How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (44 page)

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The Fall of the Houses of Valois and Bourbon

J
EANNE’S ANIMOSITY TOWARDS
Marie Antoinette had sharpened after the publication of the
Mémoires Justificatifs
. ‘On my life, for all the crowns in the world, I shall not disavow what I have said of her, and if she can only be cleansed by me, she will remain all her life as black
as a chimney.’ She planned an autobiography, telling her life from birth, which promised more revelations of royal misdeeds. Jacques Marivaux, the head of the king’s secret police, had managed to inveigle his way onto Nicolas’s legal team and manipulated the comte de La Motte into pleading with his wife not to publish. Having failed to convince her to back down or return to Paris – ‘Why is my presence in Paris so much desired?’, Jeanne wrote suspiciously. ‘The Salpêtrière has not been destroyed, consequently they might throw me again into their
loathsome holes’ – Marivaux enlisted the aid of the general-administrator of the post office, Dubu de Longchamp, a fleeting acquaintance of the La Mottes.

In June 1791, Longchamp sent an associate called Bertrand to London to trail Jeanne and thwart any approaches by other factions. The mission was of the utmost secrecy – Bertrand never even mentioned Jeanne’s name in his dispatches. On reaching London, he discovered a calamity had occurred. A Mr Mackenzie, an upholsterer to whom Jeanne owed money, had finally lost patience and sent the bailiffs round. Jeanne temporised, offering them a glass of wine; but a fear of arrest had been graven into her soul and, as her would-be captors drank, she escaped into a nearby house. Jeanne locked herself in a high room and improvised a barricade. The bailiffs gave chase and crashed through the door to see Jeanne hurling herself through the window. Her thigh cracked as she smashed into the street, her knee snapped, her eye spurted from its socket, ‘the blood
issued with a violence from her wounds, that for a while resisted every effort to
stop its course’.

Jeanne was tended by a perfumer named Mr Warren, a friend and sometime landlord who lived on Lambeth Street near Westminster Bridge. Bertrand called on Jeanne on the day of his arrival:

When I entered the room, she began to play on my feelings. She lifted the bedclothes so that I might see her injuries. There was never seen a sight so horrible. Her thigh is broken about the middle, one leg is broken at the knee and both are in splints. Deposits of pus are forming and the surgeon is obliged to make incisions to allow suppuration. Her whole body is a dark yellow in colour,
from head to foot.

Four days later, Bertrand reported that her condition had deteriorated:

A whitish spot has appeared on the thigh. After the administration of a poultice, a considerable swelling formed, which burst and flooded her thigh with pus, the odour of which was rather cadaverous, and the product was so abundant that five saucerfuls of it were thrown away. When I went in, the smell was unendurable, though a lot of brown paper had been burnt and all
the windows were open.

Initially sympathetic, Warren soon felt the strain of supporting Jeanne. He grew irritated when she dirtied the linen, refused to subsidise a nurse and suggested that the inquisitive Frenchman might stump up for her care.

Despite Jeanne’s battered state, Bertrand persisted in his mission. He offered Jeanne financial incentives to withdraw authorisation for her autobiography’s release. Exhausted and in agony, she relented. But when the money was not instantly forthcoming, her mind boiled with despair and mistrust. Bertrand wrote to Longchamp:

She told me that she was quite convinced I had only come to London to make her perish in the most outrageous manner; that it was in order to seize her hard-earned crust by delaying the publication of her work, which was her only means of subsistence; that she would have gladly pardoned me if I had plunged a knife into her heart; that all that was left to her, after revenging herself on you and me, was to end her unhappy existence as promptly as possible. I believe that if her strength had permitted, she would have carried out
this cruel design.

At eleven o’clock in the evening on 23 August 1791, Jeanne died. Though her condition had been improving for a number of days, a surfeit of mulberries brought on a spasm of vomiting which choked her. She was buried three days later at St Mary’s, Lambeth. ‘She had a horse, mourning coach, etc.’, wrote Warren to Nicolas, angling for assistance with the funeral expenses, ‘and a
few friends attended’. Many found it hard to believe that Jeanne’s injuries had been sustained merely for the sake of a paltry debt. The timing seemed too pertinent, and a lattice of mythology quickly wired itself around the accident: Georgel said that she had been accidentally defenestrated during an orgy; Nicolas claimed that her pursuers were in fact agents of the duc d’Orléans sent to snatch her.

