The Queen's Lover by Francine Du Plessix Gray Page B

rare discipline which won the admiration of the Americans and English troops. The wise, prudent, and simple conduct of M. de Rochambeau has done more to conciliate the Americans than the winning of four battles ever could.
    Boston, December 21, 1782
    We are all going on board tonight; the ships are ready, and if the wind is fair we shall sail tomorrow morning. As soon as we reach the West India islands I will send you my news, dear Father, and shall have the pleasure of assuring you of my respectful attachment.
    T HAT WAS MY BROTHER’S last letter. Upon leaving Williamsburg in the first months of 1783 his regiment was sent to Porto Caballo, Venezuela, to join Spanish troops in the invasion of some British Caribbeanislands. But the attack was canceled upon news of the peace treaty being signed by France and Great Britain. Axel suffered much from the tropical climate, contracting a microbe that led him to suffer recurrent fevers for the rest of his life, and permanently damaged his health.
    “I want your news,” he wrote me. “It’s the only consolation we have in this vile country. We’re dying of boredom here; we’re becoming thin and dried up, growing old and yellow with heat and boredom…. Men are not made to live here, but rather tigers, bears, and caymans.”
    Having no one but the queen in mind, Axel was eager to return to Paris, and had to placate our father because he had no intention of going back to Sweden that year. To appease
Père
he hinted that he might be ready to settle down. “Despite the little inclination I have for this sacrament,” he wrote him, “I’m at an age when marriage may become a necessary thing.” He wrote Miss Leyel to ask her if she had changed her mind about marrying him, but soon learned that while he was away she had married the Earl De La Warr. He considered another marital prospect, the immensely wealthy Germaine Necker. “This project depends entirely on your wishes,” he wrote our father; “I have no interest in it but yours…. I’ve only seen her once in passing…. I only recall that there was nothing disagreeable about her.” But this notion also came to naught, for he found out that Mademoiselle Necker had been proposed to by his compatriot and old friend Erik de Staël. And so to Axel’s great relief, all talk of marriage ceased for a while.
    I’ M PROUD TO LIST ALL the honors my brother was awarded for his fine conduct in the War of Independence.
    Louis XVI named him Chevalier of the Order of Military Merit and appointed him second colonel of the Regiment Deux-Ponts. At the request of King Gustavus, France granted Axel a pension of twentythousand francs a year; he was also made proprietary colonel of France’s Royal Swedish Regiment.
    King Gustavus promoted him to the ranks of titular colonel in the Swedish army, and made him a Chevalier of the Order of the Sword. (“Young Count Fersen,” Ambassador Creutz had written the king, “was always present at the thickest of the battles, either at the spearhead of the attacking forces, or in the trenches, and displayed the most valiant courage.”)

CHAPTER 5
    Axel:
    LOVING JOSEPHINE
    C OULD ANYONE IMAGINE that I would not instantly rush to see the queen upon my return from America? Although she had been militantly opposed to the American Revolution, which in her eyes countered all principles of the Divine Right of Kings, she had resigned herself to the fact that I had joined the French Expeditionary Force because I admired the American cause. And we had corresponded during my absence, but each letter took months, months to arrive, and our separation had been made all the more painful by the long wait between missives.
    My ship having arrived in Brest on July 17, 1783, I reached Paris on the twenty-third. I dropped off my satchels at my flat; and by the time it took me to ready my coach and have new horses harnessed—a matter of hours—I was off to Versailles. I’d had no time to warn the queen of my arrival. Her