Read How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair Online
Authors: Jonathan Beckman
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The La Mottes followed the Court.
October 1783 found them in Fontainebleau: Nicolas spent each day wandering through the heated rooms of the chateau to stave off the cold; Jeanne kept herself warm and solvent with a succession of gentleman visitors. From Fontainebleu the La Mottes switched back to Versailles, to a greasy inn on the Place Dauphine, where they dined on cabbage, lentils and haricot beans.
Then, after two years of chivvying and pleading and loitering and dreaming, Jeanne struck a potentially lucrative seam: she obtained an interview with Madame Elisabeth, the king’s sister.
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On meeting her, she fainted. The sense of occasion may have been overwhelming, but it is more likely that her swoon was premeditated. Jeanne had bored even herself with the legal intricacies of her own petition. Her claims were so self-evident, she believed, that their acknowledgement would be determined merely by the level of sympathy she induced. How better to reinforce them than by showing herself on the point of collapse, by demonstrating that she was so sensitive to the mysterious power of royalty that, in its presence, her spirit left her body and flew towards it? When Jeanne came to, having been whisked home, she instructed her servant Deschamps that ‘if Madame sends one of her people to ask after me, tell them that I’ve had a miscarriage [and] that I
was bled five times’. Madame did send her doctors to enquire after Jeanne’s health, along with a gift of ten louis, but that was the extent of her concern.
Despite not being invited back to Madame Elisabeth’s, Jeanne acted as though she were now a bosom friend of the princess and the recipient of her patronage (in practice this meant that whenever she told her landlady that she was going to
‘visit Madame’, she sat in the Hotel Jouy around the corner for a few hours). In January 1784, Calonne, the
contrôleur-général
, doubled Jeanne’s pension to 1,500 livres and gave her a one-off grant of
nearly 800 livres. The reason for the change of heart is unclear, but the timing suggests that word of the princess’s interest may have been a consideration. Not that Jeanne was grateful: ‘the king’, she confidently told Calonne,
‘gives more than this to his valets
and footmen’, and she dismissed the minister’s apparent generosity as a bribe to withdraw her claims for the restitution of her estates.
The new spurt of money instantly whirled through the rusty drain-grate of accrued debt. By February all of Jeanne’s possessions, including her dresses, had been pawned. She would not countenance finding a job and, shackled to her husband, could no longer hope for a transformative marriage. Inspired by the modest success of her collapse in front of Madame Elisabeth, Jeanne rustled up a somewhat desperate plan. Perhaps another damsel display of keeling over would prick the heart of someone with even greater influence and a reputation for whimsical concern. And so it was on 2 February 1784, the feast of Candlemas, that Jeanne, hugging her petition, found herself in the mirrored gallery of Versailles, as the winter light dustily reflected, awaiting the approach of the queen.
*
Necker was technically director-general of finances because, as a foreigner and a Protestant, he could not be appointed
contrôleur-général
. Nonetheless, he was the government’s chief finance minister.
*
Beugnot’s memoirs, written many years after the Diamond Necklace Affair, also present problems of interpretation. He misdates events and inserts himself into episodes from which he was provably absent. But Beugnot was being marginalised at this juncture and he does not – as he clearly does elsewhere – embellish his memories by insisting on his importance. It is significant too that, during the trial, the cardinal, for all his growls of outrage, never explicitly denied an affair with Jeanne.
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Rohan claimed that he occasionally gave Jeanne two or three louis (each of which was worth twenty-four livres). He sent her vermouth when she was ill, and the odd bottle of wine or
haunch of venison. According to Jeanne, however, the cardinal gave her a pouch full of louis during their first meeting. He rented and furnished her apartments, subsidised her sister’s medical bills, paid off thousands of livres of debt and would think nothing of dropping by with 15,000 livres in cash in case her purse needed replenishing. In total, she claimed, she received more than
80,000 livres.
