Read How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair Online
Authors: Jonathan Beckman
A few days later, Jeanne delivered a response. According to Georgel, it ran: ‘I have read your letter. I am delighted to find that you are not guilty. I am not yet able to grant you the audience you desire. When the circumstances permit it, I will let you know.
Be discreet.’
*
Now began a series of letters between Rohan and the person he believed to be the queen. Each letter was, in fact, dictated by Jeanne to Villette – presumably because Rohan was familiar with her own hand – who wrote on blue-bordered paper bought by Jeanne from a stationer on the
nearby rue Sainte-Anastase (this was a relatively restrained choice: paper edged with gilt or bordered with flowers or dusted with gold was highly fashionable). No attempt was made to procure a sample of the queen’s handwriting and imitate it, even though this was probably not the first time that Jeanne had adopted
such a method (at the end of 1783, she had been accused of
forging letters of recommendation).
Later, many people would express disbelief that Rohan failed to realise the letters were not in the queen’s hand. But there had been no contact between the cardinal and the queen – in person or in writing – for a decade, and there is no good reason why, during that time, he should have encountered an extended example of Marie Antoinette’s script (though he must have scanned her signature in the registers of the Chapel Royal). It was clear from the outset that the correspondence was, if not illicit, at least secretive. From the refusal to grant an immediate audience and the order to ‘be discreet’, Rohan would have deduced that there were powerful figures who objected to his reconciliation: perhaps the Polignacs and other members of the queen’s circle, protective of their election; perhaps the king’s approval needed to be carefully coaxed out. Even had Rohan noted something amiss with the handwriting he may well have reasoned – and Jeanne could have argued – that a disguised hand was a necessary precaution in the event of the letters being intercepted.
This was not the first occasion in Louis XVI’s reign that the queen’s confidence, her gestures or her handwriting had been exploited: Madame Cahouet de Villers, the wife of the treasurer-general of the king’s household, was
a repeat offender. In the twilight years of Louis XV’s reign, she had boasted of being the king’s mistress. After Louis XVI ascended to the throne, Cahouet de Villers took as a lover an
intendant
of the queen’s finances, whose principal attraction was that he offered access to the queen’s rooms on Sundays. At first, Cahouet de Villers made a genuine if deluded attempt to befriend Marie Antoinette. She commissioned a portrait of the queen, which the latter refused to accept, objecting to the quality of both the picture and its donor.
Cahouet de Villers then resorted to craftier measures. Her lover provided her with a sample of the queen’s handwriting, which she copied over and over until her own hand matched it. Cahouet de Villers then composed a number of letters to herself from Marie Antoinette ‘in the tenderest and
most familiar style’, as evidence of the queen’s favour. Jewellers received orders from the queen,
instructing them to send Cahouet de Villers their wares. In 1776 Cahouet de Villers alighted on Jean-Louis Loiseau de Bérengar, an immensely wealthy tax collector who hankered after respectability to complement his riches. She told him the queen desired a loan of 200,000 livres – the queen’s debts were well known – and needed to keep it secret from Louis. Bérengar was eager to comply, but demanded the go-ahead from the queen in person. Impossible, said Cahouet de Villers, that was not how the queen did business. Instead, she promised that the queen would signal her approval, with a smile and twist of her head, as she walked to Mass. Cahouet de Villers spread word that two women would be sporting particularly elaborate headdresses, and arranged for two friends of hers to be suitably scaffolded and decked out. When the queen noticed them, she reacted as predicted. Bérengar’s money was spent furnishing the Cahouet de Villers’
hôtel
with chandeliers of Bohemian crystal and paintings by Rubens and Titian.
But Bérengar grew suspicious and informed the police, whose investigation uncovered a skilful forgery – the only difference between the queen’s handwriting and Cahouet de Villers’s counterfeits was ‘a little more regularity in the letters’. The case was reported in the newsletters: some speculated that Cahouet de Villers had been framed by the queen, who had genuinely asked her to arrange a loan on the quiet. The comte de Maurepas acted decisively, exiling the false scrivener to a convent and preventing the poisoning of the queen’s reputation had the case been sent to trial (as some argued it should).
