The Queen's Necklace (30 page)

Louis XVI, incidentally, hastened to crown the two blunders he had made over the trial with a third. The one wise thing he could have done in the circumstances would have been to
behave as if nothing had happened; a true king would never have admitted that his subjects had so upset him. Instead Louis gave free reign to his resentment, and set out to punish the pardoned Rohan as much as he could without risking a furore. The Grand Almoner was forced to resign his position and leave Paris within three days, to return to the Chaise-Dieu, the cloister where he had been a monk. Cagliostro was given eight days to leave Paris and three weeks to be out of France.

Naturally, the fairy godmothers could not acquiesce in this. Mme de Marsan called on the King and reminded him for the umpteenth time that she had nursed him as an infant and brought him up, and she implored him to send Rohan into exile somewhere else, as the climate at Chaise-Dieu would be so bad for his knees; and she threatened never to set foot in the Court again. But now that there was no need for it, Louis was obdurate. However this time he did not push the matter too far. He did eventually agree that Rohan could base himself at Marmoutiers, in the beautiful Loire valley.

And now we come to the final scene, in which Jeanne de Valois de la Motte undergoes her appropriate punishment. When she learnt that the Cardinal had been acquitted, Jeanne had one of her usual fits and began to rage. A soul filled with malicious fury finds its own misfortunes much easier to live with than the good fortune of others. She could not bear the fact that the Cardinal, who had always been so good and so chivalrous to her, should have escaped from the danger that she had brought on his head.

On 21st June 1786, she was woken by her warders at five in the morning. Thinking it must be something to do with another court hearing, she refused to get up. Finally, after much delay, she decided she would and went out into the courtyard. There she was seized by four powerful executioners assisted by two footmen, and bundled along to the foot of the stairs. She kicked out and bit, and the usual deluge of never-ending curses poured
from her mouth. She was forced to her knees and made to listen while the sentence was read out. When she heard that she was to be birched, she shrieked:

“You will shed the royal blood of the Valois!”

Her screams filled the whole palace.

“How can you bear to let these people shed the blood of your kings?”

Even at this early hour, the commotion drew an audience of some two or three hundred people. They watched while her clothes were ripped from her as she fought with her hands, her feet and her teeth, and was beaten over the shoulders with a birch.

Then she tore herself free and flung herself about on the stone floor in a hysterical fit. She pulled up her skirt and thrust herself forward obscenely, to express her defiant, diabolical feelings about the world. At that moment everything else fell away from her—that pose was the most sincere gesture she ever made.

The executioner managed to brand her with only one of the Vs (for
voleuse
, ‘thief’). When he tried to apply the second, as she thrashed about in agony, the scorching iron slipped onto her breast. She leapt up and bit the shoulder of one of the executioners through his clothing, drawing blood. Then she collapsed.

Later she was moved to the Salpêtrière hospital, which also served as a prison. There she was made to wear prison uniform, and the gold ring was removed from her ear. A doctor offered her twelve livres for it. Jeanne, who up to that point been sunk in taciturn silence, suddenly came to herself:

“What? Twelve livres? The gold alone is worth more than that!”

She was not going to be cheated.

Shortly afterwards the second part of the sentence was carried out. At Bar-sur-Aube all the La Motte possessions, both fixed and personal, were sold off on behalf of the Treasury.

In its days of greatness the French monarchy would surely have found a way of removing Jeanne from the land of the living without the publicity attached to locking her up in the Salpêtrière. No true governing power could have tolerated the restless, malcontent nature of such a creature. In this too, the Ancien Régime was simply weak.

And so it happened that, in time, and with the help of a kindly nun, Jeanne quietly and effortlessly slipped out of prison. The nun is said to have shouted this pleasantly ambiguous piece of advice after her:

“
Adieu, Madame, prenez garde de vous faire remarquer
.”—Farewell, Madame, and try not to draw attention to yourself.

She went to London, where her husband was waiting for her. And there she lived, perhaps on money left over from the sale of the diamonds, or perhaps secretly helped by the King’s enemies—possibly the Duc d’Orleans himself; but above all, she lived by her writing. Neither she nor Réteaux de Villette allowed the popular sympathy for her cause to go untapped, and both of them poured out a stream of pamphlets and memoirs.

Jeanne’s literary imagination, unlike the practical imagination revealed in her intrigues and machinations, was not of the first rank. Her literary fantasies are those of a hysterical parlour maid who concocts interminable fictions to the discredit of her employers. It seems that the Valois blood did not predominate after all; she too belonged rather to the house of Figaro.

The most notable of these masterworks appeared in London in 1788, entitled:
Mémoirs justificatifs de la Comtesse de la Motte, écrits par elle-même
. According to this testimony, the affair between Rohan and Marie-Antoinette began back in Vienna. Their relationship finally ended when the Princess left him for a German officer, whereupon Rohan, wounded in his manly pride, committed various indiscretions and brought her wrath down upon himself. He hoped he might win her heart again when she came to Paris, but now the Comte d’Artois had come between them.

