How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (25 page)

The third member of the commission was the unaffiliated maréchal de Castries, a veteran of the Seven Years War, who had commanded the garrison in Lunéville where Nicolas de La Motte had enlisted.
From the outset, the inquiry was prejudiced by the king’s conviction that there
‘is excessive proof that he [Rohan] used the name of the queen in forged signatures to obtain from a jeweller diamonds worth 1.6 million livres’. The ministers’ task was limited to discovering ‘if there are not other people mixed up in this crime’. Louis himself was driven more by grief than revenge. ‘It is the saddest and most horrible affair that I have yet seen,’ he wrote to Vergennes: sadness at the pain caused to the queen; horror at the grand almoner’s betrayal, but also in the burgeoning awareness that the cardinal’s slip may have splashed acid over his wife’s reputation.

Rohan spent all of 16 August instructing his family about his predicament, the men of the king’s
garde du corps
clinging to his walls like stuccoed columns. He appeared at a window, playing with his monkey, to reassure the world he was
still cheerful. At eleven o’clock, he retired to bed. Scarcely had he fallen asleep than he was roused by d’Agoult. Breteuil had personally delivered a
lettre de cachet
ordering his immediate transfer to the Bastille.

Lettres de cachets
were more than simply arrest warrants. They were issued in the name of the king and could command the imprisonment or exile of the recipient for an indefinite amount of time. Regarded as arbitrary in their employment, and immune to appeal, they were the clearest exemplar of absolute rule’s tendency to despotism, though their prevalence was exaggerated by their detractors. Most, in fact, were issued at the request of families to restrain delinquent relatives. Even though the use of
lettres de cachets
had been restricted in Louis XVI’s reign, the public’s detestation of them was lit by a number of excoriating indictments. The future Jacobin Billaud-Varenne, in his catalogue of ministerial atrocities published in 1789, called the
lettre de cachet
‘the Arm of Despotism’ at the service of ‘the
horrors of tyranny’; the comte de Mirabeau’s
Des lettres de cachets et des prisons d’état
, written after he had been shut up in the dungeons of Vincennes, argued that only a transformation in government – ‘a body of representatives freely elected from the
greatest part of the nation’ – could preserve liberty from such abuses. Rohan had expected, at worst, to be banished to his diocese, not boarded up like an enemy of the state. He gathered a few possessions and stepped into the carriage of the marquis de Launay, governor of the prison.

The Bastille is remembered as the architectural embodiment of all that the Revolution upended – a bleacher of beards, a scarifier of brows, a candlesnuffer of men’s lives; a medieval edifice that seemed to draw the light out from the capital
of the Enlightenment. It had been built during the Hundred Years War as a fortress to defend Paris from the English – its blackened walls designed to repel invaders, not deter escapees – and had welcomed nobles and prelates many times before, along with the overweeningly ambitious, intriguers against the kingdom, sexual and religious deviants, as well as dozens of writers whose pens had scribbled too freely. The dank subterranean
cachots
, in which it was easy to forget a man, had been withdrawn from active service, though the
calottes
in the attic were still in use, leaking with rain, blasted by the heat.

In general, however, the detainees, the vast majority of whom were held in the eight octagonal towers that framed the castle, lived in circumstances which, while not plush, were far superior to the rest of Paris’s prisons. The cells were sprucely furnished – a bed hung with green baize curtains, a fireplace or stove, a table, a smattering of chairs. Some had mattresses for valets, latrines and armchairs, and residents were allowed to accessorise their rooms. The marquis de Sade installed a wardrobe for his numerous outfits, tapestries and paintings, and 133 books. Prisoners could read books from the lending library or play billiards. Some were allowed visitors (though, most frequently, it was rats who breezed through), consultations with doctors, and took constitutionals on the battlements and the inner courtyard. For many years, none of the doors had bolts. A staff of 110, including a doctor, an apothecary, a midwife and a chaplain, served, on average, fewer than 40
bastillards
.

