Read How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair Online
Authors: Jonathan Beckman
It is not known whether Rohan read
Les Liaisons dangereuses
. The chances are that, like most other fashionable and broad-minded cosmopolitans, he did. If so, he failed to absorb its lessons. The book is a compendium of the dangers in sending and receiving letters. In the novel’s very first letter, Cécile tells Sophie she is ‘sitting as I write at the prettiest desk to which I have been given the key so that I can
lock away whatever I wish’. Soon she will be banished to the country after her mother breaks it open and discovers Danceny’s love letters. Merteuil, more worldly wise, lists among the precautions she takes to preserve her respectability
‘never writing letters’ to her lovers. Valmont is grudgingly admitted by Tourvel into her home, where she finally breaks her marriage vows, on the pretext of returning the letters she wrote to him.
Letters are hostages. They contain confessions that we are only willing to reveal to a select group of people. Secrets are divulged in the hope that our confidant will offer advice or incline more favourably towards us. But ink and paper are durable. Our most emotionally naked moments, when we have offered ourselves up unprotected by
irony or restraint, can be turned against us if our hazards fail or our trust is betrayed. Rohan’s greatest quandary in the spring of 1784 was not deciding whether his correspondent was actually the queen but whether, should things turn sour, his letters might be the death of him. The gamble was large, the potential reward almost without measure.
The exchanges sharpened Rohan’s appetite for meeting the queen in person. Jeanne was able to fend him off for a number of weeks with a variety of petty excuses, like the real Marie Antoinette had done after the cardinal returned from Vienna. But as June wore into July, Rohan sensed a discord between the warmth of Marie Antoinette’s sentiments and her evasions. Jeanne realised that there was great danger if the cardinal’s suspicions proliferated, but her fundamental problem seemed insoluble – she could not produce the queen. With courage forged in desperation, Jeanne hit upon a stratagem so audacious that if it misfired it would, at the very least, expose her deceit to Rohan and cut off his trickling patronage, and might lead to her arraignment, trial, imprisonment or worse. But if, somehow, it succeeded, the cardinal would be unshakeably convinced that Marie Antoinette was his friend, ally and redeemer.
*
Jeanne claimed that there were two hundred; the baron de Planta testified that most of the queen’s responses were conveyed verbally by Jeanne.
O
N A SUNNY
afternoon in July 1784, a woman of thirty-two – blonde-haired, blue-eyed, long-necked and full-figured – sits basking in
the gardens of the Palais-Royal. A gentleman, smartly dressed and of distinguished bearing, settles down next to her wearing an expression of determined thoughtfulness, as though worried it might fall off. The man jangles with nerves, looks the woman up and down like a dressmaker during a fitting, then leaves without uttering a word. For a number of days the man returns, each time staring at the woman intently, each time saying nothing.
The Palais-Royal was a free state in the middle of Paris, a seminary of sedition and licentiousness, a Bacchic democracy where
morality was tossed aside. It had been acquired in the middle of the seventeenth century by the Orléans, the cadet line of the Bourbons, who brooded resentfully over their cousins’ supremacy. The complex had been developed during the early 1780s by the duc de Chartres, the Orléans’ heir: he erected in its arcades boutiques and cafes, a theatre, a Roman circus where races were held and a waxworks exhibit. It was a lotus-eating paradise, known as ‘the capital of Paris’, a place, wrote the journalist Louis-Sébastien Mercier, where you would gladly be confined as a prisoner. It was a temple to consumption, from disposable gewgaws to bejewelled telescopes, where the vendors would tell you that bronze was gold and paste diamonds were the real deal. In the Caveau, idlers would congregate to eat ice cream and prattle about literature and politics – because the municipal police were forbidden from entering the Palais, you could voice radical opinions here louder than in the rest of the city. Young libertines came to the Palais to graze and brassed-up courtesans mingled indistinguishably with duchesses. There were few hours of
the day where an attractive young woman could promenade without a leer or a grope.
When the man finally addresses the woman, he asks permission to accompany her to her apartment and to
‘woo her’ (the wooing was to be very brief and transactional). The woman agrees – she is an archetypal denizen of the Palais-Royal – and the man becomes a frequent visitor.
