Read How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair Online
Authors: Jonathan Beckman
Like a pendulum that twists as it swings, strangling its own arc, Villette returned yet again to confront Jeanne and the cardinal. His second meeting with Jeanne on 5 May was painful for both parties. She felt far greater affinity with her amanuensis than with her husband. ‘I would love it if you were not guilty, as I would myself,’ Villette told her in sorrow, ‘but unfortunately the crime
has been demonstrated.’
Grimly, as even the judges called her a liar, Jeanne continued to
reject their imputations, refusing even to accept Villette’s confessions of his own involvement.
If I had been in the situation of forcing Monsieur de Villette to make the document in question, Monsieur de Villette, who is more savvy than me, would have been in a better position than me to judge the consequences . . . and he would not have been so deprived of sense to manufacture a forgery and
compromise the queen.
Villette, wishing to mitigate his former lover’s punishment as best he could, pleaded with her that
‘you understand your interests very badly’. An admission might not ‘expiate [your lies] in the eyes of justice’ but it would moderate the punishment. Jeanne’s obstinacy was nothing more than ‘ill-judged self-assurance’, and continued denials ‘will only add to your wrongs, not diminish them’.
Jeanne responded with the haunting tranquillity of someone embracing their fate:
I understand more than anyone the self-interest I would have felt were I guilty and hoped that an admission would make the punishment less severe; but I am waiting calmly for my punishment, as I am not guilty, because up until now I have proven by my conduct that I am innocent, since I remain calm without trying to evade anything even when I
have the chance.
Yet signs emerged that her conscience was shifting restlessly. Jeanne informed Titon that d’Oliva did not know that she was impersonating the queen; and she exonerated Cagliostro (‘I never claimed that he did [play a part in the affair]’, she told Rohan. ‘The only accusation that I have against him is that he advised you
to blame me.’)
But she doughtily maintained her innocence as though her sanity might otherwise slip her grasp. In her last confrontation with Rohan, he implored her to reveal any confederates; instead
she hid beneath her hat so that I would not see the tears flowing, but they were too much and after having let them run for a few moments, she demanded to have read back to her what had been said; but then her expressions of grief began again and she replied, sobbing, that she had nothing to say. After the commissioner had
remarked that after several opportunities she had not said anything, she said that she would answer to Providence alone, and she called on it as a source of strength, after
a moment’s silence.
The cardinal, in contrast, glowered with confidence. Since Villette had come clean, he no longer felt the need to play the sympathetic confessor to reel in the truth, and was determined that the
parlement
should look upon Villette as equally complicit as Jeanne. Aware that the conviction of his enemies would not necessarily entail his own absolution from the charge of
lèse-majesté
, Rohan spoke, as Jeanne had done, of a wider conspiracy to disgrace him. Now Villette and Jeanne had been discredited, he even denied ever writing to Marie Antoinette or pestering Jeanne to arrange an audience with her. The senior magistrates of the
parlement
would decide whether these late efforts to cut himself adrift from previously acknowledged misjudgements were credible.
The muscular bullying of Villette belied the state of Rohan’s emotional and physical health. When the archbishop of Paris received special permission from the king to visit the cardinal in January 1786, he
barely recognised him. Rohan was rattled by the fear that his secret communications with Target would be discovered. ‘I do not dare send you the continuation of the confrontations until I have your word that you will only show them to M[onsieur] Target,’ he wrote to Traverse, the compliant surgeon who attended on him, ‘for, I’ll say it again to you, if they get wind of it or suspect anything, there are all sorts of actions which
might be taken.’
Every confrontation left him exhausted and depressed, because of their gruelling length and the
‘unsupportable’ uncertainty. He spoke to Dupuis de Marcé, who was sympathetic to his plight, of
the pain I feel in pressing arguments on guilty people who have yet to make an admission, and who seem to me not strong enough to defend themselves. I recognise this sentiment but I don’t think I am in the wrong since . . . the new calumnies of my adversaries make me realise how my feelings towards them are far from what I ought to show them and so I become more forceful. Yet despite this I predict that if these same adversaries give way to the force of truth and appear to regret their crimes, they will have the same claims
upon my sympathy.
