How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (33 page)

The Genevans, wishing to curry favour with the French, were willing either to keep Villette immured indefinitely or repatriate
him – whichever was more amenable. On 19 March Vergennes wrote to the Syndics of Geneva asking them formally to arrest Villette, and Inspector Quidor of the Paris Police was sent to escort him home. Quidor had been ordered to treat Villette with ‘all possible mildness’ and
‘establish trust’ with him. On the journey back the captive
choked up confessions like a half-drowned man: he admitted attending on Jeanne and d’Oliva during the garden scene, and implied that Jeanne had deceived the cardinal to obtain the necklace. Villette’s effusions were not entirely unstudied – there was a certain degree of calculation aimed at deflecting suspicion that he had been at the heart of the plot.

Word of Villette’s arrival at the Bastille on the 29 March percolated
through the city. D’Oliva, who caught a glimpse of the new prisoner, recognised him immediately. The arrest was of such significance that the king himself demanded to see Villette’s papers. Initially, Villette was interrogated
as a witness. Retracting some of his confidences to Quidor, he admitted only that Jeanne had told him the crown jewellers were selling a very valuable necklace. A short while later, he had been asked by Jeanne to broker the sale of some diamonds. When presented with the terms of sale, he was unable, he said, to identify the forged handwriting. The
parlement
was unconvinced. On 6 April, they passed a
decret de prise de corps
against him, and he was immediately seated for
interrogation by Titon.

Villette’s answers were extremely circumspect and reflected his uncertainty of the extent of the court’s knowledge about his and Jeanne’s activities. He acknowledged little more than the questions themselves revealed: that he took dictation from Jeanne for a number of documents; that he met d’Oliva through the La Mottes, and went to Versailles with the three of them in July 1784. As they walked through the park he injured his heel and rested on a bench, so had no idea what occurred in the Bosquet de Venus.

But when Titon asked
‘Do you know that the girl d’Oliva played the role of the queen?’ Villette’s pretence of ignorance became unsustainable: ‘I learnt about it immediately afterwards; I certainly admit that I had the idiocy to regard this wrongdoing as a joke and I laughed a lot about it. Lengthy remorse has atoned for the moment
of madness.’ He had no idea, he added, why Jeanne had dressed up d’Oliva as the queen. What Villette did not know, and had no chance of knowing, was that Jeanne’s defence relied on a complete denial of the garden scene ever having occurred.

Less oblivious betrayals of his co-conspirator surfaced as well. Villette said that Jeanne had told him she received the queen’s favours; he had noticed, in the summer of 1785, that the La Mottes had an abundance of diamonds of unknown provenance. As he was prodded further about the sale of the necklace, he could offer no insight into the circumstance surrounding it, until he was asked directly:
‘Do you recognise the handwriting of the words
approuvé
and the signature
Marie Antoinette de France
, and was it not you who wrote them?’

Something wilted within Villette, as he realised that a wispy evasion on this count would be swatted down by the court. Nonetheless, he maintained his denials, while proposing an ingenious legal argument in his defence:

Suppose that as a result of being totally enamoured, I may have been made to commit a crime of this nature. It is easy to imagine how I would be afraid of confessing this. Admit, moreover, that things looked stacked against me; suppose, even, that false witnesses might have deposed that they had seen me write these words, it would then be a case of judging the action and myself as guilty.

But, indeed, neither the handwriting nor the signature are the queen’s. Not only has there been no copying of the queen’s handwriting, in which case there has been no material forgery; and not only was there no use of the signature that the queen uses, so there has been neither forgery nor the crime of
lèse-majesté
, but even the signature that exists cannot be that of the queen, since it takes the form ‘Marie Antoinette de France’, who is an imaginary being in this kingdom. I ask therefore, what weight can be attributed to such a signature? Ought it not be treated in the way it was taken? First by the queen’s jewellers, who conduct business with the queen, and especially by the cardinal, a man of the Court who, because of his position and rank, ought to recognise the handwriting here, and at least know how Her Majesty signs and that the name ‘Marie Antoinette de France’ could not be her signature. Note, furthermore, that this [the signature] is only a tiny thing that I could not have profited from. Note,
furthermore, that one can only object to this document, of which I am suspected of being the author, in so much as it was presented to the jewellers as being the true handwriting of the queen and convinced them to hand over the necklace. If the crime lay there, it could certainly not be imputed to me, since I know neither the cardinal nor the jewellers. If I claimed such connections I’d be laughed at and arrested. In a word, I made no use of the signature, and did not profit from it.

