How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (28 page)

Georgel, now informed that the diamonds had been sold in England, sent Louis Ramond de Carbonnières, an aide-de-camp of the cardinal, to London.
*
Carbonnières, assisted by François Barthélemy, the deputy head of the French mission, tracked down Barthélemy Macdermott, the friar who had acted as Nicolas’s guide earlier that year. Macdermott was initially reluctant to talk, but was convinced to provide a statement by Carbonnières’s impassioned plea that only he could save Rohan – and a smattering of bluster that he might otherwise be arrested as an accomplice. The priest agreed to testify at Rohan’s trial, though Carbonnières believed he was still concealing Nicolas’s current hideaway. Gray and Jefferys, the two jewellers whom Nicolas had approached, were also deposed; both confirmed, after examining a sketch of the Boehmers’ necklace, that the diamonds shown to them had been taken from it.

A crucial breakthrough came in the Austrian Netherlands. D’Oliva, living under the assumed name of Madame Genet, had been arrested in Brussels on 19 October along with her lover, Toussaint de Beausire. She had remained in Paris until the end of September, but fled the country after, Georgel suspected, Jeanne’s lawyer had put the frighteners on her with grizzly stories of the Bastille’s
cachots
. Vergennes’s intelligence led him to believe that d’Oliva was in the Low Countries, and he had instructed Hirzinger, his chargé d’affaires in Brussels, to
‘take secret measures and to consult with the magistrates of the Brussels police to try and discover the fugitives and have them arrested’. Yet securing their return from Brabant seemed nigh-on impossible – Brussels was a safe haven for fugitives, political and criminal, precisely because its privileges forbade extradition to France.

The only way that d’Oliva and Beausire could be repatriated, the foreign minister told Georgel, was by their own volition. They needed someone to gain their confidence and tease them out. With the Paris Police now effectively acting as Rohan’s agents, Inspector Quidor, its specialist in delicate diplomatic operations, travelled to Brussels. On arrival, he discovered the couple desperate for release, and willing to risk rearrest in France. D’Oliva must have been
comforted by the sight of the benevolent policeman, whom she knew as a bantering antagonist from her streetwalking days. Quidor genuinely took pity on her: ‘I believe her more stupid than
mischievous or wicked,’ he wrote to Vergennes. But the copper’s good word came to naught: by 4 November, d’Oliva and Beausire had joined Rohan, Jeanne and the Cagliostros in the Bastille.

*
In later life, Carbonnières would become a distinguished mountaineer, and an expert on the flora and geology of the Pyrenees.

16

Tired and Emotional

S
EDULOUSLY, SINGLE-MINDEDLY AND
exhaustingly, the magistrates and the
procureur-général
’s office had laboured through the autumn to substantiate the case against the detainees. ‘The work is long and tiring,’ wrote Pierre Laurencel, Joly de Fleury’s deputy, to his boss. ‘I beg you, sir, not to refer to me any
other matter.’ Nicolas’s banker and the assorted goldsmiths, diamond brokers, clockmakers and upholsterers who had done business with the La Mottes, along with Madame du Barry herself – handed down from her carriage by the senior magistrate Titon – were all deposed
at the Palais de Justice.
*

For the first time, the narrative Jeanne had presented to de Crosne was subjected to exacting contradiction. Loth told Titon that a rash of spending in the La Mottes’ household broke out at the same time as gifts were granted by Rohan in the late summer of 1784, and again after the sale of the necklace. Jeanne had explained to the friar that these were the golden fruits of the queen’s orchard. He also recalled that at the end of July, when Jeanne gave Rohan 30,000 livres to pay the interest on the necklace, she was scrabbling around to raise exactly
that sum of money. Laporte and Bassenge confirmed Loth’s testimony that Jeanne had boasted of the queen’s friendship, and a number of Parisian artisans reported that, during the first half of 1785, Jeanne had offered to pay them with diamonds
rather than cash. Most significantly, d’Oliva’s testimony substantiated Rohan’s seemingly fantastical story about meeting the queen in the gardens of Versailles: she admitted to having been groomed by the comtesse de La Motte to perform a favour for the queen, to being dressed
up, led at night to the palace gardens and presenting a rose to an unknown man, to whom she said ‘You know
what this means.’

The slow erosion of Jeanne’s credibility ought to have buoyed Rohan. Yet the mere fact that Jeanne may have deceived him did not absolve him from the sin of presumption, and suspicions that he had authored the fraud still adhered to him. His debts were motive enough; he was the last person seen with the necklace; and the testimony of a single distinguished witness threatened to suck the air out of Rohan’s declamations of innocence.