Jeanne’s calculations are hyperinflated – for much of the period in which she was supposedly the object of generosity she lived on the hem of poverty. Rohan, whose own expenditure was in need of retrenchment, could not have afforded such sums even had he desired to dispense them. But Rohan was more munificent than he let on. He acted as Jeanne’s guarantor on a 5,000-livre loan (which he paid
when Jeanne defaulted). Later, during his interrogations, Rohan would suddenly remember an occasion when he gave 600 livres to Jeanne without offering any
explanation for his actions. A member of Jeanne’s household – who had been turned by Rohan’s lawyers and might have been expected to comply with their narrative – testified that Rohan supplied Jeanne with a
regular weekly stipend. Despite his own financial travails, Rohan had access to the royal almonry and could easily have skimmed off funds to support this worthy cause.
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In her autobiography Jeanne claimed to have been presented as a child to Madame Elisabeth by the Boulainvilliers.
F
ERTILITY WAS NOT
just a symbol of a
royal dynasty’s magnificence. It expanded a family’s influence – the more children, the more alliances could be sealed in marriage. And the Habsburgs, sitting plumb in the middle of Europe with acquisitive powers on either side, were in need of all the support they could secure. Marie Antoinette, known to her family as Antoine, was born on 2 November 1755: she was the fifteenth child, and the twelfth who survived. Her father, Francis Stephen, a Lorrainer, was an indulgent and affectionate parent; Maria Theresa less so. Maria’s domineering attitude towards her children – which would continue through Marie Antoinette’s time in France – was exacerbated by the strain of the Seven Years War and the sudden death of her beloved husband in 1763. Though Marie Antoinette strove to please her mother, it was difficult to earn her affection – the empress was always distracted by her other children and affairs of state. When she was noticed, it tended to be in the form of admonition. ‘I love the Empress,’ she later wrote after she had left her homeland, ‘but
I am frightened of her.’
She was an attractive young woman, once her splayed teeth had been straightened on a wire, with blue eyes and a slender neck. A high, pale expanse of forehead was mounted by a tower of gunmetal, powdered hair (its natural colour was a dirty blonde). Her first family heirloom was the Habsburg lip, the protruding lower jaw that could make her appear surly to the uninstructed onlooker, but she delighted everyone she met. Even her mother, a severe judge, praised her
‘affability’. Hester Thrale, Samuel Johnson’s friend and biographer, visited France in 1775 and reported that Marie Antoinette was ‘the prettiest Woman
at her own Court’.
The archduchess’s education focused on the refinements expected
of a young princess. The Habsburg Court was filled with music – by Haydn, Gluck and Mozart, an exact contemporary of Marie Antoinette whom she heard perform when they were both six. She was taught to play the harpsichord and the armonica, and her deportment and dancing were universally admired. The more academic aspects of schooling received less sustained attention: Marie Antoinette’s first governess, the Countess Brandeis, preferred coddling her charge to instructing her – she took far longer than normal to learn to read and write. Eventually the abbé de Vermond was appointed as her tutor – he scrubbed up her French in time for her marriage, and would remain her counsellor during her life in France.
Marie Antoinette was not the only princess under consideration for the hand of the Dauphin of France – she wasn’t even the only member of her own family. Her older sister Charlotte had been suggested, but was snapped up by the king of Naples after the death of another sister, Josepha. Siblings were fungible in the politics of dynastic marriage; their value lay in locking together ruling houses and deterring the breaking of an alliance – which would mean not just tearing up paper, but families too. The intense mutual suspicion that persisted among the political elite of France and Austria required the two nations to be firmly lashed together, and Marie Antoinette was the fourth of Maria Theresa’s children to marry a grandchild of Louis XV. Her wedding was conducted under the gothic vaulting of the Augustinian Church in Vienna on 19 April 1770, with her older brother Archduke Ferdinand serving as a proxy husband. Two days later a convoy of fifty-seven carriages accompanied the new dauphine on her journey to France.
At his birth, no one considered that Louis Auguste would be Dauphin at the age of eleven, but the deaths of his father and older brother in the space of four years left him, by 1765, the heir to the kingdom. He did not appear magisterial, being bulky, costive, gauche, introverted and short-sighted, which led him to lour down on people as he struggled to identify them. His sense of humour, for what it was, tended towards slapstick. His diary, most of which devoutly itemises his daily game bag, shows, in the words of his biographer John Hardman,
‘the mind of an accountant’. The entry for 13 March 1767
read simply ‘Death of my mother at eight in the evening’ – though, to be fair, the hand is noticeably scraggier than usual.