Titon was flummoxed by the argument, and made no objections during the interrogation. By the
récolement
, however, a response had been formulated. There was a very simple reason why the writing of the words ‘Marie Antoinette de France’ was a crime: they had been already deemed so by the king’s letters patent. No further quibbling over
the matter was possible.

For the time being, the ostensible success of his argument made Villette a little more cocksure.

‘Did the cardinal know that the words
approuvé
and the signature . . . were not the handwriting and signature of the queen?’ asked Titon.

‘I don’t have actual knowledge,’ he replied. ‘But, without being as enlightened as the cardinal, I think that I would not have been deceived had I been in his position.’

Perceptions that he had fled to escape arrest were misguided, Villette concluded – he had left Paris in August 1785 ‘to fulfil a longstanding wish of
travelling to Italy’. Nothing could have been more innocent.

While Villette was being interrogated, Dupuis began to arrange confrontations between the accused. First came the face-off between Jeanne and Cagliostro, a brief, bursting flare, prologue to the lengthier sessions between Jeanne and Rohan. Jeanne scythed away at Cagliostro’s character and breathed mephitic suggestions about his activities: he was a commoner who lied about his nobility, a fantasist who had imagined his exotic birth,
‘an opportunist who wanted to live at the cardinal’s expense’. Remaining vague about Cagliostro’s involvement in the Diamond Necklace Affair to exacerbate the sense that his influence permeated it like a fog, Jeanne accused the comte of ‘seeking to involve the cardinal in things in order to compromise him’.

Cagliostro responded in kind: Jeanne had told him that she
possessed a key to the queen’s private apartments; that she visited them often; and that the queen had even called on her in her own home. Cagliostro’s counter-attack enraged Jeanne so much she hurled a candlestick at him in frustration, though she managed only to burn
her own eye.

The two incompatible narratives that had been presented to the investigating magistrates finally bore down on each other in the confrontations between Jeanne and Rohan. Jeanne sought to mire the cardinal in detail. The entirety of the first day – five hours long – was spent compiling all the payments she claimed to have received from Rohan. There were ten in 1782 alone, most of them worth thousands of livres, along with hampers crammed with game and wine. Rohan responded with a frustration that showed his difficulty in rebutting such falsehoods: ‘You deliberately multiply the details in order to
make things plausible,’ half-admitting that the relative thinness of his own account weakened his case. The sums of money she spoke of, Rohan argued, amounted to almost all the funds available to the grand almoner. When her imaginary facts were coshed by reality, she responded with indignation: ‘You should be ashamed of yourself for acting so badly today when you once
did so much good.’

This was just one of a repertory of poses Jeanne struck. Sometimes, she spoke obliquely, hinting at a conspiracy to bury her. At other times her voice was serrated with menace. She could be angry or prolix or self-congratulatory. Even the shifts in her story could be summoned in her defence: ‘to the public, one can say what one wants,’ Jeanne told Rohan. ‘But in the confrontations
one must speak the truth.’

Rohan’s allegations were reflected back onto him. It was the cardinal, she claimed, who had showed her letters from the queen which promised his elevation to chief minister; it was the cardinal who had guided her to a secret entrance to the queen’s rooms through which he entered unseen. These fantasias were ornamented with comical embellishments. To disguise himself, Jeanne announced, Rohan used to wander around Versailles in a white
lévite
and a deep-bowled hat, burying his face in a handkerchief. To sneak into Trianon, he would scurry across a plank over a ditch – on one occasion he fell in, dislocating his thumb and tearing his skullcap.

