THIS MUCH, at any rate, is now beyond dispute, that Axel de Fersen was not, as was so long believed, a mere accessory, but was the chief figure in Marie Antoinette’s spiritual romance. We know that his relationship to the Queen was not a mere flirtation, but an enduring love, equipped with all the insignia of love’s power, with the fiery mantle of passion, the splendour of courage, the unstinted greatness of feeling. One last uncertainty persists as to the form of this love. Was it, as in the nineteenth century people were fond of saying, a ‘pure’ love—a term by which, basely enough, was meant a love relationship in which a passionately loving and passionately loved woman prudishly refused the gift of her body to the loving and the beloved man? Or was it, in the sense of those who still cherish the puritan tradition, a ‘criminal’ love—that is to say in our sense a love without chill reserve, a love which boldly gave and boldly took all? Was Axel de Fersen no more than the cavaliere servente, the romantic worshipper of Marie Antoinette, or was he really and physically her lover? Was he or was he not?
“No! Certainly not!” exclaim, with suspicious haste and irritability, certain royalist-reactionary biographers, whose one desire it is that at all costs the Queen, ‘their’ Queen, should be regarded as ‘pure’ and as safeguarded against any ‘degradation’.—“He loved the Queen passionately,” contends Werner von Heidenstam with enviable certainty, “without ever having this love besoiled by fleshly thoughts, this love worthy of the troubadours and of the knights of the Round Table. Marie Antoinette loved him without ever for a moment forgetting her duties as wife, her dignity as Queen.” A fanatic of this sort finds it inconceivable, or protests against anyone’s entertaining the thought, that the last Queen of France could have been false to the “dépôt d’honneur—honourable deposit—which all or almost all the mothers of our kings had bequeathed to her”. For God’s sake, therefore, let there be no enquiry into the matter, no discussion of this “affreuse calomnie”—horrible calumny (Goncourt), no “acharnement sournois ou cynique”—this underhanded or cynical harrassment—for the disclosure of the true state of affairs! The fanatical defenders of Marie Antoinette’s ‘purity’ warn us off the course directly we approach the question.
Must we comply with their wishes, with their commands? Must we, finger on lips, pass over the enquiry whether Fersen continued, for all the years of their acquaintanceship, to regard Marie Antoinette only ‘with an aureole round her head’, or whether he really and effectively loved her as a man loves a woman? Are we not right in saying that anyone who ‘chastely’ evades this question misses the core of the problem? We do not know a human being until the last secrets of the heart have been revealed, and above all we do not understand the character of a woman until we understand her love life. In such a relationship as this, which is intimately connected with one of the great movements of history—where a passion held in leash for years was not something which had a merely casual bearing on the lives of those concerned but was a matter which stirred their souls to the depths—the question as to the actual form in which their love found expression is neither idle nor depraved, but is a decisive element in the composition of the spiritual likeness of the woman about whom this book is written. No painter can paint a portrait with his eyes half closed. Let us face the issues, therefore; let us closely consider the situation and the documents that bear on it. We may well hope that a frank enquiry will enable us to solve the riddle.
Here is the first question! Even supposing the champions of the bourgeois code of morality are right, even though Marie Antoinette were to be accounted blameworthy if she gave herself unreservedly to Fersen—who among us has the right to cast a stone? Let us consider the personality of those who have unhesitatingly declared that the Queen became his mistress. Among her contemporaries there were three, all men of mark, not eavesdroppers, but thoroughly well-informed persons, who may be supposed to have written or spoken with full knowledge and a due sense of responsibility—Napoleon, Talleyrand and Saint-Priest the minister of state; the last-named a daily witness of what was going on. All three of them say without reserve that Marie Antoinette was Fersen’s mistress. Saint-Priest, who had the most direct acquaintance with the situation, gives precise details. By no means hostile to the Queen, thoroughly matter-of-fact, he tells of Fersen’s secret nocturnal visits to Trianon, Saint-Cloud and the Tuileries. He declares that Madame de Polignac was privy to the liaison, regarding it with no disfavour, seeing that the Queen’s affection had been given to a foreigner who would not derive any personal advantages from Marie Antoinette’s passion for him. It is amazing to find even the most rabid champions of the Queen’s ‘virtue’ disregarding such testimony, and speaking of Napoleon and Talleyrand, likewise, as calumniators!