Nicole le Guay was born in the parish of Saint Laurent in Paris on 1 September 1751 into a
hard-working but poor family. Her mother died when she was young and the savings she had put aside for her daughter’s upkeep were stolen by her executors. Even though some of the money was recovered, Nicole ran up debts with loan sharks and was forced, at least temporarily, to turn to prostitution. Earlier in 1784, she had obtained a moratorium against her creditors. She was young, pretty and broke, and with her broad forehead, her straight, chiselled nose and her small, protuberant mouth, she resembled no one so much as Marie Antoinette. And the man Nicole welcomed into her rooms? Well, he was Nicolas de La Motte.
Nicolas described himself as a high-ranking officer, with good prospects for promotion and numerous influential patrons. On his ninth visit, he arrived with an air of
‘satisfaction and joy’. ‘I have come’, he said, ‘from a house, where a person of very great standing has spoken much of you. I will take you there this evening.’ Nicole was bemused, her only acquaintance with noble gentlemen being quick and carnal: ‘I do not know who that could be,’ she replied. ‘I do not have the honour of knowing any person at Court.’ Leaving the mystery hanging in the air, Nicolas left.
He returned that evening and announced to Nicole, who had been fretting all afternoon, that the secret admirer would arrive presently. His wife walked in a moment later.
‘You might be a bit surprised by my visit since you don’t know me,’ said Jeanne, bluntly anticipating Nicole’s confusion. Nicole, who had no inkling of the woman’s identity, replied politely that ‘this surprise can only be agreeable’. Jeanne – at no point giving any indication that she was married to Nicolas – sat down next to Nicole and, smiling, simpering, caressing her hand, looked at her ‘with an expression at once mysterious and trusting’; she threw me ‘a glance in which’, Nicole later
remembered, ‘I thought I saw the interest and informality of friendship.’
‘You can be confident, my dear, in what I am about to tell you,’ continued Jeanne. ‘I am a respectable woman and well-connected at Court.’
She handed Nicole letters, which she said had been sent to her by Marie Antoinette. The younger woman, who half-realised that perusing the queen’s correspondence was as sacrilegious as seeing her naked, could barely bring herself to look.
‘But, madame, I don’t understand any of this. It is an enigma to me,’ said Nicole.
‘You will understand me, my dear. I have the queen’s total confidence. She and I are as close as two fingers of a hand. She has just given me new proof of this, in charging me to find a person who could do something that will be explained when the time comes. I saw you. If you want to do this, I’ll give you 15,000 livres: and the present you’ll receive from the queen will be even better. I cannot reveal who I am at the moment, but you’ll soon find out. If you don’t take me at my word, if you want guarantees for the 15,000 livres, we will go straight away to a lawyer.’
Nicole was thoroughly disconcerted at being asked by the queen for a favour. Turning her down would be unimaginable. Who could refuse to serve their queen? And those 15,000 livres obliterated any lurking qualms: ‘I would give my blood, I would sacrifice my life for my sovereign,’ she said. ‘I could not refuse a demand, whatever it may be, which I believe to have been made in the name of the queen herself.’
*
It was arranged that Nicolas would collect her the next day.
On 11 August 1784, Nicolas and Nicole left Paris in a remise. They arrived in Versailles at ten o’clock in the evening (Nicolas airily
promised the coachman that someone would be sent to him with the fare – no one ever came). Jeanne greeted them and instructed Nicolas to take Nicole to their rooms on the Place Dauphine, where he left her with Jeanne’s chambermaid. Two hours passed in tentative conversation and stagnating silence. The La Mottes returned, glowing with good cheer, at around midnight, and told Nicole that the queen was delighted with her safe arrival and looked forward ‘with the most
lively impatience’ to what was planned. Unable to rein in her curiosity any longer, Nicole asked what was going to happen. ‘Oh, it’s the smallest thing in the world,’ Jeanne replied dismissively. To divert the girl’s curiosity, Jeanne now revealed that she and Nicolas were the comte and comtesse de Valois. It was unacceptable, said Jeanne, that Nicole should meet the queen without a title of her own – so she peremptorily dubbed her the baronne d’Oliva.
The next day, Jeanne groomed and dressed d’Oliva. The newly anointed baroness put on a
gaulle
(a dress of white, flecked linen), gathered at the waist by a ribbon, with a translucent ruffle at the neck and sleeves puffed like piped cream. Her head was snugly rimmed with a demi-bonnet. Jeanne handed d’Oliva a tiny letter, saying: ‘I will lead you this evening to the park, and you will hand over this letter to a very noble seigneur whom
you will meet there.’ The outside of the letter was blank and no clue was given as to its contents.
