Read How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair Online
Authors: Jonathan Beckman
‘Aha! You are very curious,’ said Rohan. ‘And who do you think it is for?’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Jeanne.
‘It’s for your sovereign – but it is top secret, because everything could go awry.’
Around the same time, Rohan asked Jeanne to help him sell some diamonds. Titon suggested she ought to have realised these were from the dismantled necklace. Jeanne replied:
Had I known the diamonds came from the necklace, I would not have sold them and I would have warned the jewellers. My husband, seeing so many diamonds, said to me one day: ‘What the devil! Where do they come from?’ I asked the cardinal various questions about where the diamonds came from. He replied: ‘They are from old pieces of jewellery that I no longer wear, now that
I am an old man.’
This, she explained, was the reason she frequented so many diamond brokers, jewellers and clockmakers in the first few months of 1785, visits she itemised to the point of tedium.
While claiming she was uninformed about the cardinal’s intentions, Jeanne insinuated that Cagliostro guided all his decisions – he must have led Rohan down the road to perfidy. The cardinal had told her: ‘People don’t know the fortune of this being, they do not
know who he is, for he is a god. Look at his portrait, look at the eyes looking to heaven, he is an
utterly extraordinary man.’ Cagliostro had presided over a sabbath, the pungent incense of which had solemnised Nicolas’s departure to England to sell diamonds there on Rohan’s behalf.
Throughout, Jeanne played the innocent, oblivious of the jealousies of Court that made Rohan’s position so awkward. ‘I am astonished’, she told Titon, ‘that the cardinal claims to have needed me to set up
a meeting with the queen.’ Presented with the bill of sale, she denied having ever seen it but remarked that even she knew the queen did not sign her name
‘Marie Antoinette de France’. When Rohan had entrusted her with jewels to sell, she reported him saying, ‘Here are the diamonds; if you were intelligent . . . but no, your husband can tell me
what they are worth.’ Politicians like Rohan plot; beneficiaries of their kindness only simper with gratitude – this was Jeanne’s
vraisemblance
.
Jeanne also threw elbows at any witnesses whose testimony threatened to contradict her own.
Loth, her traitorous friend, was accused of pandering to Rohan because he hankered after an appointment; d’Oliva had slept with her husband and was still smarting from being dropped when Jeanne found out; she had heard that Cagliostro, who had no obvious source of income, was on the verge of buying a house for 50,000 écus cash. Their prejudices against her tainted their testimony.
Any variant tales the court might have heard about necklaces and forged signatures and prostitutes in fancy dress were ‘stories devised between all those involved to give [them] more plausibility’. Titon, who found Jeanne’s responses
‘extraordinary’, asked if she had ‘witnesses to confirm for us this differing account’. She did not, replying emphatically that she spoke ‘the most exact truth’. The only reason no documentation existed to prove her assertions was because Rohan had stripped her of her papers shortly before she went to Bar in August 1785. And, she riposted, if Titon continued to accuse her of passing letters between the cardinal and the queen, he should produce them.
Jeanne’s slippery skill in constructing an alternate reality, which slalomed around the undeniable facts, is brilliantly demonstrated in her claustrophobic rendering of the affair’s denouement:
It was the second of August. Having just arrived at my house at eleven o’clock in the morning, the cardinal said to me: ‘I need your help and assistance. I have just done a stupid thing. You know the necklace which I’ve mentioned was for the queen? There was a documented arrangement, and I had the idiocy to say to Boehmer, who was tormenting me, “Dear God, present yourself to the queen”, and to make him write a letter to the queen. They [the jewellers] have just told me that the queen does not understand what they are on about, and this was told to them by Madame Campan, one of the queen’s
femmes de chambre
, who had gone to seek them out.’
At this point Rohan said, trembling, that he was about to be undone. He begged me to send immediately for Bassenge, to instruct him about rectifying the stupid thing he had made Boehmer do, and to tell him that he had been played for a fool by the queen, who had wanted to destroy him for a long time, and the Mesdames de Polignac, who had mended their differences with the baron de Breteuil, his greatest enemy, in order to deceive and destroy him the better.