Now comes a second question. Which among the contemporaries of the affair who were eyewitnesses of what went on can be found to stigmatize as a falsehood the statement that Fersen was Marie Antoinette’s lover? Not a single one. No, the remarkable feature in the case is that those who must have been most intimately acquainted with what was happening, and whose position made it necessary for them to be discreet, seem to have carefully avoided the mention of Fersen’s name. Mercy, for instance, a meticulous observer, and profoundly interested in the Queen’s doings, never mentions the Swedish count in his official dispatches. The familiars of the court make frequent mention of “a certain person” to whom letters have been conveyed, but the name of this person is withheld. For a whole century there was a conspiracy of silence, and the first official biography explicitly omitted to say a word about Fersen. How can we avoid gathering the impression that a ‘mot d’ordre’—watchword—had been issued to shun any reference to a man who marches disturbingly athwart the romanticist legend of the martyred Queen’s immaculate chastity?
For a long time, therefore, historical students were faced with an insoluble enigma. Everywhere they encountered ground for serious suspicion, and yet everywhere the decisive documentary proof had been carefully shuffled out of sight. The available material did not justify a plain yes or no. Forse che si, forse che no—perhaps, perhaps not. That is all that historians could venture to say, since they lacked definitive proof.
Yet where strictly factual research reaches its bourne, imagination, with soaring pinions, can still do useful and in a sense trustworthy work; where paleography fails us, psychology has a word to say—for we know that the probabilities unveiled by psychological study are often nearer the truth than the crude ‘truth’ of documents and facts. Were we exclusively dependent upon documents in our study of history, how narrow, how poverty-stricken, how full of gaps would this science be! The unambiguous, the manifest, is the domain of science; the polyvalent, the ambiguous, that which needs interpretation and illumination, is the realm of the poietic imagination. When we are short of materials for proof that would be accepted as valid in a law court, there still remain boundless possibilities for the psychologist. Feeling can tell us more about a man or a woman than can all the documents in the world.
Still, let us return to the documents. Axel de Fersen, though romantically inclined, was an orderly person. He wrote up his diary with the utmost regularity and precision. Morning after morning he carefully noted the weather, the barometric reading of the day and the political and personal pressure as well as the atmospheric. In addition to this diary, he had a correspondence book in which he recorded the letters received and sent under the appropriate date. He also had a memorandum book in which he made notes of his plans—and he carefully filed his correspondence. In short, he was one of those men who are treasure trove for the historian. When he died a violent death in 1810, he left behind him an accurate record of all the details of his life—a record of incomparable value for those who love ‘hard facts’.
Well, what was done with this treasure? Nothing! This seems strange enough at the first glance. Its existence was carefully, nay timidly, concealed by Axel’s heirs. No one was granted access to the archives, no one was told anything about them. At long last, half a century after Fersen’s death, one of his successors, a certain Baron Klinkowström, published the correspondence and part of the diaries. But the correspondence was incomplete. A number of Marie Antoinette’s letters, entered in the correspondence book as received from “Josephine”, had disappeared. Vanished, too, were Fersen’s diaries recording the incidents of the most decisive years. Strangest of all, in the published letters we find passage after passage represented merely by dots. Someone, it is evident, must have played the censor in dealing with these literary remains. But whenever correspondence is thus ‘edited’ or destroyed by those of a later day, we cannot free ourselves from the suspicion that inconvenient facts have been obscured in pursuit of some etiolated ideal aim. However, we must not prejudge the case. Let us preserve our calm, let us maintain our sense of justice. Look into the matter dispassionately!
Passages are omitted from the letters, and have been replaced by dots. Why? Klinkowström informs us that they had been deliberately made illegible in the original. By whom? “Probably by Fersen himself,” says Klinkowström. “Probably!” But why? Klinkowström, obviously at a loss for a plausible answer, says that presumably these erased lines had contained political secrets or undesirable remarks made by Marie Antoinette concerning King Gustavus III. Since Fersen showed all these letters (all?) to the King, it is likely (likely!) that he had himself erased the objectionable passages. A very remarkable story! A great many of the letters were written in cipher, so Fersen can only have read transcripts to the King. Why, then, should he take the trouble to mutilate the originals and to render them unreadable? Is not this a highly suspicious circumstance? Still, as aforesaid, let us go on considering the matter without prejudice.