As midnight approached, d’Oliva was taken towards Versailles by Jeanne and Nicolas. Louis XIV had devoted thirty years of his life to modelling the gardens at the rear of the palace, and was so obsessed with his creation that he wrote the first guidebook to them, the
Manière de montrer les jardins de Versailles
. An area extending over 230 acres had required draining, flattening, terracing, planting and irrigating. From the gravelled parterre on the central axis, the Sun King looked down to the fountain of Apollo, the Sun God, which stood at the tip of the Grand Canal. Flanking this vista stood a number of
bosquets
, densely planted with espaliered trees – hazels and maples, sycamores, elms and hornbeams – that were accessible only by narrow paths, in the middle of which an explorer might find platoons of statuary, an Arc de Triomphe firing off bursts of water or, in the case of the Salle de Bal, an amphitheatre.
Once on the parterre, Jeanne gave d’Oliva a rose.
‘You will hand over the rose with the letter to the person who introduces himself to you, and the only thing you will say will be “You know what this means”,’ instructed Jeanne. ‘The queen will be there to see how your interview goes. She will speak to you later. She is there. She will be behind you. You yourself will get to speak to her very soon.’ D’Oliva’s skin itched with awe. ‘I don’t know how to address a queen,’ she said. ‘Just call her Your Majesty,’ replied Nicolas, as though she were about to visit the doctor or go to confession. Suddenly, a man loomed into view. ‘Ah, there you are,’ he said and, having confirmed their arrival, strode off into the black. Tacking south-west, the three figures descended to the Bosquet de Venus, named after the bronze cast of the Medici Venus which stood there (in theory the gardens were for the use of the royal family alone, but it was easy to obtain a key if you knew the right people). A snaggle of trails writhed around a clearing at its centre, where the royal family picnicked during the summer. Once they had settled d’Oliva in position, Jeanne and Nicolas darted back the way they had come. The darkness was absolute, the moon buried by clouds. A citric tang, drifting down from the Orangerie, played at the girl’s nostrils. D’Oliva heard only the hoots of the owls and the rapid tread of her heart, as her eyes, adjusting to the darkness, searched out the hidden queen.
As d’Oliva and Nicolas were driving to Versailles, another carriage had bounced in the same direction. It contained Jeanne and the baron de Planta, who had been summoned by Rohan to assist on a very delicate mission. For a number of weeks, Jeanne had tantalised Rohan with the prospect of a meeting with Marie Antoinette. ‘If you just happen to be in the park at Versailles,’ she told him, ‘perhaps some day you will be fortunate enough to meet the queen, so she can confirm herself the consolatory change in circumstances that
I foresee for you.’ Rohan spent a number of fruitless evenings mooning through the garden’s walks and poking around bowers.
But then, on 12 August, he received word through Jeanne that the queen was willing to see him. The tête-à-tête could not happen in the palace itself, as the queen was not yet ready to reveal their concord to the world, but something more discreet was on offer. So, trying to look unobtrusive in a plain, black soutane and a
drooping, broad-brimmed hat, the cardinal was to be found late that evening on the palace terrace, loitering nervily with de Planta by his side. Up scurried Jeanne, masked in a black domino and hyperventilating. ‘I have just left the queen,’ she said as she shuffled the cardinal towards the grove, ‘she is very upset. She will not be able to extend the interview as she wanted. Madame’ – Louis XVI’s sister – ‘and Madame d’Artois have suggested a walk with her. She will escape them and, despite the short window, she will give you unequivocal proofs of
her protection and benevolence.’ Jeanne took Rohan to the Bosquet de Venus and left him at the opening of the clearing.
He would have seen her first, the solitary, female figure whose dress glowed grey against the leaves. She would have heard his muffled tramp on the sward before she saw his outline. The regal features looked familiar to him, as did her clothing. She had no idea who he was. A drunken priest lost on the way home? An emissary from hell? He didn’t look much like a mighty lord. He kneels at her feet in submission. Dumb with fear of the unknown man and her exalted audience, she thrusts the rose towards him – as though a rat had materialised in her hands – unable even to look him in the eyes. She raises her fan to hide her face (he thinks she is flicking away a frond of hair). Words scratch around her dry throat. Perhaps she says, ‘You know what this means.’ But she’s not thinking clearly any more. He will later claim that she said ‘You may believe that
the past will be forgotten.’ But that might just have been what he wanted to hear.