The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette (21 page)

Louis has had the entire matter looked into with great care. It seems that Amélie, unknown to any of us, even Eric, has been corrupted by the radical orators and pamphleteers who preach and write ugly lies about Louis and me. She hates me anyway, because of Eric’s devotion to me. No doubt she imagines that we are lovers, though we never have been. In any case, she has become one of those who are demanding change, and trying to force it to come about through dramatic action. She has been secretly attending meetings and listening to rabble-rousing speakers and allowing herself to be corrupted
by the things they say about Louis and about the government. For a year and more she has been pursuing this dangerous secret life, learning to read and write and even teaching others and spreading the new gospel of change among others of low birth like herself.

Knowing that we intended to take Louis-Joseph to be blessed at the chapel in St.-Brolâdre, she went there, harangued the villagers (whom she knew well, having grown up among them), and convinced them to make a statement to Louis and me by their absence on our arrival. After much discussion the villagers formulated a list of grievances and she wrote it down.

Her mistake came in staying on in St.-Brolâdre after the others had left. No doubt she wanted to observe our surprise and unease when we got there and found no reception prepared, no crowds to greet us. So she stayed—and was captured. Now she is receiving her just punishment.

I am sorry for Eric and his two children. I don’t imagine that Eric misses Amélie, but I’m sure her children do. How Mousseline and Louis-Joseph would suffer if I were to be taken from them!

I have intervened on the family’s behalf and Louis has given the governors of the Bastille a special order to permit Eric and the children to visit Amélie once a week for an hour.

November 20, 1783

My autumn melancholy is with me again. Axel has told me that he must leave Versailles for some time, in order to accompany King Gustavus on a tour of Italy. He will be gone many months. I have had him with me for far too short a time. I am already missing him and grieving his departure to come.

It is not only Axel’s leaving, and the bare lifeless trees and short dark days and cold winds of autumn that are lowering my spirits, but the flood of ugly writings that are sold not only in Paris but right on our doorstep, as it were, here in Versailles.

Right below the terrace of the palace is a ramp leading to the road. A bookseller has set up his stall just at the end of that ramp, so that visitors to the palace, once they pass through the outer and inner gates, must walk right by him on their way into the galleries and salons. There are thousands of these visitors, and a great many of them, I am told, buy the filth from this bookstall and read it.

Terrible, wicked things are written about me. That I am guilty of practicing the “German vice” (loving women instead of men), that I have lived the life of a prostitute, that I have no morals whatever and even seduce young boys and girls. Copies of these horrible books and pamphlets have been found in the palace, papers that picture me as a monster who can never have enough sex, always seeking new victims to seduce. Ugly caricatures of me are horrifying. I am portrayed as a greedy, grotesque demon or a harpy, feeding off the flesh of the poor while I indulge in every kind of sexual excess.

Louis says there is no way to prevent these publications from being sold. Hundreds of them are seized every week by the authorities but the printers just keep on printing more. As long as there are people eager to buy this filth, printers will print it and sell it. The bookseller near the palace has been arrested several times yet each time he is set free eventually he comes back and opens his stall for business again.

January 14, 1784

A new year has begun and before long Axel will be going. Louis-Joseph has a rheum in his chest and is being treated
with plasters. I have had three of my back teeth drawn. Afterwards I could not rest or sleep for five days, the pain was so terrible.

February 19, 1784

Sophie came to me this morning during my levee and whispered to me that there was a woman to see me. She said “a woman” and not “a lady” and she implied that I would want to see this woman in private, not during my levee when the room was full of others milling about and my every word and deed would be scrutinized.

I told Sophie to bring the woman to my sitting room just before mass, when I could see her alone.

When I entered the room I saw, seated on a sofa, a middle-aged woman of ample proportions wearing a whimsically eccentric gown of red and orange silk and a jaunty hat with an orange feather. When she stood and curtseyed to me, hurriedly removing her hat, I saw that her brown hair was streaked with gray. Evidently she did not bother, as so many other women over thirty do, to dye her hair or cover her gray strands with false hair. Her pleasant, round face was smiling benignly and I could not help noticing, even through her layers of silk, that her body was strong and muscular.

