Read How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair Online
Authors: Jonathan Beckman
A
T MIDDAY, SPECTATORS
, drily whispering, gather as the king and queen make their way to Mass. The queen strides down the gallery, ringed by her ladies-in-waiting and her
garde du corps
.
As she passes, Jeanne topples
like a felled sapling. Perhaps the queen is too enveloped in conversation to notice; perhaps she glances at the falling woman but presumes that she will be looked after.
*
But Marie Antoinette does not halt, does not seek to discover who Jeanne is or why she was taken ill. No royal doctors arrive to diagnose the malady; no coin-stuffed purses are delivered to Jeanne’s lodgings.
Jeanne’s ambush had guttered out dismally, but failure
did not deter her. She told everyone who would listen that the queen had taken a profound interest in her health, actually. She had been invited to the queen’s private rooms, Jeanne said, where she had told Marie Antoinette about her family and its misfortunes. The queen was deeply touched and had proffered her money. Jeanne’s story gained plausibility because in May 1784 she received permission to sell both her and her brother’s pensions
for 9,000 livres. She claimed this money flowed from the queen.
One of Jeanne’s closest friends would later argue that Jeanne concocted this grand lie as she was simply too
‘vain’ to admit her stratagem had failed. Jeanne was indeed sensitive to others’ opinions because of her dubious and dilute royal heritage. But she had also learned from her time at Versailles that the regard in which one was
held – and the material benefits which flowered from this – was proportionate to one’s perceived closeness to the royal family. Those who had hitherto dealt with you frostily would become open-eared and amenable at the merest snip of a rumour that you were welcome in the private quarters of a princess. Jeanne’s boasts of proximity to the queen could be leveraged with others desperate for advancement and recognition – but mortal danger awaited if her deceit was exposed and those who were not convinced were summarily excised from her company: Madame Colson, a relative of Jeanne who had been lodging with the La Mottes, was exiled to a convent
for voicing doubts.
Jeanne began to solidify a scheme by which she could transmute her blossoming ‘friendship’ with the queen into hard coin. She had been brooding on this for some time. A begging letter written to d’Ormesson, the finance minister, in 1783 was pregnant with menace: ‘You will without doubt find me, Monsieur, very extravagant; but I cannot stop myself from complaining since the smallest favour has not been granted to me. I am no longer surprised if a great evil is done and I can only say again that my faith has held me back
from doing evil.’ Her plotting was energised by the arrival in Paris of a potential accomplice of far greater nous that her plodding husband: Rétaux de Villette, an old messmate of Nicolas’s from Lunéville.
Villette had been born in 1754 in Lyons, where his father was a tax collector. After his father’s death, he and his mother moved north to Troyes. Villette was educated at the artillery school in Bapaume before joining the Gendarmerie, where he and Nicolas squandered many undisturbed hours at cards. He later served in the Maréchaussée, the regional police force, but was chased from ‘a small provincial town . . . having received a blow at a ball where he had had the brazenness to insult a young lady of quality
before her mother and father’.
Out of money and on the make, Villette arrived in Paris in January 1784. In May, just as Jeanne received the windfall from her mortgaged pensions, he renewed his acquaintance with his old comrade. Beugnot described Villette as
‘smooth and insinuating’: he shared with Jeanne a crafty intelligence and a greaseless plausibility. Most historians of the Diamond Necklace Affair have presumed that Villette and Jeanne
became lovers, which seems reasonable: Villette had a reputation for caddishness and Jeanne, who had previously deployed her body for pragmatic ends, may have felt that giving herself to Villette was necessary to dissuade this man – in whom she saw her own duplicity reflected – from double-crossing her. Nicolas was either past caring whom his wife slept with, or was too dull to notice.
Without realising it, Rohan had shown Jeanne a tempting chink in their very first meeting, when he told her that, because of the queen’s hatred for him, he could not arrange an audience. The cardinal made no attempt to hide the chagrin he felt at the disgrace into which he had fallen: it was, wrote Georgel, ‘a habitual bitterness that poisoned all
his most beautiful days’. Rohan’s malcontent was both personal and political. He was humiliated when celebrating Mass for the royal family – as was his duty whenever he stayed at Versailles – to feel the prick of the queen’s disdainful gaze and to slouch out afterwards without the slightest acknowledgement. As grand almoner Rohan sat snugly at the centre of the Court; but his juxtaposition to the royal family made him feel all the more peripheral when ignored by them.
