Domesticity—the care of her own precious family—was where Marie Antoinette’s heart lay at this point, not surprisingly when one considers her strong maternal instinct on the one hand and the difficulties she had encountered in producing this family on the other. The Queen was, for example, personally concerned with the education of her daughter, “keeping her with her all day long” and certainly not wishing to hand her over entirely to the grand court servants who believed it was their right—not the mother’s—to rear the Children of France. Such a preoccupation ran through her letters to her friends the Hesse Princesses, while Count Mercy groaned over the childish talk and games that distracted the Queen from her true political duties.21 An unexpected and horrifying bankruptcy of a noble family in the early autumn of 1782 was therefore of particular concern to the Queen because it involved the Royal Governess of her children. This was the Princesse de Guéméné who only a year previously had so happily paraded the newborn Dauphin round the ranks of applauding courtiers.
Afterwards the Prince de Rohan-Guéméné—to give him his full title—issued the following sympathetic explanation of his bankruptcy. He invoked the name of the notary Sieur Marchand who had produced all the trouble by his creative way with annuities: “I was deceived and I have deceived the whole world. To do Monsieur Marchand justice he was led on by the desire to give us a splendid lifestyle.” To provide the Prince and Princesse with income, Marchand had in fact encouraged all types of people to invest their savings in these annuities by offering enticing and therefore exorbitant rates of interest. Then he—or rather the Prince de Guéméné—could not pay. It was the latter who went bankrupt to the tune of 33 million livres although it was Marchand who went to prison, a fate preferable to facing the creditors in the outside world.22
The Rohan-Guéménés, as a couple, had been dazzling, and for a while it was difficult to believe in the collapse of their brilliant future. The Prince, aged thirty-two in 1782, was a nephew of the former Royal Governess, the Comtesse de Marsan, and the Cardinal de Rohan. His wife came from another branch of the family, Rohan-Soubise, headed by her father, a Marshal of France who had been an intimate of Louis XV. It was an eighteenth-century marriage. The handsome and courteous Prince had been the accepted lover of the beautiful Madame Dillon until her recent death, in her early thirties, from consumption. The Princesse for her part was amusing, intelligent and rather eccentric, with a love of dogs that led her to believe that through them she was in touch with the spirits.23
Much royal favour was enjoyed. At the time of the King’s coronation, seven years earlier, it was Marie Antoinette who had negotiated for the Prince to take the post of Grand Chamberlain. This had previously been occupied by the Prince’s uncle on his mother’s side, the Duc de Bouillon. The latter would have much preferred to have kept the position himself for his lifetime, allowing his nephew the “reversion”—to receive it on his death. But Guéméné had his way. The lofty standing of the Prince and Princesse was confirmed by the fact that the whole royal family signed the marriage contracts of their son the Duc de Montbazon and daughter Josephine who in the Rohan fashion had married a cousin, Prince Charles de Rohan-Rochefort.24
As for the role of the Princesse, for a while it seemed that she might weather the storm if only because a Royal Governess, in common with other similar office-holders at Versailles, could not be dismissed. Yet it was unthinkable by the standards of the time—of any time—that someone tainted with such a disgrace should occupy such a position of trust and power, even if rumours of the Princesse’s maladministration were probably not true. It was resignation or nothing, and this resignation was the subject of delicate negotiations. The Princesse finally gave up her post exactly a year after the birth of the Dauphin, the day of her greatest triumph. The King and Queen behaved as well and generously as it was in their power to do, despite the advice of Mercy and Vermond that the Queen should avoid any entanglement in this distressing affair.25 Marie Antoinette secured an enormous pension for the Princesse on the surrender of her post, while the King bought the Guéméné property at Montreuil and presented it to Madame Elisabeth. Guéméné himself was similarly rewarded on his surrender of the post of Grand Chamberlain, which was restored to his uncle the Duc de Bouillon.
