Marie Antoinette: The Journey

  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.13 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.*66 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.14 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).15 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.*67

  The conspiracy, unlike the diamond necklace itself, began to emerge into the open when Jeanne de Lamotte was unable to maintain the modest repayments by which “the Queen” kept the Cardinal and Boehmer quiescent; she could not, of course, secure that display of the necklace at the white throat of the Queen of France that her victims continued to expect. So Cardinal and jewellers both found themselves owed money; questions began to be asked, which led to Boehmer’s note to the Queen, dictated by the Cardinal, of 12 July. Shortly after the arrest of the Cardinal, and following his statement, Jeanne was arrested; her lover, the forger Rétaux de Villette, was brought back from Geneva where he had fled; the hapless Nicole d’Oliva, who had imagined she was being hired for sexual services, not to impersonate the sovereign, was also arrested. Cagliostro too was detained as being part of the plot but he at least mounted a magnificent defence; he was guilty, he said, of no crime beyond the murder of Pompey at the orders of the Pharaoh in ancient Egypt. (He was subsequently acquitted either for his sheer audacity or more likely because he was actually not guilty.) The Comte de Lamotte remained at liberty in London.

  The Queen’s thirtieth birthday fell on 2 November 1785. It was a date that she took seriously. Marie Antoinette told Rose Bertin that her outfits must have more gravity; she renounced wearing her beloved flowers in her headdresses in favour of more matronly (and, to the modern eye, far less becoming) velvet poufs. Six months later the Duke of Dorset told Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire that their mutual friend “Mrs. Brown” (meaning Bourbon), as they nicknamed Marie Antoinette in correspondence, now looked on herself as “an old woman,” though he added loyally that she “
never was handsomer” than when she had appeared yesterday at the hunt at Marly. The fact was that the Queen was beginning to put on weight, and was in the majesty of her appearance; spring had given way to summer and a ripening summer at that. The Comte d’Hezecques made the point that her carriage became especially proud and regal as she faced the anonymous slanders over the diamond necklace. She might now be “rather stout” but to illustrate her dignity, he quoted a passage from Fénelon; as the Queen proceeded to Mass in stately fashion, the plumes of her headdress shook, and she dominated all the other ladies of the court as a great oak rises above all the other trees of the forest.17

  Some of this perceived stoutness can probably be attributed to a new pregnancy that began about the time of her birthday, when the Queen had not completely recovered her figure from the birth of the Duc de Normandie earlier in the same year. It was certainly an important point that throughout the months that followed, in which her unpopularity would reach unprecedented heights, the Queen herself was not only pregnant but feeling ill with it. This pregnancy, unlike the previous three which resulted in live births, never seems to have gone well from the start. For some time there was real doubt about whether the Queen was actually enceinte, and it was not until February that she confirmed the fact to Princess Louise of Hesse-Darmstadt. Count Mercy, having believed at the end of January that the suspension of the Queen’s règles mensuelles was due to her distress over the Diamond Necklace Affair, wrote only on 10 March 1786 that she was expecting a child at the end of July. Court rumours sped around that the Queen was annoyed to find herself pregnant once more, on the grounds that she had already produced two male heirs; she herself told Joseph that she thought she had enough children and that this birth might have severe implications for her health. The Duke of Dorset told Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire that he would keep “a sharp eye on the bambino: without spectacles I can guess who it will most resemble.” But this was enjoyable if scurrilous gossip among friends. Once again Louis XVI never questioned the baby’s paternity so one may assume that his conjugal visits had not ceased—and Fersen’s measures to avoid conception also continued.18

  Marie Antoinette’s reluctance may have simply been due to feeling ill; alternatively she may have felt that the gap between the two pregnancies was too short. It is more likely that she was expressing a kind of generalized melancholy at the way things were turning out for the worst in every department of her life. The Treaty of Fontainebleau of 9 November 1785 brought to an end “the Dutch mischief” at last as the Emperor abandoned his claims to the Scheldt. But France’s subsequent defensive alliance with the Dutch manifestly did not advance the interests of Austria. Marie Antoinette was left protesting—as usual—to her brother that the Franco-Austrian alliance was more precious to her than to anyone, without having any opportunity to exercise her influence in its favour.

  If there was no comfort to be derived from France’s foreign policy, neither did matters nearer home provide solace. By the beginning of December, all Paris was agog at the publication of Jeanne de Lamotte’s trial brief, which contained a torrent of abuse directed at the Queen, filling in the details of the latter’s supposed sexual intrigue with the Cardinal. Humiliating as the charge was for Marie Antoinette, given her total dislike for Rohan, it was gleefully accepted by the public. As Fersen reported to the Swedish King as early as September 1785, everybody believed that the Queen had fooled the King. These trial briefs, in theory addressed to the courts, were printed in advance and read avidly; Nicole d’Oliva’s trial brief, for example, appearing in March 1786, sold 20,000 copies. They provided an excellent opportunity to disseminate sensational and scandalous stories without the possibility of contradiction.19

