The Queen's Necklace (18 page)

In England, La Motte set about his task diligently. His line was that an old family had broken up an item of jewellery in order to raise money on the individual pieces. The English jewellers were made suspicious by the low prices he was asking, but were very familiar with the circumstances of members of the aristocracy experiencing financial difficulties. At all events, they raised the matter with the French Embassy, but the people there had no knowledge of any significant theft involving diamonds. La Motte raised almost
£
240,000 in ready money, leaving so many stones with the English jewellers that they set them up in framed displays; he also traded nearly
£
8,000 worth of diamonds for other goods: watches, chains, swords, razors, corkscrews, asparagus spoons, boxes of toothpicks and other useless flummery. The Comte was not a man of business, and can have received barely half of what the diamonds were really worth.

Meanwhile Jeanne too had been busy. She had herself sold about 100,000 livres’ worth of diamonds to jewellers in Paris, settled her debts and gone shopping, paying for everything in diamonds. It troubled her not a whit that she had to tell a few stories about where they had all come from. To prepare the ground for her husband’s return awash with money, she told
all her acquaintance that he had won a vast sum of money in England on the horses.

He was back on 1st June. The money was there in his hands. And now we turn to you, gentle reader, and ask you to rack your brains and think what you would have done in the couple’s place?

You would no doubt consider where you might invest such a sum profitably. Even in Jeanne’s time, though the practice was not yet common, you could have bought stocks and shares, annuities and national bonds; you could have purchased land, and, given the general upsurge in, and the great strength of, the economy described earlier, you could, above all, have set up some new industrial enterprise. You could even have bought yourself some well-remunerated state office, such as that of
fermier général
, as a great many financiers were doing.

On the other hand, you could use it to travel to some distant country, where you could buy plantations and slaves … America was just the place for that.

The La Mottes did nothing of the sort, and we can hardly blame them. They were children of the Ancien Régime, aristocrats of the same breed as Rohan, if not quite so refined in their recent origins. Money-making schemes were every bit as alien to them as they were to the Cardinal. And above all, they were adventurers, people with no yesterdays, and (especially) no tomorrows. They valued life in terms of feeling, and the figure they might cut before it. The whole mighty sum was spent, just as it had come, in the grandiose style appropriate to their station. Jeanne realised the Valois dream, and La Motte went about dressed up like a thrice-compounded pimp.

From his study of police and other contemporary records Funck-Brentano calculated just how much money the couple spent. He lists the number and variety of tailcoats La Motte purchased for himself (they take up an entire page), and he enumerates Jeanne’s newly-acquired jewels. We have just space enough for one or two interesting details—her new furniture
was hauled from Paris to Bar-sur-Aube, where they set up residence, by forty-two drays. At Bar they kept six coaches and twelve horses. They went about in a grey English carriage emblazoned with the Valois crest and motto:
Rege ab avo sanguinem, nomen et lilia
—I take my blood, my name and the lily from a royal forebear. The coach was drawn by four English stallions ridden by flunkeys, with a negro covered from head to toe in silver standing on the step. They gave soirée after soirée, and their house was permanently full of guests, even when they themselves were away.

Certainly none of us would have behaved in this way. No one living nowadays could possibly be so stupid: the modern way of life is simply unsuited to indulging one’s desires with such pomp. But we confess a certain sympathy, indeed, a respect for Jeanne, and for her aristocratic style. She, the offspring of the Valois, had to this point been nothing more than a damp rocket at the great party, her fuse poisonously fulminating and fuming in torment; now the flame had reached the dry tinder and sent up a shower of sparks, scattering flowers and garlands in the sky alongside the stars and all the other glowing rockets. She felt that at last she had found her place in the aristocratic cosmos—and she knew, too, that in due course her fire would fade, and she would plunge back down into the eternal darkness.

T
HE READER
who is interested only in the story of the necklace can confidently skip this chapter.

The Queen could never for a moment have imagined that a phantom figure dressed as herself would lure the dream-locked Cardinal to the edge of the tragic whirlpool. She went about her royal life totally unsuspecting, and in the summer of 1784 received a visit from, among others, King Gustav III of Sweden, who was travelling around Europe under the name of Count Haga.

Ever since she had met Axel Fersen, Marie-Antoinette had loved everything to do with Sweden. Or perhaps her love of the Swedes might be traced to an even earlier date—even before Fersen’s time she had had a Swedish protégé, Count Stedingk. However her initial feelings towards Gustav III were more likely to have been hostile. She had met him while she was still the Dauphine, when Gustav, as heir to the throne, was spending time at the French Court. But he had thought it wiser to bid for the favour of Mme du Barry and to ignore the young and powerless Princess—an error that, as we know, she and her normally indulgent husband found hard to forgive.

