How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (24 page)

*
The two best-known chronicles of the skirmishing that occurred in the king’s council chamber were written decades after the event, by people who were not present and who were each fierce partisans of one of the participants – Madame Campan and the Abbé Georgel. Their accounts are vivid, dramatic and – festooned with an implausible quantity of reported speech – entirely unreliable. Fortunately, four more objective sources, all written contemporaneously, allow us to reconstruct the disputation before the king and the queen. The navy minister, the maréchal de Castries, kept a diary during his time in office. Though he was not in the room, he remained in constant communication with his colleagues and was involved in questioning the cardinal during the early stages of the investigation. He was of neither the king’s nor the queen’s faction (in fact, he was desperate to leave government and had tried to resign – and failed – a number of times). Diplomatic dispatches also exist from Jean-Baptiste Rivière, the chargé d’affaires of the Saxon legation at the French court; and the Swedish ambassador, the Baron de Staël-Holstein. Staël-Holstein maintained firm friendships with Axel Fersen, his countryman, and the duchesse de Polignac, both boon companions of the queen. Finally, there is a report of the meeting by Louis Thiroux de Crosne, who had just been appointed as lieutenant-general of the Paris Police.

*
According to Staël-Holstein, Rohan claimed he had only ever met Jeanne once. But it would have been bizarre to risk such a blatant and easily refutable lie, and one that undermined his case. After all, would Rohan have bought such an expensive item for a woman he believed despised him if asked by someone he barely knew?

13

Arresting Developments

F
ROM MIDSUMMER ONWARDS
, a fleet of wagons, distended with furniture, had trundled down the road from Paris
to Bar-sur-Aube. Twenty craftsmen toiled on improving the La Mottes’ house, lacquering it in the most fashionable oriental taste. Ceiling-high mirrors and a riot of ormolu made the rooms swell and glint. Stuff jostled everywhere: busts of Rousseau and Voltaire, statues of Flora and Hebe, vases balanced on plinths, stucco columns surmounted with bronze candelabra, a litter of card tables, an ostrich egg. One display case was filled entirely with diamonds; two mechanical canaries twittered in harmony; golden music boxes sang; the clocks were decorated with marionettes that danced when the hour struck. Novels by Riccoboni and Crébillon, Rousseau’s collected works in thirty volumes and Père Anselme’s
Genealogical and Chronological History of the Royal House of France
filled the bookshelves. In the dining room, two gargantuan dressers shouldered silver plate and porcelain; twenty capacious copper pans hung in the kitchen. Jeanne’s bed alone cost more than 6,000 livres: a canopied
lit à la polonaise
with a coverlet of crimson velvet, embroidered with sequins and gold lace and pearls.

On the evening of 6 August, having left Rohan and the jewellers floundering, the La Mottes arrived in Bar. They had given no thought to fleeing abroad. Jeanne did not desire to live in comfortable exile. Her father’s dying words were indelibly stamped upon her conscience. Remembering that she was a Valois was not an exercise in nostalgia or a goad to moral nobility: it meant acquiring the resources, by any means necessary, to live according to her station. For all her success in the shark pool of the capital, Jeanne ultimately wished to return home, to be reverenced by the folk among whom she had been raised.

One of those surprised to see the La Mottes was their lawyer, Jacques Beugnot, who had returned to Bar in July. When he had seen Jeanne before leaving Paris, she had told him she would remain there until October (an indication that Jeanne was forced to activate her escape plan earlier than anticipated). Beugnot saw something melancholy in the couple’s relentless expenditure: they acted, he thought, like ‘people that are bored of money and feel the urge to throw it
out of the window’. On their last visit, many had been awed by their ostentation; now they were disgusted by it. Jeanne was a courtesan who got lucky, the townfolk sniped. Few people attended their soirées and fewer still invited them.

On 17 August, Jeanne dined with Beugnot at the Abbey of Clairvaux. It was the feast of St Bernard, the monastery’s founder, and the Abbé Maury, one of the most popular preachers in the country (and, later, Napoleon’s archbishop of Paris) was due to address the assembled dignitaries. He was delayed, however, and dinner began without him, the abbot treating Jeanne like a
‘princess of the church’, presuming she was Rohan’s lover.

