How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (36 page)

The public sphere that emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries existed between the privacy of the home and the outer limits of the state’s authority. It was oppositional, disputatious, rational. Through its institutions – the salon, the coffee house, the Masonic lodge, the scientific academy, the debating society, the efflorescence of journals, gazettes and news-sheets – culture and politics were subjected to robust consideration, and a political consciousness emerged among a class of people who had no role and little influence in government.

France was still a society cramped by censorship, and Paris a city infested with police informers. Though newspapers were widely read, the most influential were still published abroad – in Britain, in the Low Countries and in the Rhineland – to avoid being suppressed. The king’s subjects needed to take care about their words and the publications they read, for fear of landing in the Bastille. There were few touchier topics of conversation than the Diamond Necklace Affair.

Breteuil’s clarion blast to arrest the cardinal sounded across Europe.
As it faded, a babble of wonderment grew louder, speculations combining and splitting like petrol on water. Paris was a workshop of gossip: according to the
Correspondance Secrète
, ‘there are no suppositions so criminal or absurd that they are unable
to find partisans’. Had the queen wanted the necklace but the king forbidden it to her? Had Jeanne almost persuaded Rohan to buy the necklace for the queen, but instead he sold it in Denmark and
squandered the proceeds? Had Cagliostro, Rohan and the Holy Roman Empire conspired to re-annex Lorraine, lost by the Habsburgs during the
Thirty Years War? ‘The people in general,’ reported the duke of Dorset, the British ambassador, ‘unaccustomed to events of so extraordinary a nature, have imagined there must be some intrigue of state at the bottom, and that very great personages are
implicated in it.’ No one knew any certainties, and many did not want to know – the latest rumour always trumps the truest one.

The variety of opinion was whittled down as members of the public chose which side to champion. Familiarity won nobody any friends. ‘In the town, they accuse Madame de La Motte and the cardinal,’ wrote the
Correspondance Secrète
, ‘but at the Court they
accuse the queen.’ Many – not just enemies of the Rohan family – were willing to believe that Rohan had stolen the necklace to meet his towering debts. Even Vergennes, an ally of the Rohan, struggled to believe in the cardinal’s innocence. ‘It is rare that someone with so much wit could also have been
so stupidly duped,’ he wrote to the marquis de Noailles, the ambassador in Vienna.

Equally vociferous were those who presumed the queen wanted to hush up a failed plot to ruin the cardinal. The comte de Fersen heard a whisper that

it was only a jest between the queen and the cardinal, that all was well between them, that she had indeed instructed him to buy the necklace, and that she pretended she could not stand him in order to disguise the jest, that the king, having been informed of it, had reproached her, that she had fallen ill and made
herself seem pregnant.

Seasoned courtiers looked on helplessly at the gross mishandling of the affair. The clamour of Rohan’s arrest, wrote the duc de Levis,
was suited to a ‘crime of state that was too imminent to brook the slightest delay’, not for ‘a minor intrigue of a charlatan and a knave, who had plotted to swindle money from a credulous, vain man . . . Wise men find the minister’s conduct almost as blameworthy as the cardinal’s . . . The name of the queen had been compromised [by Breteuil’s actions] more than by all the libels
published against her.’

Within a month of the scandal’s outbreak, there was a clear majority who believed in Rohan’s innocence of the theft of the necklace. They presumed the king must have reached the same conclusions and would halt the trial, exiling the cardinal temporarily, were punishment needed. Support for the cardinal among the higher echelons of society was particularly vigorous. After
parlement
took charge of the investigation, the Rohan family embarked on a campaign on his behalf. The Rohans were linked by marriage to the junior branches of the Bourbons, the Condés and the Contis, and soon princes of the blood were openly
denouncing the queen. Even the Habsburg emperor reached a different conclusion from his sister over Rohan’s actions. ‘He is very capable of absent-mindedness and can’t keep control of his finances,’ he told the marquis de Noailles, ‘but he’s not someone who would immerse himself
in actual criminality.’ Nobles felt outrage at the brutal treatment of a member of their order, manhandled in front of the crowd like a pickpocket. A number of high-born ladies had less patriotic reasons for standing by Rohan – they were relieved that he had burnt his correspondence, so their billets doux would remain forever unread.