I sat down on a sofa opposite her, and two of my pugs jumped up beside me. Absently I stroked their heads.

“Your royal highness,” she said, smiling, “I am Eleanora Sullivan. We have a mutual friend in Count Axel Fersen.”

My eyes widened, but I said nothing, and kept my outward composure. This was the woman who had been Axel’s mistress for many years, the former acrobat. I knew that she lived in Paris and that he still saw her, though she had a liaison with some wealthy American financier who was her benefactor and
protector. I thought, so this aging woman has been my rival all these years.

Remembering my manners, I invited her to sit down.

“Thank you for receiving me, your royal highness. I would not have come, except that I have heard how gracious you can be and how you place a high value on simplicity and sincerity.”

“I place a high value on honesty, Miss Sullivan.”

“Mrs. Sullivan, if I may correct you. I was married for many years to a wonderful man, when we were both performers in the circus.”

“Very well then, Mrs. Sullivan. Why have you come to see me?”

She leaned forward, and the look on her face was very earnest.

“Because you are standing in Axel’s way.”

“In what sense?”

“His very great love for you is preventing him from living the normal life that would be best for him.”

I wanted to blurt out, how do you know what is best for him? Surely I know him best. He is happiest when with me. We could not love each other more. But I held my tongue. Queens do not quarrel with circus acrobats, no matter how far they may have risen in the world of Paris society.

“Did he tell you that he has been looking for a wife?”

I was nonplussed. Finally I managed to say, “No. He didn’t.”

“At his sister’s urging, and knowing it would have been his father’s wish, on his last leave from the American War he went to many balls and dinner parties in Stockholm. He met Margaretta von Roddinge. She is twenty-three, pretty, charming and warm, well educated, from one of Sweden’s finest military families. Her father is a general in King Gustavus’s cavalry. Axel likes her, and she admires him, as any young woman would. The family had another match in mind for her but
they are not pursuing it. They are waiting for Axel to propose.”

She waited a moment for all that she had told me to have its effect.

“I have met Margaretta,” she went on at length. “Axel brought her to see me. I believe he wanted my approval, though heaven knows why he would feel he needed it. I liked her very much, and wished them both well.”

I felt faint. I longed to call for my orange-flower water and ether. I fanned myself rapidly, and reached out for my pugs, which were panting and licking themselves. Then my courage rose.

“Then why doesn’t he propose?” I asked Eleanora Sullivan defiantly.

“Because of you, your highness.”

“There have always been other women in Axel’s life, as long as I have known him,” I said, trying to sound as worldly-wise as possible. “Yourself among them.”

“Forgive me for speaking so straightforwardly, but we both know that he has never loved another woman as he loves you. He is bound to you by ties too strong for him to break. But you can break them, if only you will.”

“Are you asking me to send him away?” I could hardly say the words. Send Axel away? Send away the love of my life?

When she spoke, her voice was flinty. “Release him. Let him go home, marry, become the father of a family. Let him do it wholeheartedly, with no lingering hopes that somehow you and he will one day make a life together.”

Upset as I was by all that this odd and unexpected visitor was telling me, I was yet able to study her expression, in an effort to understand whether she was being entirely truthful, and what her motives were in coming to me with her devastating news.

There was sympathy in her wide brown eyes, and determination
in the set of her generous wide mouth. I saw no malice or envy in her, though she might well have envied me on account of Axel’s deep feelings for me, feelings which, I was sure, had long since driven her to the margins of his emotional life. I felt instinctively that she was speaking the truth about Axel’s considering marriage, and about the girl Margaretta. He would marry, I thought, out of duty to his family, and because it was the conventional thing to do. He would choose a good woman, an exceptional woman. But he would always love me best.

“We both want Count Fersen’s happiness, Mrs. Sullivan. France is grateful for his service—a service that my husband needs now more than ever. For a man of Count Fersen’s ability and achievements, matters of state must always come before personal considerations.”

