Sex with the Queen (45 page)

doorstep for their prisoner, her new jailers became concerned that she did not emerge from her carriage for some time. After she finally did venture out, they looked inside and saw that the floor was coated with blood. Once in her cell, the queen kept losing alarming amounts of blood. It is likely that she was dying of uterine cancer.

In a cold chamber with no fire, the queen began to show symptoms of tuberculosis. The sheets on her narrow bed were filthy, and she had a single dirty blanket with holes in it. Dressed in black to hide the blood, she expected to be murdered in her cell or led to her execution at any moment. One day, walking through a door she struck her head on the doorway. Asked if she were hurt, she replied, “Oh no—nothing can hurt me any more.”46

On September 4 Fersen wrote to Sophie, “I often reproach myself even for the air I breathe when I think she is shut up in a dreadful prison. This idea is breaking my heart and poisoning my life, and I’m constantly torn between grief and rage.”47

In October 1793 Marie Antoinette, the Austrian whore, as she was called, was charged with aiding and abetting the enemies of France to launch an invasion, which was true. Many of the let-ters she had had smuggled out of prison had been intercepted and decoded. To drag her despised name through the mud even further, she was also accused of sexually abusing her son, which was untrue. The terrified little boy had been beaten until he tes-tified against her. Found guilty of all charges, she was sentenced to be guillotined.

She was, without the aid of the guillotine, already a dying woman, eaten up by tuberculosis and cancer and the grief that fed their growth. In her final letter, she wrote to her sister-in-law, Madame Elizabeth, of her dead husband: “I hope to show the same firmness as he did in his last moments. . . .”48 She continued in a mysterious passage which must have referred to Fersen: “I used to have friends. The idea of being separated from them for ever and their grief is one of the greatest sorrows I shall carry to my grave; may they know at least that I thought of them until my last moment.”49 On her prayer book she wrote, 2 0 6

s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

“My God, have pity on me! My eyes have no tears left to weep for you, my poor children. Adieu, adieu!”50

Hours later, Marie Antoinette, dressed in a simple white dress with her hands tied behind her back, was loaded into a tumbrel which drove her from her prison to the foot of the guil-lotine. In preparation for the sharp blade, her hair had been cut. Those golden curls, once piled high with diamonds, feath-ers, and bows, were now a raggedy mess of dirty white tendrils. As the cart lurched forward through howling crowds, her priest said, “Have courage, Madame.” “Courage!” she almost spat. “It is to live that requires courage, not to die.”51

She was shoved roughly up the steps. Louis would have been proud of her, for, like him, she showed no fear. Even at that moment Marie Antoinette was still the most fashionable woman in France, leading the fashion right up to the guillotine where thousands more fashionable women would follow. Moments later her head was held up by the executioner. Her body was dumped in an unmarked grave near that of her husband. It was October 16, 1793.

Upon hearing the news that she was, at last, beyond hope of his rescue, Fersen was devastated. “I seemed to feel nothing,” he wrote in his diary.52 The next day he went out riding alone.

When he returned he wrote, “That she was alone in her last mo-ments without consolation, with no one to talk to, to give her last wishes to, is horrifying. The monsters from hell! No, without revenge, my heart will never be satisfied.”53 He kept a list of the names of the judges who had condemned her. As the years passed, he checked off the names of those who had died; with ex-quisite irony, most of them were guillotined.

Two months after the queen’s execution, he wrote to Sophie of the bungled night of Varennes two years earlier: “I would have been much happier if I’d died on June 21.”54 He was not yet forty, yet his life was over. His remaining years would not be liv-ing, but existing, dragging himself reluctantly through each day, until death assuaged his pain.

When a dejected Fersen finally returned to Stockholm, his sister handed him a scrap of paper that the queen had somehow e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y e u r o p e 2 0 7

smuggled out to Sophie shortly before her execution. “Adieu,” it said simply. “My heart is all yours.”55 A ray of light pierced the darkness of his soul; this pitiful scrap of wrinkled paper seemed to be a message from
Her
in heaven.

In June 1795 another blow hit Fersen; the death in prison of the ten-year-old Louis XVII, the boy who was perhaps his son.

