The Queen's Necklace (25 page)

On 17th August, chaperoned by Beugnot, Jeanne was a guest at Clairvaux, the famous convent named in memory of St Bernát. She was given a most gracious welcome by the Abbot, who knew that she was on particularly good terms with the Grand Almoner. They were just sitting down to dinner, having waited patiently for the Abbé Maury to arrive. (Maury was a famous pulpit orator who became Mirabeau’s great rival. It was after one of his sermon’s that Louis XVI remarked: “What a pity he didn’t say something about religion; then he really would have covered everything.”) Maury was due to give the special sermon in honour of St Bernát, but as he had not appeared, they sat down to eat without him.

At that moment he burst in, in great excitement.

“What? Haven’t you heard? Where have you been living? Prince Rohan, the Cardinal, has been arrested. Something to do with diamonds, apparently …”

Suddenly Jeanne felt unwell.

She went out, ordered her carriage to be made ready, and she and Beugnot left the abbey. By the time they were sitting in the coach she had regained her composure.

“This whole business is Cagliostro’s doing,” she told her astonished companion.

Then she lapsed into a deep silence. His advice that she fly to England before it was too late was met with scorn. She had already worked out her battle plan: how to shift the blame for the whole affair onto Cagliostro.

She was arrested at four the next morning. The amiable police made no objection when the Comte de la Motte, who had otherwise conducted himself very calmly, tore the glittering
jewels off his wife and thoughtfully put them aside against better times.

Rivarol, that witty and whimsical commentator, wrote: “M de Breteuil plucked the Cardinal out of Mme de la Motte’s clutches and dashed him against the Queen’s brow, where he certainly left his mark.” It is a grotesque image, but an expressive one.

Such was the tenor of the royal arrest warrant, the
lettre de cachet
on whose authority, on the evening of 16th August, the Commander of the Bastille (the same de Launay who died when the building was stormed in 1789), and the Comte d’Agoult, Captain of the Guard, escorted Rohan by coach into the prison. He had spent the day at home, and had been seen in the great window of his salon playing with his pet ape: perhaps they were taking their leave of one another.

At dawn on 18th August, on the authority of a second
lettre de cachet
, Jeanne de la Motte was also detained. The summons served on her husband failed to reach him. He had in fact set out for Paris with the idea of defending his wife, but had second thoughts along the way, and took himself off to London instead.

The modern visitor to the Bastille finds only the spot where the old building stood, the circular
Place
with the lofty memorial column at its centre. The historic building was destroyed on that memorable
quatorze juillet
which has since become the National Day, since it marks the beginning of freedom not just for the French but for people all over the world.

The Bastille was originally a circular fortress. Later, when no longer used to defend the city, it became a prison, playing much the same role as the Tower in London. It was so hated that it came to be seen as the physical symbol of tyranny, thanks above all to the
lettres de cachet
, whose victims were for the most part imprisoned there—but not only there: every region had its own equivalent, where people were locked away in hospitals, madhouses and solitary cells.

The
lettre de cachet
, as we have noted, was a warrant for arrest. Its significance lay in that the King himself issued it, without needing to give any reason. The detained person did not appear before any court. He remained in prison until the King saw fit to set him free. “The Bastille,” wrote a contemporary, “is a place in which anyone, without regard to age, sex or social rank, might find himself, without having any idea why he is there, how long he might remain, or how he will ever get out.”

Everyone at the time knew that the police had special agents from whom, for large sums of money, one could buy
lettres de cachet
already prepared—you had only to fill in the name—and furthermore, that both in the Bastille and others of His Majesty’s prisons large numbers of people would languish for the rest of their miserable days simply because they had been arrested on the basis of one of these documents and then forgotten about. In 1784, a M Latude was released after thirtyfive years in prison. He had been locked away for planning an attack (involving a time bomb) on one of the Pompadours. And Malesherbes mentions one unfortunate who had gone blind, had been let out with no one to care for him, and promptly begged to be allowed back into the prison. The Bastille was not a comfortable place. Malesherbes once told Prime Minister Maurepas that he ought to show Louis XVI around it.

“I never have,” was the reply. “If I did, he’d never send anyone there again.”

