How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (21 page)

Rohan shoved Bassenge towards his desk and, standing at his shoulder, supervised the jeweller as he drafted the letter. Bassenge’s first attempt – Boehmer’s French was too poor to compose official correspondence – was hideously contorted, like a man tripping himself up while attempting an over-elaborate bow:

The terror in which we live of not being able to be happy enough to find the moment to express in person to Your Majesty our respectful gratitude obliges us to do so by this note. Your Majesty today has crowned our wishes in acquiring the parure of diamonds that we have had the honour to present to her. We have eagerly accepted the latest arrangements which have been proposed in Your Majesty’s name. These arrangements being agreeable to you, we regard ourselves as fortunate in seizing the occasion to prove to Your Majesty our zeal
and our respect.

Rohan gagged at all the wriggling and fawning – he must have been privately relieved that the Boehmers had not tried to thank the queen by themselves – and briskly dictated a more elegant response:

Madame, we are filled with joy to dare to hope about the latest arrangements that have been proposed to us, which we have accepted with respect and devotion to the orders of Your Majesty, and we have genuine satisfaction in thinking that the most beautiful diamond parure that exists will be worn by the greatest and the
best of queens.

The letter’s opening communicates a subtle remonstrance from Rohan for being kept in limbo – should the emphasis fall on ‘to dare’, the Boehmers’ pro-forma expression of respect? Or on ‘to hope’, which might, from some angles, suggest capriciousness on the queen’s part? The jewellers, on whom such nuances were lost, agreed to deliver the letter to the queen immediately.

Boehmer had an audience with the queen on 12 July, in which he handed over the letter; but before the queen could respond, the
contrôleur-général
entered and he was obliged to leave. The jeweller might as well have left behind a vial containing the drool of a lunatic. According to Madame Campan, her
femme de chambre
, the queen saw ‘nothing in it but proof of
mental aberration’. She lit one of its corners and tossed it into the grate. ‘Tell Boehmer the next time you see him,’ said Marie Antoinette to Campan, ‘that I do not like diamonds now, and that I will buy no more as long as I live. If I had any money to spare, I would rather add to my property at Saint-Cloud.’

When Boehmer was told of the queen’s perplexity, he immediately took to his bed with a fever brought on by an attack of nerves. It was left to Bassenge to break the news to the cardinal. Rohan was agitated – ‘I am very surprised
at your calmness,’ he said to Bassenge – and expressed amazement that Boehmer had not battered down the queen’s doors and demanded an explanation. But he also rationalised the queen’s response: because the purchase of the necklace had been kept secret from even her closest attendants, Marie Antoinette was forced to feign bemusement when opening the letter in Campan’s presence. The cardinal ordered Boehmer to return to Versailles and clarify the queen’s disposition. Marie Antoinette, however, did not wish to hear the witterings of her jeweller any longer, and Boehmer was indefinitely barred from her presence.

A second sickening flinch of uncertainty was brought on by a new revelation: the cardinal received a letter from Marie Antoinette, which revealed that she had spent the 700,000 livres she had set aside for the necklace (on what, she did not say, though the profligate in Rohan may have quietly admired such dedicated dissipation). The payment of the first instalment would have to be delayed until 1 October, but the queen graciously insisted on paying the interest
due in August, as if not to do so would display the most abject impropriety. Jeanne suggested that Rohan touch Claude Baudard de Sainte-James, the treasurer-general of the navy, for a loan to the queen.

Sainte-James’s business interests were diversified and extremely lucrative. He had made money in sailmaking in Angers and an arms foundry in Charleville; he had stakes in the Parisian waterworks, the national discount bank, coal mines, crystal manufacturing, the Company of the North, which traded in the Baltic, and sugar plantations in the Caribbean. His income from his governmental post alone was 500,000 livres. He was the ideal man to approach, since he was the only other person who knew the secret of the necklace. In March, the Boehmers had asked the cardinal whether he could confirm to Sainte-James, their largest creditor, whom they owed 800,000 livres, that the necklace had been sold (they wanted to delay servicing their debt until the queen had delivered the first instalment). Rohan not only told Sainte-James that the queen had bought the necklace, he also showed him the bill of sale with Marie Antoinette’s signature.