  Private sadness completed the cycle. On 12 December 1785 Princess Charlotte, who had married her sister’s widower with the “terrible presentiment” that she too would die in childbirth, fulfilled the gloomy prophecy. She died at the age of thirty, having been married for not much more than a year, leaving a son, Auguste. Marie Antoinette was devastated. She told Princess Louise: “I shall conserve all my life my memory of her and my regret at her death,” and she asked for her own portrait, originally given to Charlotte, to be handed on to Auguste.20

  The trial of the Cardinal by the Parlement de Paris in May 1786, and of the other accused conspirators, took place in a charged atmosphere in which the truth of the Diamond Necklace Affair was likely to be the first casualty. Almost everyone involved had another agenda. The King refused to allow the Queen to appear on the grounds that he himself was the fount of justice in the country and it would therefore be inappropriate. So her testimony was written down and submitted. She herself was anxious that the details of the spurious meeting in the Grove of Venus should not enter the public record because she knew perfectly well the use that the libellistes would make of such colourful material. (In the event it was not struck out and she was quite right in her prediction.) The Parlement de Paris in turn was anxious to assert its independence, while the Princes were determined not to allow this attack on their rank—as they saw it—to succeed. Vergennes, preferring to injure Breteuil rather than protect his master, chose to involve himself behind the scenes with Rohan’s interests.21

  For the King and Queen all of this took place against the bizarre background of a family visit from Marie Antoinette’s brother and sister-in-law, the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Beatrice d’Este, who, incognito as “the Count and Countess Nellembourg,” arrived on 11 May and left on 17 June. Marie Antoinette had not seen Ferdinand, the brother who had acted as her proxy bridegroom, for sixteen years.

  The Archduchess Beatrice had gone down well at the English court in the autumn of 1785, her appearance being gallantly described by Queen Charlotte as “not handsome but pleasing which lasts longer.”22 Her remarkable intellectual achievements—she read Greek and Latin—were also pardoned on the grounds that she was extremely modest about them. At Versailles, however, the Archduchess’s birth, which was not strictly speaking royal, was liable to cause predictable problems. It was particularly complicated since the Princesse de Conti, a Princess of the Blood, but not of course a member of the inner royal family, was her aunt . . . As the great ladies decided who should call and when, and a series of lavish entertainments was given at the Trianon and elsewhere, a far greater drama was being played out in Paris.

  On 4 June 1786 the Queen, still concerned with the details of her brother’s seemingly endless visit, wrote a short note of instruction to Count Mercy. She added a short meaningful postscript: “What do you think of the verdict?” She might well ask. The Parlement had delivered it on 31 May. The underlings were treated comparatively lightly, Nicole d’Oliva being acquitted with only a reprimand for impersonating the sovereign, and the forger Rétaux de Villette banished with his goods forfeit. But the Lamottes—he in absentia—were handed out ferocious sentences, including flogging, branding and life imprisonment. However explicable by the penal standards of the time, considering the nature of their criminal acts, these punishments still have a chilling sound.

  But the Cardinal de Rohan was acquitted by the Parlement de Paris. He had to apologise publicly for his “criminal temerity” in believing he had had a night-time rendezvous with the Queen of France and he must seek the monarchs’ pardon; he had to divest himself of all his offices, make a donation to the poor and be banished from the court for ever. But he was free. The Parlement had believed in his good faith. As to that fatal assumption on the part of the Cardinal that the veiled figure in the Grove of Venus was the Queen murmuring invitingly in his direction, it was by implication a legitimate assumption.23 It was the most damning denunciation of the Queen’s way of life, as it was intended to be.

  Dressed in purple robes, the colour of mourning for a Cardinal, Rohan received his sentence. Around him were eighteen members of the family of Rohan, all dressed in the less striking mourning colour of black. His fate, however, was enviable compared to that of Jeanne de Lamotte. She was stripped naked
and beaten by the public executioner, then publicly branded as a thief, with the letter V for voleuse, in front of a huge crowd of prurient spectators. Jeanne struggled and screamed so much that the burning brand missed her shoulder and marked her breast. She was then taken to the women’s prison of the Salpêtrière to serve a life sentence.

  The marks upon the Queen’s reputation were equally searing. Although not physically painful, they too would prove a source of torment. They were also ineradicable. When the news of the verdict was first conveyed to her, Marie Antoinette shut herself up in her inner cabinet and wept. To Madame Campan, she burst out in indignation that there was no justice in France. If she, the Queen, had not found impartial judges in a matter that sullied her good name, how would an ordinary woman like Madame Campan hope for justice in a matter that touched her honour? The King’s comment to the First Lady was brief but eloquent. It also showed that he did not accept the Cardinal’s innocence: “You will find the Queen greatly afflicted and she has good reason to be so. But what can one say? They [the Parlement de Paris] were determined only to see a Prince of the Church, a Prince de Rohan, while he was in fact just a greedy man who needed money.”24