The Life of Jane de St Remy de Valois
was published shortly afterwards. It was a baggier thing than the
Mémoires Justificatifs
, armoured with boilerplate about despotic abuses. Yet its literary quality – Carlyle dubbed her style the
‘bastard heroic’ – was admired to the extent that Laclos was mooted as its ghostwriter (not so implausible, since he worked as an operative for the duc d’Orléans). It was – due, probably, to the influence of her amanuensis – more political than her earlier book and spiked with reformist rhetoric. Life at Court was ‘a prostitution, a mercenary employment, to me infinitely more intolerable than my
infant wretchedness’; a paean to workers concludes, ‘I have always respected the labourer and the peasant’; and the peroration envisaged in France ‘an august Senate dispensing freedom and happiness to
a renovated Empire’. The desacralisation operates more subtly here – the queen is not a lusty harpy but all too human, susceptible to the common vices of jealousy, hatred and greed. And if her failings were run-of-the-mill, the book implicitly asked, why did she deserve to be queen?

Louis was sufficiently perturbed by the publication of a French edition to buy up, after a tip-off-cum-blackmail attempt by Nicolas, the entire print run (the queen herself believed such efforts were inevitably futile). They were stored in the room of Laporte, a royal functionary, before being transported on 26 May 1792 to the Sèvres porcelain factory for incineration. It took five hours to burn the lot. Or almost all of it. The man tasked with the job behaved so operatically, loudly forbidding workers from coming near the ovens, that suspicions were aroused.
Radicals in the Assembly agitated for an investigation: it was suggested that the crown had destroyed evidence of the queen’s dealings with Austria, or banknotes forged to fund counter-revolution. Laporte’s house was searched and a single copy of the book found; the Assembly ordered its reprinting. The preface to the new edition declared that ‘the lengths to which the Court has gone to prevent the publication of this work clearly prove how greatly the monarchy feared its publication, how many facts it contains which the royalist party would have preferred to keep
from public knowledge’.

Jeanne’s death spurred
Nicolas into activity: he was now a torchbearer for a victim of despotism. He wrote to the keeper of the seals demanding a retrial – with, naturally, a more sympathetic bench than the one corrupted by Vergennes, as he put it, in the original case: ‘the French people will choose judges who would blush to let themselves be led, step by step, into the labyrinth of Themis by an insolent
and ferocious vizier’. On 4 January 1792, Nicolas was imprisoned in the Conciergerie. This was exactly what he wanted: the contumacy verdict against him for his earlier failure to appear before the
parlement
needed serving out before the judgement could be revoked. According to Nicolas’s memoirs, a fire broke out on the following night. Robespierre himself rushed to the prison to ensure Nicolas’s safety, and there were rumblings that royalists had tried to burn Nicolas alive.

A new court was convened and on 20 July 1792 Nicolas was absolved of all his crimes – but only through a technicality, ‘in view of the fact that the indictment submitted by the
procureur-général
to the
parlement
of Paris (as was) on 7 September 1785 was signed only at the end and not on each and every sheet, which is
contrary to the law’. Nonetheless, because of the severity of the charges under consideration, Nicolas remained in custody. On his eventual release later that year, he wound up in Bar where, for the second time, he married a local girl, with whom he had a son.

The Diamond Necklace Affair brought with it a transformation in
the queen’s political role. Previously she had been ineffectual or uninterested in matters of state; now her influence was felt and she
began to attend council regularly. On Vergennes’s death in 1787, she manoeuvred her own favourite, Loménie de Brienne, into office. Her interventions were motivated by patriotism – to her adopted country, not her native one. She refused to act as an unthinking instrument of Austrian policy, the role for which her mother had groomed her. It was unacceptable, she told Mercy-Argenteau, that the ‘Court of Vienna should nominate the ministers of
the Court of France’. Though she would be repeatedly maligned as a traitor until her death, the queen strove, even in the most precarious circumstances, to reconcile her actions with the national interest as she saw it.

