How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (15 page)

A rustle of bushes. Footsteps. Voices. Jeanne hurtles into the grove, whispering urgently
‘quick, quick, go’ (maybe you’re allowed to drop ‘Your Majesty’ in an emergency). Madame Elisabeth and the comtesse d’Artois are close by. At least, someone is. Villette, for instance, stomping about, the foliage his castanets. Nicolas peels d’Oliva away, Jeanne returns Rohan to Planta on the terrace, the cardinal still muttering angrily about the curtailment. It was only on the way home that d’Oliva realised that she had forgotten to hand over the letter. Jeanne did not care. ‘The queen could not be more happy than with what
has just been done,’ she told her. The table was laid, wine poured, and Nicolas, Jeanne and d’Oliva drank and joked through the night.
In the morning, Jeanne showed d’Oliva a letter that she had received from Marie Antoinette: ‘I am very happy, my dear countess, with the person you procured for me. She played her role to perfection and I beg you to inform her that she is assured a satisfactory arrangement.’ Jeanne then ripped up the letter – it was ‘not the sort of thing to carry around with you’.

The purpose of the scene in the
bosquet
– to lock Rohan irredeemably in the prison-house of his fantasies – is easy to comprehend. But its interpretation by Rohan, its complex meaning for Jeanne, and its political undertones need careful teasing out. First, the name. As historians of the affair have noted, ‘Oliva’ is a
near anagram of ‘Valois’ (it is sometimes spelt ‘Olisva’, in which case it is a perfect one). But why did Jeanne choose a name that would make it harder to cut herself loose from her accomplice, if her fraud were later exposed? The answer may be found in the Janus-faced signification of the performance – for Jeanne it fulfilled not merely a pragmatic need, but also a psychological one. She did not merely regard herself as the queen’s equal, but her equivalent. The romance of her Valois ancestors led her to imagine that she could – perhaps ought to – be a queen herself. This was a fantasy of which, perhaps, she was only partly aware. But she contrived ways in which she could play the queen. In the letters to Rohan, Jeanne spoke in the queen’s voice. And in the Bosquet de Venus, on that night of doubles, Jeanne herself performed a double doubling, hovering above the genuflecting Rohan within the scrambled name she had accorded her lead actress; and secreted among the leaves, where d’Oliva believed the true queen watched on. Jeanne spectrally wore the crown, while travestying Marie Antoinette: if she and her cronies refused to admit a Valois into their society, Jeanne would show that the only difference between a prostitute and a queen was a clean dress and a dark night.

D’Oliva’s outfit had not been
unthinkingly thrown together. In 1783, to much consternation, the queen’s favoured artist, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, exhibited
La Reine en gaulle
at the Salon. The picture showed the queen wearing a straw hat with a wide, sinuous brim that sunk on the left-hand side under the weight of a blue-grey plume, ponderous as a rain cloud. Her uncombed hair hangs loose. She is dressed in a muslin
gaulle
, cinched at the waist with a ribbon
of gold silk, the only regal flash in the painting. In her left hand she holds a bouquet of roses, which she is tying together. There was not an architectonic hairpiece or a silken gown in sight –
La Reine en gaulle
is the closest extant representation of the milkmaid queen.

The queen had begun to wear
gaulles
in 1780. They were cool in summer – the trend had been inspired by the wives of colonists in the West Indies – and did not require rigging on a whalebone cupola. Visitors to the Salon, however, thought the get-up at best unbecoming to her station – one said she was
‘dressed like a serving-maid’; another that she was ‘wearing a chambermaid’s dust-cloth’ – and at worst indecently sluttish. Many believed she had been painted in her underwear. Others were more concerned about the geopolitical implications of the painting. Were the Habsburg rose and the muslin from the Austrian Netherlands signals that the queen inclined more towards Germany than France? On that summer night, Rohan did not simply see the queen. He saw a woman of loose clothes and looser morals, a woman with sufficient political independence to raise him up. When he encountered d’Oliva, he may also have wondered whether he would be rehabilitated with benefits. Why else did she press a rose in his hand? Why else did she arrange to meet him in the grove dedicated to the goddess of love?

