How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (43 page)

The necklace is not simply a McGuffin; it embodies all that is dysfunctional at Court. The word ‘
chaîne
’ occurs frequently. The queen is chained by the searching eyes of the Polignacs; favour is
‘chained’ at her waistband; her life is a
‘chain of imprudences’; she, in turn, seeks to
‘chain the lion’ – that is, the king. Networks of patronage, taken by courtiers as essential to advancement, are twisted into a fetter, as restrictive as the
collier d’esclavage
. The ties that bind bite at the wrists. Jeanne writes of her own
‘chain of misfortunes’ and compares her suffering to a
‘dismemberment’ – the fate which befell the necklace. Ironically, Marie Antoinette vainly asserts her independence by seeking to acquire the necklace, another chain – one that furthers her dependency and encumbers her with deceit. The only escape – after Breteuil, in Jeanne’s telling, badgers the jewellers to reveal all – is through brutally cutting adrift her abettors, a denial which clamps the shackles of the Bastille around Jeanne and Rohan.

By braiding the necklace into a wider discourse of bondage, at a time when the liberties of Frenchmen were a matter of fierce debate, Jeanne re-conceived the Diamond Necklace Affair as a parable of freedom and its invisible – though still insidious – restraint by the inbreeding knot of families which leeched off the country’s riches. Despite all she endured, Jeanne refrained from blaming Rohan and Marie Antoinette outright. He was a generous prince to whom Jeanne owed gratitude for his largesse; she a queen, for all her faults, who Jeanne admired. Jeanne’s ordeals were caused by the
‘evil clash of their terrible interests’ – they, as much as Jeanne, were prisoners of the system.

The historian has no harder task than determining the impression
of a book on the heart and mind of the average reader. Scholarship has developed the pornographic interpretation of the French Revolution, initially offered by Robert Darnton, who argued that Grub Street hacks, excluded from advancement in literary circles, turned on the Establishment and, by heaping obscenities upon the royal family, denuded the French monarchy
of all respect. We now know that writers of
libelles
had a variety of motives; that the French government did an adequate job of suppressing the obscenities in the pre-revolutionary years; that the circulation of those works which were published was limited; and that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette themselves rarely featured in
libelles
. In this light, the
Mémoires Justificatifs
become all the more potent. Simon Burrows, a leading revisionist of the pornographic interpretation, calls them a – if not the –
‘foundational text’.

Unlike previous libels, Jeanne’s memoirs were not an anonymous gazette of dirty stories, stitched together or reworked from earlier anthologies. It’s hard to imagine that most readers actually believed these anecdotes; they were entertained, rather, by their insolence.
Les Amours de Charlot et Toinette
, for example, describes in verse an afternoon of passion involving a barely disguised Marie Antoinette and her brother-in-law, the comte d’Artois. Though it brings the reader up close to Marie Antoinette, draped naked over a bergère, it is recognisably a fantasy – even if Artois were actually her lover, would he really speak to her in quatrains? Accounts of the bedroom antics of the Most Christian King and Glorious Queen reduced them to sex dolls. In a country where the prevailing ideology still glued status to behaviour – French nobles, for example, could be stripped of their titles for engaging in unbecoming activities, such as commerce – whatever desacralisation occurred was the result of imagining the royals as lusty, bestial, spurred on by base appetites. The actual credence given to the gossip was largely irrelevant.

The
Mémoires Justificatifs
novelly adapted the genre. They report from the inside, meticulously tracing the seed of corruption. Though royal partisans then and readers now immediately alight upon the sexual impropriety, for the most part the book is remarkably restrained, often tedious. Jeanne is not afraid of being boring: her memoirs are, after all, ‘justificatory’, so every meeting and conversation is expounded at
remorseless length; every hostile witness, however minor, rebutted with devotion. These features glaze the book with a verisimilitude which other libels do not even attempt to attain. Even the lesbian trysts and Marie Antoinette’s infidelities are veiled in deliberately ambiguous terms, which a forgiving reader might interpret only as signs of girlish affection. This was far removed from the ‘buggering’ and ‘fucking’ found in cruder compositions.

