How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (38 page)

The mood throughout the day was sepulchral. The judges chewed their lunch, normally a convivial gathering, in silence. Every time a magistrate left the chamber, they were buttonholed by Rohan’s stalwarts. After sixteen hours of debate, at ten o’clock in the evening, the court settled down to vote. Most of the judgements reached were uncontroversial. The forged
approuvés
and signature were to be ceremonially struck out. Jeanne was to be punished
ad omnia citra mortem
, to everything bar death: flaying; branding on each shoulder with ‘v’ for ‘voleuse’ (thief ); imprisonment in the Salpêtrière, the women’s poorhouse-cum-prostitutes’ reformatory in the Faubourg Saint-Victor. D’Oliva was ruled
hors de cour
and Cagliostro acquitted. Villette, however, was spared the lash and instead banished in perpetuity. His show of contrition had convinced the court that he was simply ‘a passive tool,
led on by the La Mottes’.

The greatest uncertainty lay over the fate of Rohan. Over the course of the day it had become obvious that the punishment suggested by Joly de Fleury would not pass. But it was unclear until the end whether Rohan too would be ruled
hors de cour
, the taint of criminality still upon him. The
présidents à mortier
, the ten senior magistrates, a number of whom cherished ministerial ambitions, split five each way. As night closed in on that long, bitter day, twenty-three judges voted to rule Rohan
hors de cour
, twenty-six to absolve him completely.

Rohan left the Palais de Justice to applause and cries of
‘Long live the
parlement
, long live the cardinal’. Lips kissed his hands and cassock. Fishwives, assuming the court had spoken in one voice, thrust bouquets of roses and jasmine into the hands of Titon, who brushed them aside testily: ‘I am not on the side of the judgement that passed, and I don’t deserve this applause.’ So overwhelming was popular support for Rohan that one observer declared: ‘I don’t know where the
parlement
would have fled, if they had given
an unjust judgement.’

The cardinal was not immediately released. Target breast-stroked through the crowd to reach his client only to be told by the governor of the Bastille that Breteuil had banned anyone from speaking to Rohan, and that he and Cagliostro had been ordered back to the prison. A near riot ensued as Rohan’s carriage turned towards it, and the multitude was only assuaged when Rohan leant out of a window and assured them he was returning of his own volition. They followed him, yodelling triumphantly all the way.

The judgement was not inevitable; Rohan’s conviction could well have been secured had it not been for two tactical failings by the king’s law officers. The first was managerial: had Joly de Fleury dealt with Rohan separately, and the clerical counsellors remained in the court, it is likely that Rohan would have received a more equivocal verdict. The greater error, though, lay in the inept attempt to frame Rohan for the embezzlement of the necklace. If the charges against Rohan had been limited to
lèse-majesté
, they would have been impossible to refute; but the letters patent hemmed the prosecution in by presuming the cardinal guilty of embezzlement, and Joly de Fleury insisted on stressing this unproven allegation when he might have scudded over it in silence.

The judges were experienced and discriminating, so why did so many of them vote to acquit Rohan on all counts, when they knew he was culpable, at the very least, of
lèse-majesté
? In a report written shortly after the trial, Mercy-Argenteau explained the division entirely in terms of self-interest. The verdict had been rigged by Calonne, the finance minister and strong supporter of the Rohan, to whom a number of judges were in hock: one wanted help with buying a property, another wanted his tax bill written off, another, deeply in debt, hoped for a pension. Others had
liaisons – romantic or political – with the Rohan family. Mercy-Argenteau was so determined to attribute support for Rohan entirely to greed that some of his explanations are ludicrously contrived. One judge, Boula de Montgodefroy, apparently cast his ballot for the cardinal because ‘his nephew was threatened with having four horses that had been intended for him taken away, if his uncle
voted against [him]’.

