Read How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair Online
Authors: Jonathan Beckman
Rohan recovered from the trauma. For the next few years he lived like a country parson, preaching and hunting and benevolently regarding his flock. On one occasion, his sedate existence was disturbed by a revenant. Returning from stalking of an evening, Rohan and his huntsman stumbled upon a peasant who provided them with a light, then disappeared into the dusk like smoke. They searched for him and came to the foot of an old oak tree, where Rohan dashed out the embers of his pipe; a glint in the same spot caught his eye and he extracted a nugget which, on examination, turned out to be gold. A few days later, word trickled in from Rome that Cagliostro had died. Rohan asked his huntsman if he could identify the phantom peasant from a selection of miniatures; the retainer alighted upon the Great Copt, whom he had never met. It may simply have been a series of coincidences – a rustic with a rough Sicilian fizzog, a shiny clod – but Cagliostro’s hold over the cardinal had never slipped. The phantom only confirmed to Rohan the persistence of the comte’s miraculous powers.
In July 1796, the thrust by French armies into the Austrian Empire drove Rohan to Switzerland, where he was granted asylum until the Austrians restored him at the end of the year. After the election of royalists in Alsace, Rohan was encouraged to return to Saverne; he refused, not wishing to look upon the palace he had so lavishly repaired in ruins once more. Frightened by an anti-royalist coup in France in 1797, Rohan fled again, this time to Bavaria. As Napoleon rose to power and conflict broke out once more between France and the other continental powers, Rohan retreated deeper into Austria. Only with the Treaty of Lunéville in February 1801, in which peace was declared between France and the Holy Roman Empire, did Rohan feel safe to return to Ettenheim. He continued to be harried even there. The Concordat concluded between Napoleon and the Papacy officially stripped him of the Alsatian part of his diocese. In the last sermon addressed to his French flock, made all the more poignant because he was unable to deliver it in person, he wrote: ‘Tell them that even in ceasing to be their bishop, I will never be capable of losing the feeling that unites me with them. Remind them that, raised among them in my tenderest youth, I will always be as one among them, even when circumstances appear to
have separated us.’
Political usurpation snapped at the heels of his spiritual divestment. In the shredding and patching of German principalities which followed the eddies of great power politics, the margrave of Baden was granted the remaining lands of the one-time prince-bishop of Strasbourg. There was no one left to appeal to. On 27 September 1802, while the cardinal was out hunting, the Badeners entered Ettenheim. Rohan returned home to find himself sovereign of only his game bag. He was permitted to remain in his residence but his health, never robust especially since his Bastille days, began to fail; on 17 February 1803, at the age of sixty-eight, Rohan died. The duc d’Enghien, grandson of the prince de Condé and secret husband of Rohan’s niece, reported that ‘the cardinal finished things beautifully and truly edified us. He was with gangrene in the lungs for two days, and therefore without any hope, and had no inkling of the state he was in, even believing that
he was improving.’ On the eve of his death, he told his gathered servants that he felt like a
‘feather in the breeze’. And he drifted, painless and untroubled, towards his grave.
Weaselling through danger and improvidence, Nicolas outlasted them all. Little is recorded about his life between 1794 and 1815. There were rumours he spent time in Turkey and converted to Islam, but most likely he moved between Bar and Paris, perhaps dabbling in some light anti-Napoleonic agitation. When Louis XVI’s brother – formerly the comte de Provence, now Louis XVIII – was permanently reinstalled on the French throne after Waterloo, he appointed Jeanne’s old mucker Beugnot as a minister. Beugnot managed to wangle a position for Nicolas as director of the theatre at Porte-Saint-Martin on a salary of 3,000 francs a year. His notoriety was sufficient to grant him a cameo in Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables
as one of the
‘weather-cocks’ of the royalist salon frequented by Marius’s grandfather, Monsieur Gillenormand: ‘It was whispered . . . in somewhat awed tones: “You know who he is? He’s the Lamothe of the Necklace Affair.”’ Hugo wrote that
there was nothing remarkable about the Comte de Lamothe-Valois, an old man of seventy-five in 1815 [he was, in fact, sixty-five], except his taciturn, portentous bearing, his cold, angular countenance, flawless manners, coat buttoned to his stock and the long legs encased in trousers the colour of burnt sienna which he invariably crossed when seated. His face was the same colour. Nevertheless he counted for something in that salon because of his ‘celebrity’ and also, strangely enough, because of the name of Valois.
