Read How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair Online
Authors: Jonathan Beckman
Cagliostro laid an unsheathed sword across the table and intoned to the young medium: ‘Recommend yourself to God and to your innocence. Put yourself behind this screen, close your eyes, and wish for the thing you want to see. If you are innocent you will see what you want to see. But if you are not innocent
you will see nothing.’ He made a number of curious hand movements, as though
conducting an orchestra, and plunged into an invocation of the archangels Raphael and Michael, imploring them to ‘drive out
any demons’ who were lurking in the victim.
‘Stamp on the ground with your
innocent
foot, and tell me if you see anything,’ said Cagliostro.
Marie saw nothing.
‘Stamp again, stamp, stamp,’ insisted Cagliostro. ‘Don’t you see a woman, dressed in white, lying on her back. She’s blonde and has a large stomach.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the girl amenably.
‘Who is it? Don’t you see the queen? Do you recognise her?’
Marie may have been innocent but she was not an idiot. ‘Yes, sir,’ she said, ‘it is the queen.’
Cagliostro asked Marie to ask the queen’s phantasm if her labour would run smoothly. The well-informed apparition said that it would.
‘Say it again: in the name of the Great Copt, I order you to make me see all that I want,’ said Cagliostro, roaring like a bull. ‘Stamp. What do you see, darling? Don’t you see an angel on your right who is coming to hug you? Don’t you see it?’
Marie, worried that this was a test of her chastity, denied being groped by an angel. Cagliostro again called upon the higher powers.
‘Do you see them now?’ Cagliostro asked.
Marie realised that an angelic embrace was a vital element to the proceedings.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Kiss it hard.’
The soft squelch of puckering lips concluded the ceremony. Rohan had been praying fervently throughout, and everyone was satisfied apart from Marie. Cagliostro told her she would dream of the visions in the vase; when she later mentioned that she had not, he said this was absolute proof that she was not a virgin.
*
As the historian David Wootton has noted, this meant that only since 1950 did medicine ‘acquire a genuine capacity
to extend life’.
O
N
8 F
EBRUARY
1785 – Shrove Tuesday – Jacques-Christophe Paris, a silversmith on the Place Dauphine, was visited by a gentleman who pointedly carried with him a book about valuing diamonds. The man produced a pouch containing sixty-four diamonds and demanded 50,000 livres. Too expensive, Paris said, and refused to buy them.
On the following day, a smartly dressed figure tried to sell three lots of diamonds for 20,000 livres to Israel Vidal-Lainé, a Jewish broker on the rue Neuve-Saint-Eustache.
‘What is your name?’ asked Vidal-Lainé.
‘Villette – I am a soldier,’ said Villette, with a redundancy of information that the nervous are prone to supply.
‘And where do you live?’
‘That’s none of your business.’
Vidal-Lainé refused to negotiate further unless a reputable person vouched for the customer. He never saw him again.
Other merchants approached the authorities. On 12 February, Inspector Jean-François de Bruginères of the Paris Police was told by a jeweller that someone called Rétaux de Villette had offered him diamonds at irrationally low prices and was rumoured to be preparing to travel to Holland, intent on selling them there. Bruginères tracked down Villette to his apartment on the rue Saint-Louis and asked him to explain himself. At first Villette was ‘reticent’.
‘If you’re not doing anything dubious, you can tell me exactly what’s going on,’ said Bruginères. ‘But if you don’t fancy speaking, I could alway bring you before a judge.’
Villette admitted he had been given diamonds to sell by ‘a relative
of the queen, the comtesse de Valois de La Motte’, but, since he had been unable to strike a reasonable bargain, he had returned them. He had only been reluctant to mention this to the police officer because the comtesse had explicitly requested that she not be named. Bruginères checked if there had been any reports of stolen diamonds – as there were none, he closed the case.
It is indicative of Jeanne’s naivety that she believed she could sell such large quantities of diamonds in Paris without rousing suspicion. The La Mottes were actually more successful than Villette’s gauche approaches suggest:
70,000 livres-worth were exchanged for cash, and more for clocks and jewellery. Pierre-Auguste Regnier, the couple’s regular jeweller, was commissioned to make a sweet box with a portrait of the queen embedded in the lid, girdled with forty-nine brilliants. But it is impossible to eat bracelets or live inside a bonbonnière. The La Mottes ran through money like blight, and Villette’s brush with the law had demonstrated that they needed to sell the remainder of the stones outside the capital. Jeanne, with some trepidation, turned to her husband.
