Marie Antoinette by Stefan Zweig

Author:Stefan Zweig [Stefan Zweig]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781906548759
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2011-03-09T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

Was He or Was He Not?

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

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