But Mercy-Argenteau overestimated the finance minister’s influence over the
parlement
. Calonne had never been held in much esteem by the counsellors – greybeards remembered his efforts in the 1760s to suppress their fraternal
parlement
in Brittany. In the last months of 1785, he had tried to steer a large increase in government debt through the
parlement
, which had expressed to the king doubts about Calonne’s integrity and financial acumen. Come May 1786, Calonne was in no position to sway the court to his will; Beugnot, in his interpretation of the verdict, argued that Calonne was viewed as a representative of the crown rather than an ally of Rohan. According to Beugnot, d’Aligre, in revenge for the ministry’s bludgeoning through of the loan, refused to rally support for Joly de Fleury’s conclusions. The Diamond Necklace trial marked the beginning of the end
of the Court party.

It was, however, generally acknowledged that Rohan and his ministerial partisans on one side, and Breteuil on the other, intrigued with the judges for the desired verdict. Supporters of the queen believed that some judges had been swayed by ‘ladies who had performed a part not very commensurate
with their principles’. Castries, a reliable analyst with no skin in the game, reported that Breteuil had tried to negotiate lenient punishments for Villette and Jeanne in exchange
for Rohan’s conviction. The Rohan were equally underhand. One contemporary ballad ran:

                
If the Cardinal’s ruling

                
Appears completely askance,

                
You ought to know that money

                
Governs everything in France

                
Eh bien,

                
If you see
where I’m going.

No one wanted to give Marie Antoinette, pregnant and fragile, the news from Paris. Eventually, the duchesse de Polignac told her. The queen was distraught and disinclined to believe in Rohan’s innocence. For two days, she did not venture out. ‘Condole me,’ she asked Madame Campan:

The intriguer who wished to ruin me, or make money by misusing my name, adopting my signature, has just been fully acquitted. But, as a Frenchwoman, let me pity you. Unfortunate indeed are a people who have for their supreme tribunal a set of men who consult only their passions, some of whom are capable of being corrupted, and others of whom have an audacity which they have expressed
against authority.

To Polignac, a friend who, in truth, had not been wholeheartedly supportive during the trial, the queen wrote: ‘Come and weep with me, come and console my soul, my dear Polignac. The verdict which has just been given is a terrible insult. I am bathed with tears of grief and despair. I can be satisfied with nothing when perversity seems to search for every means to
torture my soul.’

The king was winded too, blaming himself for humiliating his wife by attributing the case to the
parlement
. In retrospect, said the baron de Fremilly, this outsourcing of justice was like ‘throwing a match underneath a barrel of powder, and the barrel blew up with
a terrible bang’. The journalist Rivarol wrote that ‘Monsieur de Breteuil has taken the cardinal from the hands of Madame de La Motte and crushed him against the forehead of the queen, who will
retain the mark.’ Louis and Marie Antoinette could scarcely believe that the
parlement
had, in effect, ruled that the queen could be mistaken for the kind of woman who might arrange a midnight assignation, buy a ruinously expensive necklace without her husband’s permission and correspond in secret to a known roué.

Louis offered a more indulgent explanation for the verdict, viewing the judges as deferential to caste rather than corrupt or insolent:

The affair has been decided outrageously. However, it is easily accounted for . . . The
parlement
perceived in the cardinal only a prince of the church, a Rohan prince, a near-relation of a prince of the Blood. While what they ought to have seen was a man unworthy
of his ecclesiastical character, a great nobleman degraded by his shameful connections.

He, too, could still not comprehend that Rohan had been trussed and stuffed by Jeanne: the cardinal, he was sure, had bought the necklace and ‘was not so silly as to believe that Madame de La Motte was received by the queen and deputed to carry out such a commission’.

On the evening of 1 June, Rohan was taken home from the Bastille by his brother, the prince de Montbazon. His entire family had assembled at his
hôtel
to greet him, along with numerous other well-wishers. (Cagliostro had to hack his way through even thicker crowds to reach his own door, before delivering an impromptu speech of thanks.) The realists in Rohan’s family acknowledged that, even with his acquittal, the cardinal could not cling to his office and honours. They advised him to resign the grand almonership, but Rohan resisted and no decision was taken that evening.
The following day, as Rohan prepared to return to the Palais de Justice to thank the judges, a revenant filled his doorway – Breteuil, who, suffering from gout, had been borne on a litter to the cardinal’s house with, for the second time, a
lettre de cachet
from the king. Louis had felt that, for the crown’s standing, the cardinal needed to be chastised, since the court had so perversely acquitted him.
‘Indecent joy’ lit the baron’s sallow face as he hobbled through the
hôtel
. Rohan was not to leave his house nor receive any visitors for three days; he was then to travel to Chaise-Dieu, his monastery by the Loire in the Auvergne (where, the king wrote to Breteuil, ‘I hope that he sees
very few people’) and await further instructions; and he was to step down immediately as grand almoner.

