The Queen's Lover (19 page)

Axel:

THE WAITING GAME

W
HAT WRETCHES THE
king’s brothers were! Informed by Bouillé of the royal family’s arrest, the Comte de Provence could hardly conceal his satisfaction. “There wasn’t a tear in those eyes as dry as his heart,” Bouillé would report. “All one could discern was their customary expression of falsity across which darted a few sparks of perfidious satisfaction.”

By this time Provence had already established his own government at Koblenz, which along with Brussels was the capital of French émigré life. He had settled in a palace given him by one of his uncles, and had appointed his brother Artois lieutenant governor of his realm. He had even had the audacity to draw up a constitution that made him regent of France and stripped Louis XVI of his sovereignty. Meanwhile the Comtesse de Provence, more given than ever to her lesbian amours, was enjoying a passionate liaison with an English woman who was said to be a spy. It was clear that the princes of the blood, perfidious as ever, were as hostile to the French monarchs as the most radical members of the National Assembly.

As for my own king, Gustavus III, at the time of the Varennes debacle he had been at Aix-la-Chapelle, waiting to celebrate Louis XVI’s deliverance. The news of Louis’s arrest put him into a terrible state of
shock. The French monarchy’s most loyal supporter, he had been the only sovereign to grasp the horrendous implications of the French Revolution for the rest of Europe. The events of June 1791 clearly unhinged him: once renowned for his liberalism, he made a radical about-face, shedding all his progressive ideals and pledging to uphold the divine right of kings. He even proposed an armed invasion of France that would involve Russian, Austrian, Prussian, and Swedish troops. An armed venture was also being demanded by Louis XVI’s brothers, though they differed with Gustavus, who wished his coalition to be led by Sweden. Gustavus’s intention was to invade France via Normandy and “throttle the Hydra in its lair.” Put into the paradoxical position of having to curb his zeal, I talked him out of this absurd venture, which equally terrified the queen of France and me: what solely obsessed Gustavus was to uphold the principle of absolute monarchy, and it had not entered his mind that such an invasion would greatly threaten the lives of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. In dearth of wise support, I thought of Quentin Craufurd, and persuaded Gustavus to appoint Craufurd as emissary to the king of England, from whom he would solicit funds for the French Crown.

As for Marie Antoinette, in the summer of 1791, shortly after the Varennes debacle, she began a complex and duplicitous relationship with Barnave. Soon after her return she contacted the deputy through the mediation of one of her favorites, the Marquis de Jarjayes, who came from the same area of France as Barnave, the Dauphine, and whose wife was one of her ladies-in-waiting. “Tell Barnave,” she said to Jarjayes, “that I was much struck by his character and by the frankness I found in him during those two days we spent together. I should very much like him to advise us as to what we are to do in our present position.” As out of touch as ever with the details of real politics, the queen wished Barnave to intercede with the Assembly on behalf of the royal family. As their correspondence progressed, Barnave—whose moderation I was
grateful for, however much I resented his close friendship with the queen—wrote Marie Antoinette long reports on the political situation. Like Mirabeau had before him, he tried to persuade the queen that the king had to accept the constitution, and support it firmly and “with sincerity.” In addition, he advised her that she and Louis had to publicly condemn the counterrevolutionary movement led by the king’s brothers, and also demand the return of those princes and of other émigrés. This ingratiating little dolt, Barnave, had even acquired intolerable influence on the queen’s daily life. “Your Majesty should go to the opera more often,” he’d tell the queen. “I’ll go to the opera tomorrow,” she would meekly reply.

It should be made clear that Marie Antoinette disliked the constitution even more than the king did, considering it unworkable, and was forthright in stating her disdain for it to Barnave. She was not alone in this regard. Her objections to it were even shared by many revolutionaries, such as Camille Desmoulins, who called the constitution “a veritable Tower of Babel” because of its numerous contradictions. Yet even though she looked on the Constituent Assembly, which had drafted it, as “a heap of blackguards, madmen, and beasts,” she promised Barnave that she and the king would “steadfastly” support it. However, during all this time she was conniving with Barnave, she was also conspiring with me and several allied rulers on an alternative plan—an armed congress. She clearly had taken the keys to the kingdom from her increasingly passive husband, who, deeply depressed by the Varennes episode, spent most of his time reading and sleeping.

