The Queen's Lover (11 page)
The dear little girl was very taken with our trysts, and while not admitting to our forbidden games, talked to her brother of her romantic feelings toward me. The duke even broached, ever so amiably, the possibility of marital intentions. I politely deflected his suggestions, saying I was determined to remain a bachelor, and asking him to console his sister with that explanation. Ah women, women, my life’s plague and chief delight!
T
RAVELING FURTHER SOUTH
in the Italian peninsula, we reached Rome, where Gustavus had asked for an audience with the pope. Our fears were awakened again: he was the first Swedish ruler since Christina who had asked to see the pontiff! But it was not our shrewd monarch’s newfound piety that drove him to the Vatican—he had ulterior motives of a political nature. Pius VI was an amiable, unimpressive little man who was made notable by his secret fondness for the Jesuits, who were currently seeking refuge in Russia after having been banned from most of Europe by a previous pontiff. Our king was perfection itself at the audience, advancing toward the pope deeply bowed and at a snail’s pace, prostrating himself at all the right times, kissing the papal ring like the earth’s most devout. And he readily charmed the pontiff into trading favors: he obtained Pius VI’s permission to have a Lutheran chapel built in Rome, in return for promising to build a Catholic church in Stockholm. We stayed in the Eternal City for several weeks, the king dallying ecstatically amid its dozens of churches and museums, and refusing to
make up his mind whether to go south to Naples or head back north to Paris. From Rome I described my impatience in a letter to my father: “We suffer from an exorbitant principle of disorder and indecision, we change plans twenty times a day, each of them more outlandish than the last. I’m in despair about participating in his trip…. It obliges me to daily witness odd and novel extravagances.”
Gustavus finally decided to go south to Naples, which was ruled by yet another sibling of my beloved’s, Queen Maria Carolina. A large, violently authoritarian woman, she totally dominated her husband, Ferdinand IV, who himself was no delicate chap. Massively built, loudmouthed, with a huge nose that led to his being named
“nasone
,” he devoted himself entirely to fishing, cleaning and skinning his catches himself. Dressed as a sailor, he sold his produce at the public market, always surrounding himself with companions of the lowest possible provenance. The coarseness of the couple would lead me to be all the more amazed by the refinement and grace of their nearest kin, the French monarchs. Maria Carolina became smitten with Armfelt. There were many gay, puerile entertainments at her court, such as costume parties at which the queen dressed as Ceres, and her ladies-in-waiting as Neapolitan peasant girls who showered the guests with roses, while Armfelt, who loved masquerades, impersonated a bear.
And then we headed north toward Paris, the true goal of this entire journey that the “Comte de Haga” had so deviously planned. Once arrived, we faced some disappointments. Many of our old friends were gone. Our former ambassador to Paris, Creutz, had been recalled to Stockholm to be minister of foreign affairs. Baron de Staël had replaced him. Moreover, everyone at the French court dreaded Gustavus’s visit because as Louis XVI’s favorite minister, Comte de Vergennes, put it, “This prince will hardly renounce a costume that will expose him to derision everywhere he’ll go.” To make it even more awkward, Gustavus arrived at Versailles unannounced. It was June 7, 1784. Louis XVI
was spending the day at Rambouillet and was about to sit down to dinner. Informed of the arrival of his royal visitor, he ordered up his horses and hastily dressed. So hastily, in fact, that to the queen’s despair he greeted his guest wearing totally dissimilar shoes: one had a red heel and a gold buckle, the other a black heel and a silver buckle.
Once the royal formalities were over, Gustavus set out to explore Parisian culture, and would not allow any member of his retinue to miss one significant event. He saw every play performed at the Comédie Française, heard Gluck’s
Armida
and a score of other works at the opera, and twice attended
The Marriage of Figaro.
There were occasions on which we were forced to attend two or three spectacles a day. “We’re constantly occupied and constantly in a hurry,” I wrote my father. “This kind of hassle very much suits the Comte de Haga, but I’m exhausted by it. He’d rather skip food, drink, and sleep than not be at spectacles all day long; it’s an obsession.”
