Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (41 page)

Historians’ opinions are divided as to whether Louis Auguste suffered from phimosis and underwent a minor procedure (not as radical as circumcision) in late 1773 to correct the defect, or whether his inability to make love to Marie Antoinette was purely psychological or psychosomatic. The latter is harder to believe, because Louis Auguste—who became Louis XVI upon his ascension to the throne with the death of his grandfather on May 10, 1774—admitted that he both loved and respected Marie Antoinette and found her very beautiful. While a number of present-day scholars vehemently dispute the phimosis speculation as being the pet theory of Marie Antoinette’s twentieth-century biographer, the Freudian Stefan Zweig, they cannot explain away the preponderance of correspondence that came out of the Bourbon court at the time. This included not merely the November 1773 dispatch from the Spanish ambassador to his sovereign graphically discussing the issue of the dauphin’s penis (which could be dismissed as gossip), but a number of letters written between Marie Antoinette and her mother discussing whether or not Louis was prepared to submit to the operation, and the medical opinions of the various court physicians on the subject. The language of that correspondence most clearly refers to a physical problem. That it was compounded by psychological and emotional issues is also a possibility. Unfortunately, Louis’ boyhood tutor, the duc de la Vauguyon,
had instilled in him a hatred of women and a particular distrust of Austrian females. But by 1773, the dauphin and dauphine had become close friends, and presented a united front against the duc’s malevolent influence.

In any event, the result was the same: The royal marriage was not consummated for more than seven years.

The course of history might have been different had the child-loving Marie Antoinette been granted her dearest wish and become a mother early in her marriage. During all those wasted years, had she given birth to at least one healthy son, the hopes of two great kingdoms would have been satisfied. She also might not have made as many enemies both inside the court and among her subjects, because she would have focused her energy on her children instead of channeling her frustration into flights of fancy, fashion, and frivolities—all-night faro games, outrageous coiffures, and masquerade balls.

True, she became an influential fashionista, and in her view stimulated the kingdom’s economy, because women slavishly copied her style. But that, too, was highly criticized. Damned if she did and damned if she didn’t, Marie Antoinette was condemned for dressing opulently—frankly in a manner befitting a monarch—and equally vilified for gowning herself more casually, derided for appearing to be wearing her lingerie, considered undignified for the queen of France.

The irony of it all was that her mania for acquisition and thrills was enabled by Louis. All too aware that his own deficiencies were the cause of his wife’s unhappiness, he indulged her requests no matter how extravagant, seeking to satisfy her desperate attempt to stave off boredom.

Although Marie Antoinette was not a classic beauty—saddled with the prominent eyes and the pronounced Hapsburg jaw of her forebears—she had also inherited their much-prized rose-and-gold complexion, which was clear in an age when foreign princesses’ faces were too often riddled with smallpox scars. Her contemporary, the writer and bureaucrat Sénac de Meilhan, remarked, “[S]he had more sparkle than beauty. There was nothing remarkable about her features taken singly but in their
ensemble
there was the greatest attraction. The word ‘charming’ is the exact word to describe the
final effect…. Her movements were of an extraordinary grace and nobility….” Marie Antoinette lacked the intellect and dazzling rapier wit so prized in eighteenth-century France, “but she had another quality that seemed to come to her intuitively,” according to Sénac. “Somehow she always knew the exact phrase that should be used in every circumstance. These always came from her heart rather than her mind.”

This statement in some measure contradicted the propaganda composed by her detractors that Marie Antoinette cared nothing for her subjects. She never uttered the infamous, tin-eared “Let them eat cake” remark in response to news that her people lacked bread. In truth she and Louis regularly gave alms. Marie Antoinette’s mother had raised her to comprehend and attend to the misfortunes of her people.

The image handed down to generations of schoolchildren in their textbooks is vastly skewed. It is famously said that history is written by the winners. Marie Antoinette couldn’t catch a break as queen of France, and ultimately became the greatest victim of the nation’s bloodiest revolution.

She did, however, enjoy a brief “honeymoon” with her adopted country when she was dauphine, if only because by then, the people detested their sovereign, Louis XV. Even during her very early years as queen, she represented a fresh hope for the kingdom.

