How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (6 page)

Choiseul did not see out the year by the king’s side. He was dismissed on Christmas Eve when Louis XV refused to support him in declaring war with Britain over the Falklands. The new foreign minister, the duc d’Aiguillon, appointed Louis de Rohan as ambassador to Vienna. This was the most prestigious ambassadorial appointment, with the onerous responsibility of maintaining good relations with France’s chief ally. Louis had no diplomatic experience, was a noted anglophile and belonged to a family that had intrigued against Austrian interests for the last fifteen years. The comte de Mercy-Argenteau, the Austrian ambassador to Versailles, called the appointment
‘as odd as it is improper’. But d’Aiguillon selected Louis precisely because he was so inappropriate: the foreign minister, more devoted to advancing his own cause than his country’s, wished to loosen his dependency on the Rohan, who had helped him to power. How better than by priming one of their sprigs – who was being groomed by his family for high office – to fail?

Louis himself expressed no enthusiasm for the position. Vienna was a shabby replacement for Paris; and he regarded a mere ambassadorship as demeaning. Eventually, he was reconciled to the job by an ample allowance and a promise to pay off his debts. It was agreed, too, that he would succeed the decrepit cardinal de La Roche-Aymon as grand almoner (the head of the French Church and the Chapel Royal – one of the great offices of state).

Anyone looking on as Rohan entered Vienna on 10 January 1772 might have wondered what business the Queen of Sheba had in town. Rohan had brought with him two state coaches and fifty horses, marshalled by a chief equerry, a sub-equerry and two grooms. Seven pages, drawn from the Breton and Alsatian nobility, followed with their tutors. There were two gentlemen of the bedchamber, a major-domo, a steward, a bursar and a chamberlain in scarlet uniforms squirted with gold braid; two postilions rode on his coach, four heralds in liveries embroidered with gold and sequinned with silver trumpeted his arrival, six
valets de chambre
and twelve footmen waited upon him, two Switzers – who stood like heavily armed tropical fish in their particoloured uniforms – guarded him, and a ten-piece orchestra was on permanent stand-by for emergency musical entertainment. Though the embassy in Vienna was fully staffed, Rohan
was accompanied by four further ambassadorial assistants, who would also be credentialled at Court, as well as his secretary Georgel and
four undersecretaries.

Vienna was a tangled city seeped of colour – tall, white-stuccoed buildings cast their shadows across the narrow streets. Because of the paucity of space – on average eighty people lived in each house – the wealthy compensated for what they lacked in frontage with their interiors. ‘Nothing can be more surprising’, wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘than the apartments. They are commonly a
suite
of eight or ten large rooms, all inlaid, the doors and windows richly carved and gilt, and the furniture such as is seldom seen in the palaces of sovereign princes of
other countries’. The city had neither the intellectual vitality nor commercial bustle of Paris, but was sustained by the expanding bureaucracy of the Habsburg monarchy. Its stifling atmosphere was heightened by the intrigues of its citizens to acquire and retain state office.

Rohan immediately presented himself to Prince Kaunitz, the Austrian Chancellor, and Joseph II, the Holy Roman Emperor and Maria Theresa’s son and co-regent. The empress herself kept Rohan waiting ten days for an audience. She was, she claimed, indisposed with a cold, though everyone recognised the delay signalled her disapproval at Rohan’s appointment. She had written to Mercy-Argenteau six months previously to express her ‘displeasure at the choice that France has made of such a wicked subject as the coadjutor of Strasbourg . . . I would have refused if I had not been held back by consideration of the unpleasantness that could have
rebounded onto my daughter’.

Maria Theresa had ruled the Habsburg Empire since 1740, having acceded to the throne at the age of only twenty-three. The unseasoned queen was fettered by shiftless advisors, and the European powers slavered in anticipation of dividing up her lands. But she had mastered statecraft through sheer force of will, replenishing her treasury, establishing a standing army and holding together her centrifugal territories. A reformer but no radical, she stalwartly, sometimes hysterically, defended religious and social proprieties.

By the time that Rohan arrived in Vienna, Maria Theresa was a tetchy, stout, ageing woman with the stouter opinions of an autodidact. Encased in a bombazine sarcophagus (she had lived in
permanent mourning since her husband’s death in 1765), she could be obtuse, bloody-minded and imperious towards her children and courtiers. She was prone to tantrums and, on occasion, threatened to abdicate and wall herself up in a convent. And she nursed decidedly firm views about moral behaviour, especially that of clergymen (in 1747 she had, briefly, established a Chastity Commission empowered to enter people’s houses and arrest anyone suspected of being an opera singer). A combination of flattery and deference would be required for Louis to win her over.