But since then, much had changed. News of his father’s death had summoned Gustav back to Stockholm. Before leaving he obtained full French support for the strange course of action he was planning. As is well known, Sweden in the eighteenth century was ruled by an anarchic oligarchy, just as Poland had been before its collapse. The King wielded rather less power than the prime minister of a republic: he voted in the state assembly
like any other noble, his privileges amounting to no more than that his vote counted twice. The two factions in the assembly, the Hats and the Caps, were at loggerheads. Between them they were unable to agree on the crucial question of who they should sell the country to, the French, as the Hats wanted, or the Russians, favoured by the Caps. This constitutional anarchy was pushing the country, sooner or later, towards domination by the Tsars, just as had happened to Poland. Both Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great were counting on it.

But France, as Sweden’s traditional ally, was not content simply to watch this resurgence of the eastern powers. So Choiseul and Vergennes, the former ambassador to Stockholm who later became Louis XVI’s Foreign Minister, encouraged the returning Prince to make a stand. Gustav was made of considerably sterner stuff than his predecessors—he was in fact a nephew of Frederick the Great on his mother’s side. And he had the same love of light, and the civilised life—literature, the theatre and public pomp—as any French
grand seigneur
of the time. Ever since the Thirty Years War the Swedish nobility had received an annual subsidy from the French Court, but oligarchical rule meant in practice that this money no longer went into the pockets of the King but was shared among leading members of the nobility. Gustav proposed putting an end to this arrangement and reverting to the historic precedent whereby all the money from France came to the monarch. He received a promise from the French court that if he could put an end to the anarchy, one-and-a-half million livres would be placed in his hand.

For that happy result he had above all to thank one of the strangest episodes of the eighteenth century, the Swedish revolution of 1772. The revolution was unusual in that in this case it was the King who rebelled against his tyrannical subjects. Every detail of this revolt should be taught in that non-existent school in which ambitious young people are instructed in the art of politics. If we read the book by Jacques Le Scène
Desmaisons that appeared in 1781 (and ended up in the bequest of the Palatine Joseph in the University Library in Budapest) we can see the extent to which the King planned and prepared every detail, in the manner of a great—and flamboyant—theatre director.

First, he allowed the Hats and Caps to quarrel for a full year over the drafting of an oath to the King, that is to say, over the best method for tying his power up in knots. Then, when the two parties duly came to heel, he secretly obstructed the distribution of grain, so that the people would go hungry and become dissatisfied. Next, he provoked a small local uprising so that his brother could raise an armed force ostensibly to put this ‘rebellion’ down. While the government was distracted by this supposed uprising, the real revolution took place miles away, on two fronts. Then he locked all the younger officers up in the palace and would not let them go until he had won them over to his cause.

Throughout all this he gave proof of his remarkable theatrical talent; to the very end he misled everyone around him as regards his intentions, and even allowed the Russian ambassador to think that he was preparing to pay his respects to the Tsarina in the near future. When it came to the final moment, he arrested his senators, occupied all the major strategic locations and toured the capital giving speeches. Everywhere he went the people saluted him as the man who had freed them from the tyranny of the nobles. “This was the king,” says Desmaisons, “who had woken that morning as Europe’s most politically hamstrung ruler, and within two hours had become a monarch as absolute as the Prussian King in Berlin or the Sultan in Constantinople.”

Next, having summoned the Diet, he set up a row of cannons outside the Palace and asked the members of the assembly whether anyone objected to what had taken place. Unsurprisingly, no one did, and the constitution was unanimously amended to ensure that every royal prerogative was returned to the Crown.

All this was done while punctiliously observing the niceties of eighteenth-century decorum. The King personally wrote to the wives and children of the detained senators asking their pardon for having unavoidably kept them as his guests for the duration. At the first opportunity the Diet, now sitting without benefit of cannons, expressed their courteous thanks to the King for depriving the nobility of their excessive privileges and restoring order to Sweden, and ordered a medal to be struck to commemorate the great event.

Considering how little the Swedish Revolution has to do with the story of the Queen’s necklace, we have dwelt on it at perhaps inordinate length. We do so partly because we think it an interesting chapter in European history and one that is far too little known, and, more importantly, because it reveals a course of action that arguably was also open to the French monarch. Here was an eighteenth century Swedish King accomplishing with elegance and humanity what, in the late middle ages, Louis XI of France and Henry VII of England had managed with altogether cruder instruments—reinforcing their own power by forging a bond with the people against the ranks of birth and privilege. The idea that something similar might be repeated in these later times entered the head of only one great statesman of the Ancien Régime, Turgot. He alone saw that the royal power should carry out the much-needed reforms itself, in the interests of the people and at the expense of the aristocracy, and that that was probably the only way in which they might have survived, sparing France the Revolution. But Louis XVI was not Gustav III, and Turgot, a proud man and a complete stranger to compromise and strategy, was easily seen off by the intrigues of the Court.

In Sweden, Gustav represented an enlightened absolutism. He did his best to compensate his people for the loss of freedom by improving their welfare, allowing free trade in grain and total freedom of worship (a purely hypothetical freedom in a country with only one denomination), and amending the Poor Law.

