The Queen's Necklace (10 page)

She must certainly have managed this part with some skill, since the Cardinal finally asked her to put a word in for him with her friend. She quickly brought news that she had spoken about him to the Queen. The Queen had heard her out in silence, but without any show of sympathy. She felt that the situation was hopeless.

Then she appeared with altogether more cheering news of her latest secret trip to Versailles. The Queen was taking her more and more into her confidence, and was slowly starting to reconsider her long-established prejudice against the Cardinal. She was beginning to see through the base intrigues of Comte Mercy-Argenteau, which had always represented Rohan in a bad light, and she had been touched by the magnanimity Rohan had shown over the trouble that had befallen his nephew, the Prince de Guéménée. In short, she was coming round to the view that the Cardinal was a fundamentally decent man. Finally in May, having faithfully promised Rohan that she would do everything she could to advance his interests, Jeanne was able to announce, with a radiant smile, that it would not be long before he was restored to royal favour.

Rohan, the most uncritical child of that most critical age, believed everything. Success increased Jeanne’s boldness. She
told him to observe the Queen carefully when she passed beside him in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, when she would make a sign with her head in his direction. (When I was a child, my father similarly suggested that the Emperor Franz Josef would acknowledge me in Fürdo˝ street.) And Rohan believed that too. When the Queen raised her head, it would be a subtle indication of her increasing friendliness. The gesture was of course intended not for him but for anyone who happened to be standing there.

Then Jeanne took another step forward. She instructed him, in the Queen’s name, to write a petition justifying his actions vis-à-vis the accusations made against him. Rohan composed his document with the greatest of care, tearing it up twenty times before finally handing it over.

The reply was swift. “I am most glad,” the Queen wrote, “not to have to consider you guilty any longer. I cannot at present grant you the audience you ask for, but I will send you a sign as soon as circumstances permit. Be discreet.”

This was the Queen’s first letter to Rohan. “Those few words,” the Abbé Georgel wrote afterwards, “threw the Cardinal into raptures it would be difficult to describe. Mme de la Motte was from that point onwards his guardian angel, smoothing his path to happiness. From that moment on, she could have whatever she wanted from him.”

On her advice, the Cardinal replied expressing his delight. The Queen’s next response was followed by a rapid exchange of letters. None has survived, for reasons which will be made clear. But the Abbé Georgel, who saw and read them, affirmed that those written by the Queen showed a clearly discernible progression. The tone becomes increasingly cordial, seeming to promise more and more. They give the impression of Jeanne’s well-judged pleadings and Rohan’s well-worded letters working their effect, and the Queen’s heart steadily softening towards her admirer.

Now the Cardinal sat, in his official residence, the Hôtel de Strasbourg, in almost continuous conference with his advisors,
Cagliostro and the Swiss Baron Planta. The whole Palace was filled with a hopeful, springlike air of expectation. Perhaps nothing was said openly, but everywhere he was met with conspiratorial smiles of congratulation. Those letters were about more than the Queen’s general goodwill. She was letting him know personally that she would receive him back into favour as soon as she could summon him openly. And then, in the silence of the night …

Elsewhere too, the days were spent in a fever of excitement. Everywhere the very ground under people’s feet seemed to be becoming less certain. Finance Minister Calonne was a kind and intelligent man, but he could do nothing: that terrifying chasm the deficit yawned wider and wider, threatening to swallow everything. Paris sweltered in the appalling, pestilential heat of summer. Far better at such a time to be at Saverne … but Rohan continued to wait in the Hôtel de Strasbourg—to wait, and believe that his star was approaching its zenith.

Finally the longed-for moment arrived. The Queen’s message read: “Be in the park at Versailles, tomorrow night, in the Bosquet de Vénus.” ‘Tomorrow’ would be 11th August 1784.

In the Bosquet de Vénus: Venus’ Bower … How much promise lay in that name!

The following evening Rohan was in the park. He wore a large black cloak, as agreed, and a broad-brimmed hat pulled down low over his eyes and, thus attired, wandered along the deserted pathways. From time to time he encountered amorous couples out late; sometimes he was startled by the sudden calling of birds. If the romantic drama had then been in existence, we might have thought of him as one of its heroes. But it wasn’t. Rohan was a precursor.