Despite the harm he had worked, he was welcomed as an authentic part of the nostalgists’ Eden – there were other adversaries now.
Nicolas must have lost his grip on this sinecure because he emerges in the less salubrious role as a police nark, under the easily penetrable cover of ‘Delmotte’. Ironically, his work involved tracing illegally published and libellous books. Louis XVIII, piqued to learn that such an infamous individual was now an employee of the state, asked Nicolas to compile his memoirs. Nicolas began enthusiastically but then told the king that he would not finish them ‘unless he were assured of a pension
on the civil list’. Louis had no inclination to
reward the man who had scourged his brother and sister-in-law, and the project was filed in a drawer. The contretemps must have led the police to dispense with Nicolas’s services, for he next emerges, impoverished and bereaved of his second wife, purveying the kind of texts he had previously helped suppress. After the accession of Charles X (the former comte d’Artois) to the throne on his brother’s death in 1824, Nicolas returned to his memoirs in the hope that the new king might be more perturbed than his predecessor by the literary disinterment of his relatives, and willing to buy him off.
He produced an account that intermittently chronicles his life until the early years of Napoleon. It is a tale strung with reversals – at each stage, contentment and sanctuary seem close at hand only for fate to upend everything. Nicolas conceives of himself as Ulysses, a man perpetually thwarted by history from sailing back to the epoch in which he flourished. He appears at historical milestones, thrust centre stage with ersatz reluctance. There he is, hoisted onto the shoulders of the fishwives as they march on Versailles to haul the royal family back to Paris. Now he is initiated into the king and queen’s secret plans to flee the capital. Inevitably, his cell in the Conciergerie is the one in which Marie Antoinette will be locked. Marooned on the far side of the Napoleonic era, he was at liberty to recast his fortuitous endurance as the trials of a hero.
Nicolas told the police he would prefer to
‘strike a deal’ for suppressing the memoirs in exchange for a small pension: ‘in this unhappy state I am expecting to succumb every day, owing to the awful pain I am suffering and my constant falls. The government or persons with whom I have been negotiating will not have me long as an annuitant.’ They agreed to provide a small stipend, and the money allowed Nicolas to live with a measure of dignity. He lodged with his niece; in September 1829 he was glimpsed in a park, walking ‘with stumbling footsteps as he shuffled along heavily on his two crutches. His elegant and immaculate appearance, his perfectly polished manners, his eminent way of greeting all spoke
in his favour.’ But the cheer had been snuffed out – Nicolas made a number of suicide attempts in his final years. A natural death came on 11 October 1831. The announcement of his passing in the
Journal de Paris
was clotted with a lifetime’s accrual of pseudonyms and sham
titles: ‘Mr Mustophragasis, Count of Valois, knight of St Louis and of the Crown, nobleman of Angoulême, has just died in Paris, at an advanced age and in poverty. He was the husband of the famous Madame de La Motte-Valois. He was generally known by the
name of Valois-Collier.’ He clung to the necklace to the very end.
The undead weight of the diamonds hung around even longer. The nationalisation during the Revolution of Rohan’s church lands, which should have financed the necklace’s repayment, bankrupted the Boehmers. Boehmer himself died in Stuttgart in 1794, while seeking the grand duke of Baden’s help in obtaining compensation from Rohan’s German properties. Bassenge’s estate continued the struggle: in 1843, a Paris court was still considering a claim against the heir of Rohan’s heir. The entirety of the debt was finally paid off in the 1890s, the Rohan regarding its clearance as a matter of familial honour, completing the cardinal’s work of repentance.
A Conclusion
J
EANNE HAD TOO
lively a spirit to remain long in the grave. Was her ‘accident’, as some believed, just a ruse to hide her disappearance? In 1825, an early historian of the affair met an Armenian potter who told a garbled story of the ‘comtesse Gachet,
a former queen of France
, who had stolen a necklace . . . When she died, and was undressed to wash her body, two letters were found branded
on her shoulder.’ The baronesse de Bode remembered this comtesse speaking ‘refined French, animatedly and with charm . . . She had known Cagliostro, never gave up talking of the Court of Louis XVI and led us to understand that she had a great mystery
in her life.’