Grand Duke Paul of Russia had visited Versailles in 1782, and Rohan, uninvited to the ball thrown by Louis and Marie Antoinette at Trianon in the duke’s honour, had persuaded a porter to let him into the party as soon as the queen had retired for the evening. Rohan, whose ardour to see the queen overpowered his discretion, sneaked out of the lodge too early. His impenetrable disguise was a greatcoat draped over his cardinal’s regalia. A pair of scarlet stockings was visible to all – including Marie Antoinette. She made her displeasure known.
Rohan was also nagged by frustrated political ambitions. He believed he ought to be prime minister, a defunct office the Bourbon kings had deliberately avoided filling. It did not matter that the comte de Vergennes, an ally of the Rohan, was the king’s closest counsellor and would remain so until his death in 1787; or that Rohan’s diplomatic career had been limited to a few controversial years in Vienna, and he lacked experience of civil or military administration. He was self-deluded enough to overlook his failure to cultivate those character traits – tact, discipline, fiscal prudence – needed to govern successfully.
He imagined himself as a worthy successor to the all-powerful cardinal-ministers the crown had called upon during the previous two hundred years: Richelieu, who had tamped down Habsburg aggrandisement during the Thirty Years War; Mazarin, effectively co-regent of France during Louis XIV’s minority and vanquisher of the Fronde; and Fleury, Louis XV’s tutor who became chief minister at the age of seventy-three and ruled unchallenged for a further seventeen years. Armand-Gaston-Maximilien, the first Rohan bishop of Strasbourg, had sat on the Council of Regency before Louis XV came of age. Rohan believed that the queen’s hatred was the sole impediment to his destiny – once his sin had been absolved, his purified talent would float unobstructed to the king’s right hand. On numerous occasions, Rohan confided in Jeanne his stunted aspirations and his fruitless assays to soften the queen’s unforgiving rigour.
Jeanne proceeded patiently. She disseminated hints of a deepening friendship with the queen while coyly refusing to confirm or deny anything. It was not long, however, before she broached the subject with Rohan. The story she told him differed slightly from the narrative she had dreamt up after the fainting episode. It is possible that she did this to probe the limits of Rohan’s credulity and test the viability of her plan, but Jeanne never placed any value in consistency and probably improvised the entire conversation.
The queen, Jeanne told the stupefied Rohan, had found her with Madame Elisabeth, recounting her troubles. Marie Antoinette was intrigued and invited Jeanne to call on her. This would have been a most unusual introduction. Women traditionally required a formal presentation to the queen: bare-shouldered in their court dress, the initiates would remove their glove and make to kiss the queen’s hem before being stopped with a flick of the hand. The presentation was inscribed in a register and published in the government’s official newspaper, the
Gazette de France
. But Jeanne’s story had some purchase with Rohan, because people of insufficient nobility were introduced on the sly and the queen was widely known to scorn formality.
Marie Antoinette, Jeanne continued, soon took her into her confidence, receiving her in a room reserved for private relaxation. This would have been the
cabinet doré
, which the queen had remodelled
the previous year. The white wooden panels were decorated in gilt, cornucopias bound up by strings of pearls, fleurs-de-lys and winged sphinxes. Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s painting of a potted pineapple tree suspending a single fruit hung on the wall. It was here that the queen sang, gossiped with her closest friends and sat for Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s portraits. In the main, however, the queen’s penetralia were more like a bunker than a palace: ‘a mass of small rooms . . . the majority [of which] were dingy [and] simply furnished, nearly all
with mirrors and panelling’. These were unexplored by even the most experienced courtiers, which enabled Jeanne to claim without fear of contradiction that she had interpolated herself into the queen’s
cabinet
.
