It was an escape from tragedy. The jubilation of American liberty was bittersweet for Jefferson. Just after Yorktown, in May 1782, his wife Martha gave birth to a daughter (who later died young of whooping cough), but after six pregnancies she deteriorated, cared for by Betty Hemings, surrounded by the Hemings children, her enslaved half-siblings, her two daughters with her husband and a distraught Jefferson. Taking Martha’s hand, Jefferson ‘promised her solemnly he’d never marry again’. When she died on 6 September, he gave her eleven-year-old half-sister, Sally Hemings, Martha’s handbell, an ambiguous keepsake that was a tribute to intimacy but also a tool of service. After ten years of ‘unchequered happiness’, he collapsed.
America’s relationship with its chief ally France was paramount: the Continental Congress asked Jefferson to become minister in Paris. He set off, taking his daughter Patsy and James Hemings, who would be trained as a French chef.
Jefferson relished the life of enlightened Paris, where, in his rented Hôtel de Langeac, he engaged with liberal society, became entangled in a passionate affair with a young married woman, Maria Cosway, and a frizelation with Angelica Church (later sister-in-law and intimate friend of another American luminary, Alexander Hamilton), able to live in a way every enlightened American could only dream of.
Antoinette’s delivery of a dauphin, Louis-François, three days after the British surrender at Yorktown was soon followed by the arrival of another son. A happy family life had brought the king and queen closer together, giving Antoinette more influence. The dauphin was sickly, but the birth of a son had increased her power; the American victory had boosted Louis too. It was most likely now, after the delivery of a son, that Antoinette, probably with Louis’s acquiescence, took Fersen as a lover.
The Swede enjoyed an array of mistresses, but he loved Antoinette. ‘I don’t want the ties of marriage which are against nature,’ wrote Fersen to his sister. ‘I can’t marry the only person I would want to, the only one who really loves me, so I can be no one’s.’ An invoice shows that Antoinette now paid a locksmith to create a pulley system that enabled her to lock and unlock the door from her bed in her secret Versailles apartments. Fersen’s logbook notes their ‘plan to lodge upstairs’. If he saw Fersen, Louis would withdraw ‘with infinite tact … so she didn’t have to fear being surprised’. In his letters to her, Fersen called her ‘Josephine’ – her full name being Marie Antoinette Josèphe. Fersen was always with her. ‘Farewell,’ he wrote to his sister, ‘I must go to the queen.’ It is possible her second son, her favourite whom she nicknamed
Yet the victory against Britain had come three years too late, costing 1.5 billion francs and bankrupting the kingdom, leaving it stricken with debt, food shortages leading to famine and a surging resentment at the isolated court where the stolid king was seen to be overwhelmed by the exuberant frivolity of his Austrian queen – who now forced her husband to let her buy yet another palace at Saint-Cloud.
Strong states are not undermined by trivialities, but scandal can destroy a weak regime as fast as gunpowder. It started with the Parisian jewellers who had created a mountainous diamond necklace to sell to Louis XV for his mistress du Barry. Louis having died, they were desperate to sell it. Back in 1775 Antoinette had spent 500,000 livres on diamonds, but now a mature queen was not interested when her husband offered it to her, saying such money would be better spent on battleships.
Instead the jeweller was manipulated by a grifter called Jeanne de la Motte, a married woman but mistress to an array of grandees and hucksters including Cardinal de Rohan,
