How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (26 page)

On 25 August, Louis summoned his council, in the presence of his wife, to discuss the cardinal’s fate. Marie Antoinette spoke first.
‘I am accused; I am talked about in public as having received a necklace and not having paid for it. I want to know the truth about an incident in which someone dared to make free with my name. The relatives of the cardinal wish that he should be dealt with according to normal legal procedures. He appears to feel the same way. I want the affair to be sent [to the courts].’

Awkward silence. A shuffling of papers. Bowed eyes endlessly fascinated with toecaps. Vergennes, Miromesnil and Castries, all experienced ministers, knew that a lengthy trial could have uncontrollable repercussions – the queen’s reputation, far from being repaired, might be singed further. Finally Castries spoke: ‘Since the investigation has been conducted so far down an extrajudicial route, it appears that we could still pursue it in the same way and arrange a confrontation [between those arrested], in order to throw the necessary light on things.
*
I am sure . . . that the relatives, though not afraid of the courts, have not yet demanded [a trial].’

Miromesnil, on the other hand, felt Rohan had already been
handled too brutally: ‘These are shameful measures to take with a cardinal, and it would go too far to arrange a confrontation in order to establish what happened.’

‘Why?’ responded Castries. ‘There have already been a number of confrontations.
*
It is against my own interest to make this suggestion, for the moment that the affair is taken up by the court, we will have nothing more to do with it. But I believe that the most moderate step is the one that should be preferred.’

Vergennes, the king’s most trusted advisor, kept his counsel, careful not to say anything that might anger the queen – Marie Antoinette detested his influence over her husband – or betray the slightest favouritism towards Rohan.

‘Well then,’ said the queen, ‘in my opinion a choice should be given to the cardinal. He should assemble all his family, he should discuss the matter, and he should choose whether to continue the case extrajudicially or through the courts. He should present his request, which should be endorsed by his family, to the king in writing, and the investigation should be conducted quickly for I have been compromised.’ The proposal seemed reasonable, but had in fact been weighted to ensure the outcome she desired: Marie Antoinette calculated that Rohan would rather risk a trial than leave his freedom to her and Louis’s discretion.

The triumvirate returned to the Bastille and told the cardinal that Jeanne de La Motte had denied ever receiving a necklace or speaking of a friendship with the queen.

‘Oh my God,’ he cried. ‘If I could be granted a confrontation I am sure that I could
confound that woman.’

This was refused: Rohan was given three days to choose whether to be tried or to appeal to the king’s magnanimity. To Georgel, Rohan fumed at being cut adrift by Jeanne: ‘This is an infernal wickedness! How does she have temerity to deny the truths for which her conscience ought to
rebuke her?’ Then his anger slackened and he wished for death rather than a life of pity and ridicule.

In the quiet of his cell, as he rolled his memories around his mind to examine their undercarriages, Rohan began to accept that he had
been deceived by Jeanne. He was still unsure whether she had acted on her own initiative or at the behest of his enemies. One enormous uncertainty complicated his decision-making – had Jeanne preserved the letters he had written to Marie Antoinette? If they were produced during a trial, because of the indiscretions contained within them, his punishment might not merely be disgrace but execution.

Rohan had appointed a formidable team of lawyers, headed by the pre-eminent barrister of the age, Guy-Jean-Baptiste Target. Target was an advocate of firm liberal credentials: he had challenged
lettres de cachet
, campaigned for religious toleration and led the opposition to governmental attempts at limiting the courts’ authority. Like Rohan, he was a member of the Académie Française and his prose style was admired for its fluency, if not for its concision. The involvement of Target inevitably led to the politicising of the trial, and the perception that this was yet another intervention by the lawyer against the excesses of absolute monarchy.