Baudard de Sainte-James told Titon that, at the party where he and the cardinal discussed a loan to the queen, Rohan had
‘assured [him] he had seen in the queen’s own hands 700,000 livres in banknotes which she had wanted to give to him to hand over to Monsieur Boehmer as payment for the necklace’. The cardinal had added that ‘he feared deeply that she would not keep the 700,000 livres and would not put them to the use that they had been intended’. Not only was the slur of spendthriftiness yet another example of Rohan’s contempt for Marie Antoinette, but, for the first time, evidence was presented that Rohan had boasted of meeting the queen in private. If he had really spoken these words, then he appeared little different from Jeanne – a man who flaunted his connections with the queen to squeeze money out of the rich and desperate. Sainte-James’s testimony inflicted a wound the sharks scented.

Though life at Versailles continued as though Rohan had already been swallowed by oblivion, he continued to fascinate and torment those connected to the case. ‘Happy are they’, wrote Vergennes to his ambassador in Rome, ‘whose occupations shelter them from hearing from morning until evening arguments for and against the same matter, which makes everyone feel imprisoned, for no reason and
no useful purpose.’

Louis was briefed regularly about the progress of the investigation and Vergennes’s attempts to track down the suspects. But he wished to be reminded of the affair no more frequently than necessary. Soubise, who raged around the Court denouncing the cardinal’s detention, was expelled from the council of state: ‘His presence there
pains me,’ said Louis brusquely. The queen told her family that all memories of the cardinal and the necklace had been banished from her mind, now
the
parlement
had jurisdiction over the case; in reality, she was unable to purge herself of barbed thoughts.
She obtained a portrait of Jeanne and contemplated the woman who had stolen her identity and defaced it; whose crookedness she now, in the eyes of her traducers, owned. One of her
femmes de chambres
remarked that ‘the affair is very painful for her and requires
a lot of effort’ – the effort to forget it, the effort to conceal the pain when she couldn’t. The impropriety of forcefully defending her honour in public – when Madame Campan offered to testify, Louis refused her permission (‘it would look as if you were sent by the Queen and that
would not be right’) – left her feeling impotent. She became a character in other people’s stories, but her own went unreported. The leg-ironed speed at which the trial dragged on gave birth to fears that the immediate delight at Rohan’s imprisonment entailed humiliations unappreciated at the time: ‘From the moment the cardinal was arrested,’ Marie Antoinette wrote to her brother Joseph II, ‘I had counted on the fact that he would no longer be able to reappear at Court; but the proceedings which will last for seven months could
have other consequences.’

At the beginning of November, Laurencel presented Joly de Fleury with an analysis of the case against the cardinal. Sainte-James and Bassenge’s depositions excited the prosecution the most. Unlike Boehmer, whose memories were fragmentary, Bassenge had provided a very detailed account of events leading up to and beyond the purchase of the necklace. He remembered clearly the occasion when Rohan revealed he was negotiating on behalf of Marie Antoinette – a
prima facie
abuse of the queen’s name. The testimony had already led Laurencel to conclude that ‘the cardinal is much more guilty than Madame de la Mothe’. Where Jeanne’s account clashed with Rohan’s,
Laurencel was invariably inclined to believe the former: for example, he accepted, without cavil, Jeanne’s contention that Rohan dismembered the necklace and instructed Nicolas to sell it in London.

Laurencel displayed a carnivorous tenacity in picking over the evidence against Rohan. One can read him anticipating Target’s lines of defence: that the cardinal never claimed to have received orders from the queen in person; that had his motivations been criminal, he would never have insisted that the jewellers thank the queen in
writing. Laurencel was aware, too, of the political context of the trial:

No one regards the cardinal with any esteem or respect, but they pity his family. They do not want to believe him guilty of a forgery, of an infamous swindle; they would rather like to believe he is crazy, misled by his ambition and the victim of seduction by a woman devoid of honour, with whom he did not blush to live.

Knowing that his superiors wanted to crush Rohan, Laurencel arranged the evidence in such a way that it spelt out ‘fraudster’ not ‘fool’. Employing an obtuse logic, he argued that since Rohan admitted delivering the necklace to Jeanne, and Jeanne admitted that Nicolas sold diamonds given to her by Rohan, Rohan must therefore have instructed Jeanne to prise the diamonds from the necklace and dispose of them on his behalf. ‘There are no grounds’, the deputy wrote, ‘for saying the cardinal de Rohan was led astray by Madame de La Motte . . . If Madame de La Motte counterfeited the signature of the queen, or had knowledge that the signature was assumed, she only participated in the manoeuvre at the instigation of the cardinal’ (though Laurencel admitted there was no evidence to attribute the forgery to Rohan).

