Sex with the Queen (42 page)

discussing the question which engrossed her! I have seen the king take notice of this, smile, and grant her wish.”6

Once, when she did not get her way despite cajoling, threat-ening, storming, imploring,
and
the white-glove trick, she bit her husband’s hand so hard he had a scar for quite some time.

Realizing her own political wisdom was not sufficient to run a nation, in 1779 she nominated an English visitor, the ex-naval officer Sir John Acton, as chief adviser. Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador, reported, “He was forty-two, an experi-enced man of the world, enterprising, cosmopolitan and a bach-elor. After a few conversations with him, Maria Carolina was convinced that she had found a perfect collaborator. . . . She regarded him as her own discovery. Together they would create a really independent kingdom. Acton set to work with cool thor-oughness, patience and a systematic energy almost unknown in Naples.”7

She also fell head over heels in love with him. Tall, lean, with an intelligent face and dignified bearing, the very proper Sir John seemed oblivious to the queen’s charms, which made her passion burn more brightly. She finally conquered him, however, and rewarded him with the war department and, soon after, the finance ministry, where he became prime minister in all but name. Last, he became a field marshal and general of the Neapolitan armed forces. The right foil to the queen’s melodrama, the taciturn Sir John ruled Naples with calm strength.

But the queen’s long white arms had ceased to pull Acton’s puppet strings by the late 1780s, when he began to work openly against her cockamamie political ideas. He was in the possession of steamy titillating letters she had written him and checked her scheming by threatening to release them. To punish him, she took countless young lovers. Unconcerned with her sexual es-capades, Acton intervened only when he saw a young man delv-ing into politics. Acton would inform the king of his wife’s love affair, and the lover would be exiled. Ironically, Acton became the king’s best friend and the queen’s greatest enemy. The for-mer lovers studiously avoided each other.

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The queen fumed against Acton as the man “whose wicked-ness has altogether surpassed what I could have imagined, and I admit that this black ingratitude is deeply distressing to me and disgusts me more and more with this world.”8

Throughout the tumult caused by the Napoleonic wars, Acton stood by the royal family. He arranged their escape from revolu-tionary forces and lived with them in their Sicilian exile while Napoleon’s sister and her husband, the Murats, ruled Naples.

But finally, plagued by old age, poor health, and the queen’s temper tantrums, he retired and the lethargic king permitted his wife to rule once more. We can assume she went right to her glove drawer.

M a r i e A n t o i n e t t e o f A u s t r i a , Q u e e n o f F r a n c e

“Adieu, My Heart Is All Yours”

When seventeen-year-old Marie Antoinette of Austria, for three years the wife of the heir to the French throne, made her first official entrance into Paris in 1773, she was met by the thunder-ous applause of wildly cheering crowds. “Madame, you have here a hundred thousand lovers,” a city official told her.9 But they would, over time, dwindle down to one.

On a glittering cold January night in 1774 she met him at a masked ball in Paris. Such balls had been the rage for over a cen-tury because masked women could flirt outrageously without be-ing recognized. Incognito, even the noblest women teased unknown men and sometimes had sex with them in carriages or gardens, willingly raising their skirts but never their black velvet masks. There were reports that some men had sex with their own wives at masked balls and never knew it.

Eighteen-year-old Count Axel Fersen of Sweden, sent by his powerful father on a European tour to polish him up, was en-chanted when a lovely masked girl approached him, placed her hand ever so gently upon his sleeve, and began to flirt. After a time, she raised her mask and others gasped to see the dauphine, e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y e u r o p e 1 9 3

or crown princess, Marie Antoinette. The dauphine should have been presiding over her elegant court at Versailles, not attending a shocking masked ball in Paris. But she had been forced to marry a man she found repulsive, a man who after five years of marriage was still unable to consummate it. She vented her frus-trations in dancing, gambling, and shopping.

Marie Antoinette looked straight into the grave blue eyes of young Count Axel Fersen and laughed out loud before disap-pearing into the crowd. The following day Fersen attended a ball at Versailles where he danced continuously for five hours, the ea-gle eyes of the dauphine watching his graceful movements. A few days later he reported in his diary, “I go only to the balls given by Madame la Dauphine.”10 Possibly he had already fallen in love.

For four months he stayed at Versailles, and it is likely that he saw her often at court events.