Both of the choices presented by the ministers bristled with dangers. Placing himself at the king’s mercy was, Rohan felt, a tacit admission of guilt. As the king was the source of all justice in the realm he could, theoretically, judge any matter himself. Previous monarchs had; some sent men to their deaths. Alternatively the king could convoke a special tribunal, hand-selecting the judges with only one verdict in mind. There was no guarantee that Louis, inflamed by the vengeful baying of his wife and Breteuil, would act mercifully or even justly. Many royal adversaries had pickled indefinitely in the Bastille. But the courts appeared no friendlier, as Rohan had been involved in a long-simmering dispute with the
parlement
of Paris regarding his autocratic administration of the Quinze-Vingts, a hospital for the blind.

Two of the lawyers, Tronchet and Collet, argued against the judicial route. The shame of an adverse verdict would cling longer than shame of seeking clemency; and the king would surely stack the
parlement
against him. Rohan’s relations tearfully begged him to follow the advice of the two lawyers. But Target, while not recommending a specific course, presented a more balanced choice: ‘If the means of showing your innocence can be found, the
parlement
is preferable, even if it possibly means being subjected to the lengthy humiliations of a criminal investigation. If measures taken by your
enemies will prevent you from making your defence, you must choose the smallest of two evils – in that case it’s worth placing yourself at the
mercy of the king.’

Rohan had no evidence in his possession capable of convincing a court of his innocence: there were no independent witnesses to corroborate his case; no proof of who wrote the forged signature; no inkling of whom he had knelt before in the gardens of Versailles. Nonetheless, in the teeth of his family’s misgivings, he chose a court trial.

Rohan composed a brief letter to the king, which angled for indulgence while refusing to deliver himself up to Louis without the near-certainty of merciful treatment:

Sire, I was hoping by means of a confrontation [with Jeanne] to obtain the proofs that would have convinced Your Majesty of the truth about the fraud of which I have been the pawn, and in such a case I would have aspired only to your justice and your goodwill as judges. As the refusal of a confrontation deprives me of this hope, I accept, with the most respectful gratitude, the permission that Your Majesty grants me to prove my innocence by judicial means and, in consequence, I beg Your Majesty to give the necessary orders that my affair should be sent and allocated to the entire body of the
parlement
of Paris.

However, if I could hope that the explanations that have been given, and which I am unaware of, might have led Your Majesty to judge that I am guilty only of having been tricked, I would then dare to beg you, Sire, to give judgement according to your
justice and goodwill.

The decision surprised the king. He had assumed that Rohan wanted to avoid a scandal, and had only suggested a trial to placate his wife. Marie Antoinette bullishly told her brother that Rohan would regret his decision: she remained convinced he was a ‘vile and clumsy forger’ who, ‘pressed by a need for money . . . believed himself able to pay the jewellers at the time indicated without anything
being discovered’. More perspicacious thinkers worried about the unpleasantness which might condense around the case. As Georgel wrote, ‘it was to strip himself [Louis] of sovereign power to fight in the judicial arena against
one of his subjects’. The king could not be both the source and final arbiter of the law, and a partisan in his wife’s defence. Doubt would be cast over the fairness of the trial, if he who held the scales of justice also stood in one of its pans. The king’s stature would be
diminished by his embroilment in a public quarrel over the queen’s dignity. And Louis had also submitted not just his wife but himself, his reign and the monarchy to another fickle judge, one swayed more by well-wrought tales than facts, whose sympathies, like spring weather, shifted unpredictably – public opinion.

Of more immediate concern to Louis was the allegiance of the
parlement
of Paris itself. It was not a parliament in the English sense, but a court. Similar provincial ones existed across the country, though the jurisdiction of Paris, covering about a third of the country, was the largest, and the capital’s
parlement
heard the nation’s most serious cases. It also played an important constitutional role, though its exact significance was a matter of dispute between the court and the crown. Royal edicts needed to be registered there. Magistrates, if they objected, could issue a remonstrance. There were few practical consequences, since the king, in the ceremony known as the
lit de justice
, was able, through his very presence, to silence objectors and enforce his legislation. But the
parlement
nonetheless styled itself as the custodian of France’s ancient constitution, the representative of the French people and guardian of their liberty against despotic incursions.