But when too many childless years had passed and she poured her passion and energy instead into the pursuit of pleasure, the grace period was over. Marie Antoinette was criticized for gallivanting off to Paris for the nightlife with her girlfriends and the king’s younger brother the comte d’Artois, while her husband slumbered back at Versailles. She became a scapegoat. Those who had wished her ill from the start began the drumbeat. They were joined by the ostracized courtiers who disseminated their poisoned screeds among the people. It was the aristocrats who invented the character of the debauched spendthrift queen, the “Austrian bitch.”

As dauphine, Marie Antoinette had had no use for the older generation of courtiers, and her open mocking of them as straitlaced fuddy-duddies continued when she was a young queen. Her behavior would come back to haunt her. Owing to their mutual dislike, instead
of regally tolerating their presence, Marie Antoinette excluded these courtiers from her intimate circle of friends and from le Petit Trianon, her personal idyll at Versailles. On one level, it’s understandable that the queen would not wish to surround herself with detractors. But when she shut out those whose families had for decades, if not centuries, earned privileges that brought them into close proximity with the sovereigns, Marie Antoinette reaped a heap of revenge.

The insulted and disgruntled courtiers spread rumors about her conduct at le Petit Trianon, spinning perfectly innocuous behavior behind the doors that were closed to them into tales of illicit orgies with lovers of both sexes. Even after Marie Antoinette finally became a mother in December 1778, giving birth to a daughter, the diatribes did not abate. In fact, they increased when she finally bore a son and heir to the throne in October 1781. Scurrilous pamphlets accused her of cuckolding the king with the comte d’Artois. Marie Antoinette bore Louis a total of four children, although two of them died before the French Revolution began.

In June 1789, Louis convened a meeting of representatives from France’s three Estates. The clergy and nobility comprised the First and Second Estates. Everyone else was lumped into the Third Estate, the only entity that paid taxes.

By the time the Bastille was stormed by a mob of more than twenty thousand vitriolic Parisians on July 14, it was far too late for Marie Antoinette to reverse her bad press. Her demise was inevitable. The king’s authority was gradually eroded, until in 1792 the National Assembly abolished the monarchy, deposed the sovereigns, and renamed Louis and Marie Antoinette, although they had been Bourbons, Citizen and Citizeness Capet, for a monarchy that had ended in 1328.

Tried and found guily of high treason and crimes against the state, Louis was sent to the guillotine in January 1793, and as French queens were never more than consorts, Marie Antoinette, now the Widow Capet, no longer had any political standing. But the most radical revolutionary element worried that after the king’s execution their cause was losing steam, and the people’s thirst for bloodshed was on the wane. To them, Marie Antoinette’s existence still represented that
of the monarchy, so they needed to present her as a treacherous and dangerous woman whose death was the only way that France could be fully cleansed and a new order reborn.

She was tried for treason, the verdict of guilty a foregone conclusion. The ultimate victim of the Revolution, Marie Antoinette was executed on October 16, 1793. Forbidden to wear black, as she was still in mourning for her husband, she dressed in white, which the revolutionaries seemed unaware was the traditional color of mourning for medieval and Renaissance queens.

Some scholars believe that on her ascent to the scaffold she accidentally stepped on the foot of the executioner, Henri Sanson, and politely asked his forgiveness. Along with several other victims of the guillotine that day, Marie Antoinette’s remains were taken unceremoniously to the Cimitière de la Madeleine, where, as one story goes, the gravediggers, taking their lunch break, tossed her head between the legs of her corpse, while they casually ate their meal. As burials were costly, not until sixty bodies were accumulated was her coffin smothered with quicklime and interred with the others.

After Napoleon’s exile to Elba and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, an effort was made to accord Louis and Marie Antoinette a proper burial. On January 15, 1815, Marie Antoinette’s bones were identified by scraps of her black filoselle stockings and the garters that she customarily wore. Louis’ remains were found the following day. Their bones were reinterred in the royal crypt at Saint-Denis on January 21, ironically the twenty-second anniversary of Louis’ execution.

