How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (42 page)

What happened next is disputed. Jeanne claimed that she and Marianne opened the locked doors with their key, then simply hopped into a boat waiting where the Seine ran beside the hospital and were rowed upstream to Charenton; the diarist Siméon-Prosper Hardy recorded, less romantically, that the pair were picked up by a coach waiting at the main gate. In either event, news of the breakout quickly spread: the celebrity escapee was supposedly glimpsed across the city, a flash of muslin leaping up carriage steps. There were rumours that she had dug herself out or clambered over the wall with the aid of a ladder.

At Provins, Jeanne was nearly unmasked. ‘I see what is happening,’ a soldier ribbed her. ‘You’re a young lady running away from the convent, and going to join the happy man who
has your heart.’ Disconcerted, Jeanne drowned her disguise in a brook and transformed herself into a bonny country wench, with frothy pastel petticoats and a basket of butter and eggs swinging from her wrist. She and Marianne hitched lifts with friendly carters and slept in forest glades. Jeanne camped out in the quarries of Crottières, near Bar, and sent her maid to alert her friends and in-laws. They were more generous with sympathy than tangible aid.

From Bar, with sweaty brows and callousing feet, Jeanne marched through Nancy, Lunéville, Metz, Thoinville, to relative safety in Hollerich, across the border in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. There she waited nervously until 27 July – fearful she would be exposed and returned to prison – when she was intercepted by an associate of Nicolas. They travelled swiftly through the Netherlands to Ostend and caught the packet to Dover. At four o’clock on 4 August 1787, Jeanne saw her husband for the first time in nearly two years.

Who were the guardian angels who uncaged Jeanne? It was clear to all observers that she had received outside assistance. Did Jeanne’s confessor Tillet, who had shown himself zealous in her cause, lend a hand? One of the investigating police officers wondered if ‘she might have been able to rely on some assistance from those
in charge of her’. The public’s suspicion immediately fell on the queen’s circle.
Madame de Polignac had travelled to England in May 1787, ostensibly to take the waters at Bath. But politic minds questioned whether the trip was not connected by a series of threats emanating from Nicolas. Already by August 1786, Nicolas had plans to publish a libel. The
Morning Star
of 13 December reported that ‘nothing can stop the comte de La Motte from lifting the veil which covers
this mysterious intrigue’.

D’Adhémar, the ambassador to Britain, believed that Nicolas’s menaces should be ignored: ‘If the government enters into negotiations of any sort whatsoever, we would be flooded with libels . . . To endure and show contempt, that is the sole course
I believe reasonable.’ He told the police chief de Crosne that
‘nothing is more foolish than according significance to libels . . . Her Majesty would be very indignant that you should presume that such horrors might affect her in any way.’ ‘I endure their bellowing’, he ruefully concluded of the
libellistes
, ‘like I hear the cries of dogs in the street.’ D’Adhémar was simply reiterating the policy the French government had pursued since 1783, when they realised that muckrakers were never truly bought off – they often tried to print the same material under a different title – and folding to blackmail only encouraged
les autres
. Yet this case was different. Whereas the majority of libels in the late 1770s and 1780s had portrayed figures long dead or socially irrelevant, such as Louis XV and Madame du Barry, Nicolas’s hypothetical exposé aimed deep into the Court, scorching the queen and those closest to her, and potentially reigniting a scandal now in cinders. There is no proof the duchesse de Polignac was on anything more than a spa holiday, but it was widely presumed that the true purpose of her visit was to barter Jeanne’s freedom for Nicolas’s silence (Nicolas’s own memoir, though hugely unreliable, speaks of a meeting with the duchesse).

This perception was strengthened by the slackness of the investigation. The head warder only contacted the public prosecutor five hours after Jeanne’s disappearance, and the police on the following day. Collectively, they reached the limp conclusion that they could find ‘nothing which would be able to indicate to us the means which were used
for their escape’ and suggested she may have floated down an aqueduct. (Inventive minds conjured up more colourful
details: a British paper reported that Jeanne passed through seven doors – like some initiate in the Eleusinian mysteries – pressing gold into the guard’s palm at each stage. It was said that she left hugging a birdcage containing a favoured canary.)

