28. Marie Antoinette Could Hardly Mask Her Feelings for von Fersen
The Queen of France’s attraction to von Fersen did not go unnoticed. Sweden’s envoy to the court of King Louis XVI noted in 1779 that Marie Antoinette could hardly hide her love for the Swedish count in public, and he feared that a scandal might erupt at any moment. He was relieved when his fellow Swede left for the American Colonies in 1780, where he served as an aide de camp to the Comte de Rochambeau, commander of the French army that fought on the Patriots’ side. Von Fersen was in at the kill when the allied French and American armies besieged and forced the surrender of a British army at Yorktown in 1781.
He returned to France in 1783 and resumed his love affair with Marie Antoinette. Secret letters were exchanged, and his diary contains numerous entries about a woman named “Elle” – his codename for the queen – whom he madly loved but could not wed because she was already married. In the meantime, it was an open secret that whenever von Fersen was in Paris, he spent days on end at Marie Antoinette’s private chateau, the Petit Trianon. When he left for Sweden a year later, he got the queen a dog, which she cherished and named Odin.