Court intrigue, Jeanne suggested, explained everything. When the cardinal discovered that the signature was false,

he told me that it was the Polignac woman who had dreamt up all this intrigue to destroy me. ‘I will let go of that affair,’ he told me. ‘I am going to continue to go to Versailles, where I will seize the first opportunity that presents itself to speak to the king, and I will throw myself at his feet as I tell him about all my suffering. I know that everything will be all right. I can count on his kindness and I will not have to deal with the queen. Rather, I have many people that matter on my side, Monsieur de Vergennes, Monsieur de
Maurepas and my family.’

The comte de Maurepas was certainly a formidable politician, but his influence had diminished precipitously since his death five years earlier.

Rohan responded by arguing that he and Jeanne ought to be held to different standards:

My simple denial of Madame de La Motte’s alleged suppositions ought to have the force of proof and not be treated as equivalent with Madame de La Motte’s denials. For it has been demonstrated and will be shown again during the course of the investigation that at every event for which there are witnesses, they testify against her. Consequently my assertions have been proven true by the same testimony. I must be believed when I contradict her, since Madame de La Motte has spoken falsely at all times – anything she says without proof or witnesses, and which is denied by me,
will be false again.

More succinctly he said: ‘Everything that Madame de La Motte calls a fact is actually a story made up
on the spot.’

Rohan admitted he had been ‘guilty of too great a credulity and good faith – but that is
my only wrong’. His too-generous heart had inhibited him from exposing Jeanne, even when his suspicions of her deceit were grounded:

A fear seized me of harming Madame de La Motte, that she should fall much deeper into the pain that I had seen in her and about which she had expressed herself so movingly, at having fallen into the unhappy position of having displeased the queen. Had I added to these griefs, I could have
harmed her irreparably.

Despite his fortification of the moral high ground, the cardinal could be nimble-footed on occasion. ‘It is not a crime if I’m mistaken about a date,’ Jeanne pleaded as she tried to mop up an inconsistency.
‘It’s not a crime’, Rohan shot back, ‘but it is a falsehood.’ Yet he indulged in falsehoods of his own. Still worried that evidence of his correspondence to the queen might emerge, he set down for the record that he had left Jeanne on a number of occasions by herself in his study, where she would have had the opportunity to filch a stash of his notepaper. Who knows, he suggested, what letters might have been forged with his signature: ‘I reject therefore all these writings on which there is only my signature and I reject equally letters that she might produce or which might concern the
sale of the diamonds.’

Both Jeanne and Rohan were aware that, in their disputation, they needed to avoid replicating the crime of appropriating the queen’s name each time they tried to explain themselves. It offered Rohan an excuse to fulminate by rote, when feeling exhausted. He felt
‘the most cruel sorrow to see a name worthy of such respect impersonated in this way; the horror that these words cause me is the only response that I will permit myself‘. Jeanne showed herself aggrieved at every mention of the queen: ‘I am exposing all of the cardinal’s lies and am suffering more than a person ought to be obliged to, for invoking the queen’s name in my defence.’

Jeanne’s attitude towards Rohan wavered throughout the confrontations. In some instances, she portrayed him as a satanic manipulator, who had bribed d’Oliva to support his invention of the garden scene. Witnesses Rohan cited in support were part of the
‘cabal of the cardinal’. But she also expressed pity for him – ‘he was not the only guilty party in this horrible affair: it was [Cagliostro’s] advice to the cardinal that set him up to be the victim’ – and offered to prove that Cagliostro was guilty of even ‘blacker crimes’ (evidence of which she never got round to providing).

Despite the misery Jeanne had inflicted upon him, Rohan could not suppress his respect for the faint gleams of integrity he discerned. After Jeanne had explained that the reason her husband had fled immediately after her arrest was to avoid divulging secrets told to
him by the cardinal, Rohan wrote to Target: ‘I cannot stop myself admiring the care which she took to
absolve her husband.’ In Jeanne’s presence, he veered between admiring and abhorring her jusqu’auboutisme.