He walked until late. The night was very dark. He finally withdrew beside a broad flight of steps. This was the Bower of Venus, so called because there were plans to set up a statue to the goddess there. It was never erected, and the bower was later named the Bosquet de la Reine, in memory of this particular night.

Inside the bower it was particularly dark. Not a single light shone in the windows of the vast palace. The eternal fountains were silent, the trees tossed and whispered to one another, and the statues of classical gods were a ghostly white presence among the bushes.

Footsteps were heard. Three people were approaching: two women and a man. The man Rohan recognised as the Comte de la Motte. One of the women was Jeanne de Valois. The other woman …

The Comte and Comtesse stopped outside, and the woman stepped hesitantly into the bower. Now he recognised her: it was the face … or rather, he seemed to discern the contours … the way she walked … the dress he knew very well: it was the full Gallic cloak recently painted by Mme Vigée-Lebrun in the portrait now hanging in the Salon. Rohan made a deep bow and kissed the hem of her dress. It was not an empty gesture: it was the only way he could express what he was feeling.

The lady murmured something in a low voice; extremely low. But Rohan understood, or thought that he understood, the words:

“You may hope. Let us forget the past.” And a rose fell from her hand.

“Monseigneur, down on thy knees,” Carlyle shouts at this point to Rohan, from the distance of half-a-century. “Never can red breeches be better wasted.” Rohan knelt.

Then a shadow loomed.

“Quick, quick, you must be off!” it hissed, with theatrical huskiness. “Madame and the Comtesse d’Artois are coming.”

La Motte stepped into the bower and plucked the Queen away, while Jeanne took the Cardinal by the arm and led him off. Rohan pulled his hat even further down over his eyes. A sweet delirium filled his soul. It did not occur to him to wonder what the King’s sister and sister-in-law might be doing in the darkness of the park.

We can inform our gentle readers that the husky theatrical tones were those of Réteaux de Villette, Jeanne’s confidant (no doubt
in the fullest sense of the word) and the one who had written the Queen’s letters, at her dictation, in his exquisite, feminine hand. Later he admitted that there had been an element of
inclination
—seductiveness—in the letters, but he then withdrew the remark and would only concede that the their tone had been
agréable
.

But who was ‘the Queen’?

La Motte would often stroll in the garden of the Palais Royal, the residence of the Duc d’Orléans. It was during this period that the building attained the form and outline we see today, but while it was being built the garden remained open to the public. It was here that all sorts of lesser nobility, people like La Motte himself, would take the air—cardsharpers, rumour-mongers, gigolos, the whole aristocratic underworld, whose prince was the palace’s owner, Philippe-Égalité. Of course they were not the only people moving about. “There is nowhere like it in the round world,” writes Mercier. “You can visit London, Amsterdam, Madrid and Vienna, and see nothing that resembles it. A prisoner could live there and never get bored: it would be years before he even thought about freedom. They call it the capital of Paris. Here you can find everything: a young man of twenty with an income of 50,000 livres might enter this fairy garden and never be able to leave.”

Here, under the trees, came all those children of the age whose passion was for free and open talk about the deepest questions of the time—religion, politics, the future of the monarchy, and the great changes impending. This is where public opinion was born. This is where the Revolution was born.

All Europe has at some time or another had much to thank the Palais Royal for. You too, gentle reader, will at some point take a stroll there, or we hope you will. When you do, take a good look at the statue of Camille Desmoulins. He seems to have leapt up into his chair just this instant; his huge head of
hair flies in the wind, like the hair of a madman. The very air around him trembles with the excitement of youth—the youth of all mankind.

