How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (3 page)

Migration was how the poor survived in eighteenth-century France. Some went in search of seasonal, agricultural work; others moved permanently from the country to town. Paris had swollen under the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV: by the middle of the eighteenth century, less than a quarter of its residents were
native Parisians. A new city offered opportunities for reinvention. Vulpine cronies; debts like grenades fizzing towards explosion; even inveterate character traits – all could be abandoned. Jacques showed more application in the forced march north-west than he had ever done before. But well-advertised snares awaited newcomers to the metropolis: exploitation, robbery, and a life of beggary,
prostitution and theft.

On arrival, the family split: the two Jacques took off together, while Jeanne remained with her mother. Marie had no desire to work if her perfectly healthy daughter could line her pockets, so Jeanne was sent out begging each morning (this was far from unusual – between a half and two-thirds of beggars in France at the time were children), her name supposed to inspire curiosity. She walked the streets, pipsqueaking ‘ladies and gentlemen, take compassion on a poor orphan, descended directly from Henry II, of Valois,
King of France’, as Marie stood close by with an array of genealogical charts to further intrigue punters. Unfortunately the worldly citizens of Paris were sceptical of princesses in rags, and all Jeanne received for her pains were barrages of abuse and the occasional cuff round the ear.

Jacques had been planning to unearth legal support for the restitution of his lands but, his mind addled by drink, achieved nothing. The family moved to Boulogne where the parish priest,
Abbé Henocque, agreed to help them petition the crown, yet the optimism did not last long, as Jacques was arrested by the police. The reasons for this are unclear, though it may have been because he bandied
about his Valois title, which was believed to be extinct. Visiting her father in prison, Jeanne saw him ‘extended on a bed of straw, his body emaciated, his complexion sallow and pinched, his eyes languid and sunken, yet a faint and transient gleam seemed to speak the joy in his heart and
welcome our approach’.

Henocque agitated for Jacques’s release, which finally occurred seven weeks after his arrest. By then, his constitution, already charred by alcohol, had crumbled under the strain of prison. He was taken to the Hôtel-Dieu, the paupers’ hospital adjoining Notre Dame. The prospect of recovery there was minimal: up to six people were crammed in each bed, the infectious jostling against the convalescent, clammy with each other’s sweat as the shudders of the dying sent
tremors through the living. It did not take long for Jacques to expire, with Jeanne on hand to record his last words: ‘My dear child! I fear my conduct will cause you much misery in the future; but let me beg you, under every misfortune, to remember that you are a VALOIS! Cherish, throughout life, sentiments of that name and never forget your birth! – I tremble . . . I tremble at the thought of leaving you in the care of
such a mother!’

It is extremely unlikely that Jacques de Saint-Rémy ever uttered these words, doused in unctuous sentimentality. He failed to protect his eldest daughter from the violence of her mother during his life and, from the little that can be extrapolated of his character, upholding the reputation of the Valois was not his principal motivation. That should not, however, obscure the harrowing effect of Jacques’s death on Jeanne and its reverberations over the course of her life. Her father may not have lived up to the family name, but Jeanne declaimed it every time she went out begging. From a young age, she would have marked the contrast between her lineage and the means to which she had been reduced to support her relatives. ‘[T]he noble blood of the Valois flowing within my veins oppos[ed], like an indignant torrent,
such degradation,’ she recalled. Jeanne’s subsequent ambition can only be understood in the light of her wish to comport herself like a Valois.

In March 1762, three months after Jacques’s death, Marie and her children moved to Versailles. Jeanne resumed begging, but pre-empted official harassment by ingratiating herself with the family of
the chief of police, Monsieur Deionice. His wife and daughter lavished her with food, toys and spare change, though her success probably relied more on Deionice’s regular visits to Marie’s bedroom – when Marie took up with Jean-Baptiste Ramond, a handsome Sardinian soldier, Jeanne found herself no longer welcome in the Deionice household. The couple married and settled in a dosshouse in Chaillot, just to the west of Paris. The newlyweds shared the bed; the children slept on the floor on straw pallets.