In the middle of April, Nicolas rode north, accompanied by Laisus, his valet, and the Chevalier O’Neil, a captain in the Irish Brigade, who had been cajoled by Nicolas into accompanying him to London on what, he had been told, was a business trip. Nicolas took with him a pouch full of diamonds, a credit note for
6,000 livres and all his brusque charm.
London, along with Amsterdam, was the major centre of the gem trade in northern Europe. Its jewellery shops, according to one foreign visitor, made
‘a most brilliant and agreeable shew . . . which is productive of an air of wealth and elegance that we do not see in any other city’. Nicolas arrived in London on 17 April and sought recommendations of trustworthy dealers. He was directed towards Nathaniel Jefferys, jeweller to the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, and William Gray, who worked out of New Bond Street.
Nicolas went first to Jefferys but considered his offer for eighteen diamonds insufficiently generous. A few days later, Jefferys asked the Runners at Bow Street if there was news of a theft in Paris. He did not believe that Nicolas could have acquired his jewels through legal
means, his suspicions having been aroused by the Frenchman’s decision to sell the diamonds in London, where, because of the large quantity in circulation, prices were considerably cheaper than in Paris. The police had nothing to report, but Jefferys still refused to do business with Nicolas.
Meanwhile Nicolas had opened negotiations with Gray, telling him the jewels originated from a stomacher he had inherited from his mother. After protracted bargaining, Nicolas sold most of his hoard for 240,000 livres, significantly less than the diamonds’ nominal value of 400,000 livres – partly because, in their haste to remove the diamonds from their settings, the La Mottes had scratched them; partly because of Nicolas’s eagerness to conclude a deal; and partly because of the poor exchange rate. Of the total, 130,000 livres-worth were paid in silver coin, some with bankers’ drafts and the rest in kind. So greedily did Nicolas seize upon Gray’s merchandise that he ended up paying back the jeweller over £5,000: his trove included diamond medallions, a diamond brooch in the shape of a star, a diamond rose, diamond earrings, a diamond ring, a pearl bow, a pearl necklace, over £1,800-worth of loose pearls, a gold watch, a watch chain, two steel epées, two toothpick boxes, a pair of jewellery balances, a carving knife, a strong box, four razors, two thousand needles, a silk briefcase, a snuff box and some asparagus tongs.
Early in May, O’Neil was summoned to his regiment. Before he left, he introduced Nicolas to Barthélemy Macdermott, a 55-year-old Capuchin friar, who offered to act as an interpreter in O’Neil’s absence. Previously Macdermott had served as chaplain to the French ambassador; he was also a spy in the pay of at least
two French ministers. Macdermott was worldly and politic, a fixer whose first piece of advice to his new friend was how best to smuggle the pearls past English customs.
Macdermott had lived in a friary not far from Bar-sur-Aube and knew Nicolas’s family. As they grew closer, Nicolas confided in him the reason he had so many diamonds. He told the familiar story of Jeanne’s initiation into the queen’s circle: his wife, Nicolas said, had been unwilling to take advantage of the queen’s goodwill; he had no such qualms. At the time they could not even afford bread, so he had insisted that Jeanne appeal to Marie Antoinette for support
(there is something pitiful in Nicolas’s insistence that he was the decisive spirit, a symptom of the redundancy he must have felt in Paris as Jeanne and Villette conspired without him). The queen foisted upon them unwanted necklaces and bracelets. He had come to England to sell them, even though he would receive a lower price, so that those who had originally bought the jewellery for Marie Antoinette would not be put out by happening upon their gift in a Paris showroom.