The
parlement
of Paris had served as a safe haven and breeding ground for opposition for two hundred years. The leaders of the Fronde, the rebellion against Louis XIV, emerged from it. In the eighteenth century, it had protected Jansenists, the sect of austere Augustanians suspected of being crypto-Protestant; and had led the campaign against the unfair taxation demanded by bellicose ministries. The
parlement
’s disputatiousness led to muscular restatements by the crown of absolutist ideology, and in 1771 Chancellor Maupeou lunged to assert the king’s supremacy: he accused the
parlementaires
of treason, exiled them, confiscated their offices and appointed compliant judges in their place. Polemicists castigated Maupeou’s coup as a rent in the very fabric of the nation, and the ensuing debate to define despotism would rumble through to the Revolution.

The banished
parlements
were only reinstated when Louis XVI ascended the throne and sacked Maupeou. Maurepas, the new chief minister, cultivated a pro-government faction in the
parlement
, the
parti ministériel.
Yet even loyalists among the magistrates had mixed feelings
towards the crown, and guarded against moves to extend its power. After Maurepas’s death the crown’s leash on the
parti
had slackened. By the autumn of 1785 the first president of the court, Etienne François d’Aligre, could not bring himself to exchange a polite word with Miromesnil, the minister responsible for justice – and Miromesnil’s own loyalty to his king over the cardinal’s trial was vacillating.

In turning the case over to the
parlement
there were perils for both sides: it was possible that the magistrates might treat the imprisonment of the cardinal as an assault on noble prerogatives and yet another example of monarchical overreaching. But solidarity with Rohan, who had a special propensity for infuriating members of his own class, was by no means assured.

The
parlement
of Paris was not the only, or even the most obvious place to try a bishop of Strasbourg. Rohan was a prince of the Holy Roman Empire and a prince of the Catholic Church, and the king’s attribution of the case to the
parlement
had the potential to enrage both Vienna and Rome. In the event the emperor acquiesced – after all, it was his own sister who had mooted a trial. The pope, however, was splenetic, though he directed most of his ire at the cardinal for agreeing to submit
to a secular tribunal.

Rohan’s defence was further assailed on 5 September when Jacques-Nicolas Blin and Alexis-Joseph Harger, the joint secretaries of the Bureau académique d’écriture, examined the queen’s forged signature. They compared it to handwriting samples from Jeanne, Cagliostro, the baron de Planta, Jeanne’s maid Rosalie Brissault and three of Jeanne’s associates. From the obliquely crossed ‘t’s, the loopy ‘o’s and the final ‘s’s, the experts concluded that Planta was the closest match. Though they cautioned that the paucity of evidence made their attribution provisional, it nonetheless lent credence to the belief that Rohan had masterminded the
theft of the necklace.

*
In the French legal system, confrontations between suspects tested disputed facts.

*
There had not – he may have meant interrogations.

15

Witness Protection

O
N
5
SEPTEMBER
, letters patent, issued by the king at Saint-Cloud, officially transferred the case to the
parlement
of Paris. They trained their sights on Rohan, proclaiming that he,

unknown to the queen, our very dear wife and companion, had said to them [the Boehmers] that he had been authorised by her to make the acquisition . . . We have not been able to regard the matter without a just indignation, that someone should have dared to appropriate an august name which is dear to us in so many regards and to violate with such extraordinary temerity the respect owed to royal majesty.

Jeanne received only a glancing mention – Rohan had claimed that ‘he had been tricked by a woman named La Mothe de Valois’.

The crimes were to be investigated jointly by the Grand Chambre and the Tournelle – the highest civil and criminal courts in the
parlement
– deliberately excluding the hotheads and gadflies who populated the lower rungs of the magistracy. ‘The matter required haste so that which might disappear with delay should not be allowed
to be destroyed.’ The
parlement
registered the case without any remonstrance
on 6 September. This caused further perturbation to the Rohan, since the letters patent delimited the scope of the investigation: their propositions were taken as established fact, and were not themselves to be scrutinised. As they presumed that the cardinal had violated the respect due to the queen and appropriated her name, there seemed to be only one possible verdict at which the
parlement
could arrive – guilty.