How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (2 page)

This extraordinary performance was delivered in solidarity with the family’s golden boy, Cardinal Louis de Rohan, prince-bishop of Strasbourg, provisor of the Sorbonne and grand almoner of France. He stood accused not only of stealing one of the most valuable items of jewellery in Europe – a 2,800-carat diamond necklace worth 1.6 million livres – but of invoking the name of the queen to lubricate his criminal enterprise. This left him vulnerable to the charge of
lèse-majesté
– offending royal dignity – an exponentially more serious
offence than theft. That Rohan should have claimed to represent the queen was one of the most prominent improbabilities in a story tattooed with them, for Marie Antoinette – as everyone knew – despised him. His gilded, feckless youth had slumped into a gilded, feckless middle age of pursuing stags and society ladies, before, thanks to political manoeuvrings by his family, he was appointed ambassador to Vienna. While in his post, he managed to offend the Empress Maria Theresa, Marie Antoinette’s mother, so gracelessly that the French queen treated him from then on with silent contempt.

Rohan believed that Marie Antoinette’s hatred prevented his appointment, like the great cardinal-politicians before him, to chief minister of the realm. His frustrated ambition turned sour, vinegaring his spendthrift days. He was overjoyed, therefore, to make the acquaintance in 1782 of the impoverished, alluring Jeanne, comtesse de La Motte-Valois. She had been born in Champagne to a family that claimed descent from an illegitimate line of the Valois kings. After her father had squandered her inheritance, she and her husband had decamped to Paris in an attempt to regain her ancestral domains. Rohan – intrigued, charmed, lusty – took the comtesse under his wing, but shortly afterwards found himself seeking her patronage. Jeanne told the cardinal that the queen had taken pity on her condition, had invited her into her private chambers, and had adopted her as a companion. She used the opportunity to tell the queen of the chagrin Rohan felt at his disgrace and of his wish to atone. Marie Antoinette proved open to a reconciliation, and they embarked on a correspondence, with Jeanne as go-between, of welling intimacy.

There were endless factional rivalries that needed assuaging and numerous political obstructions to be overcome before the rapprochement could be acknowledged openly, but Rohan was granted a brief interview with the queen late one night in the gardens of Versailles. True, the moon was obscured and Marie Antoinette’s face could only be dimly made out; true, too, there was time only to exchange a single sentence before the assignation was abruptly terminated by the sound of nearby footsteps. But Rohan was convinced the press of Her Majesty’s hand had absolved him of his misdemeanours, promised him, indeed, that the high office he deserved would soon
be his. Soon enough an instruction arrived from the queen for a delicate mission – he was the only man she could trust to oversee it. She wished to buy the gargantuan necklace assembled by Boehmer and Bassenge, jewellers to the crown. They were delighted and relieved – having failed a number of times to sell their masterwork to Marie Antoinette, they were hanging on the verge of bankruptcy. An agreement was reached – the first instalment was to be paid six months later – and a copy of the terms returned from the queen signed ‘Marie Antoinette de France’.

No money was forthcoming, however, at the beginning of August 1785 when the initial tranche fell due. Rohan explained to the jewellers that the queen was temporarily out of funds but would pay off a greater proportion in October. They tried to question Marie Antoinette in person; she, angered by their persistent importuning, refused to see them. Eventually, word reached the Court that Boehmer and Bassenge were seeking payment from the queen for the necklace. This was preposterous, she declared to the king and his ministers, she had never agreed to buy any necklace, certainly not a grotesque one she had rejected numerous times before. When Rohan was summoned to explain himself, he could barely stammer out a sentence, let alone construct a convincing explanation of the necklace’s disappearance. He was arrested and imprisoned in the Bastille, while a police investigation was opened.

Paris was het up with speculation. Had the cardinal devised a lunatic scheme to pay off his debts? Or had he been the victim of another’s deceit? Was the queen, whose extravagant behaviour had provoked envy and contempt, entirely uninvolved, despite her aggrieved denials? And what was the role of Jeanne? Was she pawn or player? The case was heard before the
parlement
of Paris, the country’s supreme court, and nothing less than the reputation of the queen was at stake. For nine months the investigating judges sifted through evidence and interrogated the suspects, for nine months the citizens of Paris, France, Europe stood slack-jawed as they heard the fantastical defences of the accused. Never before had the expected conduct of a queen been debated so exhaustively by the public. The disputes would echo down through the Revolution – a
cri de guerre
to the rebellious, a taunting cacophony to the faithful.