Maria Theresa spent their first meeting trying to needle him. She listed those predecessors she had known and, coming to Choiseul – to whose dismissal Louis owed his job – she wistfully remarked, ‘whom
I will never forget’. The French ambassador smiled silently and remained complaisant. ‘He had . . . an air of composure,’ Maria Theresa reported to Mercy-Argenteau, ‘his manners are utterly smooth and his appearance is extremely plain . . . he is very polite towards everyone’. Though, she added distrustfully, ‘perhaps this is only in order to require a complete reciprocation of attentiveness and respect’. The initial cordiality soon drained away. A little more than a month after his arrival, the empress was writing to Mercy-Argenteau that Louis ‘was a great tome stuffed full with wicked words, that are little in keeping with his position as a cleric and as a minister. He talks carelessly in all sorts of company . . . always in a tone of superficiality,
presumption and flippancy.’ Louis was ‘a very wicked subject: without talent, without discretion,
without morals’.

Rohan refused to behave like a pious churchman. He hunted constantly and flirted outrageously: ‘nearly all of our ladies, young and old, beautiful and ugly are still enchanted by
this wicked genius,’ despaired Maria Theresa. His men smuggled contraband in diplomatic bags and, on one occasion, cudgelled the empress’s servants. Louis also hosted extravagant dinner parties that flouted protocol by sitting guests at small, round tables rather than the long tables normally employed for official dinners, where placement was dictated by minute discriminations of rank. Maria Theresa divined in this a plot to deflower the ingenuous virgins of Vienna. When she asked Louis to desist, he replied that he ‘did not depart from the rules of the most
scrupulous decency’; indeed, unwarranted suspicion would be cast upon his guests were he to suspend his suppers.

But Louis’s transgressions went beyond a cavalier disregard for punctilio. Like all good diplomats he had a taste for gossip; like bad ones he had penchant for gossiping. He had mocked Maria Theresa’s fond memories of Choiseul to his aunt, the comtesse de Marsan, who had then disparaged the empress at Versailles. It did not take long for one of Rohan’s enemies to brief Mercy-Argenteau. To Maria Theresa, Rohan did not simply appear as a braggart: he was the ambassador of a faction conniving against her daughter. She began to pray for the bishop of Strasbourg’s death to hasten Louis’s recall.

Chancellor Kaunitz and Joseph II found Louis more congenial. The two Austrians could be companionable but they were keenly conscious of their own superiority – in Kaunitz’s case intellectual, in Joseph’s social – and frequently disdained members of their own class (Joseph remarked that ‘if I conversed only with my equals, I should have to spend my days
in the imperial vault’). Louis’s chumminess, which so affronted Maria Theresa, was welcomed by her son. The coadjutor and the emperor shared a sense of frustration: both were middle-aged men who had been waiting too long for the death of an elderly, bed-blocking relative.

Though Louis’s lack of self-effacement undoubtedly stymied his embassy, he was, when he concentrated on business, far more prescient on the most important diplomatic issue of the day than his more experienced colleagues. Austria was looking fearfully to the east. In 1764, the Russian empress, Catherine the Great, had imposed a discarded lover, Stanislaw Poniatowski, on the Poles as king. This had provoked a rebellion by the Polish nobility, which was tacitly supported by the French, who sent hundreds of military advisors (France had a longstanding involvement in Polish affairs and Louis XV’s queen, Marie Leszczyńska, was a Pole). Russian victories over the Ottoman Empire threatened to molest Austrian lands in south-eastern Europe and Austria pondered war to deter Russia’s destabilising advances. But Russia’s ally Prussia, still recuperating from the battering it received in the Seven Years War, had no desire to be dragged into a conflict over a patch of Europe of little concern to her. The Prussian king,
Frederick the Great, devised a plan to maintain the equilibrium in Europe – the tripartite division of Poland. Negotiations were conducted through the winter of 1771 and, a month after Louis took up his post, Austria, Prussia and Russia concluded a secret compact.