Rohan was initially incredulous but, with persistence, Jeanne managed to batter through his amazement. That Marie Antoinette should have adopted Jeanne may have seemed outlandish but it was not entirely impossible to believe. The queen was given to spasms of generosity: once, she came across an orphan being trampled by horses and, even though he sprung up unhurt, she vowed to support him and his five siblings. Mercy-Argenteau noted that ‘it was already a flaw in her character in Vienna to press the cause of all sorts of people to the hilt, without
examining their worthiness’. How much more likely, then, that her heart would have wept for Jeanne, an orphan of distinguished lineage, whose state of indigence would have moved anyone who valued royal dignity.
Jeanne – voluble, contentious and brash – was the antithesis of the placid, unchallenging women in Marie Antoinette’s circle. But the cardinal was too preoccupied imagining how, allied to Jeanne, he might restore himself in the queen’s estimation and resuscitate his political career to ponder this. With his early doubts overcome, Rohan urged Jeanne to mention him to the queen at every available opportunity, but Jeanne insisted that their friendship was still too fragile for so unwelcome a subject to be broached. This was the first example of the accomplishment Jeanne showed in managing and manipulating Rohan’s expectations. When Rohan began to express doubts, Jeanne produced letters, supposedly from Marie Antoinette, addressed to
‘My cousin, the comtesse de Valois’; she flourished 1,000 écus which she said were a gift from the queen
(they were actually the proceeds of her liquidated pension). The La Motte household began to look less dowdy. Jeanne bought – on credit, naturally – three dozen sets of silver cutlery, a large silver soup ladle, two dozen silver coffee spoons and two crystal salt cellars. Nicolas and Jeanne sported new bracelets and rings
worth thousands of livres. The couple chatted openly about the source of their wealth; Jeanne told the abbesse of Longchamps, her alma mater, that she received now an annual stipend of
45,000 livres from the king. The La Mottes still had to scrimp and hustle to find the money for less conspicuous consumption such as rent and food; despite the windfall of 9,000 livres from the sale of the pensions, Nicolas borrowed 300 livres in June 1784
to pay the landlord. And the only way that they could maintain their pied-à-terre in Versailles was by purchasing a bolt of satin in Paris – again on credit – then pawning it as soon as they
stepped off the coach.
It is unlikely that Jeanne had planned her deception precisely. She was not a naturally strategic thinker, but she did understand the necessity of advancing carefully to the point where Rohan was utterly dependent on her. And Jeanne’s motivations must have been more complex than just exploitation. She was buoyed up by the surge of attention. Doors, once locked against her, were now held respectfully open. Toadies and place-seekers courted her. People sprang forward to seek her assistance: a Madame de Quinques gave Jeanne 1,000 écus, believing that she had sufficient influence with the queen to obtain a
sinecure for a friend. She experienced, on the cheap, the life she had long desired, dispensing patronage and basking in sycophancy. She knew that it was painted on pasteboard but, an actress herself, she enjoyed playing the part.
Her relationship with Rohan had reversed itself. Now he was in need of her good offices, he had to vie for her attention, had to discard his lordliness and beg. For Jeanne’s pretence was, indirectly, a form of revenge. Revenge at Marie Antoinette for disregarding her; and revenge at Rohan for treating her like just another poor girl. If their esteem would not be granted freely, then it would be counterfeited. With Marie Antoinette, the subject of her story, and Rohan, her rapt audience, Jeanne had become, as authors do, a kind of absolute monarch, determining the fates of her characters and
toying with the expectations of her readers. It was as though she had been crowned the last Valois queen.
Once Jeanne had seen Rohan grow accustomed to her anecdotes of afternoons at the palace, she told him that she had spoken to Marie Antoinette about the cardinal’s concern for her. ‘Above all,’ said Jeanne, ‘I generously extolled the good that you do in your diocese and the prodigious good deeds the gratitude for which I
hear about every day.’ The queen had not blenched at the mention of Rohan’s name, so Jeanne had informed her that Rohan’s ‘health was visibly altered’ because he had exhausted all means of persuading her of his remorse and continued devotion. She convinced Marie Antoinette to allow the cardinal to justify himself in writing.
Rohan must have already written such a letter a thousand times in his head. The one he committed to paper does not survive, but, if other examples of his correspondence are any guide, it would have been elegant and direct: an apology for any offence caused, perhaps a brief defence that he had been misrepresented by his enemies, a declaration of his respect for his queen and a request for an audience.