How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (41 page)

Rohan’s retreat from Court was more sedate. On 5 June 1786, he set out for Chaise-Dieu, accompanied by his brother Ferdinand and a train of seven carriages. He travelled with some trepidation, having fruitlessly asked Louis if he could reside in a more temperate region, so that his arthritic knee might escape the pinch of the Auvergnian winter (not that the journey was without comforts – two hundred labourers paved the last stretch of road for the cardinal’s smooth passage).

The resident monks bore little affection for Rohan, who for years had valued the abbey only for its income. Yet they found him so
modest and amiable, so eager to join the community – when a fire ravaged the town in July, he stood on the front line, pail in hand – that their loathing soon turned to respect. Rohan stayed for only four months, before moving to the more clement surroundings of the Benedictine abbey of Marmoutiers, near Tours, where he rested, meditated in prayer and immersed himself in provincial society. At the beginning of 1787, Rohan was restored to the cardinalate. He remained in touch with Target, to whom he confided about the transformations wrought on him: ‘It seems to me, sir, that sorrows make still more sensitive the souls that injustice has not been able to harden. I confess that mine has retained that delicious
source of happiness.’ His servant Joseph Diss noted that, though the cardinal retained his ‘irresistible charisma that worked on all who approached him . . . [he] never shook off the terrible ordeal of the affair of the necklace which aged him in several ways, emotionally
as well as physically’ (he still wore an eye patch and walked with a cane).

On 24 December 1788, the order for Rohan’s exile was suppressed by the king. He made a victor’s progress through Alsace, a double rank of infantry lining the route, the crowds fizzing around his coach, demanding to bear him themselves along the road. At his palace in Mutzig, he was greeted by dragoons with their sabres unsheathed, local dignitaries, clergymen and the community of two hundred Jews whose rabbi preached a sermon of welcome. An ode was composed for the occasion, entitled ‘Apollo Recalled from Exile’. Two cardboard
arcs de triomphe
were erected in Saverne, alongside two obelisks showing the sun emerging from a cloud.

At home at last, Rohan grew introspective and read a great deal of verse – Homer, Horace and Virgil, as well as Tasso, Dante, Corneille and Racine. It was said that he had been working for many years on a work of literature, though it never amounted to anything. He continued to experiment, especially with electricity, and he predicted, on looking at his shotgun, that one day something similarly propulsive would enable people to ‘cross space, to delve in the mysteries of the stars and the planets and communicate from one end of the world
to the other’. The cardinal hoped to preserve Alsace’s tranquillity from the political ructions undulating through
the rest of France, though he realised that doing so was beyond his power. One evening, looking upon the ruined castle of Hohbarr, he declared: ‘A voice seems to speak to me here that one day my palace down there will be like the rubble here. How can I prevent that? I would like to see raised an impassable wall between
Alsace and France.’

Alsace could no more insulate itself from the crisis in the rest of the country than it could float down the Rhine and the Danube to hide itself in an obscure corner of the Balkans. Financial crisis could no longer be staved off and the king instructed the Estates-General, which brought together representatives of the nation’s three estates – the clergy, the nobility and the commoners – to gather, for the first time since 1614, on 1 May 1789, in order to negotiate a solution. Rohan was elected as a deputy of the clergy of Haguenau. He hoped, amid the turbulence of allegiances, to win a measure of grace through steadfast loyalty to the king as democracy shivered the kingdom.

In the event, royalists suspected him of conspiring with the opportunist duc d’Orléans, and he was unable to take up his place when the king addressed the three estates on 5 May. He was still excluded by royal decree from Versailles and its environs. While it is unclear whether Rohan was himself eager to attend the Estates-General, or reluctantly accepted the responsibility thrust upon him by his admiring electors, liberals viewed Rohan’s continued punishment as an example of vengeful despotism and campaigned for his admission. It took until 24 July for the election to be ratified; but Rohan could not fill his post immediately. He was temporarily in Ettenheim, in the transpontine half of his principality, having been flushed out of Alsace by anti-aristocratic rioting – part of the ‘Great Fear’ which blazed across the country that summer like forest fire. Only in September did the cardinal take up his seat in what had become the National Assembly. By then, the government’s monopoly on power had sundered and the events we now refer to as the French Revolution careered onwards, ineluctable and unbridled.