Miracles of resurrection did not cease. During the July Monarchy, a bishop, returned from abroad, had introduced to Parisian society a venerable noblewoman known only as comtesse Jeanne. A benefactor granted her a wing in his house where she entertained with whist and chit-chat of the Ancien Régime. When she died, her room was found filled with charred papers. The Paris newspapers declared the deceased to be Madame de La Motte.
She lived on, too, in literary works, though the dizzying melodrama of the Diamond Necklace Affair could not easily be confined within fictional frames. Alexandre Dumas’s novel
The Queen’s Necklace
is a farrago of lurching motivations and breezy coincidence. D’Oliva resembles Marie Antoinette so precisely that she is frequently taken for the queen in Parisian society, leading to unjust rumours about the latter’s conduct; Cagliostro is an omniscient and near-omnipotent force of anarchy, manoeuvring each character undetected to perform his bidding, as he seeks to upend the French monarchy; the garden scene is played through a number of times, not just with d’Oliva, but with Marie Antoinette and her would-be lover. Dumas, who takes Marie
Antoinette’s infidelity for granted, is at his most perceptive when describing the queen’s powerlessness, the vulnerability of her reputation and her complete dependence on her husband’s favour. Again and again, she shrilly protests her innocence only for no one to believe her – a dry run for her appearance before the revolutionary tribunal.
Goethe, repelled yet fascinated by Cagliostro, tracked down his family when he visited Palermo in 1787, pretending to be an Englishman with news from London of the great man. Three generations lived poverty-stricken in one large room, ‘a single window lighted the great walls, which once had been painted, and on which, all around, hung dark pictures of saints
in golden frames’. Cagliostro’s teenage nephew told Goethe that ‘it would be our happiness, if he were to come here someday and agree to take care of us. But . . . we hear that he disowns us everywhere and poses as a man
of noble birth.’ Four years later, Goethe’s play about the Diamond Necklace Affair was performed in Weimar. Initially intended as an opera,
The Great Copt
is a slight work whose anonymous characters are easily identified with historical protagonists. The Cardinal (Rohan) is duped by both the Marquise (Jeanne) and the Count (Cagliostro), who establishes a cult of universal brotherhood to serve his own greed. Goethe primarily intended to ridicule Cagliostro, though he was aware of the episode’s more disturbing ramifications:
‘the story of the necklace seems to me as frightening as the head of the Medusa’ – it irrevocably ‘destroyed royal dignity’.
Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 essay ‘The Diamond Necklace’ is the most exhilarating nineteenth-century treatment of the scandal. Having come to the subject through his interest in Cagliostro, Carlyle caught a glimpse of
‘Romance’, of history fuelled by ‘passion’ – passions which were becoming trussed up by modern life’s imperative for respectability and mind-deadening drudge work. Here was a story which, in its vitality, in Rohan and Jeanne’s refusal to accept the political and social limitations placed on them, shows itself to be a sliver of Universal History – the chaotic spirit-web that runs through time but which we are often blind to. Jeanne is a
‘spark of life’; Rohan is filled with
‘radical vigour and fire’ even though he allows them ‘to stagnate and ferment . . . [like a] Mud-Volcano, gurgling and sluttishly simmering’.
Carlyle constantly emphasises how history’s tendrils wind beyond the consciousness of the participants. He gives a bravura speculative biography of the diamonds, from ‘the uncounted ages and aeons [they lay] silently imbedded
in the rock’. The Diamond Necklace Affair is played out during an epochal moment: the transition between ‘the age of Chivalry . . . and
that of Bankruptcy’. Carlyle uses these terms when writing of Louis’s refusal to buy the necklace because of his straitened finances, but they are more broadly applicable to the case. Rohan’s courtliness, the value he places on breeding, his wooing of Marie Antoinette like an infatuated troubadour are mercilessly exploited by Jeanne, a speculator out for quick money with no deference towards institutions. She is the Revolution in microcosm, an avatar of modernity, the power of which Carlyle cannot help admiring, even though he despises many of its consequences.