The essential thing is to undertake a closer scrutiny of the excisions. What is the first thing that strikes us? We find that the dotted passages are almost always at the beginning or the end of a letter, so that there is no opening address, or there is a gap after the word ‘Adieu’. For instance, we read: “Je vais finir”—signifying “I have done with business and politics, and am now going on to …” Going on to what? In the mutilated publication nothing follows but dots, dots, dots. When there is an omission in the middle of a letter, we always find it in a place where political matters are not in question. Let me give another example: “Comment va votre santé? Je parie que vous ne vous soignez pas et vous avez tort … Pour moi je me soutiens mieux que je ne devrais.”—“How’s your health? I bet that you don’t take care of yourselves and you are wrong … As for me, I’m holding up better than expected.” Will anyone in his sane senses imagine that the elided passage can have related to politics? Again, when the Queen is writing about her children, “Cette occupation c’est mon seul bonheur … et quand je suis bien triste, je prends mon petit garçon”—“This occupation is my only happiness … and when I am very sad, I take my little boy” nine hundred and ninety-nine persons out of a thousand will fill in the gap with the words ‘since you left me’, and not with some sarcastic observation concerning the King of Sweden! It is impossible to accept Klinkowström’s embarrassed assertion. Obviously what has been suppressed is not a political secret but a secret which concerns the intimate sentiments of human beings. Well, after all, there is a way of unriddling such riddles. Micro-photography makes it easy for us to decipher passages in letters which have thus been rendered illegible by ‘pigeons’ nests’. Let us examine the originals!
Here we are faced with a fresh surprise. The originals no longer exist! Down till about 1900, for more than a century, they were kept in good order and condition in the Fersens’ hereditary seat. Then they were destroyed. Baron Klinkowström, a strictly moral man, seems to have been haunted by the spectre that a day might come when the passages that had been rendered illegible might be read, and so, shortly before his death, he burned Marie Antoinette’s letters to Fersen. It was an act of vandalism worthy of Herostratus, not only senseless, but, as we shall learn, ineffective. However, Klinkowström wanted, at any cost, to keep Fersen’s relations with the Queen shrouded in mystery, to foster a legend in place of disclosing irrefutable truths. He could die (so he imagined) with an easy conscience, since Fersen’s ‘honour’ and Marie Antoinette’s ‘honour’, had been safeguarded by committing the letters to the flames.
But, to quote a well-known saying, this auto-da-fé was worse than a crime, it was a blunder. For, first of all, the destruction of evidence is itself evidence of a guilt-complex, and, secondly, as every criminologist knows, when proofs are hastily annihilated, it nearly always happens that some damnatory item is left undestroyed. Alma Sjöderhelm, an able investigator, looking through the documents that had survived, discovered a copy made by Fersen of one of Marie Antoinette’s letters, which seems to have escaped Klinkowström’s notice because it was a transcript and not in the Queen’s handwriting. Thus we have a full text of one, and therewith the key to all, of the mutilated letters. We can guess, now, we can more than guess, what the mealy-mouthed editor had cut out of those that he published, for in this epistle likewise there is towards the close an “Adieu” which is followed, not by erasures or dots, but by loving words: “Adieu, le plus aimant et le plus aimé des hommes”—Farewell, the most loving and the most loved of men.
We understand, at length, why the Klinkowströms, the Heidenstams and the other purity fanatics (who probably had access to more documents of this kind than will ever become known to posterity) showed so much affect whenever an unbiased attempt was made to study the Fersen case. For one familiar with the tones of the human heart there can be no doubt that a queen who addresses a man so boldly and in such sublimely unconventional terms must long before have granted him the last proof of her love. The one line that has come down to us makes good for all those that were cancelled. Had not the cancellation in itself been sufficient proof, persons endowed with insight, persons capable of true feeling, will be fully convinced by these words that have escaped the hand of the destroyer.