In Ramond, Marie had found a partner more suited to her taste for violence. Jeanne, bearing Marguerite on her back, was instructed to bring back ten
sous
each day – and twenty on Sundays and holidays. This was a formidable target. A lacemaker or woolspinner could not expect to make more than eight
sous
, and an agricultural labourer
no more than ten. When Jeanne failed to collect enough money, she was ordered to sleep in the streets. If she tried to evade her mother and stepfather, Ramond would hunt her down and drag her home, where Marie beat her with a vinegar-soaked rod which tore her back with splinters.

Ramond moved to Paris with Jacques, so that the children’s profitability might be maximised. He appropriated the boy’s titles and styled himself the baron de Valois, but was repeatedly arrested for begging. On the third occasion, the authorities decided to employ a more effective deterrent: he was sentenced to the pillory for twenty-four hours, then banished from the city for five years. On hearing of her lover’s imminent exile, Marie hurried to join him for a final embrace, leaving her two young daughters with a bag of hazelnuts and a breezy promise that she would return within the week. They never saw her again.

It seems Marie eventually returned to Fontette, where she found no shortage of admirers prepared to
buy her dinner. When her looks faded, she toiled in the vineyards. From the mid-1760s to the mid-1770s, harvests were lean. The freeing up of the trade in grain in 1763 and 1764 encouraged speculation and hoarding, exacerbating the scarcity and leading to a surge in food prices. At some point during these years, Marie ceased to be able to support herself. She left Fontette and wandered off the historical record – most likely working as a migrant labourer and intermittent prostitute until a penurious death.

There is more evidence, though less clarity, about the fate of the children. According to
one account – written by a
champenois
who knew the family – the kindly priest Abbé Henocque took in Jeanne and her siblings and obtained the patronage of a wealthy noble family, who paid for their education in a convent.
Jeanne’s own account arrives at a similar destination, though by a more picturesque route. After Marie’s disappearance, the little street rats scurried around as usual, badgering anyone they could find for a coin. Whatever trepidation they may have felt about their abandonment must have been alleviated by the disappearence of anyone likely to batter them with an improvised weapon at the slightest provocation.

Nearly a month had passed when a coach drew up beside a tiny, pale six-year-old girl, standing on the side of a country road and bellowing that she was the last relict of the Valois. The vehicle contained the marquis and marquise de Boulainvilliers, who asked Jeanne to explain herself. As she told her story the marquis’s face torqued itself incredulously, but his wife told Jeanne, ‘if you speak the truth, I will be a mother to you’. When the claims were corroborated by their neighbours and Henocque, Jeanne, Jacques and Marguerite were packed off to the Boulainvilliers’ chateau at Passy, where they were washed, dressed, given proper beds with crisp linen sheets, and introduced to the marquise’s daughters, whom they were told to regard as sisters.

Anne Gabriel Henri Bernard, marquis de Boulainvilliers, was a man of considerable distinction. He was
prévôt
of Paris, supervising the policing and legal administration of the city. Boulainvilliers’s grandfather was Henri, comte de Boulainvilliers – astrologer, admirer of Mohammed and, according to Voltaire, the ‘most scholarly man in the
history of the kingdom’. In his historical works, the comte pined after a feudal age of seigneurial camaraderie, in which his caste was neither reduced to mummers in the spectacles of absolute monarchy, nor diluted by the admission of thousands of arrivistes who had purchased their rank. It was ironic, then, that his daughter – the marquis’s mother – should marry the son of Samuel Bernard who, though elevated as the comte de Coubert, had been raised in the stolidly bourgeois household of a Dutch painter of portrait miniatures. Bernard was the richest banker in Europe and underwrote
the French government during the War of the Spanish Succession. The Boulainvilliers’ household combined staggering wealth with a pious, if hypocritical adulation of the old nobility – a combination that may have made them especially susceptible to the plight of the young Valois.

Jeanne herself had reasons to claim she had effectively been adopted by the Boulainvilliers, not just treated as a distant charitable project funded at the behest of a kindly old curate. Her entry into the family offered, as much as any official documentation, recognition of her deserts, and challenged the authorities to support her in comparable luxury. Though her story seems like a fairy tale, it has corroboration from other quarters. Jacques’s petition to Louis XVI in 1776 spoke of how the ‘Marquise de Boulainvilliers met them
by chance on the road’; and Rose Bertin, Marie Antoinette’s dressmaker, knew the Boulainvilliers’ cook, who told her that the children had turned up at Passy with a little casket containing
their title deeds.

