Read How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair Online
Authors: Jonathan Beckman
That Christmastide, Louis Capet, as he was now known, was indicted for treason before the country’s new representative body, the National Convention. His conviction was inevitable, though not the sentence – but the Convention voted, by a small majority, for death, and Louis was guillotined on 21 January 1793. He had promised to visit his wife that morning but he never came.
After the execution, grief could be read on Marie Antoinette’s body. She grew pallid, skeletal and sullen (it did not help that her toilette was no longer as all-masking as in her heyday). She was afflicted by debilitating bleedings, caused perhaps by incipient cancer of the womb. All that nourished her now was pious adherence to the old faith. It seemed as if the queen would not suffer the same fate as her husband; the talk was of exile or repatriation to Austria. But after a series of military reversals and a royalist revolt in the Vendée on the Atlantic coast, the Convention’s fears were trained on her.
In July, with roars and tears, she was separated from her son, whose preservation had directed all her activities over the four preceding years. She was transported to the Conciergerie, where Jeanne had spent a couple of anxious weeks after
parlement
had ruled
against her. And, like Jeanne in the Salpêtrière, she became an attraction – a tigress captured, declawed, tentatively prodded. The instinct for survival had left her and she showed little interest in the crackpot schemes for escape proposed by her adherents. On 14 October 1793, Marie Antoinette was brought before the hanging judges.
According to the comte de La Marck, ‘it is in the malice and lies which were spread between 1785 and 1788 by the Court against the queen that one must look for the pretext for the accusations of the
Revolutionary Tribunal’. These accusations ranged from great crimes such as plundering the nation of gold to, on one occasion, casting a
‘vindictive’ stare at a member of the National Guard. The Diamond Necklace Affair was directly invoked as an example of her pitiless destruction of the ‘agents of
her criminal intrigues’.
‘Did you not’, asked Fouquier-Tinville, the prosecutor, ‘make the acquaintance of the woman La Motte for the first time at Petit-Trianon?’
‘I never saw her there,’ the queen answered.
‘Was she not your victim in the famous affair of the necklace?’
‘She could not have been, since then I did not know her.’
‘You persist to deny what you know.’
‘My intention is not denial. It is the truth that I have spoken, and I will continue to speak it.’
The most vicious charge, which provided the darkest shading in the cartoon of the queen’s inexhaustible depravity, alleged that Marie Antoinette had sexually abused her son. Hébert himself presented the ‘evidence’ to the court. ‘Nature herself refuses to respond to such a charge laid
against a mother,’ she replied. Her dignity and nimble parrying counted for naught. She was found guilty of high treason and sentenced to death.
On 16 October 1793, the day of execution, her hair was cropped and her hands bound. She had dressed all in white, the solitary despondent gesture the black ribbon about her bonnet. She wrote to her sister-in-law with words of fortitude for her two children, before being placed in a cart and driven to the Place de la Revolution. The howls of the crowd did not discompose her. The Jacobin artist David sketched her with thinning hair tasselling her cap, her straight back the only means of defiance, her eyes lowered and jaw fixed as
though setting her face into its own death mask. At the scaffold she apologised to Sanson, the executioner, for treading on his foot and exasperatedly dismissed a priest who urged ‘courage’: ‘Courage! One needs it much more to live
than to die.’ Then she placed her head in the guillotine and waited for the exhale of the falling blade.
C
AGLIOSTRO, THE MAN
who prophesied the fall of the Bastille, found himself struck down by its debris. After leaving London, his peregrinations took him to Switzerland, where he lived, bankrolled by his followers, in a tiny chateau near Bienne. But a fusillade of exposés, including two plays by Catherine the Great,
The Trickster
and
The Tricked
, eroded his supporters’ confidence and Cagliostro’s mounting paranoia did little to conciliate them. He left the country in 1788, accusing his closest allies of conspiring to poison him.
