The Queen's Lover (10 page)

In the following weeks we saw each other as often as we possibly could. We played backgammon, at which she continued to beat me. We brought our dogs together, as of old. I gave her Saint Augustine’s
Confessions,
one of my favorite books, to read, and we discussed it at length. Toinette loved to act, and I attended the plays she staged at the Petit Trianon’s little white-and-gold theater, where she charmingly played Colette in Rousseau’s
The Village Soothsayer,
and Rosine in Beaumarchais’s
Marriage of Figaro.
The amount of time we could afford to spend together, even riding horseback, was limited; in growing older we had become more prudent, more wary of gossip and possible opprobrium. We settled for seeing each other a great deal at the opera—the queen had a loge into which she was in the habit of inviting half a dozen friends; I could easily be there as one of her chums, bantering with the Duchesse de Polignac or Madame de Fitz-James. We smiled slyly at each other when we heard Dido sing to Aeneas, “Ah I was well inspired / When I received you at my court.”

One evening, while sitting alone with me in her opera box—her other guests had left to consume ices—she confessed her love for me. She slipped her finger into my hand and spoke in a low whisper while vigorously agitating her fan. “I love you, Axel, I love you, what else can I say?” She quickly withdrew her hand, and continued to whisper: “What else can I tell you, what else can I say?” I responded by scribbling her a tiny note on one of my visiting cards. “I too,” I wrote, “I love you desperately.” She read the card gravely, and then tore it into tiny bits—fourths, eighths, sixteenths—dropping the shreds of paper into her purse. What opera were we seeing that night? Rameau’s
Les Indes Galantes,
I believe. That summer, as we walked the footpaths in the woods near the Petit Trianon, we often sat down on park benches, by
the side of brooks or under heavy trees, to exchange embraces. Our mutual desire was throbbing, urgent, desperate. We talked a lot about opera, about how it reflected our relationship, about the impossible loves that were the central themes of most operas, about those operatic passions that led to tragedy and death.

We finally consummated our love some two months after my return from America, on a July night when Versailles was relatively emptied of courtiers, and the king had gone for a two-day hunting trip to Saint-Cloud. There was a small octagonal chamber above the queen’s apartments that had been built just the year before, in which a few of her favorites—Lamballe, Polignac—had already stayed. It contained a large sofa set into a curtained alcove, and was reached by a secret staircase.

I am wary of disclosing too many details of those blessed hours. Let me just say this: I’d never felt truly
loved
before. I ask male readers to answer the following questions: Have you ever felt totally consumed by the intensity of a woman’s love? Have you ever had the sense—it is sublime—that you were the first to fulfill her sensual needs? All this and heaven too I experienced. But the sweetest of all was to feel Toinette’s purity, the guilelessness of her virginity. For a woman to be penetrated does not necessarily alter her chastity, which I look upon as a state of mind, and in her case, a state of grace. As she lay below me, her dark gold hair undone, looking at me with tenderness, but also with a never-before wonder caused by the novel sensations that washed over her; as all restraints fled and her body unfurled as into a sail that transported her to regions she’d never before traveled; as I mouthed her large erect nipples, as she finally moaned her pleasure with a kind of desperation, I finally knew the delight other men have experienced when deflowering a very young girl. For chasteness is a condition of the psyche that would always remain hers, that no man, not even I, could alter. And the greatest marvel of it was her ability to retain her purity while communicating her passion: by the manner in which her arms wandered
over my nakedness, by the endearments she whispered, with an almost sisterly tenderness—
“Mon ami, mon âme, mon adoré
.”

The following morning I wrote a note to Sophie, ending it with this phrase: “I’ve more than one reason to be happy.” I commemorated that day—July 15—for the rest of my life. I find the following phrase in a diary note written decades later, many years after the royal family’s tragedies, on July 15 of 1798: “I recall the day when I came to her privately for the first time,”
“Je me rappelle le jour ou je suis allé chez Elle la premiere fois.”
For “Elle,” with a capital
E,
was one of the two code names I gave her from then on, to hide her identity from the eyes of curious valets or other possible foragers of my papers. The other code name was “Josephine,” Josepha being one of her middle names.