The Palais Royal was in effect a coffee house. People sat, either beneath the arcades or outside, in the kiosks dotted about the garden, sipping those cunning potions you can still buy in St Mark’s Square in Venice, which they so closely resembled. Inside was the Exchange, where the life of commerce pulsed and raged before it was given a palatial building of its own. In the eighteenth century the speculator was still part of a colourful democracy, rubbing shoulders with the gigolo, the oral reporter (that is, gossip columnist) and the streetwalker. It was all very Bohemian, not yet lent a corpulent dignity by wealth. And there were foreigners here too. Foreigners usually end up in the Bohemian district, as a consequence of their own lack of social position. (The English were making trips to Paris for a bit of immorality even then.) In August 1785 five theatres were playing in the Palais Royal: the Ombres Chinoises, the Pygmées Françaises, the Vrais Fantoccini Italiens, Les Variétés Amusantes and Mme de Beaujolais’s Petits Comédiens.

Beneath the arcades stood a cheerful assembly of jewellers’ shops and boutiques selling women’s things, in front of which paraded
les filles
, as the French euphemistically termed those young ladies whose careers guaranteed that
filles
—maidens—was the one thing they were not. At the time of our story the Palais Royal was the most famous place not just in Paris but in the whole world, for such maidenly gatherings.

Among the regulars was a young woman called Marie-Nicole Leguay. By day she was a worker in one of the fashion shops where Jeanne had begun her career. In her free time she walked the Palais Royal, and it was there that La Motte first came across her.

He must have been instantly struck by her single interesting feature—her remarkable resemblance to Marie-Antoinette. On this every contemporary source agrees. The portrait still
in Funck-Brentano’s collection reveals the same round, listless face, the slightly protruding lower lip, the soft features, the tall, fine head of hair. La Motte stood before her as before the Angel of the Lord.

He instantly propositioned her.

Next, he accompanied her to her home, where what passed between them took the same course as it would between many thousands of similar acquaintances made at the Palais Royal that evening. But at first La Motte preserved a deep silence about his real intentions. Some time later he invited the girl back to his house, where the Comtesse received her with a conspicuous display of friendliness. Soon, she even gave her a more suitable name so that she could deal on equal terms in the fashionable quarter. She became the Baronne d’Oliva—the letters deriving from ‘Valois’, further evidence of Jeanne’s strange obsession.

The young woman was completely charmed by the Comtesse, especially when she came to understand whom she was dealing with—the intimate friend of Marie-Antoinette. And since the Baronne d’Oliva was a particularly, indeed infinitely, well-intentioned soul, how could she possibly refuse when the Comtesse asked her one day if she would do her a personal favour, really just a trifle, but it would be doing the Queen a very great service. And of course she could count on the Queen’s gratitude. She would get 15,000 livres, and a present, my dear, a personal present, to at least the same value, though what it would be she couldn’t yet say. What she would have to do, it was really nothing, just hand over a letter, and a single rose, to a noble gentleman at Versailles.

“It wasn’t difficult persuading her,” Jeanne admitted later. “She was really stupid.”

“O Ixion de Rohan, happiest mortal of this world!” exclaims Carlyle, comparing the Cardinal to the character in Greek
mythology who fell in love with Hera, the Queen of the Skies, and was made by the malicious gods to embrace her in the semblance of a cloud. If ever there were happy days in Rohan’s life they must have been those that followed the scene in the bower. What an experience for his soul, with its deep yearning for mysticism and wonder: the park, the dark night, the Queen’s appearance out of the gloom—almost like something imagined—the fevered words, the rose let fall to the ground, and the secrecy surrounding everything. Why had the Queen been so nervous? What lay behind that? Perhaps she was ashamed of her feelings that night? … And indeed perhaps it was better that she did vanish, like an apparition. Had she stayed there a moment longer the truth would have come out—and the Cardinal had had his fill of truth, which had lavished too many of its gifts upon him:

Jeanne was indeed a kindly villain. Like Faust, and other devils of myth and legend, she gave Rohan what his heart desired. No other mortal could have done more than that.

And she seemed to realise it, because she quickly set about cashing in. On the Queen’s behalf she let Rohan know that she would look very kindly on it if he could lend her 50,000 livres: an impoverished relative was in urgent need of assistance, and just at that moment she did not have the ready cash to hand. Rohan was delighted that the Queen had taken him so far into her confidence as to ask him for money. He quickly raised the sum from a moneylender, since he too had no cash to spare at that time …