Both the nobility and much of the general citizenry were indignant at the cardinal’s treatment by the king. In their eyes he was innocent, laundered clean of guilt by the
parlement
(though some looked on more sceptically: the cardinal’s innocence shone ‘like a turd
underneath a lantern’, according to one scabrous song). ‘Tyranny’ was yelled from street corners, in answer to the king’s
lettre de cachet
. ‘They pity him,’ wrote the baron de Staël of Rohan, ‘as they pity oppressed virtue, and they call what the royal court has done
harshness, so that the public take the side of a man whom up till now has been
covered in contempt.’ Castries, looking back ruefully, identified in the popular reaction ‘the seed of the Revolution that would happen
three years later’. Up until this juncture Marie Antoinette alone had been the target of anti-royalist feeling; now, for the first time, the king’s actions were also regarded as despotic.

Under French law, convicts were forbidden from learning the exact nature of their punishments until they were carried out. The
parlement
went into recess for Pentecost immediately after the trial, and no further action could be taken for three weeks. Villette and Jeanne knew that the court had found against them, but not how they would be dealt with. In the Conciergerie, Villette raised the spirits of the other inmates by playing the violin, but his sentence distressed his family. A pitiful letter survives among Joly de Fleury’s papers from Villette’s brother, begging the
procureur-général
to allow him to visit and make arrangements for the exile. It ends: ‘I am going to throw myself at the feet of the throne, if the jailer of the Conciergerie again refuses to let me see him. For this is the last day that I can prolong a stay as sad as it is expensive, considering all that calls me back
to my house.’ Joly de Fleury did not bother replying and, as far as we know, the brothers were not granted a final reunion. Villette was led to a city gate with a halter around his neck and presented, as was customary on these occasions, with a loaf of stale bread. The executioner ‘with great solemnity, turning the culprit’s back upon Paris, gave him a smart kick in the breech, and bade him
never to return!’

When Jeanne heard what her punishment was to be – in her autobiography, a snatch of conversation slides through her barred windows – she collapsed in her chair, as if stung by
‘an electrical shock’. It was the first of a number of fits she suffered during this period of custody. On one occasion, she collapsed crying, ‘Merciful heaven! What will become of me! – I am certainly
destined for destruction.’ Another time, she hurled her plate and cutlery up in the air, before trying to dash her brains out with a Dutch china mug (afterwards she was banned from the unsupervised use of crockery). But there was also comfort in the domestic rhythms of the Conciergerie, a far cry from the isolation of the Bastille: Jeanne
dined each day with the concierge and his family, and played cards in the evening with the oldest child.

No one knew whether Jeanne’s sentence would be carried out. Castries and Mercy-Argenteau had heard noises that she would be spared, but could not confirm them. Outside the prison, only one friend agitated for clemency –
Doillot, her lawyer. He lent her money and implored Breteuil for at least a suspension of the sentence, only to be fobbed off. His fidelity to such a pariah seemed barely explicable – his brother concluded that ‘it must be either that he has gone mad, or else that Madame de La Motte has enchanted him, as she
enchanted the cardinal’.

Throughout her limbo, Jeanne was unable to see her lawyer. Early on the morning of 21 June, she was finally informed that they had permission to meet. Having walked through the Palais de Justice, Jeanne was confronted, not with Doillot, but a clerk of the court, who, without so much as a word of greeting, began to read out her sentence. She grew ‘flustered with astonishment, rage, fear and despair, and this sent her into convulsions. She could not comprehend what was being read to her. She rolled on the ground,
yelling wildly.’ The judgement was read out twice, to make certain that Jeanne had understood. ‘It is the blood of the Valois that you outrage,’ she yelled and, imploring the crowd, asked: ‘Will you suffer a descendant of your kings to be treated thus? Rescue me
from these murderers.’