How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (13 page)

The reigning ideology – the belief in the king’s quasi-divinity – conjured forth an extravagance of language that could easily slide from devotion to the queen as the crowning glory of France to admiration of her person, her figure, her lips, to effusions that would sit neatly in a billet-doux. Strait-laced contemporaries compared Marie Antoinette, quite innocently, to the classical goddesses Flora and Venus, but such comparisons might edge into flirtation.

Any letter from a man to a woman, especially in secret, is stamped with an erotic seal. In Fragonard’s paintings, the mere presence of writing paper, even if illegible, serves as evidence of an affair.
The Love Letter
(c.1770) shows a young woman with her head pertly turned towards the viewer holding a bunch of flowers out of which a note protrudes; has she bent forward to conceal or to tantalise? Is she teasingly drawing the paper out or coolly slipping it in? The secrecy surrounding Rohan’s correspondence inevitably suggested that political bargains might be thrashed out in the queen’s bed.

A second gathering of fictional letters caused sputters of fascination, condemnation and hypocrisy on nearly the same scale as the Diamond Necklace Affair. In April 1782, a collection of 175 letters was published in Paris by the bookseller Durand. Together, they told the story of the debauching of a virtuous married woman and the rape-seduction of a teenage girl by an incorrigible yet charming womaniser. Its editor claimed to have sifted the printed selection from a much larger cache – though a publisher’s note warns that ‘we cannot
guarantee its authenticity’ – and been forbidden by its owner from amending any stylistic flaws.

The book was Choderlos de Laclos’s
Les Liaisons dangereuses
, one of the most popular and notorious novels of the eighteenth century. The
modest initial print-run of two thousand copies sold out instantaneously, and between sixteen and twenty further editions were printed in 1782 alone. The review in Grimm’s
Correspondance littéraire
called it
‘dazzling’. The critic Jean-François de La Harpe said that the book was
‘without morality’. Moufle d’Angerville, who admired the novel’s construction, denounced its contents as ‘very black, it is indeed a pack of
horrors and infamies’. Laclos, a provincial artillery officer, was treated like the god Dionysus – one journalist wrote that he
‘is feared, admired, celebrated’ – and his book, if you believed the stories, infected all who read it: the novelist Rétif de la Bretonne reported that when a mother confiscated a copy from her fifteen-year-old daughter, the girl told an older acquaintance that he could do whatever he wanted with her, so long as she got to finish the story.

Les Liaisons dangereuses
is an epistolary novel of great artistry: the letters do not simply recount events but are themselves vectors of the plot – concealed, discovered, expected, exchanged. Cécile Volanges, just out of her convent school, falls in love with the Chevalier Danceny, even though her stern mother has betrothed her to the comte de Gercourt. The marquise de Merteuil – who, despite a reputation for probity, discreetly and voraciously entertains a series of lovers – wishes to exact revenge on Gercourt for jilting her once. So she entices another of her former inamoratos, the vicomte de Valmont, into deflowering Cécile before the marriage, and weasels herself into the young girl’s confidence. Valmont’s energies are primarily devoted to ‘the most ambitious plan I have yet conceived’, the seduction of the pious présidente de Tourvel. Valmont treats Merteuil to involved descriptions of his investment of the redoubtable Tourvel, whose resistance, nonetheless, slowly buckles. He also serves as mentor to the chevalier and go-between with his beloved; and the obduracy of the présidente is made more endurable by a diversionary dalliance with – or rather the sexual assault of – Cécile. Merteuil, in turn, enjoys herself with Danceny. Eventually Valmont’s cajoling relieves Tourvel of her chastity. The maxim ‘revenge is a dish best served cold’ is frequently misattributed to the novel – but it is certainly a story in which just desserts are consumed lukewarm.

