The Queen's Necklace (16 page)

But all this, you remind me, gentle reader, is just a theory, smoke without fire—what is needed is some sort of basis in fact. So we can no longer avoid closer inspection of the raw material of the myth. Indeed, we are obliged to provide one, lest we give the impression that we are guilty of the same petty bourgeois prurience.

So let us dispose of the most delicate question of all.

Marie-Antoinette was married in 1770, but properly became Louis XVI’s wife only in 1777. One morning she told Mme Campan:

“At last I am Queen of France.”

The following year her first child was born, the
Madame Royale
, who was christened by Rohan. In 1781 came the Dauphin (who died in 1789), and in 1785 the Prince of Normandy, later Louis XVII, the luckless child inmate of the Temple prison whose fate is lost in the shadow of mystery. “If Marie-Antoinette had known the joys of motherhood earlier,” said the excellent Casimir Stryenski, “she would not have taken to seeking a remedy for her idleness and boredom in the pursuit of empty pleasures; she would have had no time to listen to flatterers and self-seeking advisers, and no time to get involved in intrigues. Perhaps then she would have avoided slander, or, at the very least, it would have had no purchase on a life filled with the laughter of children and the tearful joys and pains of child rearing.”

Today it is common knowledge what caused that seven-year delay. Stefan Zweig, in his somewhat coarse psychoanalysis, sees it as the foundation of her entire fate. Louis XVI had been born with a certain physical abnormality, which produced
no symptoms but which impeded intercourse. After years of hesitation, Joseph II visited France for a heart-to-heart talk with his brother-in-law, and he at last made up his mind to have the necessary minor operation.

So for seven years Marie-Antoinette was a wife and not a wife. A less delicate nervous system than hers would have found those seven years’ uncertainty a trial. At all events, they do explain a lot: her yearning for pleasure, her capricious behaviour and the strangely erotic atmosphere that grew up around her—the ambience of a woman whom nothing could satisfy.

In seeking consolation in this way, did Marie-Antoinette behave just as any other Frenchwoman in her situation might have? At all events, her contemporaries tended to see a pattern in her many diversions.

First and foremost of those was the person closest to her, her brother-in-law, the Comte d’Artois. Of Louis XV’s three male grandsons only Charles, Comte d’Artois, bore any resemblance to the French kings of old. The future Louis XVI was shy and low-spirited, the Comte de Provence clever, cunning and duplicitous, but Artois was a good-looking, sociable, sunny character, who kept high-born mistresses and ran up appalling levels of debt. Easy-going and sensual, he was a true Bourbon. The melancholy fate in store for him was to become, as Charles X, the very last of the senior Bourbon branch to take the French throne. But the genial young man became an intransigent king. He was the one Bourbon who in his time in exile learnt nothing and forgot nothing, who would have given up the throne rather than make any concession that might diminish his royal status. When, a great many years later, his steadfast supporter Chateaubriand called on the aged ex-King in Prague, he found him just as he had always been: a man who, if he had had his time all over again, would have done exactly what he had done before.

The relationship between the Queen and Artois must have been one of genuine friendship from the start. While
Louis XV was still alive, the younger members of the royal family ate together, went everywhere together and entertained one another. Artois even learnt how to rope dance because the Queen admired one particular master of the art. Their fun-loving, pleasure-seeking temperaments brought them close together. She would no doubt have listened eagerly to his revelations about his many amorous experiences, because she was always interested in such stories. Before very long scandal linked their names, and by 1779 an unspeakably obscene poem was going the rounds under the title:
Les amours de Charlot et de Toinette
.

Speculation also strongly linked Marie-Antoinette and a startlingly handsome young courtier called Édouard Dillon. According to the legend, she once said to him, during a Court ball:

“Monsieur Dillon, just put your hand here a moment, and feel how my heart is beating.”

To which the King replied, in his phlegmatic way:

“Madame … Monsieur Dillon will take your word for that.”