Rohan’s ailments gave him little pause for magnanimity.
His stomach cramps were so severe that he suspected poison at work (the blame actually lay in a dodgy stew); his migraines were debilitating; his eyes leaked pus. The only visitor in his cell was God, to whom he turned more frequently than he had done in more carefree times. He had written, on the wall of his cell, the words of Psalm 119: ‘
It is good
for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes.’ The embarrassment he had brought upon his family tortured him too: ‘I embrace you from the bottom of my heart,’ Rohan wrote to his brother, ‘as I do all my relatives. At that word tears stream from my eyes and my cruellest torment is that
which I cause them.’
There were justifiable worries that the magistrates, especially Titon, were no longer acting impartially. Their lines of questioning sought ‘to join me in some fashion
to their [Villette and Jeanne’s] lot’. When facing yet another interrogation in the latter stages of the case, Rohan wrote in anguish that ‘it will be very difficult for me to hide the pain . . . if I am forced
to face Titon’. Fortunately, the magistrate had not pressed him over the contents of the letters to Marie Antoinette, where undoubtedly the worst examples of his
lèse-majesté
lay. And the cardinal could not shake the queen from his mind. ‘Let me know’, he wrote to Target on one occasion, ‘if it is true that the queen is
always sad?’ On another he simply asked, ‘Have you any news
of the queen?’, hoping only that her misery would not be added to his crimes.
Jeanne’s increasing derangement had been the subject of much speculation, some of which, it appears, had been deliberately spread by Rohan’s allies: she had leaped at the cardinal and scratched his face; she had beaten up Cagliostro; she had made a pass at the governor of the Bastille; her
femme de chambre
, overcome by remorse, had tried to
drown herself. Her parlous legal position gave her great cause for agitation. The comte d’Artois expressed her prospects tersely: ‘I fear that my dear cousin Valois may be hanged by
her pretty neck.’
On 22 May, Titon began his report to sixty-four magistrates of the
parlement
, an unusually large tribunal since the roster had been swelled by honorary counsellors – legal grandees who turned out for high-profile cases. Despite the cardinal’s Ciceronian performance
during the confrontations, the Rohan had few reasons to be confident: the allegations of
lèse-majesté
appeared insurmountable; the court had been well managed for a number of years by the
premier président
, d’Aligre, whose pockets clinked with royal emoluments; the Rohan, and the cardinal particularly, were not held in great affection.
The abbé de Véri noted in his diary on 23 March 1786 that neither side conducted itself honestly:
A widespread rumour is running wild which certainly is a terrible calumny but which is no less detrimental for that. They say that 4 million livres have been set aside to be distributed among the judges once the cardinal has been condemned. I am very far from believing such an imputation. I must, however, admit that several of the judges have given in to a too noticeable partiality. On the subject of the cardinal they get very heated, those for as much as those against. The number of those who are against now appear the stronger. The first president d’Aligre shows his colours with so little decency that the cardinal could
demand his recusal.
According to Georgel, the queen herself had intervened, telling a group of judges that Rohan was ‘the enemy of her rest
and her reputation’. They knew which way to vote. In the streets and cafes of Paris, grisly punishments were conjured up: Jeanne would have her head chopped off, Villette his hand.
For eight days the voluminous transcripts of the interrogations and confrontations were read out, word for word. In the early hours of 30 May, the prisoners were transported to the Conciergerie, the prison annexe of the Palais de Justice where the
parlement
sat. They were due to be cross-examined by the entire court later that morning. Jeanne, d’Oliva and Villette were driven there shortly after midnight; Rohan and Cagliostro arrived at five o’clock in the morning. Was it a deliberate attempt by Joly de Fleury and Titon to exhaust them? Titon righteously insisted he only wanted to spare the cardinal the inconvenience of bunking down in a new cell. They were escorted by a troop of Bastille guards who remained on parliamentary premises, all the better, the conspiratorially minded thought, to snatch them away should the prosecution be thrown out. Security was
twisted tight. The exits of the
parlement
were sealed; even lawyers were not allowed access.