He and Seraphina travelled to Savoy, then down through Italy, harried as they went by Bourbon emissaries. Seraphina wished dearly to live again with her family; with support from sympathetic clerics, she convinced Cagliostro that the Pope might be willing to incorporate Freemasonry into orthodox Catholicism. He dutifully began to attend confession and practised his catechism. The couple arrived in Rome in May 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, having been given indications that their entry into the Papal States would be nodded through. There was fervid interest in their arrival and, though Cagliostro took care not to fraternise in public with known Masons, he still conducted a seance for the cream of Roman society in which he turned water into wine ‘rather similar
to Orvieto white’.
Despite assurances that he would not be troubled if he renounced his activities, Cagliostro was arrested by officials of the Inquisition on 27 December 1789, just as he had sent a petition to the National Assembly for readmittance to France. Who was the Judas? It turned out to be his wife. As the troop of soldiers prepared to apprehend him, Cagliostro smelt betrayal. He aimed his pistol at Seraphina, but it failed to fire. She had, for months, found her husband’s rages and lunatic episodes – most likely the effects of tertiary syphilis
– unbearable. On one occasion, she had soaped the stairs to their house in the hope Cagliostro would slip and break his neck. Seraphina believed that a conviction for impiety would lead to a dissolution of their marriage; she provoked Cagliostro’s blasphemous impulses with constant prayer and genuflection and encouraged the servants to report his outrages. The plan worked: ‘What saints, what Virgin? That’s a load of rubbish; you’ll find all the saints you want
up my arse.’
Other allegations included exposing himself, demanding worship of his cock as a relic, encouragement to fornication, prostitution of his wife, failure to observe fast days, disparaging Jesus, Mary, the Apostles, saints, cardinals and priests (whom he called nancy boys and cuckolds), destroying holy objects, forbidding prayer, denying Christ’s divinity, god’s omnipotence and the existence of Purgatory, idolatry, heresy, fraud, forgery, slander, incitement to rebellion and rejoicing at news of revolution in France.
Seraphina was detained in the convent of Sant’Apollonia, for further examination; Cagliostro in the Castel Sant’Angelo. Despite his wife’s treachery, he was inconsolable without her and begged the guards to allow them to share a cell. Meanwhile, searches of the Cagliostros’ house uncovered a number of suspicious objects ‘including a doll in the shape of a flexible and yielding woman, a bed, a sofa, a mirror, two crossed swords, several rings of fire, apparatus of fumigation, tripods and many
instruments of lechery’.
Forty-three witnesses were deposed over the course of the fifteen-month investigation. Emissaries fanned out across Europe to gather evidence and Cagliostro’s powders were subjected to chemical analysis. So important was the case that Pope Pius VI sat in on the interrogations. Suspicion of Cagliostro was bound up with fears about events in France, and he was accused of having instigated the Revolution in revenge for his treatment by the Bourbons. His presence in Rome, the Inquisition suggested, was to foment revolt, raise a fleet and establish a republic in the Papal States – a document was found among Cagliostro’s papers that predicted Pius would be the last incumbent of the throne of St Peter.
Cagliostro tried to argue that the tenets of the Egyptian rite were entirely compatible with Catholic dogma. But his gab had gone. ‘I
don’t understand all your word-games. I don’t even understand myself any more. I don’t know what to say. I weep for my sad condition, I only seek help for my soul. I am in error a hundred thousand times with
regard to religion.’ He offered to make a public retraction, to turn missionary and convince his followers to suckle from the bosom of the Church. ‘All I desire is the salvation of my soul. I am ready, indeed anxious, to undergo the most
severe public correction.’ Then he collapsed and tried to recant, screaming he had been tortured. Little had been achieved in softening the inquisitors’ final verdict, and they rejected his last-minute plea of insanity: ‘The defendant is a sceptic, an atheist, an animal, a despicable and very wicked man, held by many to be an impostor, a rascal, a source of false religion, fierce and brutish, a charlatan, fanatic, scoundrel, heretic, deist and most depraved and ignorant
in religious matters.’
They sentenced him to death but, as he knelt with the black hood stifling his breath, mitigated the punishment to life imprisonment ‘without
possibility of pardon’. He was not allowed pen or paper; his shaving implements were confiscated, lest he slash his own throat. Seraphina, too, had unwittingly prepared her own demise. The court were unwilling to release someone so long contaminated by Cagliostro, and she was remanded in perpetuity in the convent.