At a party in early July, the cardinal snatched a word with Sainte-James in the cool of a terrace. His thrust was that the queen no longer had – or would not have for much longer – the 700,000 livres. The prattle of the guests littered the air; the pair’s conversation was muffled by discretion; and the exact language used by Rohan would later be disputed by Sainte-James with baleful implications. In a further exchange between the two, Rohan emphasised the advantages of the situation, ‘since it would commit her [Marie Antoinette] to have recourse to you to secure the necessary funds for the
payment of the necklace’. Eager for the validation that would arise from Her Majesty’s gratitude, Sainte-James was receptive, but did not commit himself. He was rightly cautious of any financial imbroglio involving Rohan and, once he had heard of the queen’s difficulties, considered circumventing the cardinal entirely. He only wished ‘to show his zeal and willingness to serve’.

Rohan told the queen in a letter that Sainte-James was willing to lend her money. Before he received a response, news reached him that clotted his heart: Boehmer had been summoned to Versailles by the baron de Breteuil, minister for the king’s household and the
man to whom the crown jeweller reported. Rohan had especial reasons to worry about this particular minister’s interest.
Breteuil was a career diplomat, and in the final months of 1770, he had been chosen by the duc de Choiseul to serve as ambassador to the Habsburg Court. When Choiseul was rusticated by Louis XV, Rohan was sent in his stead. Breteuil, who had already shipped out his furniture, was furious to learn that he would not be joining it and nurtured an animus against the cardinal from that day on that did not smoulder out. Eventually, in 1774, Breteuil was named as Rohan’s successor, and on taking up his post he poured out his bitterness to Georgel: ‘I know one day I will revenge it. I will be his minister and will make him feel the weight
of my authority.’

The strong bond Breteuil formed with Maria Theresa while in Vienna recommended him to Marie Antoinette, who propelled him into government in 1783. Superficially Breteuil was an unattractive character: he cut a portly figure, with contemptuous eyes and a nose which protruded like a rudder, and treated even his closest friends curtly. His enemies considered him impetuous, ignorant, pompous, arrogant and slapdash, lacking the social grace, tact and clarity of mind required of a successful politician, but his admirers praised him as an effective administrator of practical intelligence.

Boehmer presumed the baron would demand an explanation of the letter he had handed to the queen and applied to Rohan for advice. The cardinal calmed the jeweller’s anxieties, but his own apprehensions over the minister’s interest in the matter would not be shaken off. At some point between 22 and 25 July, he drafted a memorandum – partly guidance for Boehmer, partly for self-motivation – which offers the only contemporaneous insight into his thinking during those anxious summer months. This gives us a clearer view than any other record of the Diamond Necklace Affair of the compound of bluster and hopefulness that muddied Rohan’s mind and dictated his conduct:

B sent for, who suspects that it is to speak to him about that object. He asked me how he must reply. I said to him that he must keep himself from mentioning it at all, and to say only that he has sent the object in question abroad, and I requested again the strictest secrecy
and that he not mention it at all.
*
He insisted and repeated several times that his life was no longer anything but torture, especially since he took the liberty to write to . . . and after what had been said to him by C that the master did not understand what these men intended – it was making his head spin. This coincidence of circumstances could, I believe, make mine spin too, if I was not confident that the proposed plan sorts everything out for the present and the future. Rather, the person I suggest knows about everything because, as a debtor, he could not do otherwise. Thus, this changes nothing in the scheme of things and, on the contrary, gives rise to peace where there is, at the moment,
worry and despair.

‘B’ is Boehmer; ‘C’ is Madame Campan; ‘the person I suggest’ is Sainte-James; and ‘the master’ and the ellipsis signify the queen. The tone here is scumbled and evasive, perhaps because Rohan feared the note falling into the wrong hands, but also, one senses, because he believed that directly confronting his mind-conceived monsters might summon them into existence. The triumphant sense of security with which the minute ends is not earned by its argument – it’s the bravado of man straining to patch up and reinflate his burst confidence.