On 17 June, the commoners, resisting procedural attempts to marginalise their voice, had declared themselves the National Assembly. Three days later, they found their meeting room locked.
Believing this to be an attempt to silence them, they trooped to a tennis court close by and swore to remain united as a body until ‘the constitution of the realm and public regeneration are
established and assured’. An impasse had been reached between the king and the National Assembly, who were further alienated when Louis attempted to impose his own conservative vision for constitutional reform. As increasing numbers of clergy and nobility drifted into the Assembly, the king was forced to acknowledge its legitimacy. His actions, however, suggested discontent. The dismissal of conciliatory ministers, scarcity of bread and the advance of 20,000 troops on Paris sparked panic and revolution – it was hard to distinguish between the two – in the capital. Ransacking and arson broke out. On 14 July, the Bastille was taken by a crowd high on fear and freedom. The marquis de Launay, the custodian of all the accused during the Diamond Necklace Affair, was decapitated. The upheaval cracked apart the king’s authority and radical deputies sought to exploit it. From 4 to 11 August the National Assembly, giddy with destruction, sliced through the feudal ligatures of the Bourbon polity: seigneurial dues and rights, tithes, the sale of offices and serfdom were abolished. On 26 August, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was passed: sovereignty now inhered in the nation, not the monarch.

This unravelling of the kingdom went far beyond whatever gentle liberalising improvements Rohan had envisaged. The abolition of feudalism uniquely impinged upon Alsace, since the Treaty of Westphalia, through which Alsace had been incorporated into France, guaranteed that the feudal customs of the Holy Roman Empire would continue to be respected. The cardinal’s income dwindled further in November, when church property was nationalised – Rohan’s schedule for debt repayments relied predominantly on revenue from his abbeys and diocese.

Rohan relinquished any hope of diverting the course, at least locally, of the Revolution. In April 1790, his request to return to Alsace was accepted by the National Assembly. With the abolition of noble titles and a ban on displaying coats-of-arms, passed on 19 June, Rohan resolved to become an emigré. He left Saverne on 13 July, accompanied by twenty of his men, provocatively dressed in their liveries. The
assembly had endorsed the day before the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, through which the state effectively kidnapped the church from Rome (a change to which the cardinal would never consent). A few days after his departure, the gardens of Saverne were uprooted by the rejoicing citizenry.

26

Down and Out in Paris and London

P
RIMARILY A HOSPITAL
for the indigent, the Salpêtrière also detained criminal, licentious and unruly women. Its
maison de force
was divided into four sections: the
commun
housed prostitutes and women of ‘evil conduct, life and manners’; the
correction
, rebellious women of good families, constrained by
lettres de cachet
; those with limited sentences were housed in the
prison
, and those with life sentences in the
grande force
. It was to this last that Jeanne, swollen tongue lolling out of her swollen mouth, was brought
after her branding.

She was given a bed in a dormitory, under the glare of a cross-shaped window, but was soon transferred to her own cell. Not that she now lived in cushioned comfort; her room was furnished only with a straw mattress and a glassless window bolted dark with wooden shutters. It was cold and damp in all seasons. The prospect of endless years in this hole grieved Jeanne beyond consolation – ‘a
slow and prolonged death’, she called it. In her first weeks she was an aspergillum of tears and the staff treated her stonily. One of the sisters told her that ‘the cardinal is blessed in this house where he has done a lot of good. I advise you to keep your silence if you want to
live in peace here.’ Another warned ‘If you fight with your companions, I warn you that no one will come to separate you. When there is a ruckus here, the doors are closed. If the prisoners injure themselves, they are bandaged. If they kill themselves,
they are buried.’