A few weeks later that summer—I was trying to gather the courage to inform Elle about my imminent departure for Sweden, where I had not been for seven years—I wrote the following words in a note to Sophie: “I’m very pleased Miss Leyel is married. I’ve made up my mind. If I can’t belong to the only person I wish to belong to, the only one who truly loves me, I do not want to belong to anyone.” How else could I put it? Elle was not only my lover, she had become my closest friend, my confidante, the very texture of my life. One can imagine how much I dreaded to tell her of my return to Sweden. But how charming and generous she was, even about that. “Of course, of course you must go,” she said, weeping gently, clutching my hands as ever, “of course you must see your family, you must see your father.” She was somewhat assuaged by my promise of returning in the spring, and spending the entire following year with her.

A
ND SO
I
SET FORTH IN
September on my way to Stockholm, traveling my usual route, through Germany. But the unpredictable happened: a few days into my journey I received word that I should remain in Germany
in order to join Gustavus III, who had just started on a long trip to Europe. I was to meet him in Rostock, on the Baltic, and accompany him on a voyage that would wind southward through Europe and continue on through Italy. What could I do? He’d appointed me captain of his bodyguard.

I had to write to
Père
, again dreading his grief at my many years’ absence.

I myself was furious at the king’s imposition. It is not as if he had chosen me alone for his company. Gustavus was to be escorted by a whole retinue of courtiers, all of them tall and handsome, like most men with whom he enjoyed traveling. They included Baron Armfelt, his chief chamberlain; Baron Sparre; my sister’s lover, Evert Taube; and a sizable group of Swedish sculptors and painters.

The king was in bed, sipping on hot chocolate, when I met him at the inn in Rostock where he waited for me. He welcomed me with effusion, laughing and weeping with joy as he murmured endearments. “Ah, my
långe
Axel! My most beautiful Axel! My beloved Axel!” I was used to the exuberantly affectionate manner he always had toward me, and tempered it as well as I could. This trip to Italy was not an end in itself, Gustavus explained to me when he’d calmed down. It was just a preliminary to his real aim, which was to obtain the French Crown’s support for his “big deal”—the invasion of Norway. The way he was playing his cards, his arrival in France, some months hence, would merely seem to be the last stage of a European journey. He would try to remain incognito on this trip, taking on the
nom de voyage
of Count de Haga.

Our first major stops in northern Italy were Turin, Milan, Vincenza. However admirable his knowledge of art history, the king’s pace of travel was utterly exhausting. He had to see every important church, every notable painting, admire every significant bit of architecture. In the Turin Cathedral he spent a long time in the Chapel of the Holy
Shroud, the altar of which contains the cloth in which Christ’s body was wrapped after His deposition from the cross. Gustavus displayed a Christian piety, on this trip, of which we had never been aware. He knelt at length before the sacred cloak, frequently making the sign of the cross, occasionally weeping. We went on to Milan, where he was particularly entranced by the church of San Simpliciano, said to be founded by Saint Ambrose in the fourth century, and reputed to be pivotal to the conversion of
Saint Augustine. (Gustavus’s big lecture here on the details of Augustine’s conversion, on his hearing a child’s voice singing
“Tolle, lege,”
instructing him to “Take up and read” the Holy Book.) When visiting the museums with which these Italian cities are studded, we were also struck by the king’s adulation of the Holy Virgin, who is barely mentioned in our Lutheran religion: Gentile da Fabriano’s
Madonna with Angels,
Tiepolo’s
Immaculate Conception
in the Museo Civico in Vicenza, Veronese’s
Madonna with Child and Saints,
incited such reverence in him that he knelt on the floor in front of these paintings, sighing with veneration and whispering to himself. “Is he going to pull a Christina on us?” Taube whispered to me during one of Gustavus’s prostrations. He was referring to our country’s seventeenth-century queen, who had converted to Roman Catholicism early in her reign, resigned her kingdom, and moved to Rome to practice her new religion in peace.