As a child Louis showed a preference for geography and science, for the empirical above the imaginative. His faith was orthodox, his tastes were middlebrow and his belief in absolute monarchy was as unreflective and firm as that of his predecessors. Like all Bourbons – apart from, ironically, the Grand Huntsman of France, the duc de Penthièvre – his first love was hunting. His second love was picking apart locks. Occasionally Louis would retreat to the turret above his private suite, from where he would observe through a telescope the to-and-fro of Versailles, and snipe at cats, a species he could not abide, with his musket. (Even a sceptic of Freud might wonder whether all that riding to hounds, keyhole surgery and gunning down of felines might have been symptomatic of a psychosexual problem.) Louis had no interest in the conventional amusements of noble life. The controller of the king’s Menus-Plaisirs, which organised royal entertainments, was effectively made redundant when Louis told him that ‘my Menus Plaisirs are to walk about the park.
I do not need you.’ Louis was personally parsimonious and refused to indulge or rescue courtiers – apart from his wife and brothers – who had sunk into unpayable debt. Refreshingly he did not stand on ceremony – he used to shave himself every morning – though he earned a rebuke from his chief minister when he entered a party so unobtrusively that none of the attendees noticed his arrival: it was disgraceful for the king not to be acknowledged.
Louis’s shortcomings were particularly acute in comparison to his two younger, more companionable brothers, the porky but ready-witted comte de Provence and the lean, raffish comte d’Artois. His natural lack of confidence had been exacerbated by his tutors, who continually compared him to his pedestalled older brother, and left him with a repulsion of any form of dispute. Provence compared Louis to ‘a set of oiled billiard balls you are trying
vainly to hold together’, not because he was duplicitous but because he would stew silently rather than risk confrontation. When Louis, in his first days as king, decided to dismiss one of his grandfather’s ministers but could not bring himself to summon him, the comte de Maurepas,
the new chief minister (in practice if not in title), refused to leave the room until the matter had been settled.
Louis knew that he was naturally ill-suited to the role for which he had been bullied into by fate – on becoming king he said ‘I feel the universe is going to
fall on me’ (a not inaccurate prophecy) – and his accession to the throne mellowed him little. He was known at Versailles as ‘the butcher’ because of his terse, unsentimental manner: when the
contrôleur-général
Henri d’Ormesson apologised for a poorly planned
travail
– his one-on-one weekly conference with the king – because his son lay mortally ill, Louis replied
‘that’s a bother’, leaving it unclear whether he was put out by his minister’s indolence or gruffly commiserating. But he grew more confident as a king over time and could be solicitous towards favoured ministers, such as the comte de Vergennes, whom he begged not to damage his health by working too hard.
From the beginning of his reign, Louis was determined to dedicate himself to the business of government, and worked far more conscientiously than his grandfather. In the early days his taciturn demeanour enabled his ministers to manipulate him: they continually fired off questions and readily supplied the answers they wanted. But he soon became adept at using silence to convey disapproval and to prey on a minister’s fears of dismissal. This maintained his influence in a system where it was quite possible for the king to be marginalised, but it did not make for healthy government. Louis’s distaste for contention prevented the compromises needed between his territorial ministers: his solution to interdepartmental quarrels was to sack one of the ministers involved, rather than attempt to reconcile the disputants.
Louis was not an easy man to love, and his marriage to Marie Antoinette struggled from the start. Louis’s anti-Austrian tutor, the duc de La Vauguyon, had instilled him with a distrust of his new wife. The couple also lacked common interests: ‘My tastes’, she wrote to her mother, ‘are not the same as the King’s, who is only interested in
hunting and his metal-working.’ More troubling, from a political perspective, was Louis’s performance in the bedroom. Seven years passed before the marriage was properly consummated, and the pressure on Louis was increased by agitators who wished
the marriage annulled. (Maria Theresa’s unhelpful advice was for the queen to tempt him with
‘redoubled caresses’.)