Read How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair Online
Authors: Jonathan Beckman
D’Oliva milked sympathy from her age, gender and class. The gift of the title ‘baronne d’Oliva’ only showed that ‘I was not a woman worthy
enough of [ Jeanne]’. ‘My femininity, my youth, feeble, ignorant and timid, without knowledge of the way
to do things’, rendered her vulnerable to Jeanne and Nicolas, who easily took advantage of her ‘credulous and docile being, without credit, without protection,
without support’. Blondel, d’Oliva’s lawyer, skilfully offered the titillation his readership wanted, while never admitting his client had strayed.
It has been argued that, in assimilating themselves with Marie Antoinette, Jeanne and d’Oliva, in their
mémoires
, also transmitted to the queen the stain of female deviousness through association. This requires some qualification. Lawyers could not help giving factual accounts of events to defend their clients, even though that
meant they replayed the counterfeiting of the queen’s appearance and handwriting – but there is little evidence to suggest that readers were incapable of distinguishing the true Marie Antoinette from the fake one.
But the
mémoires
enabled the expression of a radical politics in another way – by implicitly contrasting a justice firm and indifferent to rank, with the king’s ineffectiveness and partiality. The Paris Bar had long incubated liberal sentiments – as in many other cases, the Diamond Necklace
factums
appealed to ‘rights’ and ‘liberties’ which trumped royal prerogatives. All the lawyers involved in the case, bar the aged Doillot, would take part in the Revolution.
There is a levelling impulse throughout Blondel’s
mémoire
. D’Oliva orders Jeanne to ‘descend from the heights of your family tree, from where you defy the laws . . . I am nothing but you are only my equal, when we are together at the feet of the justice of men, before which all names, all ranks, all illustriousness must disappear, as
before eternal justice.’ Within this coils a denial of the supremacy of kings, for it is the Valois name that ‘must disappear’. Elsewhere, d’Oliva hugs Rohan tight: ‘despite the enormous distance that separates us in the social order, this deplorable affair is, however, with regard to him as regard to me, a great and too memorable example of the
danger of liaisons [du danger des liaisons]’. They had both been brought low, both barred in indistinguishable cells – all are victims, like the cast of Laclos’s novel. The liaisons are not merely a local cause of disaster but a symptom of more profound change – the dated ideology of a hierarchical society cracking apart under the strain of social mobility. There could be no more potent allegory for this than a prostitute playing the queen in the latter’s own back garden.
The cardinal’s lawyers had hoped to release their
mémoire
in the window between the interrogations and the confrontations, when Rohan was allowed to consult them again. But Joly de Fleury blocked publication, demanding numerous revisions to
run out the clock. When it finally appeared in mid-April, it had been gestating for a number of months – Target had read excerpts to a private audience
in his own home as early as the beginning of February.
The delay was partially self-inflicted. The contents had to be approved by all four of the cardinal’s lawyers, who did not always
sing in harmony. Rohan, who considered himself to have as incisive a mind and fine a style as his counsel, insisted on being involved in discussions, immersing himself in the minutiae and adding new details gleaned from the confrontations. ‘These words “difficult” and “terrible” are
two terrible expressions,’ he wrote to Target, the competition with his fellow
académicien
sizzling through.
As inevitably happens with documents bolted together by committee, the
mémoire
swelled in size. It was three times the length of any other published during the trial and stuffed further by the inclusion of an appendix of the depositions Carbonnières had taken down in England. Rohan was worried about its bulk, but ultimately proud of the achievement:
I would really like to express my great and total satisfaction with the redaction. Well done, Target. Tell him, I beg you, that it is with complete confidence that I will remember him for this – it is a masterpiece – worthy of him. It is perfect to the highest possible degree. Go, I beg you, to
tell him immediately.
Others differed in their estimation. Georgel thought the bloat muffled the
mémoire
’s impact: ‘it was voluminous and didn’t live up to the reputation of the author; one would have wanted more accuracy and dignity. The facts that needed to be stressed in order to have significant effect were lost in minute details that
overshadowed the work.’ The initial print run was a mere 1,100 – such was the eagerness to read it and the scarcity of exemplars that Rohan’s secretaries cleaned up by selling copies at the inflated price of an écu.