She had little respite from the public bruising she had endured. Her daughter, Sophie, died in 1787; the dauphin less than two years later. Her husband fell into a depression which he never shook off. Despite retrenchments in the Court’s expenditure, she became known as ‘Madame Deficit’. She waxed fat; her looks were consumed by it; her hair turned white. After the storming of the Bastille, she was abandoned by her closest friends, the Polignacs and her brother-in-law Artois, who fled the country. From then on, the Revolution became a parade of humiliations, an erosion of the grandeur and deference to which she had become accustomed.

On 6 October 1789, Versailles was invaded by a rabblement of working-class women, goaded by hunger and inebriated with rumours of orgies spiced with counter-revolutionary sweet-nothings. They dismembered two of her
garde du corps
and violated her bed with the points of their pikes. The king, the queen and their children were frogmarched back to Paris, as the crowd serenaded them as the ‘baker, the baker’s wife
and the baker’s boy’, and the impaled heads of the dead soldiers bobbed about them. Even at this early stage, Marie Antoinette predicted the course of events: ‘my duty is to die at the
feet of the king’. The royal family installed themselves in the Tuileries, a disconsolate palace that had long been used as a dormitory for royal attendants. The king made a show of gladly embracing the new dispensation, but everyone knew the National Guardsmen who protected them impounded them too.

Currents of feeling about the queen that had been diverted underground spurted forth in great gouts. Samizdat libels with tiny
circulations were now published in multiple illustrated editions and freely sold. She was compared to murderous, profligate and promiscuous queens from history – Fredegund, Agrippina, Messalina, Catherine de’ Medici – and portrayed as sexually monstrous, insatiable, devouring both men and women. There were concatenated couplings in multiple orifices; it was said she disguised herself as a streetwalker to masturbate men in public. In
The Public Bordello
she declares that ‘if all the cocks that have been in my cunt were laid end to end, they would stretch all the way from
Paris to Versailles’. Some of the libels listed her supposed lovers; Jeanne and Rohan were usually included. But the orgies were not ends in themselves – they were occasions for planning the torture and obliteration of her enemies, even regicide. There were no limits to the depravities that might be imagined and the royal family, quailing and with their power leaching away, proved incapable of a sustained refutation.

Kennelled in Paris, the queen re-emerged as an important political actor – it is possible that she may have even resorted to forgery when the king was morose and paralysed with indecision. She was busy in the organisation of the royal family’s escape in the summer of 1791. The plan was to head north-east to Lorraine and rally their supporters, hoping that their subjects in
La France profonde
would prove more loyal than the obstreperous Parisians. If that failed, they might hop over the border to freedom. The royal party slipped out of Paris on 20 June in a custom-made berlin, disguised as the household of a minor noble.

A combination of poor planning, rashness and a stolid inability to improvise led to the coach being stopped in Varennes; commissioners were sent by the National Assembly to retrieve the absconded Bourbons. An anonymous print of the time shows Marie Antoinette floating out of the Tuileries with her family clinging on to her. A necklace descends from the enormous balloon-like canopy of her dress, like a rope or glittering turds. Jeanne, her décolletage revealing almost everything, hangs on to the lowered diamonds with Rohan by her side. It offers an eccentric version of the much-chewed-over theme of royal extravagance – the queen shitting diamonds in her hurry to escape – and a telling instance of historical compression: the Affair is the original cause of the queen’s incarceration – Marie
Antoinette can never escape it, just as she fails to escape the palace. The necklace will always haul her down.

A fiction was cooked up with the connivance of the National Assembly that the royal family had been abducted, but what political influence Louis had previously held disintegrated. That autumn he accepted under compulsion a new constitution that provided him with much diminished powers. The beginning of the end arrived the following summer, when France was invaded by a Prussian-Austrian alliance. Inevitably, Marie Antoinette was barracked with accusations of abetting the enemy. The monitions of the Brunswick Manifesto, issued by the commander-in-chief of the Allied forces, against harming the king and queen only served to incite the Parisian street. On 10 August 1792, with the Tuileries surrounded, Louis and his family sought sanctuary with the Assembly. Republicans pounced on the king’s abjection and, on 21 September, the monarchy in France was abolished. The quondam king, who had been compulsively reading about Charles I, knew how his own story would end.