But there is more to come! In addition to this rescued letter, we have knowledge of a scene in Fersen’s life which is characterologically decisive. It occurred six years after the Queen’s execution. Fersen had been chosen by the Swedish government to attend the Congress of Rastatt as its representative. Bonaparte, however, bluntly informed Baron Edelsheim that he would not negotiate with Fersen, who was a royalist, and who, moreover, had slept with the Queen. The Corsican, who was wont to call a spade a spade, did not say that the man to whom he took exception had been ‘on intimate terms’ with Marie Antoinette, but challengingly and almost offensively declared: “Fersen s’est couché avec la reine.” It never occurred to Baron Edelsheim that it was incumbent upon him to defend Fersen, to protest against this charge, for he, likewise, took the relations between the pair as a matter of course. He therefore answered with a smile that he had thought these stories dating from the ‘ancien régime’ were over and done with, and had no further bearing upon contemporary politics. Then he went to Fersen, and related the whole conversation. What did Fersen do? Or, rather, what should we have expected him to do if Bonaparte’s remark had been a falsehood? Would he not at once have defended the dead Queen against the accusation? Would he not have angrily denounced the calumny? This upstart little Corsican general, who used so derogatory a term in speaking of a lady who had beyond question been Fersen’s intimate friend—would not the Swedish nobleman have challenged him forthwith to a duel? Can a straightforward and upright man allow anyone to say a woman was his mistress when she was nothing of the kind? Now or never was Fersen’s chance, nay his duty, to use his naked sword for the destruction of a rumour which had long been current.
What did Fersen actually do? Alas, he was silent. Taking up his pen, he soberly recorded in his diary the whole conversation between Edelsheim and Bonaparte, not excepting the accusation that he had “slept” with the Queen. He made no comment, did not add a word in this private communing with himself to mitigate the force of an assertion which, in the opinion of his biographers, was “an infamous and cynical” accusation. Substantially, therefore, with lowered head, he admitted that the statement was true. When, a few days later, the British newspapers got wind of the incident, and, in connection with it, dilated “upon him and the unhappy Queen”, he wrote of this publicity: “Ceci me choqua”—This shocked me. That was Fersen’s only protest, which was no protest at all. This was one of the many cases in which silence says more than speech.
Thus we see that what the pusillanimous have so strenuously endeavoured to hide, namely that Fersen was Marie Antoinette’s lover, was never denied by the lover himself. There are dozens upon dozens of confirmatory details. For instance, on one occasion when he had been seen in public in Brussels with another lady-love, his sister implored him to be more careful, for if she (“elle”) were to hear anything of the matter, she would be deeply wounded—and with what right, one must ask, if she had not been his mistress? Again, there is a passage in the diary where Fersen mentions having spent the night in the Queen’s rooms at the Tuileries, and this passage has been erased, though it is still decipherable. Once more, giving evidence before the Revolutionary Tribunal, a housemaid testified that a gentleman had frequently left the Queen’s bedroom secretly by night. These incidents are, of course, only given weight by the fact that they fit into the general picture. Disparate elements would be unconvincing if they were not in keeping with the character of the whole. An individual’s behaviour is only explicable as the outcome of his whole personality, for every ‘voluntary’ action is the expression of the circumscribed causality of a person’s whole nature. In the last analysis, therefore, the question as to whether the relationships between Fersen and Marie Antoinette were those of a passionate intimacy or remained within the limits regarded as seemly and conventional must be decided in accordance with the general spiritual make-up of the woman concerned. We have, therefore, details apart, to enquire which sort of behaviour, a liberal self-surrender or a timid renouncement, would have been logically and characterologically in conformity with the Queen’s disposition.