The three siblings were sent off to boarding school. Jacques eventually joined the navy and Jeanne made ‘rapid progress in every branch of female education,
particularly in writing’ – but Marguerite died during a smallpox outbreak. The Boulainvilliers fled Paris in fright and Jeanne would not see them again for another five years. Her schoolmistress, Madame le Clerc, took advantage of the marquise’s seclusion to force Jeanne into servitude: ‘I fetched water; I rubbed the chairs, made the beds; in short I did every menial office about the house . . . in the different occupations of washing,
ironing, housekeeping, nursing.’ She was eventually rescued by the marquise but her wish to be enfolded within the family was not granted. Soon she was apprenticed to a number of professionals – first to a seamstress, then to a maker of mantuas (loose-fitting gowns). It is evident that the marquise wanted Jeanne to learn a trade so she could support herself independently and with dignity, and needlework was the most promising profession for women without wealth.

None of this was congenial to Jeanne. Mademoiselle la Marcha may have been ‘a mantua-maker of the highest reputation’, but ‘the urgency of her very extensive business was by no means suitable for a
person of my condition’. She was moved elsewhere but chafed when taken on by a retired lady-in-waiting to the marquise de
Narbonne, ‘compelled to carry water from the bottom of a house four storeys high, to prepare the bath which her indisposition obliged her to use’ and ‘reduced to the situation of
servant to a servant
!’.

During her teenage years, Jeanne frequently fell sick and returned to the Boulainvilliers. She claimed to suffer from ‘putrid fever’ – or typhus – but it’s easy to see how, in her misery, she might have developed a hypochondriac sensitivity to the smallest somatic fluctuations, or have feigned illness. Her dreams of being waited upon by others were only fulfilled by the nurses at her sickbed. An insight into these fantasies might be found in the library she later accumulated: among the multi-volume editions of Rousseau, Crébillon and the
Hommes Illustres de Plutarque
, was shelved an obscure play called
L’Orphelin Anglais
(
The English Orphan
) by Charles Henri de Longueil. The rest of Jeanne’s books seem to have been bought to furnish her rooms rather than her mind but, as there were no other individual play scripts in the inventory,
L’Orphelin Anglais
almost certainly held some specific sentimental value.

Set in medieval England, the play was first performed by the Comédie-Française in February 1769. Its two central characters, Thomas Frick and his son-in-law Thomas Spencer, are prosperous carpenters. The younger Thomas is admirably honest, fair and devoted to his wife and children. But one of their customers, Lady Lallin, seems determined that the family should spend a number of years travelling on the continent so that young Thomas can perfect his trade. First she offers to pay for their trip; when they refuse to go, she threatens to arrange for their expulsion from the kingdom. It soon transpires that Thomas was an orphan taken in by Frick. Lord Kitson, Lady Lallin’s brother, informs him that he is, in fact, the heir to the earldom of Gloucester. His father had relinquished him when he had fallen into disgrace with the queen; and Lady Lallin is eager for the family to take a lengthy voyage abroad because she was granted the earl’s confiscated property. Reclaiming the title, however, would mean the annulment of Thomas’s marriage to Molly, a commoner, a fate that looks increasingly likely when Kitson fails to extract an exemption from the king. Only when Molly tearfully collapses before the throne is the king’s decision reversed and the family saved.

At first glance there is little in common between the personalities of Jeanne and Thomas. He takes pride in craftsmanship, has no yearning for great wealth and refuses to sacrifice his marriage in exchange for an exalted rank. But this was probably not how Jeanne read the play. It fulfilled a number of hopes that her life with the Boulainvilliers failed to deliver. She saw an orphan who had been absorbed so fully into his adoptive family that he had married into it. She observed that the fate of the high-born is of great interest to kings, if only the opportunity could be found to arouse their pity. Most dramatically, the play offered a fantasy of instantaneous redemption – however tedious the endless prospect of life as a seamstress seemed, it could be escaped in the time it takes for a man with welcome news to walk through the door. Jeanne would grow to realise that intervention was required for fantasies to become real.