Rohan’s own lack of wariness is strange, since he had come close to being hoodwinked in a similar manner. A number of years previously, Rohan had briefly been involved with a Madame Goupil, who convinced him she could engineer a
rapprochement with the queen. Though Madame Goupil was once a close companion of the queen’s friend, the princesse de Lamballe, Rohan ought to have been sceptical, since her husband had died in the Bastille.
*
Rohan’s
fling with Madame Goupil was brief and inconclusive – but this scrape did not make him any more circumspect when beckoned by a flirtatious young woman dangling the keys to Marie Antoinette’s boudoir. The cardinal would later argue in his defence that doubting Jeanne’s motives was unimaginable: from his perspective, he had generously patched up her rackety finances. To distrust her would have meant believing she was a
‘monster’.
Jeanne supplemented the forged correspondence with non-epistolary evidence of her familiarity with the queen’s household and movements.
She predicted to Rohan the days that Marie Antoinette would arrive or leave Trianon – having been tipped off by a concierge dazzled by Jeanne’s family history – and the cardinal would crouch behind a bush to observe the comings and goings. On one occasion, Villette was kitted out in royal livery and introduced to Rohan as the queen’s valet.
Not one of the letters sent to or by Rohan survives. During the subsequent investigation, the suspects – including Rohan – squirmed away from discussing their contents. But it is possible, with careful and duly tentative reading, to reconstruct some of the topography of the correspondence by examining two fictional collections of letters, one published five years after Jeanne started her deception, the other two years before.
*
Jeanne may have been encouraged in her plan by the story of
le beau
Dillon – the queen had pressed a hand to her admirer’s chest when he fainted in her presence.
*
Georgel wrote his memoirs at least twenty-five years later and without access to the cardinal’s correspondence, so the language is certainly not exact; but he was well-acquainted with the details of the affair and this message’s tenor is of a piece with subsequent events.
*
A police officer charged with suppressing libels against the monarchy, Goupil had discovered that there was a profit to be turned in printing them himself, bringing them to the attention of royal officials, then asking for money to buy off the supposed blackmailers.
T
HE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
was
built on letters. State-run postal services had expanded their reach and efficiency over the course of the 1600s. Rising levels of literacy enabled more and more families, dispersed across the globe by the scattergun dynamics of war, colonisation and commerce, to communicate with each other. Letter-writing manuals furnished the newly literate classes with exemplars from which they could fashion their own correspondence and, through it, themselves as cultivated and urbane citizens.
The possibilities of the letter – it could be structured or rag-tag, cool or effusive, conversational or declamatory, focused or miscellaneous – meant it became the template for a wide variety of literary genres. It could turn, as it does in Diderot’s
Letter on the Blind
, towards philosophical speculation; or towards social criticism like Montesquieu’s
Persian Letters
and Graffigny’s
Letters of a Peruvian Woman
, in which a faux foreigner, explaining to his or her countrymen the goings-on of an unfamiliar land, looked aslant at French mores. Newsletters, most often printed in the Low Countries or England to avoid the censor, collated reports and gossip from their correspondents. With the immense success of two books – the Abbé Prévost’s translation of Samuel Richardson’s
Clarissa
in 1751 and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse
ten years later – the epistolary novel became the epoch’s defining fictional form.
The letter is a slippery and paradoxical thing. While polite society demands affectation and hypocrisy, it appears to offer an unfrosted vitrine into the human heart. It is a safehouse into which secrets that one cannot speak of in public for fear of others overhearing are admitted. Yet the letter is both crafted and crafty. Conversation is improvisatory, rough-edged and risky; its punctuation is fluffing
and hemming and pausing for thought. You can read in the quiver of a voice, the blush of a cheek or the damp of an eye a truth that runs counter to the speaker’s words; and the tumbling momentum of speech can barrel you into revelations which you had intended to keep hidden.
