon it. Unhappily, I depart…without leaving any regrets behind me.”

The queen, however, nursed many of them. Fersen’s regiment finally left France in the spring of 1780. Marie Antoinette was said to have wept at his parting. The count distinguished himself at the Battle of Yorktown and was asked by General Rochambeau to serve as his aide-de-camp. It was Fersen who acted as the general’s translator for George Washington.

In June 1783, Axel von Fersen landed at Brest with the American auxiliary corps and hastened to Versailles. Although he had corresponded with Marie Antoinette, they had not seen each other for three years. Much had changed for both of them. She had just learned she was pregnant for the fourth time (though one pregnancy had been terminated due to a miscarriage in the summer of 1779). This baby had probably been conceived in May. The count was no longer so handsome; “
le bel
” Fersen was now something of a misnomer. “He had been ill in America,” wrote the comtesse de Boigne in her memoirs, “and he returned to Versailles aged by ten years, having lost the beauty of his face.”

Axel’s boots had scarcely made a footprint on French soil when, with the queen’s enthusiastic encouragement, he applied for the command of a French regiment, the Royal Suédois. The elder Fersen, remembering the letter three years earlier from the Swedish ambassador, was suspicious, and with good reason.

Upon his return, Axel became one of the queen’s intimate circle, enjoying frequent invitations to her idyll, the Petit Trianon, her private estate a mile or so from the Château de Versailles. Louis XV had commissioned the Petit Trianon as a gift for Madame de Pompadour, but she died before its completion. Instead it became his little pleasure palace, which he enjoyed with his last mistress, the comtesse du Barry; there the lovers could tryst without the necessity of servants hovering about or intruding every two seconds, thanks to clever mechanical contraptions, such as a dining table that could ascend from the subterranean kitchen, fully laden. In June 1774, a month after he became king, Louis XVI gave the Petit Trianon to Marie Antoinette, and she began to make her own improvements to the house and vast gardens.

By 1783, when Fersen returned from America, the queen’s popularity was already on the wane. Gone was the delighted clamor that had greeted her a decade earlier when, as dauphine, she had made her first formal visit to Paris. Instead, childless for the first eight years of marriage, her extravagant overspending and bedecking herself like a glamorous royal mistress instead of emulating the two previous Bourbon queens—a pair of pious, milquetoasty homebodies—had turned the public mood against her.

Worst was the vicious cycle she had created by alienating the aristocrats who had routinely vilified her. The courtiers who suddenly found themselves on the outside looking in grew angrier than ever at the elimination of their age-old perquisites—most important, proximity to the queen. And so their slanders and libels began, and Marie Antoinette retreated with greater frequency to her safe haven of the Petit Trianon, sometimes with her children and their governess, or with a very small circle of friends, where, with the villa’s enforced rules of informality, they waited on themselves. It was the one place on earth where the queen of France could enjoy some privacy, because no one could enter the grounds without her express permission. At Trianon, Marie Antoinette exercised her right to surround herself with only her favorite people and her beloved children, and sought to recapture some of the bucolic, untrammeled charm of her Viennese childhood. She began construction of a little working farm and dairy, the
Hameau
, or hamlet, where a dozen impoverished farmers and their families were relocated and given employment.

Le Petit Trianon had been used for amorous assignations in the past. In fact, the villa even boasted several original features that facilitated them. By this time the windows had been fitted with blinds that were mirrored on the side that faced the exterior. When the blinds were closed, the prying gaze of a would-be intruder would be his own.

The queen’s biographer, historian Antonia Fraser, posits that it was during these summer months of 1783 that Marie Antoinette and Axel von Fersen consummated their romance. Fraser asserts that, as birth control was well-known to the aristocracy, and Fersen seemed to have successfully avoided impregnating his numerous lovers on all but one occasion, there was nothing to preclude the queen from sleeping with both Axel and her husband. Nothing except perhaps her faith and moral scruples.

But setting those two things aside for the moment, if Marie Antoinette was so deeply in love with Fersen that she was willing to become the very thing she had always detested—an adulteress—recalling her scorn for Madame du Barry and even for her dear departed father, who had cheated on her mother, Ms. Fraser omits a key point:
In the summer of 1783
Marie Antoinette was already pregnant.
Therefore the fear of pregnancy was eliminated, and there was no more propitious time, biologically, for her to consummate her passion for Axel von Fersen. Is that why Marie Antoinette fought temptation and lost—at the cost of everything she had been taught to value?

Fraser attributes the queen’s topple off the moral wagon to human nature, citing an irrational expectation that her feelings for Fersen would be of the pure and lofty sort, like an unconsummated ardor out of the age of chivalry and the medieval Courts of Love. There is indeed no accounting for the vagaries of the human heart.

In some ways, Marie Antoinette lost the true north of her moral compass with the death of her mother in 1780. And although she came to the Bourbon court a decade earlier determined not to become one of the louche and debauched French courtiers—and for the most part she retained the values she was raised with—in time, she did end up a victim of Stockholm syndrome, as much like her captors, if not more so, when it came to certain extravagant behaviors.

But did it cross the line at adultery, in 1783, or at any other time?

In the absence of concrete proof either way, the Fersen and Marie Antoinette love story has become a matter of forensics. Based on the scant evidence remaining to us and our own values and experiences, it is inevitably colored by the hunches of whichever detective is assigned to the case, analyzing the queen’s fondness for Fersen and making assumptions about whether it was a purely platonic friendship, an adulterous romance, or any one of the several shades of gray in between.

Although Marie Antoinette had innocuously flirted with other men when she was dauphine and even during her early years as queen, she was far too intimidated to act upon her desires or impulses. In addition, at that point she had yet to consummate her marriage and couldn’t possibly risk pregnancy. When it came to morality, Marie Antoinette viewed adulterers as ants on a dunghill. And in royal marriages, politics always came first. If she indulged in an affair and it was discovered, she could be sent back to Austria in disgrace, destroying her mother’s greatest political achievement, the Franco-Austrian alliance forged between the millennium-old enemies.

But the queen’s feelings for Axel von Fersen may have forced her
to reexamine everything she believed and held dear. She had fallen in love with him, experienced sensations in her heart, body, and soul that were entirely new. The game changed. It was a moment of crisis. In her late teens and twenties, with no other outlet for her energy, Marie Antoinette had demonstrated little impulse control when it came to her extravagant purchases of jewelry and clothing, her high-stakes gaming and gallivanting into Paris late at night, as well as her disregard for the feelings of some of the older courtiers. Her mother had chided her sternly and repeatedly about it. It is not a wild leap to ascribe to her similar uncontrollable behavior in acting upon her desire for Fersen. And in the summer of 1783, when she was in her first trimester of pregnancy, her hormones were already all over the place.