Marie Antoinette (35 page)

Perhaps the King still smarted inwardly over Rohan’s appointment as Grand Almoner in 1777; on that occasion the former Governess to the Children of France had defeated the wishes of Marie Antoinette, leaving Louis XVI himself to cope with his wife’s resentment. When Rohan was told of his fate, he protested by invoking the names of his powerful relatives, the Comtesse de Marsan and the Prince de Soubise, and “the reputation of my family name.” This certainly exasperated the King. He replied sharply that he would try to console the Cardinal’s relations as best he could. In the meantime, he did what he must “as a king and a husband.” It was a reiteration of his words to Miromesnil over the need for immediate action: “The name of the Queen is precious to me and it has been compromised.”

Louis XVI’s instinctive and honourable support of his wife was the next key element in the affair. The King’s chivalry was evoked, and as has been noted over the various libellous publications, he was always quick to rush to the defence of her reputation. Commenting on the news to Vergennes about how the Cardinal had made use of the Queen’s name to secure a valuable necklace, Louis XVI declared that “it was the saddest and most horrifying business that he had ever come across.” From the Queen’s point of view, this firmness from a man normally so vacillating was a heartwarming development. Ironically enough, the royal couple, still not quite grasping what could happen to them in terms of public opinion, were entering a newly harmonious stage in their relationship. Marie Antoinette repeatedly and happily praised the King’s behaviour to her brother, relating how she had been much touched by the prudence and resolution he had displayed. When details of the affair were discussed with his ministers, the King took care to do so in the presence of the Queen; this was quite a new development, which sprang directly from his feeling that his wife had been hatefully traduced.

The trouble was that the chivalry of the husband prevented him from appreciating the wisest course for the sovereign. Whatever the Cardinal had done—and it was quite reasonable at this point for both King and Queen to see him as a conspirator, if not a forger—he still held a prominent ecclesiastical position at court and was a member of a family powerfully vociferous in the interests of its own. Vergennes, supported by the Marquis de Castries, who was not normally in agreement with him, believed that some special discreet tribunal should be used. If only Vergennes, an experienced and sagacious negotiator who was on good terms with Rohan, had been allowed to manage the affair! But Vergennes and Breteuil were enemies, while Mercy, who might have offered wiser counsels, also disliked Vergennes personally and was jealous on the Queen’s behalf of his influence over the King. Instead Rohan was offered a choice of pleading openly for clemency to the King or being tried by the Parlement de Paris. Rohan’s choice of the Parlement, whatever the verdict, both prolonged matters and took them into the political arena. Matters such as the rights of princes and the independence of the Parlement became inextricably entwined with the quite separate issue of the Cardinal’s guilt and the Queen’s reputation.

Breteuil had a face “beaming with satisfaction” as on 15 August he issued the orders of the King: “Arrest the Cardinal de Rohan!” He did not know that there was in fact very little cause for rejoicing. A performance of Beaumarchais’
Le Barbier de Séville
at the Trianon Theatre found Marie Antoinette playing the girl Rosina, the young Duc de Guiche as her crabbed guardian Doctor Bartolo, Vaudreuil as Figaro and Artois as the amorous Count Almaviva. The Queen was equally unaware that it was to be her last appearance on the stage there.

Even now the Cardinal showed that, gullible as he might be in many ways, he remained quick-witted. Taking advantage of an inexperienced guard, he managed to get a rapidly pencilled note to Georgel back at his house, instructing him to burn all his papers to do with the Comtesse de Lamotte. By the time Breteuil came to impose his seals, much of the evidence about the Diamond Necklace Affair, the “labyrinth” in the words of Marie Antoinette, this “enigma” in the words of Louis XVI, had vanished for ever. Added to this must be the fact that Jeanne de Lamotte Valois herself proved to be an imaginative liar on a grand scale, so that very little she said can be trusted.

The result is that the affair can never be unravelled with complete conviction as to all its details, although some things can be stated with absolute certainty about it. One of these is the innocence of the Queen; she had no prior involvement with or advance knowledge of the affair. Wild suggestions that Marie Antoinette manipulated the whole case in order to ruin the Cardinal not only ignore the fact that she had for years been successfully using her own best weapon of the freezing royal silence against him, but they also seriously misread her character. Never politically machiavellian, as Mercy constantly complained, the Queen was incapable of conceiving, let alone carrying out, such an elaborate conspiracy. It involved among other things deliberately signing “Marie Antoinette de France,” first to hoax Rohan, then to expose him, a ploy that could, of course, easily have gone wrong if Rohan had exercised normal common sense about the signature of the Queen.
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The Queen’s complete surprise and shock is well attested, as is the way she persistently underrated the seriousness of what was happening in the months to come. On 22 August she told Joseph II about the “catastrophe” of the Cardinal de Rohan in a letter that reiterated the fact that she had never in her life signed “Marie Antoinette de France,” the point on which she felt so keenly. She now thought the actual signature was that of Jeanne de Lamotte, a woman of low rank who had never had any access to her personally. Marie Antoinette was confident that all the details would soon be made clear to the whole world, which would put an end to the matter. A month later, it was the Cardinal whom Marie Antoinette castigated as a “vile and clumsy forger,” motivated by the need for money to pay his own debts to the jewellers. “For my part I am delighted we shall hear no more of this horrible business,” wrote the Queen blithely to her brother. Her main concern was the inoculation of the Dauphin, who was not quite four, against smallpox, which took place at Saint Cloud under her supervision. It went well enough although the poor delicate little boy had suffered terribly with two different sets of pustules erupting.