My words were cold and formal, the words of a queen. I was certain, however, that Eleanora Sullivan could guess the feelings that lay behind them. I was telling her that I would not let Axel go.

I rose and smiled, I hoped graciously. The interview was over. Eleanora Sullivan also rose, and curtseyed deeply.

“I hope you know, your highness, that you are breaking his heart,” she said, then left, her heavy-footed tread loud on the parquet floor. When she had gone, and I heard the door close behind her, I clutched the dogs and wept as if my own heart would break.

May 4, 1784

When Axel came to tell me that he was at last leaving for Italy with King Gustavus he found me on the grounds of the Petit Trianon, in the area set aside for the cottages I am building there. Four of the cottages are nearly complete and ready to be occupied, and I was giving instructions to the painters to paint
crooked black lines on the plaster walls, to look like cracks. I want the cottages to look charmingly weathered, as if they had been there for a hundred years. I had Louis-Joseph with me, walking unsteadily along, holding my hand. He loves coming to this little hamlet and visiting the white lambs and white goats in their pens. Only here do I see him smile.

Of course I have not told Axel about Eleanora Sullivan’s visit to me or her revelation about Margaretta von Roddinge. I thought we were so close that there would never be anything we couldn’t talk about. I was wrong. I don’t know what to say about his marriage, or possible marriage. It is as if the entire subject lies outside the closed circle of our love. Perhaps that is how he sees it as well. I have never asked him about the other women in his life, though he has talked of them from time to time. He knows that I have no lovers. That I am his, body and soul, for life. He fully understands my marriage to Louis, a blend of duty, good will and affection. It may be that he looks on Margaretta von Roddinge the same way I look on Louis, as someone with whom he can fulfill his family’s expectations and share affection and children. But his heart, like mine, will remain in another realm entirely, a realm we share together.

Nothing could have been more tender than our leavetaking. He could hardly tear himself away from me, and promised to write often from Venice and Florence and Rome, sending couriers to Versailles with his letters. He stayed on until evening and we supped together upstairs in the Petit Trianon, relaxing before the fire in the room we have shared so often, the room I keeponly for him and never use except when he is with me.

We stayed up most of the night, loving and talking of many things—but not of his plans for the future. I worry a little. Will Margaretta steal him from me? I am nearly thirty years old, no longer the beauty I once was. The tensions and sorrows of my life are there to read on my brow and in the lines beneath
my eyes. My body is too ample. The corsets I once shunned, I need now. Axel says he sees only loveliness when he looks at me, and I believe him.

He promises to ride in a gondola in Venice on a moonlit night and dream of me.

June 11, 1784

Eric has come to me to beg me to use all my influence to have Amélie released. He says she is suffering terribly, that her small dark stone cell is full of rats and that she is not given enough to eat. She is not allowed to wash and her clothes are torn and filthy. He says the children cry when they see her, and are upset for days afterwards.

I know she deserves to be punished yet I intend to talk to Louis, to see whether a milder prison can be found for her.

I have had no letters from Italy.

August 23, 1784

I have not yet said anything to anyone but I believe I may be pregnant again.

September 9, 1784

We have made the long journey to Fontainebleau and I am sick to my stomach every day. There is no doubt that I am going to have another child. It cannot be Axel’s baby as I had my monthly flow as usual after Axel left for Italy.

Louis is very happy and as a sign of his good will he has arranged for Amélie’s imprisonment to be less harsh. Her food
ration will be increased and Eric will be allowed to take food to her each week. He is also allowed to take her some bedding and new clothes. She is taken with the other prisoners to the scullery once a week where she can use the water in a common trough to wash herself.

November 7, 1784

I am still so sick I can barely bring myself to write in this journal. I was never so ill with Mousseline or Louis-Joseph. I feel tired and dread having to undergo the lengthy daily court ceremonies. Even sitting through mass is an ordeal for me, and I become very irritated with Louis and Charlot who tease each other and talk loudly throughout the celebration.