One who contemplates the matter from this standpoint will not hesitate long. Despite her many weaknesses, Marie Antoinette had one great strength—her unrestrained, unreflective, truly sovereign courage. Thoroughly straightforward, incapable of pretences, she flouted the conventions hundreds of times in matters of much less importance, indifferent to the gossip which might be going on behind her back. Even though she only achieved true greatness in the most formidable and decisive moments of her fate, she was never petty, never timid; she never subjected her will to the formalities of ‘honour’, or ‘morality’, to the pettifogging restrictions of court life. Are we to suppose that in the case of the one man whom she dearly loved this valiant woman would suddenly have played the prude, the timid and ‘faithful’ wife of her Louis, to whom she had been wedded only for reasons of state and with whom she was not bound by any ties of love? Can we believe that in so apocalyptic a time, when the bonds of discipline and order had been torn in sunder, that in the intoxicating agitation of imminent death and amid the menaces of a terrible destruction, she would have sacrificed her passion for the sake of a social prejudice? Can we believe that she, whom no one could hinder and no one could control, would have forced herself to abstain from the most natural, the most womanly expression of feeling for the sake of a phantom, of a marriage which was the mockery of true marriage, out of respect for a man who had never shown himself to be a real man, and for the sake of a moral obligation which had always been odious to the untamed instincts of her impetuous nature?
If people want to believe the incredible, no one can prevent them. But it is not those who frankly ascribe to Marie Antoinette boldness and inconsiderateness where the one great love passion of her life was concerned that deform her image; those who thus err are they who would represent a fearless woman as a coward, a brisk woman as a dullard, an impulsive and impetuous woman as one paralysed by caution and consideration—as one who would not venture the last hazard but would fight down her most natural promptings. To those who have the capacity for picturing a character as a unity it must be indubitable that Marie Antoinette, not only with her mind which had suffered such manifold disappointments, but also with the body which had so long been robbed of its rights, became the lover of Axel de Fersen.
And what about the King? Whenever a marriage bond is broken, it is the third party, the dupe, the deceived, who becomes (according as our sympathies range) an object of compassion or a figure of fun—and a goodly number of the attempts to obscure the lineaments, to round the corners of this triangle may have been made in the interests of Louis XVI. In reality, however, Louis XVI was by no means deceived, was not a ridiculous cuckold, for there can be no doubt that he was aware of the intimate relations between Fersen and his wife. Saint-Priest says in plain terms: “She found ways and means of making him acquainted with the fact that she had a liaison with the Comte de Fersen.”
This assertion is in conformity with our general picture of the situation. Nothing was more uncongenial to Marie Antoinette than hypocrisy or misrepresentation. To have betrayed her husband behind his back while pretending that she was still devoted to him both in body and in mind would have been foreign to her temperament, and we cannot in her case suppose that there can have possibly existed the common but always unclean form of triangle in which a wife goes on cohabiting with her husband while, without his knowledge, she enjoys, whenever opportunity permits, the embraces of a lover. There can be no question that as soon as her intimate relationship with Fersen began (it was probably in the later years of her married life, between the fifteenth and the twentieth), Marie Antoinette ceased to be Louis’s wife except in name. We should assume this on characterological grounds, but the supposition is confirmed by a letter from her brother the Emperor who, by means which have not come to our knowledge, had learnt that his sister, after the birth of her fourth child, wished to withdraw from her husband’s embraces—the date coinciding with that at which we have good reason to believe her intimate relations with Fersen began.
For those, then, who like to look facts in the face, the situation is perfectly clear. Marie Antoinette, wedded for reasons of state to an unloved and by no means attractive man, had for many years repressed her need for love in favour of conjugal obligations. But as soon as she had given birth to two sons, so that dynastic duties had been fulfilled by the provision of heirs who were indubitably of Bourbon blood, she felt that she had done all that morality, the state, law and family ties had a right to demand of her. At length she was free. Having devoted nearly two decades to the fulfilment of political obligations, during the last and tragically convulsive hours this sorely tried woman felt entitled to enjoy her pure and natural right, to give herself at length to the man whom she had long adored, the man who was everything to her, friend and lover, confidant and companion, as courageous as herself, and ready to requite sacrifice with sacrifice.
How pitiful seem the sophisticated hypotheses about the sweetly virtuous Queen, as contrasted with the intelligible forthrightness of her behaviour, and what a poor figure do those cut who make such a to-do about defending the royal ‘honour’ of this woman. How lacking they are in courage and in spiritual dignity. For never is a woman more honourable and nobler than when she gives free rein to the unerring sentiments and instincts which have been animating her for years; never is a queen more queenly than when she shows herself a true woman.