The affair left its imprint on fashion and consumer goods: straw hats bedecked with red ribbons –
chapeaux du cardinal sur paille
(hats of the cardinal on a straw pallet) – grew fashionable
among his detractors. A faience plate from Vizelle in the south-west from the year of the trial depicts an approximation of the necklace’s design with beads in ebony and amber
to lend colour. Printers recycled etchings of participants in forgotten causes célèbres, captioning them ‘comtesse de La Motte’, ‘Mademoiselle d’Oliva’ or ‘Rétaux de Villette’, and sold them by the thousand. Pornographic mannequins of Jeanne in coitus with Rohan and Villette
were also available. In London, a tavern in St James’s Street charged five shillings just to see a
portrait of Jeanne.

The longer Rohan was detained, the more sympathy he accrued. By mid-May 1786, Dorset reported that the ‘whole of public opinion is
greatly in [his] favour’. Ballads characterised Rohan as a mooncalf rather than a racketeer, playing up his gullibility to assure that ‘a senate will
soap him clean’. One ventriloquised Rohan instructing his supporters:

                
My good friends, who run through the town

                
To obtain my absolution

                
I make this humble confession

                
Tell everyone that
I’m a clown.

The most important publications relating to the affair were
mémoires judiciaires
or
factums
– trial briefs issued by the lawyers of the accused – which in theory were directed at the judges, but were printed and distributed with the court’s endorsement. The crafting of a
mémoire
was a barrister’s primary responsibility in Ancien Régime France. As lawyers in criminal cases were prohibited from sitting in with their clients during interrogations or pleading directly before the judges, this was their most effective means of advocacy. The
mémoire
was one of the most popular genres of its day – high-profile cases regularly generated print runs of 10,000.

A hybrid of narrative and legal argumentation, the
mémoire
braided together a sympathetic biography of the defendant with analysis of evidence, and looked to literary models for inspiration.
*
Paris had never seen a case before with such a quantity of
factums
produced. So many were printed at the height of the investigation that pedlars cried out ‘voilà du nouveau’ with each new publication.

Jeanne’s lawyer Doillot was the first to publish. He portrayed Jeanne as an ingénue, taken advantage of by a charismatic man protected by powerful interests and infatuated with Cagliostro, ‘a
false prophet’ who led him to perdition. A confusing fuzziness hovers
over the
mémoire
– it is full of aspersion and half-accusations, but never clarifies who was to blame for the necklace’s disappearance (‘the countess is guilty of nothing,’ wrote Doillot, ‘but that does not necessarily mean the cardinal is
guilty of everything’). Doillot accused Cagliostro of accumulating a huge fortune of hazy origin, but never explained his interest in the diamonds beyond ‘imagin[ing] the multiplication of the necklace
in a hundred ways’.

The vagueness was purposeful; it dramatised Jeanne’s marginality, showed her shuttling in and out of a larger plot of which she only caught intermittent glimpses. But this had the perverse consequence of reinvigorating the
lèse-majesté
, for it became impossible for Doillot to argue definitively that the queen had not been involved. Marie Antoinette exists in the
mémoire
as a spectral presence, sensed through the curtain or in the wings – not unlike a discreet yet omniscient schemer, conscientiously covering her tracks as she works her mischief. In order to save herself, Jeanne drew on – and infused with new life – the image of the queen as an unwearying intriguer.

Four thousand copies of the
mémoire
were printed and distributed free, in order to muster support for Jeanne, and the Parisians practically laid siege to Doillot’s house. A contemporary recorded:

I was not ten steps from this house – the house of M Doillot, when a lawyer’s clerk, quite winded, covered in perspiration, called out to me eagerly, ‘Have you got it, sir? Have you got it?’ . . . As I turned the corner of this accursed street, the carriage of a doctor, who was bursting his lungs by shrieking ‘the one by Mâitre Doillot’, almost ran me over . . . I swear in good faith I thought at this moment that, rather than distributing a
mémoire
about the case, they were giving away gold to every Frenchman who
happened to want it.