The La Mottes’ reunion was not a joyous one. Nicolas had not remained faithful during their two years apart and found his new wife – always headstrong – touched by her tribulations. ‘I quickly perceived that the great misfortunes she had suffered had much embittered her temper, and that tact and caution were needed to keep her
in good humour.’ Nicolas had thus far displayed the tact of a thundercloud and the caution of a drunk. ‘In spite of all my patience,’ he recalls in his memoirs, ‘I could not help saying one day that her woes were all caused by her own waywardness and extravagances’ (this from a man who stuccoed himself with diamonds at the earliest opportunity).

I had no sooner uttered the words than she flung herself on a dagger she happened to be holding in her hand and, despite my promptness in running to her, along with the other people who were in the house, we could not prevent her from striking herself below the breast, and we saw her fall
helpless to the floor.

Jeanne was not seriously wounded. The marriage endured despite each taking lovers, and, judging by the affectionate tone of their letters, mellowed into a kind of friendship. They were poor, but still tried to live grandly on credit. They worked their way into the French community in London, one that was treacherous, venal and sometimes deadly – but never dull. (There had been a sizeable contingent of Frenchmen in the capital since 1685, when the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV had ended the toleration of Protestants and driven pious Huguenots abroad; and since the middle of the century they had been joined by a motley of political renegades, bankrupts, spies, blackmailers and deserters.)

Jeanne’s most powerful patron was the former finance minister, the comte de Calonne, who had crossed the Channel after his resignation in 1787, fearing his enemies might prosecute him for fraud during his time at the Treasury. Jeanne needed money: the most obvious source was a ‘justificatory memoir’. It would either
sell in enormous numbers or she would be bought off by timorous ministers who had already shown their weakness in the arrangement struck with Nicolas. Calonne was ambitious to regain a seat in government. How better to prove his loyalty than by suppressing this treasonous publication?

The La Mottes reeled in Calonne with a go-between: Antoine Joseph Serres de La Tour, a man at the heart of the literary demimonde, who agreed to ghostwrite Jeanne’s memoirs. La Tour had been the founding editor of the
Courier
; after being ousted in 1783, he lived by hawking
Dragées de la Mecque
, sugar-coated pills for stomach complaints. When he informed Calonne of his employment, adding casually that the La Mottes were in parallel talks with Calonne’s enemy the baron de Breteuil about disappearing the manuscript, the comte acted quickly. He wrote to the queen with an offer to snuff out the libel. The reply he received stated ‘both their majesties believe that one should forget all
about this writing’. Calonne was not deterred. His recent marriage to his immensely wealthy mistress had increased his annual income by 230,000 livres, and so desperate was he to re-ingratiate himself that he offered to suppress the libel with his own money and pay the La Mottes to retire to America. His willingness was again rebuffed. Yet he had been drawn in so far that he had already emended the manuscript in his own hand, deleting elements ‘so crude and obscene, even as an intermediary, to send this document
to the queen’ – it was counterproductive, he felt, to show Rohan calling the queen a ‘whore’ and taking her from behind. Towards the end of 1788, the relationship turned sour. La Tour complained that Calonne’s protracted haggling had lost the La Mottes the opportunity to cut a deal with Breteuil, and sued Calonne for compensation.

It seems that Calonne was played as Rohan had been, but other evidence suggests he may have had a directorial role. It was widely known that Calonne and Jeanne had been lovers.
*
Though neither
Madame Campan nor Nicolas de La Motte are especially reliable witnesses, both agree, as does the neutral marquis de Bombelles, that Calonne made substantial changes. Even had Calonne intervened only in the places he himself acknowledged, he let pass numerous other insinuations of adultery between Rohan and Marie Antoinette. Calonne might have been policing the boundaries of decency, but he still needed to preserve enough smut to make the memoirs worth burying. His interests were not solely the queen’s. As Morande said, ‘it is certain that the libel would never have appeared if Monsieur de Calonne had not involved himself in a negotiation that
did not concern him’.

*
Their affair ended when, during a game of piquet, Calonne declared, ‘Madame,
you have been marked’, referring to Jeanne’s cards. Jeanne took this as an allusion to her branding. She upended the table and leapt at him, tearing his face with her nails.