When I asked the cardinal how he had been tricked and if he had seen the queen, he responded, ‘Yes.’ I replied, ‘Do you have any of her letters?’ He responded, ‘I have never actually seen her write, but I have a large number of them.’ He took out one, which he showed me, and he folded it over so I would not be shown the middle section. On it were the words: ‘Send via the little countess a sum of money’ – I can’t remember how much – ‘for these unfortunates. I am upset that they should be troubled.’ I asked him, ‘What is all that about?’ He replied: ‘It’s for the interest [on the necklace].’ I said, ‘As you are not sure what the queen’s handwriting actually looks like, you could obtain an example of it through your family, and ascertain whether your fears are real.’ ‘I dare not,’ he said. ‘They would not understand me.’
However, he then said, ‘I’ll try to get a sample – The devil! Could she have tricked me, this little countess?’ And stalking round the room, he repeated over and over again, ‘Could she have tricked me? Oh! No, I know Madame de Cagliostro too well, she is not capable of such a thing.’ Seeing himself torn, he said to me: ‘Come and see the great number of spies that are outside your door; they have not left mine for several days. I fear that there may not be enough time
to set this right. Go, find Bassenge straight away, and tell him that I know he can hold his nerve – I value that. He should go to Versailles to speak to the minister in place of Boehmer, who has been summoned by him, and he should say that Boehmer was confused, and did not mean to speak to the queen of a necklace, but of earrings of a considerable price . . . which he told me had been made for the queen – in order to make it more plausible, he should bring them with him. Insist to him that I will pay him for them. They have trusted in me too much for me to let them become bankrupt over such a thing. And I have more than enough money at my house to calm their fears. But if he does not cooperate, I could act like the queen – and deny it.’
Jeanne went on to tell Titon that the cardinal had kept her prisoner in his home for a day and a half, unsuccessfully bullying her into fleeing abroad, lest she divulge what little she knew of his activities.
Careful plotting is at work here (note the delayed identification of the little comtesse). The incoherent elements of Jeanne’s version – what exactly had Boehmer done wrong by writing to the queen? Why was she needed as an intermediary with Bassenge? – convey the impression of someone confused by machinations that have only been half-explained. Vagueness is the essence of the strategy – a means of spreading suspicion without having to fix it, proliferating potential criminals and so diluting the case against her. The nature of the Cagliostros’ involvement is left unresolved, but compelling reasons to doubt the couple are suggested. They chime with Rohan’s known weaknesses – his susceptibility to beautiful, fallen noblewomen, to mystagogues who promise him the world. They are foreigners whose wealth is unexplained and who threaten the realm with their malign, unchristian, democratic cult.
Rohan’s sudden shifts of mood, from anxiety to relative confidence, from concern for the Boehmers to threats against them, are convincingly those of a man flailing under stress. Even Jeanne’s failure to remember the exact sum of money written in the letter shown to her by Rohan is a gesture of authenticity, a sign that she is struggling to recollect rather than imagining afresh. Most riskily, Jeanne introduces the suggestion that the queen intrigued to destroy Rohan. This revelation is, of course, attributed to Rohan himself, and her
interrogator is encouraged to wonder whether he invented it to explain away his own financial incompetence. But the risk is a calculated one, aimed at stretching the undeniable accusation of
lèse-majesté
against the cardinal, which until now was arguably unintentional, into more treacherous territory – that he considered the queen a base politician, a sovereign who did not look down benevolently upon all her subjects but enviously singled out rivals for destruction.
Cagliostro and d’Oliva were subjected to much briefer interrogations. Despite Jeanne’s efforts to characterise him as Rohan’s
éminence grise
, Cagliostro demonstrated that he had only arrived in Paris after the necklace had been purchased. He claimed to have been suspicious of the comtesse de La Motte from the beginning, but only at the end of July, when he saw the counterfeited signature of Marie Antoinette, did he realise the cardinal had been deceived.
