Read How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair Online
Authors: Jonathan Beckman
Nicolas, meanwhile, ignored Beugnot’s instructions entirely. He was not the kind of man to spend days scouring deeds of conveyance in cobwebbed muniment rooms. Instead he spent all his money on ‘a kind of triumphal entry into the places that had witnessed the extreme misery of
his wife’s first years’, as if coins strewn like seed would somehow sprout of themselves into golden sheaves. On arrival in Fontette he ordered a
Te Deum
be sung in his honour, and left the church sprinkling money on the bemused but grateful villagers. He rapidly drank his way through the rest, then dashed off a letter to Paris, detailing the names of three or four lawyers Beugnot could write to if he wished, ‘but with whom a man of
his quality could not possibly
enter business’. So concluded Nicolas’s research trip.
Jeanne, too, soon ran out of money. She relied on Beugnot to buy her dinner a couple of times a week and lend cash to tide her over. She probably went without food for much of time: when Beugnot took her to a cafe, she would eat three dozen
madeleines
in a sitting. Jeanne became increasingly frustrated with what she saw as Beugnot’s pettifogging adhesion to legal protocol. She saw things simply: the lands had belonged to her family; now they belonged to the king; surely the king would see the righteousness of her claim and return them to her gladly? Wouldn’t he undoubtedly have done so already had he realised that he owned them? She would be doing Louis a favour by repossessing them herself. All that remained, then, was for Nicolas to stake their claim; and if Beugnot would not instruct him to do this, she certainly would (Beugnot later recalled ‘trembling in fear, because I knew her capable of issuing these mad directives’).
The lawyer managed to pacify Jeanne as he completed an accomplished petition, urging the Bourbons to discharge their ‘natural debt’ to their Valois predecessors. But he was dissuaded from having it printed and distributed – it was the norm for lawyers to appeal to the public – by more experienced heads who advised that any overt campaigning risked alienating the king. Jeanne remained optimistic that she would soon be the chatelaine of Fontette; but Beugnot knew that to succeed she would need ‘credibility,
powerful friends and money’, none of which were in ready supply. By the end of the summer of 1781, the La Mottes were harried by their creditors and they turned to the one person who possessed the means and inclination to help them – the marquise de Boulainvilliers. They understood her to be in Strasbourg, but Nicolas and Jeanne learned on arrival that she was thirty miles away, staying at Saverne with the local bishop, Cardinal Louis Réné Edouard de Rohan.
*
Practically all we know of Jeanne’s childhood derives from her own memoirs – and they are hugely unreliable. The narrative here is based on them, though modified where more trustworthy evidence to the contrary exists. Readers should be aware that Jeanne’s account is, in many ways, the one that she wished to tell about herself – because it is emotionally affective; because of the aura of romance – and not necessarily a comprehensive description of her early years.
F
RENCH SOCIETY DURING
the Ancien Régime, according to its most acute observers, was drenched in a
cascade de mépris
, a
cataract of disdain. Everyone was struggling to clamber up to a niche from
where they could peer with satisfaction at those beneath them; those above struggled to fend off the inundation of scrabblers from below. Wealthy bourgeois could purchase ennobling offices in the judicial system or as king’s secretaries (who numbered in the thousands), which scrubbed them clean of the grime of commonness, as well as offering enormous exemptions from tax. In the army, in the Church and at Court, many of the most senior roles were reserved for the most ancient clans (though the government itself was comparatively meritocratic). At the pinnacle, surveying all the arduous mountaineering further down the slopes, perched the Rohan.
They were an old Breton family, though their superiority was disputed. Saint-Simon, that policeman of precedence and chronicler of life at Louis XIV’s Court, thought that ‘without having origins that were any different to the rest of the nobility, nor without having ever been particularly distinguished within it, they held themselves, however, far above the ordinary nobility and were able to speak of
their most elevated rank’. The Rohan themselves traced their lineage back through the ancient kings of Brittany to the mythical founder of the kingdom, Conan Meriadoc. Their motto, ‘Roi ne puis, prince ne daigne, Rohan suis’ – ‘I cannot be a king, I won’t deign to be a prince, I am a Rohan’ – defiantly proclaimed their Celtic independence. Membership of the family granted a unique distinction that no conventional hierarchy of dukes and princes and kings could accommodate.