At 9.30, Maury dashed in: ‘There is a piece of news’, he declared, ‘that astonishes, that confounds all of Paris. The cardinal de Rohan, grand almoner of France, was arrested on Tuesday, on Assumption Day, in his pontifical robes when leaving the king’s
cabinet
.’

‘Do you know what for?’ Maury was asked.

‘No, not precisely,’ he replied. ‘They speak of a diamond necklace that he should have bought for the queen, which he didn’t buy. But people don’t believe that, for such a trifle, they would have arrested the grand almoner of France in his pontifical robes – you understand, in his pontifical robes and leaving the king’s
cabinet
.’

Jeanne dropped her napkin and, for a moment, stared palsied at her meal. Her face blenched. She had never envisioned that Rohan would be arrested; she had expected him to pay what was owed, shamefaced. Then, awakening to the company, she dashed out of the room. The more generous guests believed that she was overcome with concern for her friend; others wondered why she did not interrogate Maury further. Beugnot followed her after a few minutes. She was already waiting in the coach.

‘I was perhaps wrong to leave so abruptly, especially in the presence of the Abbé Maury,’ said Jeanne.

‘Not at all,’ Beugnot reassured her. ‘Your relationship with the cardinal is well known and, for all intents and purposes, acknowledged. His life is at stake in this, perhaps. Your duty is to stay ahead of letters, couriers, news. You would have been guilty of losing time by having supper at Clairvaux. But can you explain this arrest?’

‘No, unless it is some sleight of hand by his Cagliostro. The cardinal is obsessed with him. It is not my fault. I haven’t stopped warning him.’

‘That’s in your favour. But what is this story of a necklace that the cardinal had to buy for the queen? And why was a cardinal commissioned to buy a necklace? And how could the queen have chosen Prince Louis for this, whom she openly hates?’

‘I repeat that it is entirely Cagliostro,’ said Jeanne, her voice tightening.

‘But you have entertained this charlatan. Are you not compromised yourself at all by him?’

‘Not in the least, and I am completely relaxed. I was very wrong to leave dinner.’

‘It was not wrong. If you were at ease on your own account, you oughtn’t to be for your unfortunate friend’s.’

‘Ah, you do not know him. When he is in trouble, he is capable of saying a hundred idiocies to extract himself from it.’

Jeanne’s touchy manner, her defensiveness, the way she veered from forced serenity to angst, warned Beugnot that she was not being open. Yet, stirred by the same wilfulness that had originally attracted him and wishing to save her from it, he suggested a decisive course of action.

‘Madame de La Motte, you are saying much more than I would have wanted to hear. I have one final thing to propose to you. It is ten o’clock at night; we are approaching Bayet. I will leave you in the care of a friend, whom you should know that I can answer for. I will return in your carriage to Bar-sur-Aube. I will warn Monsieur de La Motte, who, in one hour, can come to fetch you in a post-chaise drawn by your two best horses. He’ll bring along your most precious valuables and both of you, tonight, will take the road to
Châlons, for the Troyes road is not safe for you. You will reach the Picardy coast or the Normandy one. Don’t show yourself at Boulogne, Calais or Dieppe, or you might be spotted. But, between these ports, there are twenty places where, for ten louis, you can get across to England.’

But Jeanne had no intention of fleeing the country like a smuggler.

‘Monsieur, you are tedious to the end. I have let you carry on like this because my mind was on other things. Must I tell you ten times that I have nothing to do with this? I will say it again. I’m very angry to have risen from the table, as though I was an accomplice in the madness of the cardinal.’

The Champagne night was untroubled by any more rancour. At Bar, they discovered that Nicolas had still not returned from hunting. Beugnot begged Jeanne to burn her papers. She agreed, but insisted on sifting them first. As Beugnot rummaged through the large sandalwood box which Jeanne had filled with her correspondence, the letters composed a poem of Rohan’s beguilement by Jeanne. ‘The madness of love was heightened by the madness of ambition . . . A prince of the church did not hesitate to write, to sign, to address a woman whom he knew so little and so badly.’ (Beugnot leaves ambiguous whether the woman was Jeanne or Marie Antoinette.) Jeanne vacillated over what to keep – there were bank drafts, bearer bonds, title deeds mixed in; Beugnot stood shovelling armfuls of documents into the fire. It took until three in the morning to immolate the lot; the room stank of burnt paper and wax.
*