Aficionados found the style and structure execrable, though its uncontested accusations still besmirched Rohan. The
Mémoires Secrets
adjudged that it was ‘very badly written but implicated
the cardinal exceedingly’. Its reviewer, alert to the tactical positioning of lawyers, noted ‘at first it appears disgusting that Madame de La Motte, in admitting her infinite obligations to the cardinal, should implicate him so seriously – but her natural line of
defence requires it’. The cardinal’s friends were deeply worried. Georgel acknowledged that,
irrespective of the
mémoire
’s truth, ‘the public is interested in a young woman who says that she is victim of
intrigue and lust’. He had touched on something significant. Readers, who regarded the
mémoires
as proto-novels, cared less about impeccable logic or sheaves of affidavits than a rollicking story.

A lull followed the appearance of Jeanne’s
mémoire
until after 15 February, when a
mémoire
in defence of Cagliostro was published. Three thousand copies sold out within a day, and eight guards were stationed at the door of his lawyer’s house to marshal the
avid crowds. Wide-eyed stories of Cagliostro’s wizardry had been batted about since his arrest in August. The
Correspondance Secrète
reported that, under questioning, he had ‘remarked that he could think of no misdeed to account for his arrest, unless it might be the assassination of Pompey – although regarding that ancient crime, he had acted
under the Pharaoh’s orders’. The
Gazette de Cologne
contained further tales of the supernatural – Cagliostro and his wife had escaped from their cell in the form of a dove and a wood pigeon respectively, though had returned on the instructions of the Supreme Being, who assured them they would overcome, like Daniel
in the lions’ den.

Cagliostro struck a precarious balance
in his
mémoire
– distancing himself from the more outlandish notions without discarding his mystique. He described himself simply as a doctor, one who cared altruistically for all mankind, irrespective of status. France was his ‘adoptive homeland’, before the Bastille consumed him.

Following this exordium, Cagliostro embarked on his life story. The mufti of Medina had raised him in his own palace. He did not know where he was born or who his parents were, though his tutor, the wise Althotas, reassured him they were ‘noble and Christian’. In Medina, Acharat (as Cagliostro was then known) excelled in his studies and learned to ‘love God, to love and serve those closest to him, and respect the religion and laws of every place’, a creed that rendered him innocuous and palatable to enlightened audiences. Accompanied by Althotas on a kind of oriental grand tour, Acharat travelled through Asia and Africa. In Egypt he was initiated in the mysteries of the Pyramids. When Althotas died, Acharat adopted the title Count Cagliostro, went to Rome where he married, then travelled round Europe dispensing ageless wisdom and home-brew remedies.

To propitiate the wary, Cagliostro perfumed his story with a tang of Christianity; to those enamoured of his exoticism, he was a font of Eastern knowledge. His narrative draws sustenance from stories such as Samuel Johnson’s
Rasselas
and Voltaire’s
Zadig
, fables set in the Orient about the troubled quest for happiness. Cagliostro invited his readers to see his biography as a tale of moral instruction, in which the tribulations of an Arabian savant set an example of the life lived well. Voltaire’s
conte
enabled Cagliostro to play the
comte
(the relationship was not lost on Doillot who, in a hurried response, mocked Cagliostro’s
mémoire
for reading like a novel).

D’Oliva proved even more intriguing than the Great Copt. At Versailles, many continued to believe that ‘His Eminence enjoyed in the park of Versailles the favours of Mademoiselle d’Oliva, believing he had obtained those of the princess whom she impersonated, and that rose is the
emblem of this kindness.’ Courtiers laid bets over who would bed her first
on her release. An astonishing 20,000 copies of her
mémoire
were printed, so great was the demand, and each of these would have had
multiple readers. Considering that Paris had a population of around 600,000 and literacy rates by the end of the eighteenth century were 47 per cent for men and 27 per cent for women, it is not impossible that nigh-on every literate Parisian dipped into her story which, according to the
Mémoires Secrets
, was like something out of the
Thousand and One Nights
.