“This event caused me real pain,” he wrote sadly. “He was the last and only interest left to me in France.”56

In December 1795 the seventeen-year-old dauphine, Marie Antoinette’s daughter, was exchanged for French prisoners and returned to Vienna to live with her mother’s family. Fersen fol-lowed her to Vienna and tried to meet with her Austrian relatives to ask for reimbursement of his expenses for the escape to Varennes. Ignored by the imperial circle, Fersen finally left in dejection. He paid all the capital and interest—the crushing bur-den of one million livres—out of his inheritance.

Before Marie Antoinette died, she destroyed most of her pa-pers and letters. Many of Fersen’s diaries and copies of his let-ters to the queen were passed down in his family. But when his great-nephew Baron Rin de Klinckowstrom published Fersen’s letters in 1877—in an era of Victorian prudishness—he edited them heavily, removing most of the first and last lines where amorous expressions were likely to have been inserted. After pub-lication Klinckowstrom burned them. By this time Marie An-toinette’s reputation had been established as sainted mother and holy martyr, and the publication of her adulterous love letters, salted with references to hot sex, would have been unthinkable.

Fersen never married, remaining committed to his memories of love with the queen. He had a successful political career in Sweden, and in 1797 was sent as Swedish ambassador to the Con-gress of Rastatt to treat with Napoleon. The little Corsican, how-ever, “refused to deal with a man who had slept with the Queen of France.”57

The world was rapidly changing, and Fersen did not truly be-long to the new one. “He who has not known Paris before 1789

has never known the true sweetness of living,” wrote the French statesman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand long years after the 2 0 8

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revolution.58 It had been an age of soft silks and powdered wigs, where sweet strains of the minuet echoed through gilded rooms flickering in candlelight, an age in which every aspect of living was an exquisite art form. This most civilized of civilizations had been drowned in a sea of blood, and after the mess had been mopped up, nothing would ever be the same. Talleyrand was not the only one to find the light harsher, the music louder, the women less graceful. Axel Fersen would have agreed.

In 1810 the middle-aged Crown Prince Karl August of Swe-den suddenly died of a stroke. Rumors circulated that Axel Fersen, who had disliked the prince, had in fact poisoned him.

Alarmed at the growing revolt against Fersen, his friends warned him to steer clear of the funeral procession; but as grand mar-shal, Fersen insisted that he lead it according to custom. Halfway through the procession, a mob tore him from his carriage and bludgeoned him to death.

Handsome Axel, who had danced so gracefully at Versailles, was now reduced to butcher’s offal in the streets. As a youth he had once written with a clear vision of his future, “I’m not one of those men who will find happiness.”59 It must have been a re-lief to die, to cross over the inviolable wall of separation toward
Her.
Lying in the street, as the lights dimmed, the cries subsided, and the pain diminished, perhaps he saw a radiant girl with golden hair who, laughing, touched his arm.

C a r o l i n e M a t i l d a o f B r i t a i n , Q u e e n o f D e n m a r k

“I Would Marr y Him I Loved, and Give Up My Throne”

“To be unfaithful to a husband one has been forced to marry is not a crime,” said Queen Caroline Matilda of Denmark in 1770.60 And yet the penalty she would pay for her infidelity was a heavy one.

In 1766 the fifteen-year-old British princess, great-granddaughter of Sophia Dorothea of Celle and sister of King George III, was forced to marry the seventeen-year-old King e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y e u r o p e 2 0 9

Christian VII of Denmark. Matilda—as she was known—wept when she heard of the marriage, wept all the way on the long journey from England to Copenhagen, and upon her arrival wept more when she learned that something was rotten in the state of Denmark.

During the marriage negotiations, the Danish ambassador had advertised Christian with great praise. “The amiable charac-ter of the Prince of Denmark is universally acknowledged here,”

he said.61 But in reality the amiable prince knocked over citizens in the street and beat up the night watch. “In his way of living he is regular and sober,” the ambassador continued, “eats heartily, but drinks little or no wine.”62 He neglected to mention that Christian was a staggering alcoholic by the time he hit his teens.