The royal gardens were trysting places – there were plenty of nooks in which petticoats were shifted and giggles evaporated without detection. Police arrested numerous prostitutes trawling the grounds: in 1784 Gervais Mausard, one of the queen’s coachmen, was caught in a
‘most indecent position’ with Catherine Godroi. How the queen behaved there was the subject of fervid speculation. During her pregnancy in the summer of 1778, she found the daytime heat too oppressive for promenading, so would sit on the terrace during the evening. Dressed casually and with her face obscured by a slouchy hat, she strolled incognito – so she thought – among those gathered to take the evening air. Young gallants approached her, inured from reproach by her efforts at disguise. The gentle flirtation was innocent but the queen’s informal clothes and the whispered conversations gave a risqué impression. Her night walks, wrote Mercy-Argenteau to Maria Theresa, ‘provoked a
lot of criticism in Paris’.
Her behaviour was distorted into something more sordid by those who felt excluded – a private concert on the colonnade led to jokes about which kind of instruments were played. One pamphlet,
Le Lever de l’aurore
, twisted an innocent jaunt to see the sun rise above the gardens of Marly into an orgy in which the queen rolled around the turf, copulating indiscriminately with courtiers. By staging the reconciliation in the gardens of Versailles, Jeanne heightened the sexual piquancy of the occasion.
*

Rose Bertin, Marie Antoinette’s dressmaker, called the masquerade a ‘story that would barely be credible
in a bad novel’. It reminded her of La Fontaine’s fable, ‘Le Magnifique’, in which a young blade wishes to make love to the wife of a jealous miser, Aldobrandin (it was dramatised by Antoine Houdar de La Motte – no relation – in 1753, and turned into an opera by one of the queen’s favourite composers, André Grétry, twenty years later). Le Magnifique offers to sell his horse to Aldobrandin in exchange for fifteen minutes with his wife – which Aldobrandin will supervise at a distance, so the pair can be seen but not heard. Aldobrandin agrees but, cunningly, forbids his wife from uttering a word to Le Magnifique. Once Le Magnifique twigs that the woman will not reply, he takes up her part in the conversation, agreeing to meet himself later that evening at the bottom of the gardens. After Aldobrandin goes to the country to train the spirited horse, Le Magnifique and the wife spend an enjoyable few days in the garden lodge.

La Fontaine’s tale comprehends how the confidence bred by a lover’s past successes enables him to seize control of the dynamics of courtship; to narrate the story, not merely participate. Rohan was easily
beguiled by Jeanne because the assignation in the
bosquet
tallied with the fables he told himself: it confirmed his own seductive prowess, but it also cast him as the hero of a romantic adventure. What seems to us and seemed to his contemporaries incredible – that he believed he had met the queen under these circumstances – was swallowed smoothly in the thrill of self-dramatisation. The story being written for him meshed with the one he believed he was writing for himself, and the satisfactions that arose from it – the secret preparations, the surmounting of obstacles, the flirtation with danger – left him furiously dreaming the tale’s conclusion, not attending to the implausibilities and inconsistencies of the present. You are never more unwittingly in peril than when you think you’re the author of your own fate, but are in fact a character in someone else’s plot.

There are also parallels in two fine plays, one of which may well have provided Jeanne with her inspiration. That summer, the Comédie-Française was staging its most successful production ever.
The Marriage of Figaro
, the sequel to the popular
Barber of Seville
, had suffered a protracted gestation – nearly a decade had elapsed before it reached the public. Five censors quashed it, and Louis XVI, after reading the play himself, forbade its performance or publication, abhorring its broadsides against the justice system, the prisons, venality and the state-run press. ‘The man mocks everything that should be
respected in a government,’ said the king of its author – and sometime government agent and gunrunner – Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. Most troubling was the indictment of aristocratic decadence and abuse. Count Almaviva, Figaro’s employer, claims to have given up the feudal privilege of droit de seigneur, but does not relent from pursuing Suzanne, Figaro’s intended, and threatening to stop the couple’s marriage if she denies him a tumble. Despite this unflattering portrait, the play had a number of noble supporters, especially among the light-headed companions of Marie Antoinette – the Polignacs, the comte d’Artois, the comte de Vaudreuil – who thought that outrage at Beaumarchais’s wit was a terribly common reaction. Vaudreuil organised a private performance, and in 1784 a sixth censor finally approved the play and the king withdrew his objections.