Alongside a few select Houses, the Rohan were treated in France
as
princes étrangers
, inferior only to the royal family and the princes of the blood (though both the Valois and Bourbon dynasties had Rohan nesting on branches of their family trees). Unlike other foreign princes who did not stand upon ceremony, the Rohan flaunted the privileges of their caste as a matter of principle. They guarded them more carefully than their own limbs – maintaining a spartan room at Versailles; sitting on a wobbly stool in the presence of the queen. When, in the 1760s, ministers plotted to reduce their status, the Rohan fought back furiously and successfully. The ‘courtesy of the Rohan’ was renowned, primarily as a means of softly strong-arming allies and waverers in the little treacheries of court life, but also to hold at a distance those who had become overfamiliar.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Rohan were coiled round the heart of the Court. Charles de Rohan, prince de Soubise was a favourite of Louis XV and his
maîtresse en titre
, Madame de Pompadour. Soubise was not popular – Voltaire called him ‘a snivelling little
brat in red heels’ – nor was he particularly accomplished: after the disastrous Battle of Rossbach during the Seven Years War, he supposedly wandered the battlefield with a lantern searching for the remnants of his army. But he shared with the king a profound concern for the mattress education of teenage opera singers and, despite his military embarrassments, was granted the title of marshal of France and elevated to the king’s council. Soubise’s religiose sister, the comtesse de Marsan, had been appointed governess of the children of France, in charge of the education of Louis XV’s grandchildren (the future Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X). When the Dauphin – the children’s father – died of consumption at the age of thirty-six in 1765, Marsan became responsible for moulding the character of the country’s next king.
Prince Louis de Rohan was born on 25 September 1734, the sixth child of the intermarriage of two branches of the Rohan family, the Guéméné and the Soubise. His father, Hercule Mériadec, prince de Guéméné, was described as ‘the darkest and most brutal animal
that one might encounter’, and had unwound into insanity by the time Louis emerged. The young prince was destined for a career in the Church: at the precocious age of nineteen, he was created a canon in the cathedral chapter of Strasbourg, thanks to the patronage
of his great-uncle, the bishop. One fellow pupil at his Parisian seminary, the
philosophe
Abbé Morellet, remembered him as ‘haughty, inconsiderate, unreasonable, spendthrift, not very sharp, fickle in
his tastes and his friendships’. Morellet was prone to exaggeration – Voltaire nicknamed him Abbé Mords-les (Abbé
Bite’em) because he was so relentlessly caustic – and Louis was considerably more intelligent than his critic gave him credit for. But neither at the Oratorian seminary of Saint-Magloire nor later at the Sorbonne were piety or chastity cultivated. When Louis’s uncle, Louis Constantin de Rohan, was anointed bishop of Strasbourg in 1756 he immediately requested that Louis be appointed coadjutor, a kind of ecclesiastical crownprince whose succession to the see was guaranteed. Louis stood to be the fourth successive Rohan to wear the mitre in Alsace.
Impeccably polite, still slim, with carefully coiffed blond hair and full, dark eyes that shone under gently drooping eyelids, Louis glided through Parisian society. Even when his hair grew whiter and his forehead rose higher and gleamed like a billiard ball, his face never lost its ruddy, plump, boyish openness. He charmed everyone he met, and accumulated a pantheon of lovers, including his own cousin. Madame de Genlis, mistress of the future duc d’Orléans, thought that ‘he was about as personable
as it’s possible to be’. The post-revolutionary memoirists, for whom Louis was always a fool, retrospectively diffracted his character through the incident that sealed his notoriety. Throughout most of his life, however, Louis was regarded as intelligent if superficial and unwilling to apply himself seriously – clever enough to grasp immediately the nub of a matter and therefore bored with pursuing it any further. It is understandable how an ambitious man who occupied no position of responsibility until middle age might harden into flippancy in order to reconcile himself to his lack of advancement; how frustrated ambition might lead him to snap at an opportunity, outlandish though it may seem, hanging low before him.