The Diamond Necklace Affair is shadowed by
Les Liaisons dangereuses
: in the novel, the credulous are entrapped through letters;
intermediaries and confidants exercise a stealthy dominion over those reliant on them; the book even ends with the theft of jewellery. The fictional story twines itself around historical events – inverting, reflecting, distorting. Rohan employs the language of courtship to advance his own political ambitions; Valmont and Merteuil discuss their sexual exploits in the vocabulary of politics and war (which, as Clausewitz would point out a few decades later is ‘merely the continuation of policy through other means’). In Ancien Régime France, love and statecraft were more than metaphors for each other. Matters of the heart were of interest to the government, not solely because alliances were soldered together by marriage. It was possible, for example, for a family to obtain a
lettre de cachet
from a minister to lock away an errant child. Merteuil tells Valmont that she rescued her chambermaid from her parents, who had threatened to incarcerate their daughter for a ‘folie d’amour’.

The lexicon of the anguished lover – banishment, pardon, captivity – speaks of politics in extremis. The most highly charged term – one that bursts frequently out of the pages of
Les Liaisons dangereuses
– is ‘slavery’ and its cognates. It encompasses both the successful lover, who demeans himself before his mistress and will cater to any whim in order to retain her affection; and the failed one, reduced to the status of a ‘timid slave’.

Valmont’s own invocation of the trope is rhetorical, a sham weakness to gain admittance to a woman’s affections so that he can lead an insurrection once her guard drops. Slavery had more troubling resonances in Rohan’s political courting of Marie Antoinette, as it touched upon the two great popular fears that would express themselves so violently during the French Revolution: dominion by a foreign power and despotism. In a certain light, Rohan strove for a double usurpation: he wished to replace the king in the queen’s affections; and, since his elevation to prime minister would be at the instigation of the woman already known as
L’Autrichienne
(‘The Austrian bitch’), he would have to accommodate himself to her, displacing French interests with Habsburg ones. The 1789 correspondence manifested a disloyalty not just to king, but to country – the cardinal was willing to become an Austrian cat’s paw.

The ideological justification of the Bourbon monarchs rested on
a fine – some would argue non-existent – distinction: absolute rulers were not despots and subjects were not slaves. As long as a king ruled within the limits set by the law, his monopoly on power could not be equated with tyranny. Of course, the idea that Louis XVI was able to act without restraint was a fiction – the confidence of the money markets, for example, determined his ability to raise loans – but the exercise of authority had few constitutional checks. In screening Rohan’s conduct through
Les Liasions dangereuses
, an allegory of a society ripe for despotism emerges.

There is no direct proof that Rohan actually referred to himself as ‘the slave’ in his correspondence with the queen. However, in a memorandum he drafted in 1785, he referred to the queen as ‘the master’ – the same epithet used in the letters which Jeanne attributed to them in 1789 – so it is reasonable to infer he did abase himself. In this, he is akin to Valmont, whom Merteuil compares to ‘the Sultan, you have never been either the lover or the friend of a woman, but always either
her tyrant or her slave’. Before a conquest the suitor is indentured, his sense of self-worth contingent on the outcome; afterwards, he is triumphant. The vision of politics pursued by Rohan similarly mingles despotism with dependency. While exercising his authority over the rest of the country in his dreamed-of ministry, Rohan would become a lickspittle to the queen, anxious that her support might be removed at any moment. The passing fancies of an individual replace the law at the source of sovereignty. Here lay the horrible future many saw presaged in the Diamond Necklace Affair.

One aspect of the Diamond Necklace Affair confounded contemporaries and still troubles historians today: how could Rohan have believed that the letters he received were written to him by the queen? It seems so implausible that a number of historians have concluded that the cardinal was in some way party to Jeanne’s machinations.
Les Liaisons dangereuses
cannot, of course, offer evidence for the defence; but the novel expands upon the manifold ways that letters can misdirect us and invigorate our self-deceptions. Infatuation – with another, in the case of the novel’s young lovers; with oneself, in the case of Rohan – creates a holographic universe, in which everything genuflects towards the object of desire. ‘Even when the
distractions of society carried me far out of your sphere,’ Danceny write to Cécile, ‘we were never apart . . . In company and in the street I would seize upon the
slightest resemblance to you.’ The world becomes a parade of semblances or, to put it slightly differently, a series of confirmations, in which likenesses are emphasised at the expense of distinctions, in which the particular carriage of a queen’s head can seem like a private signal.