But
Mémoires Justificatifs
also performed more insidious work – not just ridiculing the Bourbons, but providing plausible grounds to receptive minds that the queen had committed treason against the nation and her husband. The timing of publication augmented the book’s effect (the French authorities, awakening to the peril late in the day, tried – and failed – to buy up the entire London print run). Four months later, the stormers of the Bastille discovered a library of the political pornography that ministers had sealed – forever, they had thought – in darkness. Now the French public glutted itself on improbable tales of Marie Antoinette’s extravagant sex life; its receptivity to these stories was primed by the less graphic but seemingly well-evidenced accusations of Jeanne’s memoirs.

The publication of the
Mémoires Justificatifs
prompted a familiar voice to re-enter the lists. The
Mémoire Historique des Intrigues de la Cour
was published in Venice in 1790. Its author was Rétaux de Villette, about whom nothing had been heard since he had been expelled from Paris in 1786. He had been victimised more than any of the participants, he mewled – ‘used by all
and abandoned by all’. The work is an unimaginative piece of political pornography – of Rohan’s first encounter with Jeanne he wrote: ‘Never was there a courtesan who had a boudoir more delicious, more voluptuous than that into which she was introduced . . . he placed his hands on her, his eyes gleaming with lust, and Madame de La Motte, gazing at him tenderly, made him know that he
could dare all’ – and a limp defence of his own actions. After this flare-up, he was never heard of again.

On 24 June 1789, Nicole (no longer the baronne d’Oliva) died. She had shone briefly as a celebrity after her release from prison – even moving in for a short while with her lawyer, Blondel – but her constitution had been shredded by the Bastille and childbirth. Doctors
prescribed a period of recuperation in the countryside, and she lived for a while with her guardian in Passy. In April 1787, she married her on–off lover, and the father of her child, Toussaint de Beausire, a decision she would regret. She told a court in 1789 that

I was barely married before I experienced shocking treatment at the hands of my husband. He ill-used me, and beat me several times. He is leading the most scandalous life, passing his nights in gambling hells and going with other women. And all this time I am confined to the house, in absolute poverty. We live under the same roof, but lodge separately – he in a fine front room; I in a poky little box behind . . . And now he wants me to go away, to retire into a convent, but will not give me the means
of my subsistence.

Nicole eventually entered the convent at Fontenay sous Bois, where she died soon afterwards, a woman whose little happiness had been snatched from her by those more brutal and devious. Beausire did not waste much time grieving: he was at the head of the phalanx that overwhelmed the Bastille less than two weeks later.

The flux of 1789 presented Jeanne with an opportunity she had never anticipated. Might she not return to Paris and add the
parlement
’s verdict to the bonfire of absolutism? Radicals encouraged her homecoming; some influential Parisians, from across the political spectrum, believed she was hiding among them and fruitlessly sought her. But Louis was still on the throne and Jeanne was disinclined to expose herself while he still wielded power, especially since she had so recently baited him with the
Mémoires Justificatifs
.
*
Nicolas, more carefree (and also, perhaps, eager to rid himself of his wife’s growing paranoia), insisted on moving back to Paris in August 1789 to campaign for a fresh hearing of the Diamond Necklace case. Soon he was bedded down with an English mistress, Madame Seymour, and was ‘telling the
most shameful tales’ about Jeanne.

In Nicolas’s absence, Jeanne struck up a correspondence with her sister, Marianne, whom she had not heard from since her prison days. The women were more fractious than familial. Marianne’s
activities during the intervening years had been morally equivocal: she had repeatedly petitioned the king to make over to her Jeanne’s confiscated property. Whether she was attempting to secure it for herself or intended to recover it on her sister’s behalf is not clear, but Jeanne certainly believed Marianne coveted her riches: she referred to her as a
‘
moisonneuse
’ (a ‘grasper’) in a letter to Nicolas, and decried her as a
‘monster’ who ‘has not had the heart to come to her sister’s help’. Yet she yearned, at times, for Marianne’s company – called her ‘my
consolation’ – and pitied her, convincing herself that her sister had been led astray by a malignant lover.