There had been a lengthy wait for a response from the queen to Sainte-James’s overtures as Villette was in Bar, and could not, therefore, take down a letter. Jeanne mentioned to Rohan that Marie Antoinette, not wishing to take advantage of Sainte-James, had been trawling for succour in more familiar waters – but eventually the queen admitted that her efforts had been fruitless. This would be the only occasion, she stated, when she would rely on Sainte-James, and she vowed to repay him promptly.

By the time Rohan transmitted the news to Sainte-James, however, the navy treasurer was in a less bountiful mood. He would only lend the money if he could speak to the queen in person, a favour not even granted to Rohan himself. There are two possible explanations of Sainte-James’s change of mind. He may, on reflection, have realised the inadvisability of doing business with Rohan. It must have seemed
curious, if not outright suspect, that a man whom the queen was known to despise should cajole him into lending her money. There were more secure means of earning the queen’s gratitude.

Rohan’s secretary Georgel offers a
more sinister interpretation (to be taken advisedly since he is prone to conspiracy-theorising). In his version, Sainte-James, agitated by doubts, approached Breteuil and Marie Antoinette’s confidant Vermond, confirming their own suspicions that the cardinal had invoked the queen’s name in some kind of scam. Breteuil took a deposition from Sainte-James and warned him not to lend the money. There is no positive evidence for Georgel’s accusations, but it is clear that by mid-July the minister was ferreting around the edges of Boehmer’s business.
*
Boehmer, a man of violent oscillations of mood and confidence, may have revealed to Breteuil more than he was willing to admit to Rohan; and the minister could have nudged Sainte-James into withdrawing his offer. In Georgel’s account, Sainte-James, retracting the offer of the loan, asks Rohan:
‘Are you sure about the intentions of the queen? Are you mistaken or has someone tricked you?’ These were questions the cardinal was already asking himself.

*
In the event, the jeweller gabbled to Breteuil about some unspecified jewels he had wanted to show the queen.

*
Georgel was convinced that Breteuil had been planning Rohan’s downfall from July, when he instructed the Paris Police to investigate. However, the memoirs of Lenoir, the lieutenant-general of the Police, make clear that his officers received no instructions to investigate either Jeanne or Rohan in connection with the necklace’s disappearance
during that month.

11

Days of Reckoning

I
T MAY HAVE
been the promptings of Sainte-James, or the circling Breteuil, or long-hibernating fears which stretched themselves awake as awful spectres and seized Rohan’s mind, expanding, louring, sprouting sharp teeth. With his associates, the cardinal breezed confidence. When Bassenge admitted his own worries and asked Rohan whether he had complete confidence in his intermediary, he replied: ‘I have no doubts and the queen
has the necklace.’ But his actions ran contrariwise. At the end of July he procured a sample of Marie Antoinette’s handwriting and was astonished to find that it bore no resemblance to the sale agreement in his possession.
‘I’m tricked,’ cried Rohan, alone in his study, with the two sheets of paper lying alongside each other, resisting all comparison.

Rohan rushed to Cagliostro and showed him the bill of sale. Cagliostro immediately lighted upon the signature: ‘Marie Antoinette de France’.

‘The queen does not sign her name like this,’ he said. He was right – the queen signed herself simply as ‘Marie Antoinette’.

‘As grand almoner, you ought to know that. I’d wager you have been tricked.’

But the cardinal was seeking reassurance, not confirmation of his own suspicions, and dismissed Cagliostro’s instinct.

‘Surely you are tricked,’ Cagliostro persisted. ‘You have no alternative but to throw yourself at the king’s feet and tell him exactly what has happened.’

‘Alas, if I do that, this woman will be destroyed,’ said Rohan.

The exchange offers a remarkable insight into the strength of Rohan’s feeling for Jeanne. Through his paternalism, he had fashioned himself into a surrogate father: however prodigal his daughter
was, he could not himself condemn her, could not do anything that might bring her to suffer. But the cardinal’s pride was also talking here: there could be little more humiliating for a Rohan than to prostrate himself before a Bourbon king, a man he regarded as his equal. His concern for Jeanne was coupled with an impulse to stave off the day of his humbling.