My king, alas, was not popular with the French. Thirteen years before he had been a slightly effeminate young man, but now he made no bones about being homosexual. Everyone at court joked about his not attending brothels, as most every visiting dignitary did. The queen snubbed him because of his outrageous costumes and his unmistakable sexual orientation. Louis XVI found him pedantic and yawned at his conversation because of its abundance of art historical details. Nevertheless, magnificent parties were given in Gustavus’s honor. Perhaps for my sake, Toinette, always an exquisite hostess, overcame her prejudices against my king and gave him one of the greatest fetes ever held at the Trianon. The supper was served at little tables dispersed among the bushes of the park, which was lit by many hundreds of candles. The queen went from one table to the next, standing at length behind the king of Sweden’s chair, Taube’s, Armfelt’s, and mine, to speak to each of us in turn. “It was an enchantment, truly an Elysian spectacle,” Gustavus wrote home to Sweden.
My king’s pace was as feverish as usual—he had to see every site of note in the Île-de-France, as he had in Italy. Even I feigned a headache every few days to drop out of his retinue and have my essential moments of tenderness with Toinette. Gustavus would be more than enchanted by his stay in Paris. Over the weeks, the queen grew to appreciate his love of France and his remarkable culture, and ended up being quite fond of him. In exchange for granting France new trading concessions in Sweden, he obtained a colony he had desired for a long time, the island of Saint Barthélemy in the Caribbean, whose capital, I hope, will always remain named Gustavia.
This time I had to follow my king back to Sweden. It is with the greatest sorrow that I took leave of her again. My father was ill, and I had to spend the winter with him in Stockholm, where I had not been for nearly seven years. I was able to return to Paris very briefly in May, bringing Toinette a portrait of the Swedish crown prince, and we enjoyed a few sweet and passionate encounters.
I
T HAS ALWAYS
been a sorrow to me that I was in Sweden in the first months of 1785, when the queen suffered one of her life’s most difficult episodes, the event known as the Diamond Necklace Affair. The greatest royal scandal of the century, it featured Marie Antoinette and a supporting cast of swindlers and charlatans of legendary proportions, and undermined Louis XVI’s reign as no earlier event had. At the center of the imbroglio were the country’s highest prelate, the notoriously frivolous and popular Cardinal de Rohan, grand almoner of France and scion of one of its wealthiest and most venerable families (whom I’d always suspected of being a total cad); a deeply indebted Paris jeweler, Monsieur Böhmer, who had set out to sell the world’s most expensive diamond necklace to Marie Antoinette; and a gang of thieves led by a rapacious adventuress named Jeanne de La Motte, the illegitimate daughter of a
member of the ancient Valois family, who was determined to gain fame and fortune at the cadaverous court of Versailles. Quite understandably, the flamboyant Rohan had been detested by Marie Antoinette’s family during his tenure as ambassador to Vienna; the queen shared her relatives’ intense dislike for him; and La Motte’s plan was to capitalize on the cardinal’s ardent desire finally to gain the queen’s favor.
To this end La Motte, who had been Rohan’s mistress, persuaded the prelate that she was a close friend of Marie Antoinette (upon whom, in reality, she had never laid eyes) and that she could help him secure the queen’s esteem. Pretending to hand Rohan’s missives to her “dear friend” Marie Antoinette, forging letters that promised the cardinal an eventual audience, and emptying his pockets at every turn, La Motte arranged a trumped-up encounter between Rohan and the queen: she hired a cocotte who, shrouded with thick veils, successfully impersonated my poor beloved queen, and offered the deliriously happy prelate a brief evening meeting in the gardens of Versailles.
Enter August Böhmer, a prominent jeweler, often employed by the French court, who at a time of deepening financial crisis was more desperate than ever to unload a certain necklace: it was a
“rivière
” of 579 diamonds, 2,800 carats’ worth of them, which he had originally designed for Madame du Barry (due to Louis XV’s sudden death, she had never been able to buy it). Böhmer had turned to La Motte for help. Couldn’t she persuade her “dear friend” the queen to buy the trinket? La Motte was shrewd enough to know that a national debt of unprecedented proportions, and the country’s increasing alienation from Louis XVI, would deter the king from spending 1.6 million pounds on yet another trifle for his wife. But La Motte circumvented that difficulty: she persuaded Rohan to consolidate his new friendship with the queen by offering her the necklace himself. She produced a supposed letter from the queen—La Motte’s forgery of my beloved’s handwriting—that authorized him to make the purchase. The shimmering trinket was
then brought to the cardinal; besotted by the prospect of finally gaining the queen’s good graces, he handed it to a minion of La Motte’s who pretended to be the queen’s own messenger; whence it passed, of course, into the adventuress’s own hands. She had the necklace dismantled, sold its component stones in London, and for a few months lived like a multimillionaire, acquiring a grand chateau and so many luxurious furnishings that it took forty-two coaches to carry them.