Bread, cheese, wine and some kind of potage formed the basic ration, though the higher class of prisoner was fed more handsomely. Marmontel remembered ‘an excellent soup, a succulent side of beef, a thigh of boiled chicken oozing with grease, a little dish of fried, marinaded artichokes or of spinach, really fine Cressane pears, fresh grapes, a bottle of old Burgandy and the
best Moka coffee’. The luckiest were permitted luxuries: tobacco, mussels and gooseberry jam.

The Bastille’s dread reputation was due, above all, to the work of Simon Linguet. After two years inside, Linguet wrote his
Memoirs
of the Bastille
, a work made popular by its account of his eye-watering deprivations. The torments were perennial: lice, loneliness, the fear of poison. Linguet was Jonah inside the whale, a coffined man counting down his breaths. He was most troubled by the overwhelming sense of being engulfed – the ‘empty existence
more cruel than death’ – and the slow obliteration of personality that comes with the severing of companionship. The Bastille deprived inmates not just of their liberty, but their humanity; the state did not protect its children, it consumed them. Linguet’s account may have been exaggerated, but its Gothic horrors appealed to the public’s cultural tastes. In the absence of countervailing narratives – ex-prisoners who had enjoyed superior treatment were not inclined to praise the amenities – the Bastille became the kingdom’s heart of darkness.

Rohan was welcomed like an honoured guest. The rooms of the lieutenant-governor were given over to him, and he was waited on by three valets and permitted to receive visitors. Every evening he dined at the governor’s table. On 17 August, he returned to his
hôtel
under escort to witness the unsealing of his papers. Georgel had given them a thorough gutting. Breteuil seethed; Vergennes and Castries, who took no pleasure in the disgrace of a fellow nobleman, were visibly delighted. Georgel gleefully told Breteuil, when questioned about the empty files, ‘I am only fulfilling my duty, as you do to the king, when His Majesty gives
you an order.’ Then on to Versailles, Rohan chirruping all the way that he had been tricked and deserved only a fool’s cap. Again, nothing pertinent was found.

On 20 August Rohan requested a meeting with Vergennes and Castries, hoping to parlay their personal sympathy into an intervention with Louis on his behalf. His opening gambit was gauchely direct: ‘Should I treat you as the king’s men or
as friends?’ he asked, instantaneously raising Castries’s hackles.

‘We are acting as ministers,’ replied the navy minister. ‘Otherwise we would be unable to give the king advice.’

‘You’re right,’ said Rohan, ‘I was about to act wrongly. But what do you suggest I say to you? And what is my duty if my admission could compromise someone?’

‘I would speak the truth. We’re going to record what you say in writing. It will serve as the basis for the investigation of this affair.’

’Alas,’ sighed Rohan, ‘I will tell you everything.’

Once the cardinal had finished expanding on the sketchy chronology he had presented to the king, Castries asked if there was ‘any receipt, any letter, that might support what you say’.

‘No, I have burnt everything,’ said Rohan, as though expecting a round of applause for his nifty thinking.

‘But what if she denies everything you claim?’ asked Castries.

‘She will not dare when we are brought together. But you will soon be able to learn what she has to say for I gather that she has been arrested and will be brought here this evening,’ said Rohan, eager to show that imprisonment had not left him any worse informed. ‘Is this true?’

The ministers pleaded ignorance, though Jeanne was already in the Bastille, having arrived at four o’clock that morning.

*
The only account of what Jeanne did on the night she heard of the cardinal’s arrest is found in Beugnot’s memoirs, which are not entirely reliable. He also claimed that there were letters in Jeanne’s chest from the Boehmers, setting out the payment dates for the necklace, though Rohan was the only person who retained such documents. Nonetheless, we do know that all Jeanne’s correspondence was destroyed and this is the likeliest occasion for it.

14

Hotel Bastille

J
EANNE HAD BEEN
cordially welcomed in the early hours of 20 August by de Launay in his dressing gown, who promised
‘we will take great care of you’. Though assured an airy cell, the one she was led to was ‘wretched’. A complaint resulted in the delivery of ‘an excellent feather-bed with fine sheets and curtains’. The rest of the room was spartan: ‘bare walls, no cabinet . . . nothing but a stove and a small chimney’. Like so many prisoners through the years, her immediate instinct was to try to make contact with whoever was roomed close by. ‘I opened the window, to see if I could discover anybody or make myself sufficiently conspicuous for anybody to see me. I climbed up to the highest part of the window, holding my face close to the bars, but could discover nothing. As for the people, it was impossible to distinguish them.’