In recent decades the intellectual life of France has been largely dominated by writers and historians of the royalist persuasion,
who, partly by astute reasoning and partly through the sheer mass of data they have assembled, have established that the Ancien Régime was for the most part innocent of those crimes that the Revolution, and libertarian writers of the nineteenth century, ascribed to it. Among those prepared to judge on the basis of facts is Frantz Funck-Brentano, and it was he who went through the entire body of documents relating to the Bastille and came to the surprising conclusion that the
lettre de cachet
was generally not the cruel weapon of a tyrannical monarchy, but on the contrary, an outstandingly useful institution for the rest of society.

Its great advantage was that it enabled the prosecuting authorities to make rapid progress in situations where the slow and cumbersome nature of criminal proceedings might otherwise drag matters out for years. It could also be used to invoke the power of the monarchy to intervene in situations which did not fall within its normal jurisdiction. These were almost always family cases.

Lettres de cachet
were often used by parents against their own children; for example, if the son were an impulsive and incorrigible gambler, he could be taught discipline by showing him that he might spend the rest of his life being arrested and charged—thus preserving the family from shame. Funck-Brentano generally saw the device as a way of defending traditional French family life. His idea was that the world order of the Ancien Régime was based on the power of, and respect for, the family, and that the main cause of its collapse was that that respect was undermined by the influence of eighteenth century philosophy. If, for example, a young aristocrat wished to marry a bourgeois girl and thus dishonour his family, there was a simple solution. On the basis of a
lettre de cachet
the young man or the girl would be locked away and kept a prisoner until there was a change of attitude. Events of that kind naturally did not cause much of a stir, unlike those occasions when a writer such as Voltaire or Beaumarchais was imprisoned for
showing too much self-assurance in the eyes of his betters. But such examples, at least according to Funck-Brentano, were very isolated.

While we have every respect for Funck-Brentano, and the present work has so much to thank him for, and although we would not for a moment dare question the accuracy of his information, from a moral point of view we cannot agree with him. We give greater credence to the worthy Cagliostro, another of those who were unjustly imprisoned in the Bastille, who, following his release, declared in a pamphlet he wrote in England entitled
Letter to the French People:

“You, the French people, have everything you need for happiness: a fertile land and a gentle climate; good hearts and a enchanting
joie de vivre
; you have both genius and grace, no equals in the art of pleasing, and no masters in the others. All you lack, my friends, is this one trifle: the right to sleep soundly in your beds while you remain innocent.”

Be that as it may, the French Revolution greatly enlarged our sense of the worth of the individual. However much we might try, few of us nowadays would consider it an offence that cried out to heaven if a young aristocrat wanted to marry a girl from the middle class, and as for any shame that might bring on the family name, we would simply mutter “
tant pis
”—so much the worse for the family name. While we are no stranger to historical relativism, and agree that every age must be judged by its own standards, we also take the view that under every sky (since it is always the same sky) freedom is better than servitude. And since it was the very first thing they did, it seems clear that the people of Paris felt they really had to demolish the Bastille, and none of the reasoning and statistics of the Funck-Brentanos of the time have ever persuaded them that they were not right to do so.

So, one by one, all the principal actors in our story are gathering in the Bastille. Jeanne arrived on 20th August, Cagliostro and his wife three days later, on the basis of a deposition she had
made. Jeanne still felt she had nothing to fear. Very soon, using her juggler-and-monkey tricks, she had worked out a complete system of lies; Cagliostro would be shown to be capable of anything.

But it was to no avail. The truth was beginning to come out, and its instrument was none other than the good Father Loth, the Franciscan monk who acted as Jeanne’s chaplain and major domo. He had set his sights on the office of Preacher to the King, and was angling for an opportunity to speak in his presence one Whitsuntide. He had poured his heart out to Jeanne, and she had promised to have a word on his behalf with Rohan, who as Grand Almoner was head of the spiritual branch of the royal household. Rohan told Loth to show him the speech he would give, then passed it on to his deputy, the Abbé Georgel, who thought it simply inadequate. So Rohan, at Jeanne’s request, gave Loth a better one, so that he might perform more tolerably before the King.

It is possible that Father Loth had been serving the interests of the royal household all along; or perhaps he felt a stronger debt of gratitude to Rohan than he did to his patroness. But it was enough to make him call on the Abbé Georgel after the Cardinal had been arrested. Georgel was to Rohan what Mme Campan was to Marie-Antoinette, the indispensable confidant of French classic drama (we saw how Ducis felt he had to supply even Hamlet with one)—the person who listens to everything, but does nothing in his or her own right. Georgel plays the same role of reliable witness as Mme Campan, and he too has a moment when he both listens and acts, turning Loth’s disclosure to his master’s advantage.

