Duty and Devotion

During the French Revolution, when she was held in Paris, Marie Antoinette rejected any escape plans that didn't include her husband and children. Whatever her involvement with the dashing and capable Axel Fersen, she was devoted to her family and loved her less-dashing and less-capable Louis XVI.

Fersen, too, cared for him, as is evidenced many times in his writings.

After the attack on Versailles, in 1790, Fersen wrote to his father, "My position here differs from that of anyone else. I have always been treated with kindness and honour in this country by Ministers as well as the King and Queen. I have here contracted a debt of gratitude. I am attached to the King and Queen by the numerous kindnesses they bestowed upon me when it was in their power, and I should be both ungrateful and vile if I were to forsake them now that they can do nothing for me, and that I have hopes of rendering them service."

Much later, after Louis XVI's execution, he wrote to Sophie, "... Taube will give you details of the King's trial; it makes one shudder, and my very soul is torn... Poor unfortunate family. Poor King, poor Queen! Why cannot I save them at the cost of my own blood?" and, later, also to Sophie, "You doubtless know the King of France is dead. The picture of Louis XVI mounting the scaffold never leaves me."