Marianne had been horrified by the
Mémoires Justificatifs
and urged repentant silence as the only virtuous course. Why didn’t they live together, she suggested, modestly and anonymously in ‘Switzerland or Italy, or . . .
some German principality’ where the only diamonds and queens were in a pack of cards? Jeanne would not hear of this
‘nonsense’: she had smelted her justifications into biography. She truly believed she had befriended the queen, that she was a victim, not a criminal. Even in her letters to Nicolas, there is no conspiratorial backslapping – just outrage at their mistreatment. The falsehoods fermented in her mind into memories. ‘Sorrow has not stopped pressing down on me until now, reducing me to a skeleton . . . I am very ill, my love, the bile is torturing me and sorrow eating my heart out; but courage still keeps me alive, the hope of conquering my enemies
still sustains me.’

The many factions spun into existence by the Revolution trailed Jeanne, wishing either to silence her or ventriloquise her. The duc d’Orléans, his eye enviously fixed on the throne, sent emissaries to London to woo her, while Nicolas’s frantic petitioning – of the mayor of Paris, of ministers, of the National Assembly – to revoke his sentence caught the attention of figures of all political stripes, from the king’s reactionary brother, Provence, to the Jacobin Robespierre. The comte de Mirabeau, the taurine, pox-damaged, fire-preaching, debt-sunken revolutionary leader who secretly worked for the royal family, was convinced Nicolas’s agitation for a retrial formed the keystone of a plot to overthrow the monarchy by casting doubt on the chastity of Louis’s marriage and the legitimacy of his heirs.

A number of pseudepigraphal works appeared under Jeanne’s name, which professed to reveal truths hitherto unmentionable. Another
Mémoire Justificatif
was published – indisputably inauthentic, not least because the material about Jeanne’s early life derives from the
Histoire Véritable de Jeanne de Saint-Remi
, a pamphlet published at the time of the trial for the purpose of discrediting its subject – which accused Marie Antoinette of ‘twice attempting to set alight and to submerge in blood an entire empire . . . who meditated on the death of her husband at the very moment in which she tired him with
her perfidious caresses’. In a scenario ludicrous even by the standards of the Diamond Necklace Affair, Jeanne is cast aside by the queen when she refuses to poison Vergennes’s hot chocolate. Another concoction,
La Reine dévoillée ou Supplement au Mémoire de Mde La Comtesse de Valois de La Motte
, was inspired by the epistolary libel which Jeanne pioneered in the appendix to her memoir. Taking the form of a portfolio of revealing letters from the Court’s most powerful figures,
La Reine dévoillée
begins with discussions between the queen and the duchesse de Polignac about destroying Rohan, but broadens into an entire counterfactual history of the late 1780s, exposing the queen as the fons et origo of all government directives. It is a clear example of how the breach made by Jeanne in the reputation of court politics was prised open to allow a rangier critique of corruption and despotism.

Yet Jeanne was not a republican. As someone who valued her royal heritage deeply, she took no pleasure in the demolition of the Ancien Régime. Her ambiguous position emerges in two editions of
Père Duchesne
, an earthy paper written for the sans-culottes, though edited by a down-at-heel bourgeois, Jacques-René Hébert. Hébert’s avatar was a salty, pipe-chuffing old codger whose woodcut appeared at the head of each issue above the caption, ‘I’m the true Père Duchesne, for fuck’s sake’. Père Duchesne calls on Jeanne, and receives a reciprocal visit after he injures himself falling down her stairs. In these pendant stories Jeanne is game and ingenuous, of
‘sensitive character’, wanting no vengeance against the queen, just a certification of her innocence; but she is mocked for her residual affection for Rohan, her class solidarity contrasted with Duchesne’s
‘good sense’. Duchesne flips from sympathising at her treatment to
condemning her as an aristocrat (a recently coined and pejorative term). However useful Jeanne might prove as a totem for revolutionary factions, she would remain one of ‘them’ – a wannabe noble with rotten aspirations who saw the doors that she wished had been opened to her smashed in by more brutal hands.

*
This was a bald factual error, since Marie Antoinette had married Louis before Rohan’s embassy.

*
Jeanne may have been in Paris, briefly and in secret, in November 1790, only to return to England because of the dangers.