Target’s
mémoire
painstakingly demolished Doillot’s. Where Jeanne’s lawyer had relied on atmospherics and innuendo, Target built his case on dates and sums of money and nuggets of evidence mined by Georgel. Target’s primary strategy was to convince his audience to see the theft of the necklace as the gravamen of the charge against Rohan, not the
lèse-majesté
incorporated in the letters patent: it was far easier to prove Rohan had been the victim of a swindle than to exonerate him of thought crimes. By causally linking the forged letters, the scene in the garden at Versailles and the theft of the necklace, Target hoped Rohan’s innocence in the third matter would colour the judges’ attitude towards the rest. In order to accomplish
this, Target had to portray Rohan as a fool, effortlessly led on and stupid enough to believe a tarted-up prostitute was the queen herself (Rohan’s pride resisted this characterisation, and he tried to tone down some of the language).
At the same time, Target also sought to depict Rohan as an altogether more substantial figure, a hero of classical tragedy whose fall offered pause for moral reflection:
The revolutions that occur in the destiny of great men awaken suddenly among people all the passions at the same time: in some a barely concealed joy, circumspect grief in others, here worried and sorrowful pride, elsewhere the baseness that consoles itself in the sight of these reversals, in all an energetic curiosity, which goes about setting to right the
truth and lies.
Rohan’s monumentality held a grim fascination for lesser-souled men; his demolition transcends petty legal questions of right or wrong.
There was something fundamentally democratic in Target’s approach – like Blondel’s – which repeatedly invited the reader to envisage himself in Rohan’s situation: ‘Suppose that you had been tricked as him, that for a long time you had been in great error . . . a false image of the most desired truth. Don’t say that you would have known to avoid the traps laid for his good faith; no one can fix the
limits on illusion.’ It must have been galling, for a Rohan of all people, to invite the common man to burrow into his mentality. Here was an ecumenical, humanist antidote of the devious transplantation of prostitute and princess surgically engineered by Jeanne. Justice, Target suggested, derives not from divine right or the sword of authority, but the empathetic imagination of right-thinking men.
The bluntest profanity the
mémoires
collectively committed against the crown did not ever need mentioning. What Mademoiselle de Mirecourt described as ‘the fundamental law of this kingdom’ was broken: ‘that the public cannot suffer to see its princes lower themselves to the level
of mere mortals’. Snagged in a narrative which they had not the power to steer, Louis and Marie Antoinette were, in the words of the queen’s dressmaker Rose Bertin, ‘transformed
into simple individuals’. The
mémoires
’ resemblance to novels thrust
this descent into relief. The dumb loss of authority was nowhere more apparent than in the king and queen’s appearance as characters in other people’s stories. Ostensibly they were treated with respect, all parties agreeing that they were not implicated. Yet the persona of Marie Antoinette which Jeanne had mocked up was still subject to the lawyers’ debates – in the squabbling over whether Rohan had seen in person the queen riffling through banknotes, in the quibbles over what exactly had been said by d’Oliva in the garden. The Diamond Necklace Affair brought to the surface a realisation which had been brewing for some time – the royal family no longer governed their own image. This
lèse-majesté
was of an exponentially greater magnitude than anything dreamt up by Jeanne.
*
As Sarah Maza has shown, the melodramatic chiaroscuro of the
mémoires
normally drew inspiration from the bourgeois drama of Diderot, Mercier and Beaumarchais. The Diamond Necklace Affair was closer, she argues, to
opera buffa
, since it ‘offered a complicated plot, disguises and mistaken identities, purloined letters, elegant settings, and luscious female characters. It had all the elegant shallowness of a light (and late)
rococo comedy’.
A
T SIX O’CLOCK
on the morning of 31 May, Joly de Fleury began to lay before the
parlement
the charges against the defendants. The case for the cardinal’s conviction stood foremost. Rohan’s great crime had been ‘temerity’: the temerity with which he had concluded that the bill of sale had been signed by the queen; the temerity with which, surmising that the king would disapprove of the acquisition, he had flouted the royal will; the temerity with which he had ‘continued to lead the jewellers in the mistaken belief that the queen had
knowledge of the transaction’; and the temerity with which he had knelt before a woman he presumed to be the queen in the gardens of Versailles.