A letter might be scribbled down in the gyre of emotional confusion, but hyperventilations, effusions, aposiopeses can also be composed in tranquillity (many letters of the period were written for circulation beyond their intended recipient: Madame de Sévigné’s correspondence with her daughter was published from 1734 onwards, but copies had been passed around for decades previously). A letter admits none of the scrutiny or contradiction that can be interjected in company; it is never nonplussed by the recipient’s objections or suspicions, because these can be reflected upon when they are received in their turn and parried at leisure. The only voice capable of rebutting a letter’s argument is the reader’s conscience, and that may be weak or changeable or willing to believe anything it hears. While protesting honesty, the accomplished letter-writer can speak poison.
The appendix to Jeanne’s
Mémoires Justificatifs
, the apologia published in 1789, contains thirty-one letters exchanged by the cardinal and Marie Antoinette, which Jeanne claimed to have transcribed when acting as their intermediary. There is plentiful evidence – both internal and external – to discredit their authenticity, even in the eyes of those inclined to believe Jeanne. One letter, for example, implies that Marie Antoinette and Rohan had known each other in Vienna, though Rohan’s embassy began a year after Marie Antoinette arrived in France.
Nonetheless, the mind that devised these letters also dreamt up the queen’s half of the original correspondence and read Rohan’s responses, so one should expect some overlap of form, style and characterisation. In the 1789 letters, Jeanne revels in the clandestine aspect of the exchange. The letters are dabbed with obscure acronyms (‘M.B.S.T.C.B.’ and ‘J.T.R.T.B.A.V.C.S.’); transparent ciphers (‘T’ for ‘Trianon’ and ‘P’ for Polignac); and theatrical aliases – Marie Antoinette is ‘The Master’, Rohan ‘The Slave’, Louis ‘The Minister’ and the baron de Planta ‘The Savage’. Marie Antoinette appears as a woman easily
roused and quickly placated. She immediately accepts Rohan’s justification and expresses her indignation at being duped into hating him by her enemies. And she is devoted to politicking: ‘I have weighed up’, she writes to Rohan, ‘all the situations which will infallibly lead to
the outcomes that I desire.’
Marie Antoinette confesses the peril posed by her coterie: ‘I am in a wood surrounded by all the most dangerous and poisonous creatures
on the earth’s surface’, and admits that her own ‘imprudence’ has left her exposed to blackmail by the Polignacs. But she also expresses full confidence that she can scupper their intrigues and boasts of her power over the king, of having on previous occasions
‘chained the lion and made him see and believe everything that I want’. A similar funambulist reasoning must have been invoked in 1784, as Jeanne needed to keep Rohan alert with expectation while compelling him to accept that his reunion with the queen would be delayed. Villette confessed that in the letters from Rohan which he read, the cardinal grumbled about the elevation to the ministry of his enemy, the baron de Breteuil, and the nefarious power that the Polignacs held over the queen.
The 1789 letters attributed to the cardinal seem written by a lover rather than a loyal subject. The very first one, in which Rohan begs for an audience, concludes: ‘When your beautiful mouth declares yes, then you will see your slave at your feet and this day will be the
happiest of his life.’ By the twentieth letter in the correspondence, Rohan is
tutoying
Marie Antoinette.
It is impossible to calculate how far Rohan risked any amorous sentiments in the letters he actually sent. Beugnot, who claimed to have seen them, observed the
madness of love intensified by the madness of ambition . . . such were the times when a prince of the church did not hesitate to write letters . . . to a woman whom he knew so little and so badly, which in our days a man who wished for the smallest amount of respect would be able to begin reading but
would not finish.
There are reasons to doubt Beugnot’s testimony: he reported the existence of thousands of letters, when other sources point to far
fewer.
*
But Rohan’s situation bore a resemblance to that of a man wooing his mistress out of sight of her husband. He had embarked on a form of courtship – political, if not romantic – and there may have been instances where flattery of the queen could have overbalanced, or deliberately contorted itself, into protestations of affection, desire, even love.