In
The Marriage of Figaro
, Suzanne arranges to meet Almaviva at night in a grove of chestnut trees in the gardens of his castle. Her
mistress, the countess, tricks herself out like Suzanne and takes her place, in order to catch her husband misbehaving. But Almaviva is no Rohan. Where the cardinal is too eager to believe, he is tetchy with suspicions. Like a tyrant, he threatens his family and staff with exile and imprisonment, but much of the play’s comedy derives from the feisty disregard with which he is treated – doors are locked on him, servants talk back, orders are ignored.

Jeanne may have found in
Figaro
a moral justification for her actions, albeit in a roundabout way. While Figaro arrives first at the scheme of replacing Suzanne with a double, it is the countess who later suggests to Suzanne, without Figaro’s knowledge, that she herself plays the role. By aligning herself with the irrepressible and inventive Figaro – who, in his famous soliloquy, enumerates the Establishment’s successes in suppressing his endeavours – Jeanne became the scourge of the order that had refused to embrace her, deriding its foibles and its pretensions to authority. But she also, perhaps, saw her scheme as a last resort. Just as the countess used deception to recall her husband to the noble values he had cast aside, Jeanne’s staging brought to a head a process in which, at least in the theatre of Rohan’s mind, she had re-established her family in its rightful position – among royalty.
The Marriage of Figaro
, which ends indulgently – as comedies do – with the characters forgiving each other, reconciled the conflicting impulses which were the inheritance of Jeanne’s generation: a thoroughly modern sense of aspiration that wished to break free from the restraining privileges of the aristocracy; and a nostalgia for a time where true nobility would be immediately recognised through its innate virtues.

A young lady cut adrift from her family, a great woman who secludes herself, an official who believes that his mistress is in love with him, dressing up, forged letters and trickery in a garden – all these are found in Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
too. The play was not well known in eighteenth-century France. It seems there was no professional production before the Revolution – its tonal ambiguity, its swerving from tavern talk to tenderness to a kind of sadism make it a prime example of the lack of taste for which detractors like Voltaire condemned Shakespeare. Pierre-Antoine de La Place’s
Le Theatre Anglois
, an eight-volume work published between 1745 and 1748, contains
a brief precis that, with a concern for purity of language and plot, omits any reference to any of the comic characters: Malvolio, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Feste and Maria. The play is relegated to the nineteenth volume of the first ever translation into French – by Pierre Le Tourneur – of the complete plays of Shakespeare. A ‘Monsieur Lamotte’ is listed among the subscribers who funded the project, though the name is a common one. The cardinal, however, was a subscriber – he is listed as the Prince de Rohan – so it is possible that Jeanne, during a visit to the Hôtel de Rohan-Strasbourg, may have glanced through the translation, which appeared in 1783 as
La Soirée des rois
, the year before she began her machinations.

One aspect of the affinity appears to stretch the bounds of coincidence. ‘D’Oliva’ is not only a shuffling of ‘Valoi’: it is also an exact anagram of Viola, the heroine of
Twelfth Night
, and is contained within the names of Olivia and Malvolio. Each of these characters is the fictional counterpart of the players in Jeanne’s drama: Viola transforms herself into Cesario by disguising herself as a boy, just as Nicole le Guay becomes the queen with a change of clothes; Olivia, the reclusive countess, mirrors Marie Antoinette, whose aloofness enables Jeanne’s plan to succeed; and Malvolio, Olivia’s steward who, finding a letter planted in her garden, convinces himself that the woman he serves loves him, shadows Rohan. Anagrams are a particularly appropriate wormhole into Shakespeare’s play.
The letter Malvolio finds is addressed to ‘M.O.A.I’. He worries that the order differs from his own name, but concludes that ‘to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for every one of these letters are in my name’. ‘If this falls into thy hand, revolve,’ the letter continues. Annotators gloss ‘revolve’ as ‘consider’ or ‘contemplate’ (Le Tourneur translates it as ‘médite-la’). But it is also an instruction to rearrange the letters and to revolutionise his comportment, to smear a rictus across his face in place of his stern demeanour, and prance about ‘in yellow stockings, and cross-gartered’. ‘Revolution’ was still, in 1784, an innocent word but, by the end of the century, a thread would be traced from that night in the garden to the guillotine. We will never know if Jeanne read
Twelfth Night
and cast the cardinal as Malvolio; Rohan should have. Had he done so,
he would have seen that Malvolio, having obeyed the letter’s instructions, is deemed mad by his mistress, thrust into ‘a dark room and bound’, and leaves the stage swearing his revenge ‘on the whole pack of you’.