At ten o’clock the next morning Inspector Subois of the Paris Police arrived with an order for Jeanne’s arrest. Jeanne’s maid told them that her mistress was still in bed. ‘I don’t care what state she’s in,’ said Subois, ‘I have to speak with her.
Take me to her
room.’ Once inside, he drew back the curtains and prodded Jeanne awake. Bleary-eyed, she was taken into custody. What papers remained in the house were placed under seal. Nicolas, by now returned, volunteered to accompany his wife, but hastily withdrew his offer when he learned, if he wished to join her, he, too, would have to travel manacled. Don’t worry, Subois told Jeanne, you’ll soon return home.

Once the baron de Breteuil had pealed the order for the cardinal’s arrest, he did not linger long. Rohan, keenly perceiving the danger he was in, asked his guard for permission to write a brief note. The guard, as embarrassed as anyone, could hardly refuse a prince of the Church and the Holy Roman Empire so piddling a request, and even lent him a pencil. Rohan jotted down a few words and stowed the scrap of paper in his hat. Swearing volubly, he was then escorted by the captain of the king’s
garde du corps
, the duc de Villeroi, to his room in Versailles, where seals were affixed to his papers. Unobserved, he slipped the message, scribbled in German, to a servant. Though it does not survive, its tenor is easily inferred: ride to Paris as fast as you can and burn my correspondence. Rohan then travelled to the capital under guard to rejoin Breteuil.

Fortunately for the cardinal, his servant was fleeter of foot than the minister, who journeyed at a languid pace. Rohan’s valet had spurred his horse on so violently that it collapsed and died on his arrival at a quarter past two. He himself fainted, the note falling from his hands as he fell to the floor. Georgel struggled to read the cardinal’s frantic handwriting, but the young man, hastily revived, conveyed the instructions. Soon, practically all the letters from Marie Antoinette were ash in the grate. Georgel, thinking that a couple of examples might come in useful later on, stashed them far from inquisitive eyes.

Rohan arrived at his palace at three o’clock. Breteuil had prohibited him from speaking to anyone until his own arrival, but his guard, the comte d’Agoult, permitted a short conversation with Georgel, in which Rohan was reassured that his orders had been followed. ‘You must be very surprised,’ he said to the abbé, ‘but you should be certain that I’m not a fool, and that I have been authorised
to do what I have done. I have proof of it. Be calm. Perhaps we will see each
other this evening.’

An hour later, Breteuil, in the company of the police chief, de Crosne, walked into the house ‘with the air and tone of a conqueror who had defeated his enemy’. Rohan, gathering his dignity, handed over the forged authorisation. His papers were sealed and Breteuil permitted him to remain at home under d’Agoult’s watch. Throughout the evening, distressed and confused relatives visited; Rohan greeted them all with ‘a serene countenance’. Was he confident that something would be done to clear up the mess? Or did his embarrassment limit his social interaction to beatific grinning?

The maréchal de Soubise, the godfather of the Rohan clan, creaked out of bed in the pale hours of the morning after. He thought a brief discussion at the palace ought to straighten out this little misunderstanding. The cardinal had not been particularly forthcoming, but Soubise struggled to imagine a crime severe enough to warrant the measures Breteuil had taken. He found the king in implacable mood. ‘I don’t wish for his downfall; but it is for his own sake that
I must arrest him,’ said Louis, who conveyed Rohan’s own account of the sale of the necklace.

Louis directed the investigation with a purpose few believed he had in him. On the same day as he received Soubise, he appointed a
ministerial committee to interview Rohan and examine his papers. Breteuil, the minister hitherto most involved and head of the department responsible for the police, was an obvious choice. His known detestation of the cardinal was balanced by the presence of the experienced foreign minister, the comte de Vergennes, who had long-standing ties to the Rohan. A diplomat from a young age, Vergennes had served across Europe from Portugal to the Ottoman Empire. A gravel-dry workaholic, he was the most durable minister in Louis XVI’s reign, holding office from the king’s accession in 1774 to his own death in 1787. Even his enemies respected his political cunning. He was the king’s most trusted advisor and his supremacy in council was unchallenged.