Letters intensify these hallucinations because they purport to offer a landscape of the emotional hinterland while, either deliberately or unintentionally, playing upon the preconceptions of the recipient. The ingenuous Danceny admits as much without realising it: ‘A letter is a portrait of the heart, and, unlike a picture, it has not that coldness, that fixity which is so alien to love; it lends itself to all our emotions; it is in turn lively,
joyful, at rest.’ The slackness of the phrasing – to whose emotions does a letter lend itself? – suggests that a letter’s plasticity does not simply lie, as Danceny supposes, in its responsiveness to the writer’s mood. The recipient needs to write himself into a letter – or translate it into his own terms – yet this can lead him to blind himself to what was intended, or seize upon particularly suggestive elements that have been laid for him. Rohan thought that he was Valmont – a masterful tactician – while actually being Tourvel, manipulated by Jeanne, who knew him better than he knew himself. What he took for the queen’s effusions were transcripts of his own soul.

Merteuil is wise to this fallacy. She advises Cécile that, when writing to her beloved, she should

take more care of your style: You still write like a child . . . you say what you think, and never what you don’t believe. You will agree, I am sure, that when you write to someone it is for his sake and not yours. You must therefore try to say less what you think than what you think
he will be pleased to hear.

Letters are written for the most specific audience possible and, like any performance, strive for appreciation. The generous language of compliment abuts the insidious language of flattery, and sifting one from the other – or even wanting to – was beyond Rohan’s billowing vanity.

Rohan had no reason to doubt the identity of his correspondent, since most letters are composites of previous ones – the same mildewed usages, the same recycled sentiments. Merteuil writes to Danceny:

I might well say, for example, that it would be a great pleasure to see you, and that I am cross to find people around me who bore me, instead of people who amuse me, but you would translate the same sentence into ‘teach me how to live where you are not’, so that, I suppose, when you are by your mistress’s side you will not know how to live there unless I make a third . . . This is what comes of using a language which nowadays is so abused that it means less even than the jargon of compliment. It has become no more than a set of formulas, and one believes in it no more than one believes in
‘your very humble servant’.

The hyperbole of the love letters in
Les Liaisons dangereuses
, which may have been echoed in the correspondence between Rohan and the queen, is a currency. It forms part of a ritual that has been conducted many times before, to which the participants must knowingly conform, in order to consummate their desires. Merteuil felicitously touches upon the rattling inanity, ‘your very humble servant’, since that was the very part Rohan played before the queen. An abnegation was needed to wash clean the sins of his past, but it was a requirement of etiquette rather than the movement of genuine humility.

A correspondence also nurtures an intimacy that would be precluded in person. Cécile is happy to write to her confidante, Sophie, about her burgeoning love for Danceny, but adds ‘perhaps, even with you, to whom I tell everything, if we were to talk about it
I should be embarrassed’. An amorous relationship may smoothly develop because barrages of wit can be traded as more sincere feelings incubate. The physical distance gives an impression of safety, makes it easy to imagine that escape is a simple matter should you begin to feel uneasy. But it is harder to wriggle away than you suspect. The tragic predicament of Madame de Tourvel, the reason she is ensnared by Valmont, is that she is too well-mannered to simply break from him: ‘While you do everything in your power to oblige
me to discontinue this correspondence, it is I who am put to finding
some way of sustaining it,’ she writes.

Most dangerously, the isolation that letters create is easy to ignore, because the presence of the other writer is felt so intensely through the written word. The touch of a letter, its near-corporal intimacy, is evoked in Fragonard’s
Love Letters.
In a glade enclosed with snaking flowers in the foreground and the kissing boughs of two trees, a woman sits upon a pedestal reading a letter. Her lover nuzzles her neck and lays his arm across her waist, though she seems as oblivious to his presence as she is to her propped-up parasol, its erect shaft parallel to the man’s slouching spine. To the right of the canvas stands, on a higher pedestal, a statue of Cupid waving at Friendship for attention. But Friendship, looking over the lovers, overlooks the scamp at her feet. This is a garden of absorption. Fragonard’s painting crisply clarifies the illusions which letters deliver: your correspondent may seem so close that they are draped across your shoulder, but a letter does not simply resurrect the absent writer. It drags you deeper into yourself, stimulates your own imagination so you may not realise that your lover – or someone more dangerous – is at your back.