Soon she had company: later that morning, de Crosne, dressed austerely in flowing black robes, and another senior police officer, Pierre Chénon, arrived.
The pair interrogated Jeanne for hours; she neatly parried their lines of questioning. Jeanne admitted introducing Rohan to the jewellers but denied taking any role in the necklace’s sale. She had heard nothing more of it until July when an agitated Rohan confided that he believed he had been tricked by the comtesse de Cagliostro, who had become such ‘an intimate friend of the queen, that they saw each other often together in private and conducted a correspondence’. ‘I’ll pay these unfortunates [the jewellers],’ Rohan had said. ‘What I’m utterly fearful of is the case
reaching the courts.’

Rohan’s troubles, Jeanne suggested, stemmed from his infatuation with Cagliostro, whom he revered as a
‘great man’, even a ‘god’. Cagliostro conducted a seance with a small child – Jeanne did not mention that it had been her niece – where ‘Rohan was on his
knees, he was in ecstasy, he looked on tenderly, cried, raised his hands to the skies and lost his temper with me for not displaying the admiration that I ought to have done’. When questioned about an inventory of diamonds and receipts for their sale found among her papers, Jeanne replied that she and Nicolas had been given the gems by Rohan to sell on his behalf.

Jeanne’s approach in her initial interrogations would remain consistent throughout the trial: admitting facts which could be independently verified; reverting blame onto the Cagliostros, who were suspiciously foreign and inexplicably wealthy; and arguing that her actions were not those of a rational criminal. Had she wanted to steal the necklace she would not have simulated a friendship with the queen that would surely have been exposed. Had she stolen it, why did she retire to Bar – a move intended to staunch her husband’s profligacy, she claimed – rather than flee the country?

On the basis of Jeanne’s testimony, the Cagliostros were immediately arrested. The prospect of a quick release dwindled when the police lifted the seals on the comtesse de Cagliostro’s effects and discovered a number of diamonds and ‘several papers that
appeared suspect’. Cagliostro tried to ingratiate himself with his interrogators: he was a true Catholic, he said, who ‘only wants to do good
through medicine’, though his claims to be an ordinary citizen were rather undermined by his insistence that he had been raised in Egypt until the
age of eighteen.

Though the records of the ministerial investigation only partially survive, Jeanne’s story emerged as the stronger one, especially as other suspects-cum-witnesses were interrogated. Nicolas’s sister, Madame de La Tour, told the police that the La Mottes were not rich and had a measly jewellery collection. The baron de Planta mentioned the meeting with the queen in the gardens of Versailles, but his memory was too porous to supply any details. Rohan refused outright to be questioned by de Crosne, due to the latter’s inferior rank. The cardinal nourished his faith that an Establishment fudge would see him released soon, without even having to relinquish the grand almonership – but his unwillingness to comply merely allowed Jeanne’s testimony to pass unchallenged.

Marie Antoinette had been heartened by the king’s protectiveness
during the confrontation with Rohan. ‘I am extremely moved by the reason and firmness that the king displayed in that difficult encounter,’ she wrote to her brother. ‘I hope that this affair will be finished soon; but I don’t yet know if it will be sent to the
parlement
or if the guilty person and his or her family will throw themselves at the mercy of the king. In any case, I want all the details of this horrible event to be completely cleared up in the
eyes of everyone.’

The queen referred to the ‘event’ in the most abstract of terms, in part to disinfect this disgusting intrusion into her life; but also because the affair itself was poorly understood – even she, as well briefed as anyone, incorrectly reported that ‘the [forged] signature is by the aforementioned Valois de la Mothe. They have compared the letters, which are certainly
in her hand.’ A vindication was required precisely because the lack of established facts encouraged the public, many of whom were ill-disposed to the queen, to draw conclusions based on their prejudices.