The significance of the affair was evident to perceptive contemporaries. ‘Watch out for this diamond necklace business,’ wrote Talleyrand, ‘it may well
rock the throne of France.’ Napoleon, pondering the caprice of history in exile, declared that ‘the Queen’s death must be dated from
the Diamond Necklace trial’. The many nineteenth-century historians who wrote about this episode viewed it as a major staging post on the road to regicide. But the Marxist bent of much twentieth-century historiography on the Revolution, which sought out its causes in class conflict and the structural deficiencies of the French economy, considered the necklace business as so much froth lathered up by deeper-running historical currents. Another example of royal delinquency and incompetence, to be sure, but one of vastly less significance than the societal upheavals churning through the country.

Fashions change and the Diamond Necklace Affair now intersects with some of the most fruitful furrows of scholarly work on eighteenth-century France, yet it still merits only a footnote or glancing mention in many accounts of the pre-revolutionary years. Historians are now far more conscious of the effect of libellous literature, directed at elites, in desacralising the monarchy – once the king and queen had been removed from their pedestal, it was easier to pack them off in a tumbril. The Affair ought to be seen as a pivotal moment in this narrative, not simply because it produced sheaves of political pornography – it was also a defining pedagogic encounter for the French people in which they learned to discuss, interpret and judge the
actions of their betters. They would apply these lessons, with often bloody consequences, in the years that followed the summoning of the Estates-General in 1789.

This book traces the fate of the necklace and hacks through the thicket of lies which flowered during the trial. It shows that the rule of reason supposedly established by the Enlightenment was fragile, assailed by occult beliefs and subsuming desires that would not be quelled by the evidence of one’s eyes. It warns those who wish to reduce man to
homo economicus
that his motives and self-justifications are cloudy even to himself. It explores how history is comprised of the stories told by its participants, that learning to read these stories like a contemporary – to appreciate that their
terrible influence in no way correlates to their adherence to the truth – is the foremost duty of the historian. Above all, this is such an improbable story – one which, were it offered up in a novel, would be condemned for violating the laws of plausibility – that I was compelled to retell it as soon as I came across it. Thomas Carlyle was too. He saw a romance more wondrous than a poet could ever compose, which broke through the crust of everyday life to partake in our Universal History. Here, away from the ‘empty invoice-lists of Pitched Battles and
Changes of Ministry’, he heard the beat of humanity’s heart in all its complacency and fear and exhilaration.

1

Princess in Rags

F
REUD OBSERVED THAT
many children fantasise that their real mother and father are aristocrats – even royalty – and that they were ripped from their true family and implanted into a
lowlier, adoptive one. It is part of the process of growing up when a child, comparing his parents to other adults, realises they are no longer ‘the only authority and the
source of all belief’. But what if daydreams of a life among the nobility are not simply the wishful denial of your parents? What if they are coloured with regret at your belatedness, with disappointment and anger that your forebears squandered money and honours you deserved? What if you lived in a tumbledown castle and had been told from the moment you began to understand that one of your ancestors had been, long ago, the king of France?

Jeanne de Saint-Rémy was born on 22 July 1756 in the chateau of Fontette, a tiny village in Champagne about thirty miles to
the west of Troyes.
*
Her father, Jacques, the baron de Saint-Rémy, was descended from Henri de Valois de Saint-Rémy, an illegitimate son of the priapic Henri II, the Valois king who ruled France from 1547 to 1559 (the Valois dynasty preceded the Bourbons, who reigned from 1589 until the French Revolution). Henri II left 30,000 écus to his natural son, and gave permission to the Saint-Rémy heirs to sport three gold fleur-de-lys – the emblem of the French kings – on their escutcheons.