Father Loth had compared Réteaux de Villette’s handwriting to that in the letters signed by “Marie-Antoinette
de France
”, and lo and behold, they were the same. He revealed that before she fled the house Jeanne had burnt the letters she claimed to have received from Rohan. He recalled the occasion when they took d’Oliva to Versailles; it had struck him then how closely
she resembled Marie-Antoinette. He now suspected that the Comtesse had tricked a lot of money out of the Cardinal, and perhaps the necklace with it.

In his
Memoirs
, Georgel clearly sees Jeanne in the role of the Devil. But she is not the only one he blames for destroying Rohan: delicately and obliquely, he also accuses the Queen. His grounds for this are that when she received the letter from Boehmer she did not immediately insist that she knew nothing about it, or deny that she had ordered it or even received it. Georgel claims that she kept silent in order to implicate the hated Rohan even more deeply. Reading between the lines, he felt that the possibility could not be ruled out that Jeanne de la Motte was indeed working on her instructions, or at least, that she deceived the Cardinal with the Queen’s full knowledge.

“When I questioned Bassenge in Basle in 1797,” Georgel writes, “he did not deny but in fact formally acknowledged that statements he made during the trial, like the evidence submitted by Boehmer, sounded very much as if dictated by Breteuil, and that, if the two of them had not actually followed his orders blindly, they had, at the very least, been forced to remain silent about matters he did not want them to mention. After that revelation, how can one possibly exonerate Her Majesty of a degree of culpable connivance—which sits very ill with her own standards and her social rank? The dishonourable actions of the woman La Motte, abusing the Queen’s name in order to carry out her monumental theft with greater audacity and impunity, ought to have outraged any royal person. How could anyone not be shocked by it? If the Queen had acted on her initial feelings of insulted honour, it would almost certainly have prompted the jewellers to tread more carefully. But even if we accept that she did want to take revenge on the Cardinal and be rid of him, the fact remains that what had already happened, and what she already knew, were more than enough to force him to resign his position at the Court and return to his diocese. No one would have been able to challenge the justice of her actions;
the Grand Almoner would have been properly humiliated for his credulity; the house of Rohan would have been disgraced, with no grounds for complaint against her; there would have been no scandal, no Bastille and no criminal proceedings. And that is what Marie-Antoinette clearly might have done, had she followed her own line of thinking. But she listened instead to two men who persuaded her to act quite differently.” The two men Georgel refers to, the Abbé Vermond and Baron Breteuil, were the Cardinal’s sworn enemies.

Like Georgel, Mme Campan also went on to write her memoirs. She makes it clear that she does convict the Queen of a certain complicity, in that, when she received the jeweller’s letter and failed to understand a word of it, she gave it no further thought. But it also appears from Campan’s book that the Queen and her entourage were every bit as suspicious—without justification—of the Cardinal as his people were of her. Marie-Antoinette was convinced that Rohan had used her name in the forged letters to defraud Boehmer and Bassenge of the necklace, in order to repair his notorious financial position. Her phobia about Rohan was such that it even made her fear that he and his co-conspirators might have hidden the necklace in her bedroom with the intention of ‘finding’ it at a suitable moment and laying a false charge, the way people did in medieval legends. But however it was, if we knew nothing else about this episode, the Grand Almoner’s opinion of the Queen, and her opinion of him, constitutes the most frequently discussed topic in connection with the last days of the French monarchy.

From her prison Jeanne managed to send word to Nicole d’Oliva that she had been arrested on the basis of an evil slander, and that, because of the episode in the Bower of Venus, the same danger threatened her if she did not leave forthwith. The girl set off at once for Brussels with her current beau, Toussaint de Beausire. The Paris police quickly discovered her address and informed the French legation in that city. D’Oliva and her
suitor were arrested and imprisoned. But their extradition was not a simple matter. Amongst the ancient privileges of the land of Brabant was one waiving the obligation to return refugees except in cases where they themselves requested it. So the police sent their wiliest operator, a man called Quidor, who quickly persuaded d’Oliva that it would be in her own interests to apply for extradition. Which is what happened; whereupon the French government, which revealed its economising tendency on the most surprising occasions, paid her full travel expenses, then locked them both up in the Bastille.