In April 1791, Cagliostro was transferred to San Leon in the duchy of Urbino and placed in the care of the papal duke, Cardinal Doria. Erected at the peak of a cliff 700 metres above a valley with a sheer drop on all sides, the castle looks like an axe-head knapped out of the rock against the sky. Machiavelli judged it the ‘strongest
fortress in Europe’. Cagliostro was lodged at the top of one of the towers – mist slithered in through the bars and hung in droplets on the walls. Generally, he was treated well – the Pope did not want the death of the most famous man in Europe on his hands – though subjected to daily religious instructions by priests intent on his salvation. Worried that Cagliostro might be liberated by a squadron of hot-air balloonists, his jailers moved him to a more secure cell hewn into the cliff face.
With great ingenuity, he managed to fashion a pen from a straw in his mattress; he compounded snuff and piss and blood for ink. A minuscule almanac was found in which he had written: ‘Pius VI in
order to comply with the desires of the Queen has caused my sufferings . . . Woe betide France, Rome,
and her followers.’ He manifested signs of insanity, feigned or genuine it was hard to tell: crying out to his wife as though she were nearby, alternating between self-starvation and gorging, wailing from his window, rattling the bars, upending chamber pots over his captors, secreting fish so the rotting stench would choke the priests who came to reason with him. A peephole was drilled in the door to keep him under constant surveillance; his cell was regularly searched; yet even after he’d been shackled to the wall, sharpened screws and rods, sown to ambush his guards, were discovered.
On the morning of 26 August 1795 he collapsed with a stroke. Syphilis had etched itself through his brain. Weakening, he refused the last rite. He died that evening at the age of fifty-two, a scrawny, wispy-bearded ghostly thing, without his panacea, without gold, without plump diamonds, without the beholden audience which had acclaimed him the most fascinating man in Europe.
Rohan observed the Revolution’s murderous spiral from the safety of his crow’s nest in Ettenheim, in the German part of his diocese, and he devoted his much diminished resources to supporting his fellow exiles. Yet revanchists distrusted the cardinal for his involvement in the National Assembly, and the princelings of the Holy Roman Empire regarded his remaining territory as so much carrion. He was a dangling man, trusting no one, reinforced by no one, impotently threatening the Alsatians with hellfire if they joined in with the spoliation of his belongings.
Wistfully dreaming of the reconquest of Alsace, Rohan encouraged the vicomte de Mirabeau – the comte’s reactionary brother – to decamp to Ettenheim along with his raggle-taggle army. Mirabeau was so rotund he was known as Mirabeau-Tonneau – Mirabeau the barrel – and it was said of the preponderance of untested aristocrats in his crew that ‘each soldier has two captains, two lieutenants and,
to flee, two legs’. They scoured the Rhine valley for recruits, but local potentates, fearful of a French backlash, withheld their support. Rohan, by contrast, threw himself into planning and personally designed the uniforms of black and yellow, with piratical armbands
embroidered with a skull and the motto ‘Victory or Death’. Mirabeau’s well-dressed troops crossed the Rhine on 13 May 1791; they were surprised at the natives’ refusal to acknowledge them as liberators. As soon as a militia began to muster in Strasbourg, Rohan’s army fled back into German territory. For weeks after, Mirabeau would row into the middle of the river and broadcast insults at the French soldiers on the far bank. Meanwhile, his men behaved as unoccupied soldiers are prone to do – gambling, whoring and drunkenly splashing in fountains to the annoyance of the locals.
The execution of Marie Antoinette struck Rohan like a fever – he did not eat or sleep for several days after hearing the news. On 21 October 1793, still pale and weak, he sat in the church at Ettenheim to hear a requiem Mass for the late queen. As the Dies Irae played, Rohan stood up, raised a palm up to silence the organist, steadied himself against his throne. He lifted his hands to the sky and exclaimed in a voice which to the congregation sounded like death itself, ‘Domine, miserere mei et
exaudi vocem meam’ – ‘Lord, have pity on me and hearken to my voice’ – before collapsing and being stretchered into the sacristy. Had he been overcome by his complicity in the queen’s fate? Was he mortified that the opportunity for forgiveness had passed?