We went on to Vicenza, Palladio’s city; how could Gustavus not have been enthused by the Olympic Theater, the very first covered theater constructed since Roman times? What plays were performed there, he wished to know, when did this great Palladio die, where is he buried, I want to see his tomb. By this time, in order to better sate Gustavus’s voracious curiosity we had hired a guide to accompany us on our Italian journey. In Piacenza, we admired the vast Gothic portal of the Church of San Antonio; in Parma, the Correggios (more genuflections in front of the Virgins Mary); in Pavia, at San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, the tomb of Saint Augustine (more signs of the cross, more quotes from that great writer, “Oh, save me God, but not quite yet”). We went on to Brescia, where the king spent hours in the exquisite Renaissance cloister in Santa Marie della Grazie; to Cremona, which led the cause of the Holy Roman Emperor in the thirteenth century (lecture here on the struggle between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines). All these treasures were lingered at for hours, commented on at length—what a good professor Gustavus could have been! By this time every member of the king’s retinue was utterly worn out. Limping about, Taube feigned a sprained ankle and stayed in his room throughout our stay in Piacenza. Armfelt remained indoors in Cremona, pretending to have a serious migraine. Sparre took an emetic and vomited in front of the Brescia Cathedral in order to have his proper rest. Only I, as captain of the king’s bodyguard, could not afford to drop out, although I pleaded a headache every few weeks in order to have time to write to my family, and my queen.

To make things worse, we were all deeply embarrassed by the gaudy costumes our king had imposed on us—canary-yellow culottes, gilt-edged sky-blue jackets, black shako hats topped with blue and yellow plumes—which made Italian citizens stare at us with wonderment. In several of the sites we visited—Cremona, Brescia—we encountered Emperor Joseph II, the brother of my beloved, whose austere dress and simple, forthright courtesy made my king’s gaudy dress and mincing manners all the more outlandish. Joseph II, who in former years had ruled in consort with his mother, the late Maria Theresa, now that was a king! He had instituted many of the same reforms Gustavus had in his youth—freedom of the press, religious tolerance, abolition of serfdom, emancipation of the Jews. His talents included many familial virtues—one remembers that it is he who had enabled France’s royal couple to finally share a bed properly. But alas, he disliked my king because of his preference for men. “Small, miserable, a dandy in front of his mirror,” so he described Gustavus to his sister Marie-Christine. We finally
reached Florence, and there I was to meet a beauty who might have sealed my fate….

But first, of course, the “Comte de Haga” in Florence: we had to visit Santa Maria Novella, Santa Croce, the Duomo, some ten times apiece. Every stone touched by Brunelleschi was expounded on. At the Duomo, Gustavus asked for a chair and sat for hours in front of the bronze doors of the Baptistry, expounding on every detail of that great work. He lingered an equally long time in the interior of the Duomo, ecstatic before Lucca Della Robbia’s
Ascension
and Uccello’s heads of the prophets; these incited such fervent enthusiasm in him that he knelt down before them for much of the afternoon. Christina? We worried again. With this man everything was possible.

As for the Florentine beauty I have mentioned, she was Lady Emily Cowper, a relative of Lord Cowper, a British expatriate who entertained us royally. Ah, Emily, superb green-eyed Emily! Her hair was of the most marvelous reddish blond and, since she was but fifteen, still hung to below her shoulders, a smoldering curtain of gleaming amber silk. Upon one of her brother’s many evening receptions I took her outside to a park bench and kissed her deeply on her mouth—it was the first time the child had been thus embraced, and she responded with fire and ardor, as if it were second nature to her. Upon subsequent caresses in the park, I unlaced her bodice and suckled her breasts at length, biting her tiny pink nipples as she cried out her pleasure…. Oh, what a delicious lover she would later make! I let my hand wander under her vestments, up her leg, to the tiny spot in front of the vagina—it is also called
klitoris
in Swedish—the fondling of which women are so partial to. Thus with my mouth on her breast and the other on her private parts I was able to bring the child to orgasm without deflowering her, and
la petite coquine,
the little scoundrel! She ended up stretched out on the park bench, crying out her delight so loudly that I had to put my hand over her mouth lest members of our group might hear her. We repeated our games
several evenings in a row, and each time the exquisite little machine that was her body trembled more wildly, more tremulously than ever. Needless to say, I had my own difficulties remaining physically composed. I had experimented with a new kind of sexual play, always a delight for me. (I’d rather not be thought of as a rake, just as an average, venturesome sexual athlete.)