Joly de Fleury then pressed further, arguing that Rohan knew it had not been Marie Antoinette who had ordered him to broker the necklace’s acquisition. ‘The cardinal’s entire conduct’, he thundered, ‘displays
only falsehoods and lies.’ This allegation proved too much for a number of
parlementaires
. Extraordinarily Joly de Fleury’s own deputy, the
avocat-général
Abbé Séguier, argued against his superior, not even bothering to disguise his contempt. ‘You’re on the verge of descending to the grave’, he railed, ‘and you wish to cover your ashes with ignominy and to make us
magistrates share it.’
The court then heard the sentences Joly de Fleury was seeking. For Villette: whipping, branding, confiscation of possessions, lifetime service in the galleys. For Jeanne: whipping, branding, confiscation of possessions, imprisonment. For Rohan: an apology to the queen for his presumptuousness, resignation from all his positions, a ban on entering a royal palace when the king or queen were in residence,
punitive damages. ‘If it weren’t for the dignity with which he has held himself and the considerations that are due to his family,’ Joly
de Fleury spat, ‘I think that he would merit the same punishment
as Rétaux de Villette.’ The court was also requested to rule d’Oliva
hors du cour
– released only because the evidence for a conviction was inconclusive. Only Cagliostro was to be fully acquitted.
The
parlement
was not obliged to vote on Joly de Fleury’s recommendations alone: any judge was permitted to suggest alternative punishments. Two magistrates proposed that Jeanne be executed, so the thirteen ordained judges recused themselves, clerics being forbidden from spilling blood. This was a boon for the cardinal, a man not held in much affection by his fellow churchmen – only two were known to side with him.
The significance of the case was not lost on the assembly. Lef èvre d’Ormesson, one of the court’s
présidents
, said that he had never been involved in a case which required such delicate balancing between respect for the king and the principles of justice. The judges knew Joly de Fleury’s recommendations epitomised the king’s wishes, and any dilution would be taken by Louis as a snub. Pricked on by the sense of occasion, the zealots attacked the
procureur-général
as partial, illogical and overly harsh. The court would douse itself in moral turpitude should it convict Rohan, they claimed. One magistrate lectured:
The cardinal was tricked, shamefully tricked. For what is our purpose, sirs, if it is not to seek out the deceiver and to punish them? We therefore pity the cardinal, we should untie the irons that bind him and regard ourselves as lucky in saving the honour of the innocent and, through that,
cementing our own.
Robert de Saint-Vincent then stood to harangue his colleagues for their timidity. The craggy rock on which
parlementaire
opposition to the crown fastened, he accused the king’s ministers – always a tactful way to avoid blaming the king – of wishing to make the
parlement
an instrument of their vengefulness:
Since when have
ministerial
conclusions been admitted? Yes, I say
ministerial
. These have never been drawn up by the prosecutor. You will not find there conclusions reached by a magistrate. They are too opposed to the laws, to correct procedure, and never has
parlement
listened to something so distant
from its principles.
This was not just simulated outrage: the maréchal de Castries, himself a minister, noted in his diary that Joly de Fleury’s conclusions had obviously been dictated by
creatures of the queen.
Saint-Vincent’s line of argument was propitious, since the
parlement
’s legitimacy derived from its perceived independence and willingness to defy the king. Even the court party had no wish to be viewed, in the public eye, as government lackeys, and d’Aligre, who for months had coordinated the prosecution with Joly de Fleury, could not bring himself to join with the
procureur-général
’s view that Rohan deliberately obtained the necklace by deception: it ‘was impossible to conclude that he is an accomplice or had any knowledge of those things which he was involved in that led
to this infamy’. In d’Aligre’s view, Rohan should simply apologise to the queen for the offence caused. Hardly anyone rose in support of Joly de Fleury – one who did, the honorary counsellor Persan, spoke so softly that no one could hear him.