What then did actually happen and how did the Cardinal de Rohan end up with a forged note of repayment from the Queen of France at the hands of an adventuress? For that matter, why were contemporaries so fascinated by the whole tangled affair? The second question is easier to answer than the first. As an intrigue the affair had every element over which the prurient could gloat: the wicked Queen; the corrupt Prince of the Church; the beautiful impoverished heroine, Jeanne, with her royal blood (as in a fairy story—princess-as-beggar-maid) caught up with these lascivious monsters . . . Even the theme of the diamonds was a help to pornographers since the word for jewels (
bijoux
) was a code for the female genitalia. (
Les Bijoux Indiscrets
, a tale by Diderot, had the eponymous “jewels” relating their adventures.) One caricature showed the Queen with open legs being regarded by the Duc de Coigny as the Princesse de Lamballe held the necklace aloft. In another way the drama was much to contemporary taste because it echoed the kind of plot to be seen currently on the French stage. All this meant that the web of fantasy spun around the innocent Queen and the foolishly naive Cardinal was much easier to accept than the actual truth: that the whole thing was a criminal conspiracy.

So far as it can be pieced together, this is the outline of what had happened behind the scenes before the “catastrophe” of the Cardinal in August 1785.
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About the only thing that was true in the contemporary perception of the affair was Jeanne’s background. Although she was brought up in virtual beggary by her peasant mother, she did have royal Valois blood, her wastrel of a father being descended illegitimately from King Henri II. Whether or not he told her on his deathbed never to forget she was a Valois—he also incidentally told her, “Never dishonour the name”—Jeanne certainly emerged from a fairly louche girlhood with ambitions.

Married in 1780 at the age of twenty-four to Nicolas de Lamotte, who simply assumed the rank of Comte and added Valois to his name, Jeanne had several other protectors. Her aim, however, was to secure some kind of pension by right of her Valois blood, for which reason she was among the crowds haunting Versailles, seeking advancement by personal petition. Her special wish was to get access to the Queen, who was renowned for her impulsive philanthropy, but it is unlikely that this happened in any formal manner—that is, if she ever came anywhere near to Marie Antoinette during the frequent daily ceremonies of Versailles that the public attended, for she was certainly not presented to her. Once Jeanne’s portrait was engraved and widely disseminated for the general delectation, a copy was procured discreetly by Madame Campan at the Queen’s orders to see if it would jog her memory. It did not. In the meantime Jeanne’s Valois story did secure some patronage from the Comtesse de Provence, and finally a modest pension.

Jeanne met the Cardinal de Rohan as early as 1783; they had some kind of liaison, although Jeanne was by now living virtually
à trois
with her husband and her lover Rétaux de Villette. It was no doubt the presence of Rétaux de Villette in her household that encouraged Jeanne to show the Cardinal friendly letters addressed to “my cousin the Comtesse de Valois” by the Queen of France, since Villette, among his other talents, was an accomplished forger. By spending time in the Cardinal’s company, Jeanne became well aware of his obsession about Marie Antoinette’s favour. And so the elements for the sting were in place.

At some point Jeanne and her husband, with the active participation of Rétaux de Villette, conceived of a plot to rob the Cardinal (and the jewellers) of a large sum of money—as well as of the gemstones themselves. The Queen’s commission to the Cardinal to acquire the necklace that she apparently coveted, and the arrangements she made for gradual repayment, were of course forged. The happy jewellers were delighted to negotiate the exceptionally low figure of 1,600,000 francs for the necklace, a reduction of 200,000 francs on the original asking price. At all points the false Queen in her notes urged the Cardinal to be discreet. It was the impersonation of Marie Antoinette at night in the gardens of Versailles—in the well-named Grove of Venus—that was, however, the master stroke. The Comte de Lamotte went to the promenade of the Palais-Royal, frequented by the ladies of the town, and picked out a young professional called Nicole d’Oliva whose salient characteristic was her astonishing resemblance to Marie Antoinette. Although Nicole d’Oliva was in her early twenties, with the fresh air of a girl painted by Greuze, she did have the well-known profile, including, one assumes, the Habsburg lip. In any case she was to appear to the Cardinal with her face obscured by some kind of headdress, and wearing one of the white muslin dresses the Queen often wore, all in semi-darkness.

The impersonation succeeded. A rose was offered to the Cardinal—a flower adopted by the Queen as her symbol, as everyone had seen in Vigée Le Brun’s recent portrait—and the magic words were uttered that the Cardinal wanted to hear above all others: “You may now hope that the past will be forgotten.” The resemblance between this scene and that at the end of
Figaro
, where the Countess Almaviva appears, veiled, in a dark shrubbery, to her own husband in the guise of her maid Suzanne, is too great to be coincidental. The pity of it was that the Cardinal did not reflect on the coincidence himself. As to the Queen’s notes that followed, the Cardinal might also have reflected on a notorious case in which the Dame Cahouet de Villers used notes forged in the Queen’s handwriting in order to secure goods from Rose Bertin for herself. At one point the Queen had even been seen to signify her approval of this transaction as though at a prearranged signal, (the forger had in fact taken advantage of one of Marie Antoinette’s unconscious traits which was to nod her head regularly at a certain point on her journey to Mass). The Dame had ended up in the Bastille. With the false courage of audacity, Jeanne and her associates were confident of succeeding where she had failed.

Once the diamond necklace was secured from Boehmer, its fate was to be taken to London by the Comte de Lamotte. There it was shown to the English jewellers Grey and Jefferies in the form of loose gems, some of which had been so roughly prised out of their settings that they were damaged. Lamotte’s story was that he had inherited the diamonds from his mother, but he was prepared to accept such an astonishingly low price, given their real value, that the English jeweller prudently checked first with the London police as to whether there had been a recent burglary. Satisfied, he accepted the gems. And so the controversial diamond necklace proceeded on its mysterious way.
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