Slender gallant Fersen must have contrasted favorably to Marie Antoinette’s husband, Louis. The baron de Frénilly wrote of the dauphin, “He was a good man, a good husband, pious, chaste, virtuous, just, humane, but without wit, without charac-ter, without will, without experience, a heavy mass badly carved, stout, lumbering, brusque, coarse, common in speech and triv-ial in manner; it was necessary to take thought, and to close one’s eyes, to do him justice.”11

Shortly after Fersen reluctantly left Versailles to visit London, old King Louis XV succumbed to smallpox. The dull-witted dauphin was now King Louis XVI of France. Louis was miser-able in the knowledge that just as he made a terrible husband, he would make an awful king. Iron strength, unrelenting ego, and unquenchable thirst for glory were the qualities required by a king. Poor Louis was kindhearted, moral, modest, and indeci-sive. When asked what adjective he would like to see attached to his name, Louis replied with a heavy sigh, “I would like to be known as Louis the Severe.”12

The queen, for her part, said that her goal was not to be a great queen; she wanted to be the most fashionable woman in France. Marie Antoinette, though beautiful and sparkling enough to fill a decorative role at the French court, boasted even 1 9 4

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less intelligence than her plodding husband. Unlike him, she was not smart enough to realize her own limitations. Decisive and confident, Marie Antoinette prided herself on her political ge-nius, easily swaying her weak husband.

In August 1778 Axel Fersen returned to Versailles. At twenty-two he was an experienced lover and sophisticated courtier. In a crowd of clucking favor seekers, Fersen alone was reserved, discreet, thoughtful. A French nobleman, the duc de Lévis, reported, “His manners were noble and unaffected. His conversation was not very animated, and he showed more judg-ment than wit. He was circumspect with men and reserved with women, serious without being sad. His face and his manner were perfectly suited to the hero of a novel, though not of a French novel, for he had neither the brilliance nor the frivolity.”13

The queen’s page Alexandre de Tilly said that Axel was “one of the handsomest men I ever saw, though with an icy counte-nance, which women do not dislike if they can hope to give it an-imation.”14 One of his spurned lovers wrote that “he had a burning soul beneath a layer of ice.”15

As for Marie Antoinette, much had changed since she had last seen Fersen. In the intervening four years Louis had finally con-quered his impotence and the queen was pregnant. But she was still not in love with her husband. Upon seeing her former ad-mirer, the queen’s face lit up. Smiling broadly, she cried, “Ah!

But here is an old acquaintance!”16

Fersen wrote his father, “The Queen, who is the most beauti-ful and amiable princess I know, has had the kindness to ask of-ten about me. . . .”17 Hearing that as a captain of the Swedish king’s light horse he owned a gorgeous pale blue and white uni-form, she made him promise to wear it. When Fersen walked to-ward her one day resplendent in his military attire, she was leaning on the arm of her first equerry, the comte de Tessé, who

“was made aware, by a movement of her hand, of the strong emotion caused by that sight.”18

By autumn she was seen to be giving Fersen more attention than any other courtier. She played the harpsichord for him and sang. She often invited him to her private apartments where, in e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y e u r o p e 1 9 5

a small group, she would play cards with him, or perhaps draw him aside for a private chat. “My stay here becomes more agree-able by the day,” he wrote his father gleefully in December. “It’s a charming place!”19

On December 19, 1778, Marie Antoinette gave birth to a daughter. Though a girl could not inherit the French throne, and Louis was eager to try for a boy, the queen spurned his at-tentions and focused on her devoted Swede. It is likely that the burgeoning love affair was not yet physical; it consisted of bright eyes and slow smiles, the inexpressible delight of being together.

But after a time, Fersen looked about him and realized his love was futile, even dangerous. Hoping a change of scene would ease his pain, he volunteered to serve France in the American Revolutionary War. Perhaps, with an ocean between them, he could forget her.

In April 1780 the Swedish ambassador Gustaf Creutz wrote to King Gustavus III of Sweden, “I must confide to Your Majesty that young Count Fersen has been so well treated by the Queen that several people have taken umbrage at it. . . . Young Count Fersen conducted himself admirably in these circumstances by his modesty and reserve, and above all by the decision he took to go to America. . . . The Queen couldn’t take her eyes off him during the final days; when she looked at him they were filled with tears. . . .”20

On October 17, 1781, Fersen was present when the British commanding general, Lord Charles Cornwallis, surrendered to General George Washington at Yorktown. As the only English-speaking aide to the French commanding general, Comte Jean de Rochambeau, he served as interpreter for Washington and his French allies. But Fersen found his duties uninspiring and be-lieved that France was wrong to help the Americans rebel against their lawful king. To his horror, he realized that Americans were not even gentlemen. “Money is their god,” he wrote, scandal-ized. “Virtue, honor, these are nothing to them beside the pre-cious metal.”21 Worse, after the glories of Versailles, he found himself stewing in the Virginia capital of Williamsburg for sev-eral months, “a wretched hole.”22 Nonetheless, for his invaluable 1 9 6