Louis knew nothing of the bargain, but his first dispatch to the foreign minister d’Aiguillon contained a lengthy and passionate case for limiting the alliance with Austria and expressed unease at Kaunitz’s evasive blandishments. D’Aiguillon’s reply was slicked with contempt: ‘We strongly feel that your arrival in Austria is too recent for you to have anything to add to the reports
of Monsieur Durand [the Minister Plenipotentiary].’ The foreign minister refused to divulge Louis XV’s own views on policy and even forbade Louis from probing Kaunitz’s intentions. D’Aiguillon – who had ‘neither strategy,
steadfastness or money’, as the Prussian king brutally remarked – simply believed that ‘bit by bit they [the Austrians] will
warm towards the Poles’. The minister regarded Louis’s repeated warnings about partition in the spring of 1772 more as a nuisance than a source of intelligence: ‘We cannot claim to believe
any rumour that spreads,’ d’Aiguillon responded. In August 1772 the agreement was officially declared. ‘The king can only wail at
the fate of Poland,’ was Versailles’ fatalistic response.

Whether d’Aiguillon had genuinely failed to grasp the severity of the situation, or simply lacked the nous to defuse it, he refused to take responsibility. Most of his constipated intelligence was devoted to deflecting the blame for his failures onto others. ‘Your previous reports . . . had not prepared us for such a
sudden turn of events’, he told Louis, as though his ambassador had been expressing himself for the past six months in subjunctive equivocations. The pair’s professional relationship was sundered by mutual recriminations and undermining (d’Aiguillon had already angered Louis by welching on his agreement to pay his expenses).

The spat with d’Aiguillon curdled Louis’s enjoyment of Viennese hospitality; but the leak of a dispatch which ridiculed the empress was far more prejudicial to the coadjutor’s aspirations. In a letter to the foreign minister about the Polish crisis, Louis wrote, ‘I have indeed seen Maria Theresa cry over the misfortunes of the oppressed; but this princess, experienced in the art of revealing nothing, appeared
to me to have tears at her command. In one hand she held a handkerchief to dry her eyes, in the other she seized the sword of negotiation in order to be the
third partitioning power.’
*
(Louis’s characterisation is not entirely fair. Maria Theresa had tenaciously opposed Kaunitz and Joseph over the abrogation of Polish independence until it became clear that the only alternative would be war with Russia.) The letter, intended only for d’Aiguillon, was read out at one of Madame du Barry’s dinners, where the company chortled at the empress’s sanctimonious hypocrisy. Word of the mockery soon reached Marie Antoinette and she never forgave the slight to her mother. The offence taken would have perilous consequences for Louis and the future queen.

The days of Louis’s ambassadorship were numbered, even though it gasped on for nearly two more years. The Austrian ambassador Mercy-Argenteau had extracted assurances from du Barry, who held immense sway over the king, that Louis would be replaced. Louis’s poor health – he may have suffered from venereal disease – and his commitment to work rapidly sapped his energies. What strength remained was devoted to hunting: when Louis stayed with the prince of Auersperg, his party bagged over 2,000 partridges and hares in forty-eight hours.

Because of the standing of the Rohan, appearances needed to be saved. Towards the end of March 1774 Louis was granted permission to leave Vienna. Joseph II was due to travel to France at Easter – if Louis went with him, everyone would assume he was required to coordinate the visit. But Louis was paranoid about machinations against him in Versailles. ‘I will strap on my shield against them,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘Oh villains! How I despise them! How they have acted wickedly
to persecute me!’ He was still in situ at the end of May when news arrived of the death of Louis XV. The king’s smallpox-scuttled body had, over the course of a fortnight, rotted
itself to expiration; the burnt-copper scabs on the suppurating pustules which armoured his skin made him appear ‘like . . . a moor, like a negro,
swarthy and swollen’. The funeral was hurried and without pomp, the Court having fled Versailles to escape the contagion.

In mid-June Louis finally wrote to d’Aiguillon’s replacement, the comte de Vergennes, taking up his predecessor’s offer of leave. The precise reason for his change of heart is uncertain. Given the labile political situation in France, he may have felt that his presence at Versailles was needed to cement his position. Maria Theresa, though elated by his departure, had grown a little fonder of Louis in recent weeks. ‘I wish that the king would grant him some sign of favour,’ she wrote to Mercy-Argenteau, ‘since he has a good heart and his behaviour has improved
for some time now.’ She also asked her daughter to grant Louis an audience on his return.