Their surviving daughter, Marie Thérèse, had been released from prison during the Revolution in an exchange of prisoners and joined her mother’s family in Vienna. She eventually wed her first cousin, the duc d’Angoulême, and died in 1851.

Her younger brother, the dauphin Louis Charles, died in the Temple prison on June 8, 1795, at the age of ten, although rumors abounded that he had been smuggled out of the Temple and replaced with a changeling. However, in 2000, mitochondrial DNA testing on the child’s heart, which had been preserved in a crystal urn at Saint-Denis, proved without a doubt that the DNA sequences were a match with Marie Antoinette’s.

At least
la reine martyre
—the martyred queen, as she is commonly known among her adherents in France and Canada—was finally and conclusively reunited with her beloved son, a soupçon of comfort in a tale of considerable woe.

M
ARIE
A
NTOINETTE
AND
C
OUNT
A
XEL
VON
F
ERSEN
(1755–1810)

One of the great royal romances of all time may never have been consummated. The stakes, the risks, the temptation, and the queen’s morals could not have been higher. Because so many documents were destroyed and heavily redacted, even during the couple’s lifetime, there is no concrete evidence that Marie Antoinette and Axel von Fersen became lovers. On the other hand, precisely for the same reason, there remains the possibility that what began as a flirtation and blossomed into a friendship at some point passed a definable boundary into a physical relationship. Of course, not every romance involves or culminates in sex. Whether Marie Antoinette and Axel von Fersen had that kind of romance remains one of royal history’s most hotly debated issues, with each side occasionally displaying intolerance for the opposite view. There are some royal couples who spark strong emotional responses and personal convictions. Fersen and Marie Antoinette crown the list.

By the time Marie Antoinette met Count Axel von Fersen on January 30, 1774, she yearned for someone to love and who would love her in return. The Opéra ball at the Palais Royal that night would change her life. At around one a.m., Count Axel von Fersen, an eighteen-year-old Swede, arrived to find the halls thronged with partiers. Among them were the dauphine (also eighteen) and her nineteen-year-old husband, up long past his bedtime, as well as Louis Auguste’s brother, the portly and wily comte de Provence. Like many of the other aristocrats at the ball, the members of the royal family were masked to preserve their incognito. The count had been in the hall for a half hour or so before a fair
inconnue
approached him and struck up a conversation. Fersen spoke for about ten minutes with the masked young lady, later writing of the incident in his
Journal intime
,
“The Dauphine talked to me for a long time without me knowing who she was; at last when she was recognized, everybody pressed round her and she retired into a box at three o’clock: I left the ball.”

Count von Fersen departed the Opéra exhilarated, having charmed, and been enchanted by, Marie Antoinette. And, having been formally presented at Versailles on New Year’s Day, he would have many opportunities to see her again at court. Fersen had arrived in Paris in November 1773. The glamorous capital was a requisite destination on the Grand Tour embarked upon by gentlemen of the eighteenth-century nobility as a rite of passage. Having traveled the globe since the age of fifteen, Fersen, nicknamed “the richest man in Sweden,” was the older son of a decorated field marshal and statesman and a countess related to the royal house of Vasa.

In addition to his native tongue, the impossibly handsome teen, tall and slender, with a narrow face, soft brown hair, strong dark brows, and hazel eyes that alternately appeared blue, green, or brown, spoke fluent French, Italian, German, and English. These qualities, combined with his melancholy aura, and later his military heroism, made him the ultimate chick magnet. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, praised his “most gentleman-like air.” Another female acquaintance found him “a burning soul with a shell of ice.” But he had admirers among his own gender as well. The comte de Tilly considered Fersen “one of the best-looking men I ever saw,” despite, or perhaps because of, his “icy countenance,” which women undoubtedly hoped to melt. The duc de Lévis described Count von Fersen as looking like the hero of a novel—but not a French one, as the Swede was too serious and discreet. Nor was he foppish or fey, like so many of his English and French counterparts. And Marie Antoinette’s famed
friseur
, Léonard Hautier, described the count as being like Apollo—someone who excited amorous feelings in women and jealous ones in men.