According to some, Marie-Antoinette bestowed her favours on the not-so-very-young Duc de Coigny (he was aged between forty and fifty). Tilly, who was not ill-disposed to the Queen, was certain of it, as was Lord Holland. According to him, Mme Campan, who presents Marie-Antoinette as a model of sexual probity in her memoirs, was less discreet in her younger days, and did not dissuade Talleyrand from acting as a go-between for the Queen and Coigny. But was Talleyrand a man whose word you would always trust?

It would be tedious to cite every such detail concerning the Queen. But in 1792 a leaflet announced itself with the following title: “A price on their heads. Here follows a list of the names of those with whom the Queen has had illicit relations.” The list is a long and varied one. Alongside the aristocrats we also find a guardsman, an official in the Ministry of War and the son of an actor, Guibert. Eventually, the pamphlet becomes bored with its own inventory and summarises it as
toutes les tribades de
Paris. E de Goncourt calls the copy in his possession a “
pamphlet imbécilement enragé
”. It names rather more women than men. The more surprising entries include Jeanne de la Motte, Cardinal Rohan, Mme de Marsan (whom the Queen hated more than anyone) and M Campan, that excellent lady’s pious and devout husband.

There is also one self-volunteered entry, the Duc de Lauzun, the greatest Don Juan in an age of Don Juans and a supreme example of the cynical attitudes that prevailed at the end of the century. To explain why he had abandoned his wife, the charming Amélie de Bouflers, he observed: “Well you see, in the end Mme de Lauzun brought me no more than 150,000 livres a year.” “In those words,” wrote Sainte Beuve, “you have the whole vanished Ancien Régime and the complete vindication of the Revolution, which in the end, and considering all the other similar outrages, was justified.” It was Lauzun who, being at breakfast when they arrived (during the Revolution) to take him off to be executed, remarked:

“With your leave, I’ll have another dozen oysters first.”

In his memoirs he claims that the Queen was desperately in love with him. She begged him for a heron’s feather and thereafter wore it ostentatiously in public; she would not allow him to stray from her presence, and on one occasion, when they were alone together, she threw herself on his breast and, in the refined phraseology of the eighteenth century, offered herself to him. But he declined the honour, because he did not wish to let his mistress, the Duchesse de Czartoriska, down, and his manly soul had no desire to play the dubious role of Queen’s favourite. But all the same he allowed her to think that he might nonetheless relent at a later date. In the meantime he went off to the East Indies for a year with the army, and when he returned the Queen kept her distance from him, and the whole court treated him with a derisive coolness.

Lauzun’s memoirs became very influential after the restoration, and Mme Campan protested bitterly against his slanders.
The heron’s feather story was true in that he had bullied her into accepting it from him via the Princesse de Guéménée, but not long afterwards Mme Campan was standing in an adjacent room when she heard the Queen pronounce the words: “Go, sir!” Lauzun left the room dumbfounded, and Marie-Antoinette gave orders that he should never be allowed back. This throws considerable doubt on the veracity of his memoirs. Perhaps they were written not by a successful Don Juan but by a miserable hack.

Rather more serious than all this (not inconsiderable) gossip and conjecture hovering in the air, was the story involving Baron Besenval.

Besenval was a Swiss, a member of the Queen’s own inner entourage and the Polignac circle. He was the
Naturbursche
of the Court—its raw, straight-talking hillbilly, who expressed his opinions in open, unguarded language but with the courtier’s confident belief that he knew just how far he could go.

It happened that Artois and the Prince de Bourbon fell out over some issue, and all the talk at Versailles was that there would be a duel. Marie-Antoinette, who was intensely curious by nature, would peer out through a lorgnette from her bedroom window to see who was walking in the park, and kept asking who had been in the theatre on those evenings when she hadn’t been there, calming down only when reassured that “there hadn’t been so much as a cat”. She was especially curious about the details of the duel and wanted Besenval to explain them. So Campan brought the Baron, in great secrecy, into the upper level of the palace, into a suite of apartments he had never seen before, consisting of an antechamber and a bedroom. The bedroom, in practice, was for the use of the
Dame d’Honneur
when the Queen was ill. Campan let him in and told him to wait for the Queen. And there, inspired by the location, the grizzle-haired Baron fell to his knees before her and offered her his heart.