27

Confessions of a Justified Sinner

W
HEN THE DEPUTIES
arrived at the Estates-General, they brought with them
cahiers de doléances
, registers of grievances
cahier de doléances
was they wished the king to redress. Jeanne’s own smuggled into France in the spring of 1789. On 15 May, Siméon-Prosper Hardy noted in his diary that 1,500 copies of the
Mémoires Justificatifs
had entered the country. Since booksellers distributed such treasonous material surreptitiously, it is difficult to quantify precisely the extent of the memoir’s dissemination. But it has been estimated that over 10,000 copies, including pirate versions, circulated, a significant proportion among expatriate communities in London and the Low Countries. Its readership would have been much larger, as volumes were passed along, once imbibed, to others impatient to read of misbehaviour at Court.

The
Mémoires Justificatifs
were nourished by the Rousseauean sentimentality so popular in the eighteenth century. Jeanne presented herself as an ingénue transfixed and then destroyed by a
‘monster of virtue’. The crime was compounded by the high rank of her persecutors, who should have treated her as an equal, not a dispensable pawn. The book’s publication needed justification, too. Her survival in an impoverished state, Jeanne wrote, was a sign from God that she must sell her memoirs to replenish her confiscated wealth and roast the guilty. At liberty in England, far from the ‘oppressive
tyranny of France’, she could finally speak the truth.

In the briefs published during the trial, Jeanne had denied ever knowing the queen. Now she confessed to not merely being an acquaintance, but to usurping Madame de Polignac as her closest confidante (and, she all but says, bedmate). There is a sexual shimmer to Jeanne’s ambivalent language. ‘Remember those moments of
intoxication that I scarcely dare recount,’ she addresses the queen. ‘You lowered
yourself to me.’ According to Jeanne, Rohan was scorned by Marie Antoinette after she rejected his advances during his time as ambassador in Vienna.
*
The queen appeared receptive to Jeanne’s suggestion they should be reconciled. This, however, was merely a ruse: she had sworn to ruin the cardinal but required him for the time being, intending to elevate Rohan to the ministry in order to subvert the kingdom to Austrian interests. Jeanne’s story gave body and colour to the misty allegations made by revolutionary journalists that France was entirely in Austria’s pocket. The existence of an Austrian Committee was a commonplace of the radical pamphleteering of the Revolution, and the vagueness of such accusations made them all the more sinister and irrefutable. These were bolstered by Jeanne’s ‘evidence’ of a long-standing, treasonous intent. To readers willing to believe, the
Mémoires Justificatifs
offered a precursor of the plot now in motion.

Jeanne wished to show the queen and Rohan in thrall to desire, as well as political ambition. Accordingly, they become lovers, and the first third of the
Mémoire
is structured around their purported correspondence, in which rhapsody counterpoints with strategy. Marie Antoinette, worried that Rohan is gossiping about her letters, asks Jeanne to direct the garden scene in order to ‘see him
without seeing him’ and judge his suitability for an official audience. At the height of his infatuation with the queen, Rohan negotiates the purchase of the necklace. Jeanne contradicts herself about the reasons for its purchase. Did the queen covet it specifically because the king denied it her? Did Rohan need to clear his debts before Louis would agree to appoint him chief minister? Did he therefore intend to sell the diamonds? How, then, did he expect to succeed? None of these questions are satisfactorily answered.

The queen is angered by the clumsy handling of the transaction, but drops a thumping hint to Jeanne to counterfeit her signature. This was Jeanne’s first admission of forgery. Her narrative did not require such a divulgence: she could easily have attributed the
handiwork to Rohan or Cagliostro, whom she had disparaged during the trial. But Jeanne was eager for her readers to understand that she was the ultimate cause of Rohan’s fall and the public denigration of the queen. Perversely, forgery satisfied her yearning to realise her nobility through service at the queen’s side – to become, figuratively, the queen’s hand. And it also offered a formal justification for her literary project in aligning the
écriture
on the document and the more voluminous
écriture
of the
Mémoires Justificatifs
. It was by writing that Jeanne suffered, and it was through writing that she would redeem herself and punish those who abandoned her.