I never knew that my Toinette, usually so guileless, was capable of such double-dealing! Under Barnave’s guidance, for instance, she wrote a letter to her brother Leopold II, asking him to support the new French nation, and to renounce all military ventures against it. Yet soon after mailing him that missive she wrote a second one to the Austrian ambassador, Mercy, telling him that her letter to Leopold had been extorted
from her by Barnave. She concluded this message, however, with a kindly report on Barnave and his disciples. “Although they’re tenacious in their opinions I have never seen anything but the greatest decency in them…and a genuine wish to restore order and…the authority of the Crown.”

The remaining months of 1791 were equally steeped in duplicity. Toinette was deceiving me through her secret relationship with Barnave; I was hoodwinking Gustavus by assuring him that the queen shared his enthusiasm for an armed congress. Barnave, of course, was double-crossing the Assembly through his dealings with the royal family; while Leopold of Austria, though saying yes yes yes to his little sister, had no intention whatever of coming to the French royal family’s rescue in the event they needed it. Neither did the king of Prussia have any similar intent, even though he too had pledged his support of the French Crown. Meanwhile Provence and Artois, who could barely conceal their elation over the Varennes debacle, were duping the Assembly by expressing hypocritical concerns over their brother’s fate.

In the midst of all these double-dealings, how did I react, one might well ask, to Toinette’s relationship with Barnave? Although it was rumored that she was sleeping with him I did not believe a word of it. Only I knew the extent to which the French tended to sully her reputation through loathsome gossip; only I knew that she was not that sexually driven, that she could only be aroused by someone with whom she was deeply in love. However, I was concerned enough about her relationship with the blackguard to write her the following words of caution: “Do not open your heart to those madmen; they’re all scoundrels who will do nothing for you…. The nobility whom you would thus abandon would no longer feel it owes you anything. You would debase yourself in the eyes of the powers of Europe, who would accuse you of cowardice.” “Set your mind at rest,” she replied to me; “I’m hardly joining the
enragés
. If I see them or have relations with some of them, it is
only to utilize them. They inspire too much horror in me; I would never go over to them.”

But the immense correspondence the queen was maintaining with diverse factions in her effort to save the Crown—with Barnave, with me, with her brother Emperor Leopold, with several other allied sovereigns whose support she was seeking—was clearly draining her. The young woman who had once exasperated her mother with her frivolity and laziness was often at work until 2 a.m. “I’m exhausted from writing,” she wrote me in one of her letters, which she sent to me in food tins, or in the hems of clothes. “I’ve never done work such as this before and I’m always afraid of forgetting something or making some stupid mistake.” And in another letter she phrased her weariness in the following manner: “Please understand my position, and the role I’m obliged to play all day long. Sometimes I barely recognize myself and I have to pause to realize that this person is really me…. When I’m at my saddest, I take my little boy in my arms, I kiss him with all my heart, and that momentarily consoles me.”

I
N JULY AND
A
UGUST OF 1791
I considered it more prudent to not write the queen at all. For I spent those months in Vienna, trying to convince the Austrian and Prussian monarchs to join an armed venture that would restore Louis XVI to his former power. Yet if I’d anticipated the anguish my silence would cause poor Toinette I might have reconsidered my prudence. It appears that several of her letters, including the one in which she called me “the most loving and beloved of men,” were intercepted, and they reached me only years later, after her death. Not aware of these interceptions, she was hurt by my muteness. “My heart is full of grief,” she wrote our mutual friend Valentin Esterhazy, “for I have no real friends here in whom I might confide my sorrows…. To have no news of him is unbearable. Should you write HIM
tell him that many miles and many countries can never separate hearts.” A few days later she sent Esterhazy another note, in which, he reported, she enclosed two rings. “The one that’s wrapped in paper is for HIM,” she wrote him. “Send it to HIM for me. It is exactly his size. I wore it for two days before wrapping it…. I don’t know where he is. It is dreadful to have no news of those one loves and not even know where they are.” Alas, I never received the ring.