Nevertheless there were elements in the whole affair that had uncomfortable repercussions for the future, despite the desperate efforts of the Rohan family, closing ranks, to pay off the debt. The Cardinal de Rohan lost a valuable contact in the departed Royal Governess, who was doubly related to him both by blood and by marriage. His sense of exclusion could only be enhanced. Naturally, the fall of the arrogant Rohans, with their high-flown pretensions to independent princedom, was greeted with sardonic glee by the rest of the court. One exchange had a member of the stricken family declaring: “Only a King or a Rohan could go bankrupt on such a scale,” and receiving the rejoinder: “I hope this is the last act of sovereignty of the House of Rohan.” On the surface the stain of the disgrace remained. When the old Duc de Bouillon finally died six years later, Louis XVI still felt strongly enough on the subject to refuse to give the post of Grand Chamberlain to Guéméné’s son.26
The filling of the vacuum created by the resignation of the Princesse also had a long-lasting effect on the reputation of Marie Antoinette. With her strong views on the education of her children, her unfashionable desire to be closely involved with it, it was certainly comprehensible that she wanted to award the post of Royal Governess to a beloved friend. On any normal level, the Duchesse de Polignac, sympathetic and sweet-natured, was a suitable choice. She shared the concerns of motherhood; her fourth child, Camille, was born three months after the Dauphin.
But Versailles was not a normal world. The danger did not lie in the vices portrayed in the pamphlets about the Polignac with titles like La Princesse de Priape or La Messaline Française. Nor did Louis XVI object to the appointment. He took the trouble to assure the Duchesse in advance that he would readily entrust his children to her. His grateful reliance on Yolande’s ability to manage the Queen and her mercurial moods did not falter. A significant report had the King entering the Queen’s apartments and asking the Duchesse: “Well, is she still in a bad temper today?” Yolande drew the King aside, and although the subsequent conversation could not be overheard, it was clear from her manner that the Duchesse was advocating patience in the face of a storm that would soon pass.27
The new appointment was added to the list of benefits enjoyed by the Polignacs, from the thirteen-roomed apartment in Versailles to the reversion of the profitable position of Director General of the Posts, given to the Duc de Polignac. It is true that by 1782 Marie Antoinette was no longer totally dominated by the Polignac set. It was her affection for Yolande herself that was constant, although even here the Queen’s mercurial nature meant that the friendship was likened by the Comte de Tilly to a beautiful day, not without clouds and changes, but always ending fair.28
As the King and Vergennes thwarted the Queen’s will over certain appointments, passing over the Queen’s candidate of Loménie de Brienne for the Archbishopric of Paris in favour of Vergennes’ cousin, so the Queen herself stood out against the Polignacs over the question of the Comte d’Adhémar. He was proposed for the important role of Minister of the Royal Household, a post that had some of the connotations of a modern Minister of the Interior or Home Secretary. Marie Antoinette thought it an unsuitable appointment, preferring the Baron de Breteuil.
These signs of a decline of royal favour towards the Polignacs were optimistically charted by Mercy. But they paled beside the evident favouritism by which the Duchesse was made Governess to the Children of France. The rank at birth of the Duchesse de Polignac, if not modest by ordinary standards, was modest enough to be used as an excuse by Mercy to criticize the Queen’s choice. What this meant was that some lady of higher birth was deprived of her perceived due. Thus the Queen created “implacable enemies” for herself, in the words of her friend Count Esterhazy.29 Where her chi
ldren were concerned, Marie Antoinette preferred to let her affections dictate her choice. It is possible to admire on a human level the Queen’s instinct for real warmth in her family circle—birth apart, the Princesse de Guéméné had never been a very suitable candidate as Royal Governess—and at the same time to perceive the difficulties that such an instinct created in court terms.
The question of the Queen’s affections sprang into renewed prominence in late June 1783 when that “old acquaintance” Count Fersen returned at long last from America—he had been away for over three years. Marie Antoinette was once again pregnant, if not in such an advanced state as she had been at the time of their second meeting in August 1778. The baby seems to have been conceived in May if one is to go by the Marquis de Bombelles, with his intimate connections to the court, who thought the Queen was six months’ pregnant in early October.30 She was certainly pregnant throughout Fersen’s three-month sojourn in France.