At Madame Geoffrin’s salon, one of the most glittering in Paris, Louis mingled with writers, philosophers and politicians in ascendancy. He was not cowed by the flashing minds around him, even if he showed no particular brilliance of his own. The
encyclopédiste
and historiographer of France Abbé Marmontel remembered him as ‘risqué, absent-minded,
good-natured, quick-witted in competition with those of a station
comparable to his’. In these circles he discovered the materialism of Diderot and Helvétius, though later allegations that he was an atheist were misguided: Louis was fascinated by scientific experiment and became the patron of Masonic theists, but he equally felt the tug of his family’s tradition as defenders of the One True Church, and objected to the publication of Voltaire’s complete works as a ‘forge of impiety in which one might weld new
arms against religion’.
Louis also acquired a more democratic interest in men and women of wit, irrespective of their birth. The salons nourished an atmosphere of convivial sociability among the
honnêtes hommes
gathered there. ‘My warmth was only for my opinion, and
never against my adversary,’ wrote Morellet in his
Mémoires
. But affability carried dangers – it might be feigned to exploit another’s trust. Louis’s weakness for diverting company would lead him, disastrously, to equate spark with honesty.
During the 1760s the Rohan formed part of the
dévot
party – the Devouts – that coalesced around the Dauphin and sought to undermine Louis XV’s chief minister, the duc de Choiseul. The faction had existed, in various guises, since the seventeenth century, when they pressed for a government directed by religious principles (France was the pre-eminent Catholic power in Europe). They were motivated, in part, by a puritanical distaste for Choiseul, who was as debauched as Louis XV, and the struggle against the dissolution of the Jesuits in France (which ultimately occurred in 1764), an episode in the contest for supremacy between the French Church and the Vatican, which had run for much of the century. Like all opposition groups, godly or otherwise, they were primarily discontented with not being in power. The alliance brokered by Choiseul in 1756 with Habsburg Austria, France’s historic enemy, ought to have been a cause for rejoicing, as Europe’s two great Catholic powers were now conjoined, but the
dévots
could not wholeheartedly endorse it, since it had been accomplished by their political enemies.
It is unlikely that Louis himself felt strongly about these developments. His own morals were more akin to Choiseul’s than the dauphin’s; and he did little more to help local Jesuits than occasionally send
them some hares he had caught (he also appointed to his staff a defrocked Jesuit, Abbé Georgel, whose memoirs provide one of the most detailed accounts of the Diamond Necklace Affair). But following the family whip was the duty of the Rohan, and Louis helped cultivate the king’s new mistress, Madame du Barry, as a possible ally. And, despite their differences, Louis and the Dauphin enjoyed each other’s company. ‘An amicable prince, an agreeable prelate and
a dashing rogue,’ was the latter’s generous assessment.
On 7 May 1770, the fifteen-year-old Marie Antoinette entered France for the first time. Her marriage to the heir to the French throne – the now-dead Dauphin’s son also, confusingly, called Louis – was the capstone of Choiseul’s foreign policy, the clasp which would hold French and Austrian interests in alignment. She had been stripped down to her shift on an island in the Rhine, in symbolic repudiation of her motherland as she prepared to meet her husband-to-be.
Three companies of teenagers dressed as Swiss Guards lined her route into Strasbourg; juvenile shepherdesses garlanded her with flowers; the daughters of the town’s leading burghers sprinkled
petals before her. The whole city gorged itself in celebration. Oxen were roasted; fountains spumed with wine; loaves of bread were heedlessly kneaded into the cobblestones by the feet of the surging crowd. The houses on one side of the river were transformed to look like the Habsburg palace at Schönbrunn. The day after the festivities, Louis de Rohan addressed Marie Antoinette in Strasbourg Cathedral. His speech was unmemorable diplomatese about a new golden age and flourishing peace (the future queen welled up during it, though homesickness or the sting of a passing bank of incense may have been the cause). There was consternation when Marie Antoinette left the church the moment Louis finished, leaving no opportunity for him and the other canons to accompany her. It was unclear what lay behind the hurried exit: innocent confusion, a deliberate snub to the insincerity of an anti-Choiseulist, or the first instance of Marie Antoinette’s bridling at protocol? For the rest of the visit, the dauphine found Louis’s attempts at ingratiation too cloying. She later wrote to her mother that Rohan’s way of living ‘more resembled that of a soldier
than a coadjutor’.