Despite the precautions, a large crowd gathered to observe the suspects. Cagliostro strutted with ebullience but Rohan looked feeble:
‘he leant on his cane a great deal, and seemed very lame from the swelling and inflammation that he has had for some weeks past in his right knee’. He limped through ‘a vast concourse of people, who observed a profound silence, and seemed deeply affected, many of them being observed to be shedding tears’.
The court settled down at eight o’clock to question the suspects individually. All of them were forced to kneel on the
sellette
, the traditional low stool, in submission to the
parlement
’s authority. First they summoned Villette, clad all in black, who, with watery eyes, confessed his crimes. So eager was he to prove cooperative that lengthy answers spouted forth before the judges had even
finished their questions.
Next came Jeanne, wearing a black hat trimmed with lace and ribbons, and a demure lavender-grey dress tied with a metal-studded belt. Though in her memoirs she recalled feeling terrified – ‘my knees knocking together, and my whole frame trembling with agitation, unable to articulate
a single syllable’ – on the day she appeared to onlookers composed and articulate, if ultimately transparent. One wrote of her ‘assurance . . . with the eye and face of a deceitful woman
surprised at nothing’, and her clubbable attitude towards the judges verged on impudence. ‘That’s a trick question,’ Jeanne upbraided one judge, like a schoolmistress disappointed with a lazy answer. ‘I know you, Monsieur l’Abbé. I expected that you would
ask me that.’ Even she, however, leapt back when shown the
sellette
, though she soon recovered her composure and reclined as though stretched out on ‘a
chair in her apartment’. Jeanne admitted nothing, apologised for nothing, held back nebulous secrets so as
‘not to offend the queen’, and declared the cardinal to be a great rogue who tutoyed Marie Antoinette in more than two hundred letters. Whenever she was contradicted, she scratched her head dismissively.
Rohan was summoned next. He was dressed in a violet soutane, the mourning garb for cardinals, a red skullcap and shoes with low,
red heels. Across his chest, he proudly wore the sash of the Order of the Holy Spirit, to which the king had appointed him. He carried himself with dignity, ‘dismayed but not humiliated, cool . . . respectful but noble, in short worthy of
his birth and rank’, and a number of judges stood
as he entered. Pale and exhausted, he seemed so weak that the judges invited him to sit on a more comfortable chair rather than kneel – he compromised by perching on the edge of a bench. For two hours, he fielded questions, modestly, respectfully and to the point, never shirking a direct answer (the cynical alleged he referred repeatedly to a crib hidden in the fold of his robes). At the end he stood and saluted the bench, who
returned the gesture. He left through a side gate – the guards had massed on the other side of the palace to mislead the crowds – and greeted courteously the few bystanders milling around. D’Oliva and Cagliostro were dealt with cursorily. Just over two weeks before d’Oliva had given birth in the Bastille and now looked bemused at her lost innocence – like the peasant girl in Greuze’s
The Broken Pitcher
,
according to one judge. She kept the court waiting to feed her child, then stuttered out monosyllabic replies between sobs. Cagliostro, who presented himself in a green suit braided with gold, amiably tattled in Arabic,
Greek and Italian. The gaggle outside the court cheered as he emerged. He felt himself returning to life, like a parched flower in torrential rain.
‘I
T IS THE
depth of opinion in this nation that, in the end, decides
the great questions,’ wrote Vergennes as the
parlement
’s investigation plugged away. Even this arch-conservative acknowledged a democratic imperative that had been growing in volume over the previous fifty years. Yet while practically everyone recognised the existence of public opinion, locating it was much harder.
‘Does the public exist?’ asked the Parisian journalist Louis-Sébastien Mercier. ‘What is the public? Where is it? By which organ does it make its will known? . . . Say to a man who holds a position,
the public disapproves
; he will reply:
I also have my public, who approve, and I’ll stick
with that one
.’