Furthermore this pregnancy was also a matter of satisfaction to both her and the King since it was becoming painfully clear that the miraculous Dauphin lacked the robust health of his sister. Although Louis Joseph’s delicacy was at first denied by the Queen in letters to her brother, the evidence of his fragility grew cumulatively stronger as the years passed until it was tragically obvious. At any rate, the need for a second son as a safeguard was recognized early on in the life of the Dauphin Louis Joseph—apart from being an agreed principle in all royal families.
The point has some importance in reference to the marital relationship of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette since it indicates the necessity for continuing efforts at procreation on the part of the King. Whatever his initial reluctance, this dutiful monarch did not now question this need. While hardly a sexual athlete, a Duc de Lauzun, Louis XVI had already impregnated the Queen successfully twice, possibly three times (the miscarriage in between) and had now done so again.
This particular pregnancy of 1783 was to end in a bad miscarriage throughout the night of 2 November, the Queen’s twenty-eighth birthday; she had lost the child by the morning. It was ten days before Marie Antoinette even began to recover and her health caused general concern. Her foster-brother Joseph Weber, who had followed his fortune to France in 1782, testified to this. “Look, Weber, I’m not dying!” said the Queen sharply to him as he expressed his worries. Yet on 1 December her uncharacteristically solemn demeanour on a public occasion still struck an English observer. After that, although Marie Antoinette confirmed to her brother Joseph at the end of the year that she was anxious to have a second son, she believed that she should have to wait for a few months until her health was fully recovered.31 It is clear from Louis XVI’s attitude to these not infrequent pregnancies that he continued to have sexual relations with his wife in the hopes of enlarging his family.
It is against this background that the developing relationship of Marie Antoinette and Fersen must be considered. In theory, nothing precluded Marie Antoinette from sleeping with Fersen as well as with the King, and conceiving a child by her lover rather than her husband. But it is worth pointing out that birth control had been known to the aristocracy for a hundred years by this time, and although described in the confessional as “the baleful secrets” of society, it undoubtedly helped to cover up some of the extramarital goings-on at Versailles. Louis XV for example, another man with a long career as a lover, had used “preventive machines” or condoms.32
But did the Queen in fact sleep with the handsome Count? On balance of probabilities, the answer must be yes. The idea of a great pure love that is never consummated, although propagated by some sympathetic historians, does not seem to fit the facts of human nature. There was no question of his supreme attraction. Tilly said that he “was one of the best-looking men I ever saw,” even “his icy countenance” working to his advantage, since all women hoped to “give it animation.” The hairdresser Léonard, who knew the court so well, described him more romantically as being like Apollo: someone with whom all women fell in love and of whom all men felt jealous.33 Furthermore, Fersen adored women in general and in the particular, and his progress both in America and Europe was punctuated by dramatic love affairs. At the same time he prided himself on his chivalrous nature and knew how to be discreet. He understood how to appeal to a Queen who, all things considered, had had a fairly lugubrious experience of sex during the last thirteen years.
Nobody expected Fersen to offer sexual fidelity to the Queen; that was not the mode. She was, after all, not offering it to him; that was not the mode either. His affairs did not cease, with possible candidates in at least two Englishwomen, Emily Cowper and Lady Elizabeth Foster, who was mistress of the Duke of Devonshire. What he did offer was exactly what she wanted: romantic devotion, accompanied from time to time, one must believe, with physical proof of it.