But La Motte eventually faltered because she had underestimated the jeweler’s diligence. Böhmer went to visit Marie Antoinette to deliver some far more modest items she
had
ordered from him—in view of the public opinion mounting against her, my darling friend was trying hard to be less ostentatious. During their meeting, Böhmer asked the queen about the diamond necklace she was purchasing with Cardinal de Rohan’s help.
“What
necklace?” Marie Antoinette asked, immediately suspicious of the detested prelate. The queen and the jeweler did not take long to realize that they had both been the victims of a staggering swindle.
The denouement of “the Diamond Necklace Affair,” as it came to be known throughout Europe, was as extravagant a coup de théâtre as any event of the century. My poor Toinette, not realizing that Rohan had been as duped by La Motte as she, begged her husband to arrest the cardinal. I need not tell you how subservient Louis was to his wife’s wishes. On August 15, 1785, which was the queen’s name day as well as the Feast of the Assumption, Rohan was scheduled to say High Mass in front of the assembled court. The royal couple called for the cardinal to come first to their private apartments. They were in the company of their favorite minister and adviser, my friend Baron de Breteuil, an avowed enemy of Rohan’s. The detestable cardinal admitted that he had been a pathetic dupe. The king replied that since the prelate had defamed the queen’s name, he must be arrested. The four luminaries then went into the Hall of Mirrors, where thousands of courtiers were waiting for Mass
to begin. Breteuil stood next to Rohan, who was dressed in scarlet cardinal’s regalia. “Arrest the cardinal!” the minister ordered the captain of the guards, his eyes sparkling with pleasure. The crowd was stunned. No Mass was said that day at Versailles. The hugely popular cardinal was hauled off to the Bastille like a common pickpocket. Once there, he enjoyed such a profusion of luxuries and privileges—a large retinue of servants attended him, oysters and champagne were brought him daily—that for reasons of security the daily walks allowed the occupant of the neighboring jail cell, the Marquis de Sade, were suspended for the duration of the prelate’s stay.
Nine months after the necklace episode its chief participants would be brought to court before the Parlement of Paris. The jurors, after a sixteen-hour deliberation, acquitted Rohan by a vote of 26 to 22; La Motte was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. But my cherished Toinette also received a life sentence of sorts. As Rohan emerged from his trial at the Parlement, as huge crowds voiced their support with shouts of “Long live the Cardinal!,” the queen wept bitterly in her apartments. She was shrewd enough to sense that her husband’s reign had been dealt a blow from which it might never recover. However trumped-up the charges against her, the scandal had exposed the feebleness of Louis XVI’s rule, her own former frivolity, the corruption of the entire court. Philanthropy and prison reform being the fashion; it became very chic to visit La Motte in her jail cell. Two years after her conviction, the swindler escaped from prison and fled to England, whence she launched a vituperative propaganda campaign against Marie Antoinette that found an eager audience in France.
From the summer of 1786 on, the criticism focused on the queen grew barely tolerable. She was being blamed for every ill that plagued France, including the country’s increasingly shaky finances. Shortly after Rohan’s trial, it was learned that Louis’s government had had to borrow over one million pounds from foreign powers. The woman
disdainfully referred to as “L’Autrichienne” (it was pronounced with the emphasis on the last syllable,
chienne
, French for “bitch”) now became known as “Madame Deficit.” The slander was often laced with sexual innuendoes. Score upon score of lampoons published in the following years accused my chastest of friends of having gone to bed with dozens of persons of both sexes, including Cardinal de Rohan; the king’s younger brother Comte d’Artois; her friend Duchesse de Polignac, whom she had appointed to be governess of the royal children; and Jeanne de La Motte herself.
The first time the queen appeared at the theater after Rohan’s exoneration, she was greeted with such loud hisses that from then on she tried to stay out of public view. She ordered large additional cuts to be made in Versailles’s budget. She stopped buying jewelry and new garments, coming close to sacking Mademoiselle Bertin. In addition, more than 170 courtiers who depended on her financially were sent packing. There was an end to masked balls. Several royal chateaus were put up for auction, or demolished to avoid the cost of maintenance. The queen even banned gambling—a potent symbol of royal frivolity, but also her principal refuge from depression—from the palace.