Towards the end of May, Nicolas received a letter from Jeanne telling him she was in urgent need of money. He left sixty diamonds with Gray to set into a necklace and a pair of earrings – Macdermott was entrusted with delivering the pieces when they had been completed. Nicolas hurried back to Paris, arriving on 2 June, and immediately cashed the bankers’ drafts and sold the pearls. No money was saved, invested or even guarded with particular care –
one of Jeanne’s friends saw 40,000 livres in notes simply lying around, and Jeanne spent 100,000 livres on a
jewellery case alone.
Tapestries, marble, crystal and silk replaced the worsted upholstery, the tin candlesticks, the stained and tatty dresses. Sometimes the La Mottes paid for items with the remaining diamonds – a mechanical bird was exchanged for a single, plump sparkler. In the twelve months that followed d’Oliva’s performance at Versailles, the La Mottes spent something in the order of 400,000 livres, more than most of the country’s leading nobles (the Prince de Robecq, who was renowned for the state in which he lived, spent less than
200,000 livres each year). To explain their upswell in fortune, the La Mottes gave out that Nicolas had won big at the races. They were generous enough to dissuade their neighbours from probing too deeply. Every neighbour, that is, except Rohan: he still sent his servants to Jeanne with small gifts of money; when he visited, he was received in a scratchily furnished room, its walls
dour and peeling.
Managing Rohan’s hopes of advancement was proving increasingly fraught. The cardinal’s presence, in Paris and Versailles, disquieted Jeanne: he repeatedly professed his desire to speak to the queen. She also worried that Nicolas’s extended absence would arouse suspicions. But in order to convince Rohan to depart, she needed to dangle before him the promise of imminent reward. On 12 May, Jeanne
delivered a letter from the queen which dispatched Rohan to Saverne. The letter explained that ‘your absence will be necessary to decide on the measures which I believe have to be taken, in order that you are promoted to a
position you deserve’. At the end of May Jeanne travelled to Saverne disguised
as a man (not to deceive anyone in particular, but simply to impress the need for secrecy). Nicolas’s return was imminent – his absence no longer needed masking – and Jeanne knew that unless she maintained the initiative in managing Rohan’s expectations, the cardinal might strike out rashly by himself. She told Rohan to return to the capital – the queen would receive him soon after.
Rohan arrived in Paris on 7 June but no meeting was scheduled, and his confidence in Jeanne began to fray. He harped on the queen’s unwillingness to wear the necklace. Its conspicuous absence chilled him, and he felt the pulse of destiny weakening. These worries were bound to have arisen ever since Rohan handed over the necklace, but Jeanne saw no need to plan ahead. Her improvisation was bold, if risky. The queen, she told Rohan, believed that the necklace was too expensive and was now uncertain whether she would keep it: she wanted either the price reduced or an independent estimate made, as she had originally requested. If the jewellers had opted for the restitution of the necklace, Jeanne’s story would have rapidly unravelled. But Jeanne, having heard Boehmer’s plaintive confession of the despair, believed they would concede the demands.
On 10 July, Rohan asked the Boehmers to reduce the price of the necklace by 200,000 livres, to 1.4 million. This placed the jewellers in a painful position. They had already given the queen a discount and did not wish to absorb any further losses; but they abhorred the thought of being lumbered again with an object that had nestled among their stock like a squid, secreting its poison. They were terrified, too, of angering the queen and losing any future business.
They had passed up the opportunity to send the necklace to the Spanish Court, the Boehmers told Rohan, where it had been greatly in demand (a brass-necked exaggeration). More pressingly, they had reached accommodations with their creditors based on the agreed timetable of payments. Rohan returned with a compromise: the
overall price would still fall to 1.4 million livres, but the first instalment, due on 1 August, would be 700,000 livres, rather than 400,000 livres. The jewellers grudgingly agreed.
A day or two later, Rohan summoned the Boehmers and asked them again whether they had thanked the queen yet for deigning to buy the necklace. They mumbled something about not yet having found the right occasion (Boehmer had actually spurned a number of opportunities). Rohan seethed at their evasiveness and demanded that they immediately set down their appreciation for the queen’s generous request for a discount. Bassenge retorted that a letter would have more weight coming from the cardinal.
‘As my letters pass through the hands of a third party,’ said Rohan, ‘it would be better if you yourselves write it and take it to the queen. Indeed, as I’m worried that you’ll delay again,
write it now.’