Yet the public were still fascinated by Jeanne’s plight, and sympathy at the severity of her punishment flooded towards her. Those who believed the queen had a hand in the Diamond Necklace Affair accused her of having ‘abandoned Madame de La Motte to the
horror of her fate’. The Court could not shrug Jeanne off: the comte
d’Artois quipped to his brother, ‘Think, sire, how much bother it will be to marry off the dauphin when it is known that one of his relatives is
in the Hospital.’ Rumours that a close confidante of the queen – perhaps the princesse de Lamballe, perhaps the duchesse de Polignac – had called on Jeanne heated suspicions of a cover-up. (The princesse de Lamballe had, in fact, visited the hospital on other business and expressed a passing interest to the superintendent in seeing Jeanne; the superintendent replied, ‘Madame, the unfortunate comtesse has not been punished with
an audience with you.’)

Engravings were sold of Jeanne dressed in her scrubs – rough worsted clothes in grey and brown, clogs and a cap. Newspapers reported every shred of hearsay. ‘She is stretched out on a bed of pain’, wrote the
Gazette d’Utrecht
, ‘which is steeped
in her tears.’ She was portrayed as a martyr, chosen by the Lord to live among the fallen and sinful.

Her complexion is yellow. She has become extremely thin. She is mixed up with a crowd of women, the scum of nature and society, branded like herself, who yet have some consideration for the unhappy woman whom they call ‘the countess’ and whom they endeavour to console . . . Her food is black bread; on Sundays an ounce of meat, on Fridays a piece of cheese, on other days some beans or lentils soaked
in plenty of water.

Like the other inmates, Jeanne earned her keep with needlework. Many came to visit her, but she shrank away, shutting her door or merging, wraith-like, into the grey-clad crowds.

One of Jeanne’s fellow prisoners volunteered as her chambermaid, preparing soup and boiling coffee. Well-wishers sent her money and the duc d’Orléans, to spite the queen, organised a subscription on her behalf. Her situation was considerably improved when she cultivated the attention of Mathieu Tillet, one of the hospital’s administrators, who obtained for Jeanne unlimited eggs, as well as wine, jam and sweets. He provided her with a bedstead, table and chairs, and fixed on the wall a print of the Magdalen and an ivory carving of Christ. Tillet visited Jeanne every day – a concealed staircase led directly to her cloister – and some suspected that prayer was not their only business (Jeanne’s own memoir, at pains to present herself as a penitent,
still admits that Tillet ‘caressed me as much as if I
had been his daughter’).

Misery bred godliness – or at least a well-simulated version of it. The
Gazette de Leyde
reported that ‘Madame de La Motte is becoming more and more stoical and resigned to her fate. For the greater part of the day, she employs herself in reading the ascetic book,
The Imitation of Christ
.’ The archbishop of Paris found her ‘sublime in the picture of suffering she draws, and in the piety and resignation she
gives expression to’. Jeanne’s behaviour, however, did not convey resignation. Less than a month after her arrival, an escape attempt went awry. ‘She had already made a hole through which her head would go,’ wrote the
Gazette d’Utrecht
, but ‘she stuck in this opening, so that she could go neither forward nor backwards. Fright seized her; she struggled in vain, and her cries summoned the warders, who found her in that position. Her attempt has only increased the rigour
of her confinement.’

But there were hidden figures, with power and money and silent purpose, who wished Jeanne released. At the end of November 1786, Jeanne’s maidservant, Angelique, was informed by one of the guards that a plot was in motion to spring her. A letter arrived, delivered in the quiet of night, which stated ‘PEOPLE are now intent on
changing your condition’. According to the improbable scenario laid out by Jeanne in her autobiography, she was instructed to examine the key hanging from the belt of the jailer and draw it accurately enough for a replica to be made (Jeanne did not explain why she, rather than the compliant and well-placed guard, was chosen for this task). Somehow she managed to jigsaw together enough glances to sketch the key and it was duly cut, delivered and secreted.

The attempted evasion was delayed when Angelique was unexpectedly released and another girl, Marianne, appointed in her place. Eventually, the date for the escape was set for 5 June 1787. A rose was brought to Jeanne to signal that the prospect was fair (did Jeanne think of another rose, pressed into d’Oliva’s hand nearly three years earlier?). Dressed in a rich blue frock coat, a black shirt, breeches, a hat and leather gloves, and prodding the ground with a cane, she wandered out of the prison (as with Jeanne’s other
escapades, literary precedent may have embellished her account – Manon Lescaut also escaped gaol dressed as a man).