Laurencel had a specific intention in expanding Rohan’s crimes from the simple but incontestable
lèse majesté
of passing off the signature of the queen, to the far more dramatic crime of theft. When the magistrates gathered to consider the evidence, he wanted the
parlement
to pass a
decret de prise de corps
– a ruling that remanded suspects under the most stringent conditions – against the cardinal. The more calculating Rohan appeared, the more likely the
decret de prise de corps
would be voted through. Though claiming to employ the ‘principle of equity’, vindictiveness was his motivation; the pro-Court faction wished to see Rohan suffer palpably during the trial. Laurencel told Rohan’s relatives that ‘they would have to accept that Rohan was a
lost man’.

On 14 December, fifty-six magistrates, on the pews of the Grand Chambre of the Palais de Justice, listened for ten hours straight to Titon’s report on the evidence. The peers of the realm, entitled to sit as members of the Grand Chambre, had recused themselves from
proceedings involving one of their number. There was a popular expectation that now, once the witnesses had fleshed out the details, Jeanne’s deception of Rohan would emerge and the case against him dropped. A snatch of satirical verse ran:

                
The Pope made him red

                
The king blackened him

                
Madame de la Motte smeared him

                
The
parlement
will
doubtless clear him.

But doubts about his conduct evidently persisted.
Decrets de prise de corps
were passed against Rohan, Jeanne, d’Oliva, Cagliostro and, in absentia, Nicolas, which meant the first four would remain in detention, to be interrogated by the
rapporteurs
and placed in gladiatorial confrontations with witnesses and each other. The court’s ruling was deeply worrying for Rohan, since it was the first test of the disposition of sympathies in the
parlement
. Forty-eight of the judges had voted for
prise de corps
; a handful of radical judges, whom Louis XVI had dubbed ‘The Firestarters’, argued for a more lenient form of remand. It was alleged that the baron de Breteuil had suborned the court, but such comprehensive malfeasance was unlikely: as Castries asked in his diary, ‘how do you corrupt
forty-eight people?’

The suspects had spent four months in the Bastille, while the evidence against them was assembled; four months in which they grew quieter, weaker, more friable emotionally and physically. Black thoughts stampeded; bodies dried out in stale silence. The daily constitutional around the fortress’s crenellations was not sufficiently invigorating for Jeanne: ‘For want of air, for want of exercise, deprived of the pleasing variety so essential to health, my countenance wore the sallow hue of languor, and my eyes were dimmed
with weary watching.’

With the delusion of someone who is lord of four walls and a vassal to the lock and key, Jeanne convinced herself that the simplest means of escape was jemmying up the flagstones with a knife. She failed, like many before her, though she did discover that a distant relative of hers, Anne-Gédéon Lafitte, marquis de Pelleport, was locked
in the cell below. Pelleport was a miscreant of notable
ingenuity and durability, and he had already been incarcerated four or five times at the behest of his family for ‘dishonourable atrocities’.

How Jeanne discovered her neighbour is unknown – a friendly turnkey may have made the introduction. At first they communicated by knocking on the floor, later passing letters to each other on a string through the bars in the window, until they were rumbled and Pelleport was transferred to a different tower. Jeanne’s only other diversion was singing: an aria from
Richard Coeur de Lion
, Grétry’s hit opera of the previous year, in which the imprisoned King Richard laments ‘If the universe forgets me, / If I must pass my entire life here, / What use is
my glory, my valour’ was a favourite (there is an unhappy homophony between ‘valeur’ and ‘Valois’, and she substituted her own name into the song). The isolation was punishing: ‘I communed with myself
and was silent,’ she wrote in her memoirs, paraphrasing the Psalmist.
On one occasion, she was treated to a tantalising glimpse of her sister from the top of the fortress: her lawyer, Doillot, had positioned Marianne on the street in a line of sight from the Bastille. Dawdling behind her guard, Jeanne hurriedly flapped her handkerchief at the tiny figure below, but the brevity and distance only made her feel her loneliness more keenly. Early in September, Jeanne wrote to de Crosne asking that two letters be passed on to Nicolas – she had no idea where he was, though did not know that the police were equally clueless – begging him to visit and supplement her scrimped rations.