Like Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great and many other rulers of the eighteenth century, Gustav considered himself to be French in mind and spirit. He promoted a French-style literary life in Stockholm, and himself wrote plays which Swedish literary historians continue to mention with great respect. But this domestic literary life simply intensified his interest in the Paris equivalent, and was one of the reasons why he yearned for France. The other was that in the end, in the usual melancholy way of these things, the long-awaited golden age never quite materialised under his rule, and Gustav had to look for other sources of revenue. He deliberated whether to sell himself to Russia or to turn again to France. Unable to decide between the two, he eventually travelled to Italy. He shared the late-eighteenth-century passion for relics of classical antiquity, and bought a vast collection of art works to be sent home to adorn the park of the palace he was building at Lille-Haga (Count Haga was the name he used when travelling incognito). The Italians cannot have been too greatly pleased by his standards of generosity, since they composed this epigram about him:

While thus engaged he received an invitation from the French royal couple. Marie-Antoinette wrote to him personally to say that if he found himself in the vicinity he should look up his old acquaintances at Versailles. The French Court understood the great struggle going on in his mind, and were prepared to make real sacrifices to rescue him from an alliance with Russia.

To avoid unnecessary suspense we can reveal that Count Haga’s visit was a complete success. Versailles promised him a substantial subsidy of 1,200,000 livres for six years, in addition
to the existing generous support. Of course, payment of the full sum was prevented by subsequent historical events.

But these manoeuvres were not the only reason why Gustav visited Paris. Amongst other things, he was curious about the lady who was so much talked about. His Paris correspondents and diplomats faithfully reported all the current gossip surrounding the Queen, rather like events in a theatre, and these stories interested Gustav not only for political reasons but for personal ones. Like almost every other ruling prince of the century, he too had an exemplary bad marriage. He hated his wife, the royal Danish Princess, and refused to live with her. It was only after 11 years, in 1777, that he could bring himself to take the necessary steps in the interests of the succession, and that great event was undertaken as a ceremonial duty for the sake of the country. There was almost as much gossip in circulation about the Swedish Queen as there was about Marie-Antoinette, and so Gustav must have had a certain professional fellow sympathy for the French royal couple.

But as a rule he did not much enjoy contact with monarchs. Though it may seem strange, he had a sense of inferiority when dealing with the rulers of more powerful countries than his own, for which he overcompensated by behaving too familiarly or too uproariously. Thus he turned up at Versailles unannounced, like an old friend dropping in on a neighbour, and caused considerable distress to the pernickety Louis XVI, who was not attired in the manner in which he received foreign princes.

On one occasion, Mme Campan tells us, Gustav called unexpectedly on Marie-Antoinette just before lunchtime. The Queen sent Mme Campan to enquire whether he had sufficiently dined and, if not, to make the necessary arrangements. The Swedish King modestly replied that anything would do. The lady smiled, because she knew that nothing less than a full meal was ever served, and she found a way to point out the gaffe he had committed: she remembered that, in the
world she had grown up in, what people did on such occasions was to scramble a few eggs. The Queen later let him know that this had been done as a lesson to him not to be overfamiliar.

Gustav was much happier dealing with people who were charmed by the fact that, although a king, he treated them in such a kind and informal way. This was especially true of writers and artists. Through his respectful yet unmistakably regal correspondence with the Baron Melchior von Grimm we can trace his passage through the intellectual world of Paris, where we find him mixing with the leading wits of the age. This Grimm was a Frenchman of German origin who wrote perceptive and witty letters to foreign rulers describing literary and artistic events in Paris. The letters, written very much in the manner of the period, show an equal fascination with theories of state economics and the epigrams about actresses quoted in the salons. Their lively shrewdness and rococo lightness of touch make them most enjoyable reading.

Above all, Count Haga frequented the theatre. In his honour the Royal Academy of Music staged some eight or ten operas in three weeks, more than they would normally do in two or three years. The Comédie Française obligingly put on every play he asked to see. This began, apparently, when he arrived unannounced at the theatre after the first act of Beaumarchais’s
The Marriage of Figaro
had finished. The audience demanded that they begin again in honour of their distinguished guest. “Whatever that truly French, truly generous and perfectly proper act of attention cost the actors,” writes Grimm, “they never performed the piece better or earned greater applause.” The other major theatre, the Comédie Italienne (which was Italian only in name, since by then its last remaining Italian actor, the great clown Carlin, was dead) put on
Le dormeur éveillé
in his honour, with music by Piccini and libretto by Marmontel, whom Gustav had greatly admired since his youth.

Amongst the most celebrated people in Paris at the time were the Vestris family, famous opera dancers. Count Haga
was naturally very curious about them, and when he paid his final visit to the Opera before his departure, Marie-Antoinette sent word on three separate occasions requiring the younger Vestris to appear without fail. But he had returned from a guest appearance in London “with an injured foot”, and the doctors “had forbidden him to appear”. “It could be that this reply pushed the degree of stupidity or impertinence beyond what was permitted to a dancer,” says Grimm. It was enough to persuade the Interior Minister Baron Breteuil to lock the young man up, and, in the heat of revolutionary fever, all Paris took sides for or against him. The older Vestris, the leader of the troop, observed with tears in his eyes:

“
Helás!
this is the first disagreement our house has ever had with the Bourbon family.”