Cagliostro was also required to defend the seance he had directed. He protested that it had been a jest, which he only agreed to perform after Rohan had pleaded with him to allay Jeanne’s concerns about the queen’s forthcoming labour – though he squirmed evasively over the details. There may have been thirty or so candles lit, but that was
‘normal for a prince’s house’; he could not remember whether he was decked out in fantastical crosses and sashes. But Cagliostro perfectly refuted Jeanne’s insinuations that the woman who deceived Rohan was his own wife – the comtesse de Cagliostro could not have forged letters from the queen, since she was illiterate.
At the end of January, Rohan was recalled by Titon so that he could hear the accusations that Jeanne had made against him. The cardinal was by now exhausted and resentful of the finicky sifting of his recent past. His responses, in the most part variations of ‘everything she says is false’, sounded petulant and uncooperative. Sometimes he answered only with a curt ‘no’. The fight in him had burned out; the effort of repelling Jeanne’s inventions appeared too great. Titon wrung from him sad admiration for the craft with which Jeanne had trussed him up:
Madame de La Motte’s conduct is not so thoughtless. She believed that she had me so wrapped up in her ploys that I would not dare say anything. And indeed, the twists had multiplied to such an extent that I would have certainly preferred to pay, to not reveal anything, and leave Madame de La Motte to enjoy the
fruit of her intrigues.
T
HERE WAS A
two-week break following the interrogations, as the
rapporteurs
prepared to brief the
parlement
. At this session, those under investigation had the opportunity to present a
requête
, an application to the court which argued for more lenient treatment or even a dismissal of their case. The lawyers were readmitted to the Bastille and huddled with their clients in preparation. Events in Rome did not augur well for Rohan. The college of cardinals, meeting on 13 February 1786, agreed with near unanimity that Rohan should be suspended from the cardinalate for six months, during which time he was required to justify his decision not to insist on a trial
before an ecclesiastical court.
The reading of the interrogation report to the
parlement
was set for 15 February. There was a widespread belief that the king would choose this moment to suspend the case and punish Rohan in private but the date arrived with no word from Versailles. Target’s
requête
repeated at length the contentions that Rohan had put forward during his interrogation: a secular court had no jurisdiction over him, and that his actions proved that he had been deceived by Jeanne. The court was unmoved. Titon successfully construed Rohan’s description of his fellow bishops as a
‘competent tribunal’ into a slur on the
parlement
’s authority and abilities.
A
réglement à l’extraordinaire
, a judgement that placed the investigation on the most serious criminal footing, was passed against Rohan, Jeanne, d’Oliva and Cagliostro. The witnesses were to be summoned again for a
récolement
, where they would be read back their testimony and given the opportunity to amend anything that had been misrepresented the first time around. Two sets of confrontations would then take place: the accused would face relevant witnesses and respond
to their allegations; then each of the accused would confront his or her fellow suspects, and transcripts of the interrogations would be quibbled over line by line.
The
parlement
’s
réglement à l’extraordinaire
deflated Rohan. He grimly reported to his lawyer a remark he had overheard: ‘If the cardinal was tricked at first, he will end up by sharing in everything. The investigation is not running
in his favour.’ Georgel asked Target to ‘slip off for half an hour to see the prince. He’s morbid about the confrontations. He will not listen to
my good sense.’
A more aggressive posture than had been displayed in the interrogations was now required. Target wrote:
It is greatly to be desired that the cardinal does not wrap himself in the cloak of his innocence, as he has done far too often since the beginning of this affair. It is a battle in which it is not sufficient to have good reasons, good weapons and good troops. He must leap into combat, in order to fight with success. He must be persuasive, for both hot heads and cool characters are won round only by firm conviction, a belief presented with the appearance of confidence in those whom one wants to persuade. It is the cunning of the courtier that he
needs to employ.
There was only a short window to prepare the cardinal, as he would again be forbidden visitors once the confrontations started. Target repeatedly stressed the importance of giving
‘proactive answers’ instead of brusque denials. Dates and locations needed to be precisely remembered. The cardinal needed to contest forcibly the evidence of Sainte-James and the Boehmers on the grounds that they were too financially involved in the fate of the necklace to offer impartial testimony. Only if ambushed by letters he had written to Marie Antoinette was he to affect memory loss.