I wrote the queen in late summer, after I’d finished my consultations with the Austrian emperor and the king of Prussia (whose pledges of support I did not in the least trust). It was a propitious time to write the queen; for in September of 1791 Louis’s decision to accept the constitution, which I now realize to have been essential to the survival, however temporary, of the monarchy, unleashed much indignation among Europe’s royalists. Gustavus was so outraged by Louis’s intention to sign this document that he threatened to entirely withdraw his support of the French Crown. Catherine of Russia was as incensed as Gustavus. Even more vociferous than those sovereigns were the king’s brothers, who were still holding their make-believe alternate court in Koblenz. Their verbal abuse, predictably, was directed at Marie Antoinette, whom they accused of being the one who had convinced the king to ally himself with what was now called the National Constituent Assembly.

Meanwhile the royal family’s life at the Tuileries, in the aftermath of Varennes, had become a kind of imprisonment. Menacing crowds often swarmed close to the palace, shouting threatening phrases such as “Death to the king!” or “Kill the queen!” Thousands of National Guardsmen camped in tents next to the château. Anyone wishing to enter the Tuileries was searched, and had to present a note signed by Lafayette himself. The king and queen could not even move about freely in their own apartments. Four officers escorted Marie Antoinette when she went to see the dauphin in the boy’s quarters. One of them knocked on the prince’s door and shouted, “The queen!” The sentry on duty at the dauphin’s rooms
opened the door for the queen, and her four guards would remain with her while she visited her son. The same procedure was followed when the young prince went to visit his mother. Equally painful, Toinette wrote me, was her lack of privacy at night. National Guardsmen were posted right outside her bedroom door, which she was not allowed to shut, even when she went to sleep. They often entered her room to make sure that she had not fled, and one night a guard even had the temerity to sit himself on her bed to “have a good talk” with her.

The Tuileries’ aura also remained hostile when the royal couple were alone with Madame Elisabeth, for the king’s sister served as her émigré brothers’ secret agent, fully supporting their belief in counterrevolution. “It’s hell at home,” the queen wrote me. “All conversation is impossible…. My sister-in-law is so indiscreet, and surrounded with so many intriguers, that if we spoke to each other at all we would argue all day.” In her letters to me, the queen gave full vent to her growing resentment of the French, and I fully concurred, calling them, to her delight, “wretches,” “monsters,” “a cursed race.” Our correspondence, as ever, was written in invisible ink, and coded. Our codebook in those years was
Paul et Virginie,
Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s 1788 novel, and we were careful about our couriers, mostly using the queen’s secretary, Goguelat, or else Eleanore Sullivan’s housekeeper.

O
N SEPTEMBER 13, 1791,
the Salle du Manège where the National Constituent Assembly met was packed as the king came to take his oath to the constitution. When Louis stood up, took off his hat, and began speaking the first words of the oath, he noticed that the deputies, breaching all protocol, had sat down and had failed to take off their own hats. Feeling deeply humbled, Louis continued to read the document while
sitting down. In spite of the loud cheers that rang out when he had finished speaking, the king was distinctly dismayed by the event. On his return to the Tuileries, he broke down and wept in the arms of the queen. “Why did you come to France to see me so humiliated?” he asked. But the monarchs were heartily cheered again when they went to the theater that night, and indeed the surveillance imposed upon them was somewhat relaxed after the constitution had been signed.

The threat of counterrevolution, however, continued to menace the Assembly, and it asked the king to sign additional, more contentious decrees. In December 1791 the Assembly voted several ordinances concerning émigrés, and “refractory” priests who had not taken the oath to the constitution. The émigrés, including the king’s brothers, were threatened with the seizure of their assets if they did not return to France within two months; in addition, Louis was to ask all European princes who had welcomed the émigrés to expel them from their domains. As for the refractory priests, they were threatened with deportation if they did not take the oath to the constitution. The king did not mind signing the decrees that concerned his brothers and other émigrés. But his great innate piety, and his deep allegiance to the church of Rome, led him to veto the statutes concerning refractory priests. Although the monarchs placated the Assembly by attending daily masses celebrated by state clergy who had taken the oath, they would secretly make their Easter duties in 1792 at a predawn service celebrated by nonjuring priests. However, the Assembly, suspecting the king’s support of refractory priests, threatened to abolish the right of veto originally granted him by the new constitution. Accusing the queen of having pressured her husband into resisting the Assembly’s ordinances, deputies began to call her “Madame Veto,” and she lost whatever small degree of popularity she had regained in previous months.