“Rise, sir,” she said. “The King shall be ignorant of an offence which would disgrace you for ever.”

And Besenval remained at the Court.

From this story it naturally appears that Besenval was simply another ‘volunteer’, so much so that his name does not even feature in the extremely long list. His behaviour could be put down to the unbounded stupidity and arrogance of the male sex, which was even more in evidence in this licentious age of pampered knights. To drive a final nail into the gentleman’s coffin, Besenval, though an intelligent man and one who knew the Queen well, actually believed that, in spite of his grey hairs, she had invited him into the little room with amorous intent.

We get something of the measure of all this unfounded gossip if we can believe, with the Duc de Ligne, that the basis of the slander was “the Queen’s coquettishness, with which she hoped to please everyone”, and that “the Queen’s supposed flirtatiousness was simply an extreme form of amiability”. But even if we also accept the noble, elevated portrait painted by Mme Campan and the nineteenth-century writings that followed her, there remains absolutely no doubt of her feelings for Axel Fersen.

That love, far from destroying the overall charm of Mme Campan’s idealised portrait, actually completes and enhances it—the noble passion of a noble mind, the one serious, deep and truly romantic attachment in an age of coldly elegant and frivolous love games.

In the middle of the last century, suitably bowdlerised to fit the prudishness and discretion of the times, Marie-Antoinette’s letters to Fersen were published. “That publication,” says Stefan Zweig, “totally changed the received image of her as a thoughtless woman. A profoundly dramatic story was laid bare, a story of danger and power played out half in the royal court, half in the shadow of the scaffold—like one of those tear-jerking novels whose plots are so improbable that they can occur only in real life—two people, one of them the Queen of France, the other a minor Scandinavian nobleman, united in passionate love yet compelled by duty and prudence
to conceal their secret in the depths, to be separated over and over again, forever yearning for one another across the terrible gulf between their two worlds. And in the background of this tale of two individual fates, a world collapsing, a time of apocalypse …”

The most significant expressions of this great love were enacted only after the main event in our story was over, when the Queen found herself completely isolated following the necklace trial. But its origins went back to a time long before it, and Rohan must have known about them.

Axel Fersen was a nineteen-year-old Swedish count who arrived in Paris in 1774 while on a grand tour of Europe. The Dauphine met him at a ball, in which they were both masked, and the young man discovered only later who it was that he had spoken with at such length. When he returned to Paris in 1778 she greeted him like an old acquaintance. The young man had grown into the most beautiful person in all Europe: tall, slender, blond—like the youthful hero of a Nordic saga. Both outwardly and inwardly he was worlds apart from the likes of Lauzun, the roués, the sort of men most Frenchwomen idolised. Fersen was both shy and proud, pure of soul, reticent and discreet; a sensitive and yet order-loving northerner—almost aridly so. The efforts of the Abbé Vermond and the French Court to turn Marie-Antoinette into a Frenchwoman had not succeeded; instead, the mysterious workings of racial type led this blonde Germanic woman to the fair-haired Nordic man, with his Northern richness of feeling and spiritual purity. While the French courtiers around them seemed to have stepped from the pages of
Les liaisons dangereuses
, these two inhabited the world of the young Werther.

Although they both concealed their feelings with true northern modesty, perhaps even from each other, the gaze of the Court
was always on them. The Swedish ambassador Creutz took a certain fatherly pride in telling King Gustav III of his young compatriot’s success.

A stanza of Verlaine’s comes to mind—it is from the
Fêtes galantes
, which captures the whimsical mood of the eighteenth century in its most exquisite form:

And when they could no longer deny what they meant to each other, the wise and sober Fersen thought it better to put an ocean between the two of them, and went off to fight for freedom, as Lafayette’s aide-de-camp in America.