Very little was known of this at the time. Contemporaries were markedly reticent, while the libellistes, with their guns fixed on incest with the Comte d’Artois and lesbianism with the Duchesse de Polignac, were facing the wrong way.*52 There were a few nineteenth-century stories depending on hearsay, which hardly constituted proof. Nevertheless the verdict of the Comtesse de Boigne—“Intimates scarcely doubted that she yielded to his passion”—is significant. For the Comtesse, although born at Versailles in 1781 and thus too young to remember these events, was old enough when she wrote her memoirs to have heard all the gossip within the bosom of the court; her uncle, who survived until 1839, was that beau Dillon, a member of the Polignac set once accused of being the Queen’s lover himself. The earlier testimony of Lady Elizabeth Foster in her private journal is even more conclusive, given her own connection to Fersen and the fact that she moved in the aristocratic Anglo-French circle among which Marie Antoinette numbered many friends. On 29 June 1791 Lady Elizabeth wrote in her journal that Fersen had been “considered as the lover and was certainly the intimate friend of the Queen for these last eight years.” She then went on to praise him for being “so unassuming in his great favour . . . so brave and loyal in his conduct that he was the only one to escape the general odium heaped upon her friends.”34
Nevertheless, documentary proof was slow to arrive. In 1877 Fersen’s great-nephew, the Baron R. M. de Klinckowström, who published Fersen’s Journal intime and his letters, censored them heavily; the Queen’s responses had long ago vanished, presumed destroyed. In 1930, however, a Swedish writer, Alma Söderjholm, had the intelligent idea of investigating Fersen’s Letter Book (which was still extant), a kind of filing system in which from 1783 onwards he noted details of his own correspondence. A correlation was discovered between a mysterious “Josephine” and the Queen, Josèphe or Josepha being one of her baptismal names. As the years passed, Josephine did not always represent Marie Antoinette; confusingly there was a maid with the same name who features in his correspondence. But the evidence of unusual intimacy was there.35
After Fersen left Paris on 20 September 1783 he wrote eight letters to “Josephine” before his return in June the following year. It is therefore perfectly possible that a reference to 15 July 1783 written in his Journal intime exactly fifteen years later (“I remember this day . . . I went chez Elle for the first time”)36 was a code for the beginning of their liaison proper. On the other hand, Fersen was also extremely anxious to secure a military appointment and the Queen was equally anxious to help him—patronage that once again would have the paradoxical effect of taking him away from her side. Since at the time the Count and the Queen had not met for well over three years, it is also quite possible that Fersen was reporting with joy on his renewed access to her Private Society.
Similarly, one can interpret in various ways his letter to his beloved sister Sophie Piper on the subject of a future wife. Fersen had continued to toy with marriage plans that were always based on money, never on love. One prospective spouse was Germaine Necker, the Swiss Protestant heiress, daughter of the former Finance Minister: “Her father has a big fortune . . . I don’t remember what she looks like,?
?? he commented. But she preferred Fersen’s fellow Swede, the Baron de Staël. Another prospective wealthy bride, already mentioned, was the only daughter of the Baron de Breteuil, the Comtesse de Matignon, who had been widowed in 1773; one of Fersen’s Swedish friends, Baron Evert Taube, thought he was “very much in love with her”—or was it her money? In any case the “dissipated and elegant” Comtesse preferred to remain unmarried.37 “Unless marriage vastly increases my own wealth, it’s hardly worth the trouble, with all its burdens, embarrassments and deprivations,” wrote the gallant bachelor to his father, declaring himself happy in his state. Therefore when Fersen also told his sister on 31 July that he thought the married state was not for him, he may have been inspired by his own cynical philosophy—“the conjugal life is against nature”—or he may have been referring anonymously to his new relationship with the Queen: “I can’t be with the only person I want, the only person who really loves me, so I don’t want to be with anyone.”38
One cannot know for certain, then, exactly when Fersen became the Queen’s lover, although it is suggested here that he did, either in the high summer of 1783 or, if his long absence (and the Queen’s early pregnancy) was an inhibition, the following year. It is noteworthy that Lady Elizabeth Foster’s assertion that they had been lovers for “eight years” prior to June 1791 would bring the date for its inception almost exactly to that of Fersen’s return to Versailles from America. Unquestionably the Queen toiled away to help Fersen buy the colonelcy of the Royal Swedish Regiment, a French force originally founded to give Swedish prisoners the option of service or the galleys. The purchase of the colonelcy involved Fersen’s father in the enormous expenditure of 100,000 livres, something that needed delicate negotiation. This had not been fully ironed out by the time Fersen left France on 20 September 1783 although he had already become “proprietary colonel.” For a while Fersen had to endure accusations of profligacy and time-wasting from his father in Sweden, somewhat reminiscent of the reproaches of Maria Teresa to Marie Antoinette. Angrily Fersen pointed out how he had left the delights of Paris to follow General Rochambeau, spending three whole winters in America . . .39