But by the end of the seventeenth century the family’s wealth had been decimated. French inheritance law generally allowed each child to claim a portion of their parents’ estate, which meant that, without complex financial planning, a handsome patrimony could be pared down to slivers in
less than a century. Despite protesting of her sole entitlement to her family’s lands, Jeanne was only descended from the sixth and final child of the second baron de Saint-Rémy. Her grandfather, Nicolas-René, had served in Louis XIV’s
garde du corps
for ten years but had moved back to Fontette to marry the daughter of a prominent local official in nearby Bar-sur-Seine. The Saint-Rémys had neither the inclination nor the money to buzz around Versailles in search of promotion and lucrative sinecures: local legend had it that, when Louis XIII asked one of Jeanne’s ancestors why he avoided the Court, he replied ‘Je n’y fait ce que je dois’, which means ‘I only do there what I ought to’ and ‘I only make there what I owe’ – he was later discovered
illegally minting coins.

The family’s sullen and blocky chateau rose from within a tonsure of walnut trees, and was set among fields of oats and lucerne. In Champagne the Saint-Rémys lived as though their royal forebear had endowed them with limitless droits de seigneur, stealing from neighbours’ property and cowing the local authorities into inaction. But by the middle of the eighteenth century, they could barely squeeze a living from their land. The debilitating
famines which afflicted France in 1725 and 1740 ate into their capital, and they were forced to sell off parts of their acreage and chateau piecemeal.

Their plight was not unusual, especially in Champagne, one of the country’s poorer provinces. While many members of the nobility had accrued vast fortunes, others needed to scrimp to maintain appearances. The most abject nobles were known as
hobereaux
(‘little hawks’): over 5,000 families existed on
less than 1,000 livres a year, which left them dangerously susceptible to slipping into poverty. They poached, fished and hunted game; some indentured themselves to the wealthy; all hoped their situation would pass unnoticed and they would escape
dérogance
– being forcibly submerged into the ranks of commoners should they fail to uphold the dignity of their estate.

Jacques’s parents may have intended a respectable match for their son. They were certainly appalled when Jacques seduced or – more
likely, given his general lassitude – was seduced by Marie Jossell, the family’s illiterate and alluring housekeeper. She had ‘fine blue eyes [that] appear[ed] through long silken lashes . . . her dark tresses [fell] in graceful profusion over her shoulder drawing out to the greatest advantage
the natural whiteness of her skin’. Though Marie was evidently pregnant, Nicolas-René forbade their marriage. Jacques would not disobey his father but refused to abandon his lover. A son, also named Jacques, was born on 25 February 1755. Nicolas-René must have relented because the couple were married in Langres in July. Jeanne was born almost a year later; Marianne arrived in 1757; and Marguerite followed in 1759.

Jacques had a sweet temperament but, as a contemporary described him, he was ‘weak, indolent, a man who
amounted to nothing’. He spent most of his time and money on drink. Like many impoverished noblemen, he became indistinguishable from the peasants he lived alongside. His lack of resolve deliquesced into self-destructive generosity: if a neighbour slaughtered a pig, he would exchange a copse or a field
for a share. While Jacques indulged his children, Marie treated them sternly. Scarcely had they left their cribs than she forced them to work. Jeanne, feisty from an early age, was frequently beaten by her mother for refusing to
herd the cows. Both parents utterly neglected their offsprings’ well-being. They were ‘brought up
like savages’, wandering around naked and reliant for their food on charitable neighbours, who slipped them bowls of soup. What little money the family accrued was siphoned off by Marie for her relatives.

Between the prodigality of Jacques and the peculation of Marie, it was not long before the family was broke. 1759 was an especially hungry year. A poor harvest inflated food prices; money was already tight after tax obligations surged in 1756 to pay for what would become the Seven Years War against Britain and Prussia. By 1760 all the Saint-Rémys’ property had been sold or mortgaged – and Marie was expecting another baby. The family’s only option was to flee their creditors. Marianne, too young to travel and too heavy to be carried, was left hanging in a basket outside the window of the house of her godfather Durand, a sympathetic farmer who had quietly subsidised Jacques in the past. The family slipped out of the
village by night and hurried down the road to Paris. Occasionally they were able to thumb a lift from a wagon, but Jeanne, still only four years old, trudged practically the entire distance – over two hundred kilometres – on foot. Adversity did not forge any familial solidarity: Marie beat Jeanne with a rod wreathed in nettles; when Jacques found out he
pummelled his wife.