The instant Marie-Antoinette met Jeanne she took her to her heart and gave her ten thousand livres, as friendship is strengthened by such little gifts. Out of pure kindness Jeanne mediated between them on Rohan’s behalf, but he had another, far more powerful, patron, the Emperor Joseph II, who thought it in the Austrian interest to demand that his friend Rohan should be made Prime Minister of France. (Here she neatly worked in the greatest of all the accusations levelled at Marie-Antoinette, that she served the interests of a foreign power.) Marie-Antoinette did not really like Rohan, but she blindly obeyed her brother and so made her peace with him, and their passion flared up again. The expression is of course colourful rather than precise, since both were merely feigning, Marie-Antoinette for political reasons (the Austrian cause) and Rohan from ambition. Rohan was at the time both morally and physically a broken man, who needed to take Cagliostro’s magic pills with him to the assignations; and on the way—oh masterstroke of the parlour maid’s imagination!—he would call in on his young mistress at Passy to “get his head up …”

Then she comes to the letters. She had not kept all two hundred of them, only some thirty or so—copies—supposedly made at the time. They are indeed love letters, but not very entertaining. Here, all the same, is a brief example—a graphic illustration of just what the French were capable of believing about their royalty:

The time has come for us to say a few words about Marie-Antoinette’s dire and ever-increasing unpopularity, that shift in sentiment which played such a significant part in the outbreak of the Revolution.

When she arrived in Paris with her new husband in 1773 she was given a rapturous reception by the people. As she stood on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, that fine old cavalier Maréchal Brissac said to her:

“
Voila, Madame
—two thousand admirers stand before you.”

And it was no exaggeration. The French passionately admired the beautiful little princess who had brought a touch of youth to the ageing Bourbon Court. She sensed this, and was happy in the knowledge of it. At around this time she wrote to her mother:

“As we withdrew, we waved to the people and they were so delighted. How happy is our situation when we can win the friendship of an entire people so cheaply!” This did not mean that she would not have been prepared to pay a great deal for it.

But as the years passed and the impatiently-awaited Dauphin failed to appear, her popularity began to wane. When a son was born to the Duc d’Artois, the fishwives pouring into Versailles demanded to know why she was not following the example. But when the Dauphin did finally arrive, the enthusiasm was not
what it would once have been, at the start of the reign. Without ever noticing it, Marie-Antoinette had lost the people’s love.

By degrees she came to be held responsible for everything the public disliked. Even the King’s refusal to be vaccinated was laid at her door. People knew that the Queen was all-powerful—so she must have been to blame for whatever happened or failed to happen. But seen from this distance, Marie-Antoinette was not all-powerful. Her greatest wish in the field of politics, that Choiseul should be recalled from exile, was never fulfilled. Instead, despite her every protest, Calonne was made
Contrôleur Général
(Finance Minister), and it was as a result of his profligacy, his ineffective and doomed financial policies, that people turned against Marie-Antoinette and ridiculed her as
Madame Déficit
.

When, in March 1785, Marie-Antoinette attended the thanksgiving service held in Notre Dame for the birth of her second son, the Duc de Normandie, she was received by the crowd in icy silence. She returned to Versailles in tears.

“
Mais que leur ai-je donc fait?
”—But what have I done to them?—she asked her companions, in bewilderment.

For a year now, ever since the affair of the necklace, she had been so passionately hated by all sections of society that the kindly old Duc de Penthièvre advised the King to lock her up in the nunnery at Val-de-Grace in the interests of public order.

Mais que leur ai-je donc fait?
What had given rise to such bottomless hatred?

According to the brothers Goncourt, it originated in the Court, from where it was skilfully fostered, and made its way out into an ever-widening sphere. We have already discussed why the majority of courtiers so disliked her: the more elderly, because she was young and so much at ease with younger people; the zealots, for the general gaiety of her life; the ‘old French’ party, because she stood for the Austrian connection; those who did not belong to the Polignac circle, because they felt themselves slighted; and everyone else, because the witty superiority of her entourage diminished their self-esteem.

History provides many examples of courtiers taking to a new queen with less than total enthusiasm, but it is unusual for them to foment such powerful and far-reaching intrigues against one; and it is quite without parallel for them to involve the common people. This itself was a sign of the times. But it is more than that. Not only does it suggest that public opinion had become a factor in a purely internal palace revolution; it also shows the extent to which the Court had lost its political instinct. Its chief source of strength was now to make common cause against the authority of the King with his greatest enemy, the mob. That alone would have been enough to bring down judgement on the leading section in society. Had the power of the aristocracy not been ended by the Revolution, it would have collapsed of its own accord, precisely because it had lost its most fundamental instinct, its whole raison d’être, which derived from the same instinct that brought it to leadership in the first place: its capacity to survive.

If we were to ask a sober-minded French citizen of the time what his complaint against the Queen was, he would no doubt have summarised it under three headings: her extravagance, her immoral life and her lack of patriotism. The first charge—whether founded or not—we have explored elsewhere. The second we touched on in the discussion of the vast number of lovers she was imagined to have. And of course, after the necklace trial, this particular accusation was greatly reinforced by the influence of the literary productions of Jeanne de la Motte and the pamphleteers.

By this stage there was nothing the Queen could do to stop those Parisians with filthy minds and the souls of
concierges
instantly ‘seeing through’ her schemes for debauchery. If the Queen was so fond of spending her summer evenings out on the terraces overlooking the park at Versailles, it was perfectly clear what she got up to in the dark … Thus it rapidly got abroad that she and her intimate circle—Coigny, Vaudreuil, Besenval and the rest—had ordered costumes representing wild animals, and
“after dressing up as harts and hinds, had strayed through the park, giving themselves up to the pleasures of harts and hinds”. That could only speak for itself. According to others, Marie-Antoinette would wander through the Versailles gardens dressed as an Amazon, offering herself to anyone—man or woman—she came upon. One young man in particular, an official from the War Ministry, a real Adonis, had caught her eye, but Artois became jealous, the young man vanished without trace shortly afterwards, and his family never saw him again. And so on, and on, and on …