Read The Queen's Necklace Online
Authors: Antal Szerb
It is interesting too, how strongly the events in the novel found an echo in aristocratic society. Chamfort referred to it constantly, and the Comte de Tilly speaks of it, and of its harmful influence, at some length in his memoirs. He calls Laclos the genius of wickedness, and says: “His book was one of the waves pouring into the ocean of the French Revolution to cleanse the throne.” And yet there is nothing revolutionary about it—it is just a love story, nothing more.
So that was how this society saw itself: so fundamentally wicked that it seemed almost to revel in the artistic perfection of its own wickedness. Tilly thought that the novel helped prepare the way for the Revolution by laying bare the immorality of the aristocracy, whether real or supposed. But he himself is an example of the way the aristocrats themselves delighted in the revelation. It is rather like those American financiers who take pleasure in reading the novelistic indictments of Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis.
A rather less open hostility to the ruling class is found in the dis-illusionment and cynicism of Chamfort. The illegitimate son of a nobleman, he was an embittered and defiant
déclassé
. As a young man—when, according to one of his mistresses women would begin by thinking of him as an Adonis but then discover he was a Hercules—he enjoyed the favour of high-born ladies. Later his body and life were blighted by venereal disease, which in those times struck down the dissolute like the workings of an ancient curse. There is scarcely a memoir in which it does not feature.
Chamfort’s resentment of the aristocratic world is an unusual and complex phenomenon. Certainly he had no cause for complaint about not being accepted by it. He received two pensions from the King by right, was made secretary to the Duc de Condé, reader to the Duc d’Artois and secretary to Mme Elisabeth. He became an Academician, and lodged with the Comte de Vaudreuil. But his bitterness arose from precisely
the fact that he was accepted. As a pampered writer proud of his gifts he refused to play the role of court jester assigned to the intellectual in an aristocratic society. “It is a ridiculous thing to grow old as an actor in a theatrical company in which you count as only half a man.” Later he provided the single most celebrated slogan for the Revolution. He is said to be the source of the opening words of the famous pamphlet by Sieyès: “
Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État? Tout. Qu’a-t-il été jusqu’à présent dans l’ordre politique? Rien.
”—What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it ever been in the political order? Nothing. And again: “
Guerre aux châteaux! Paix aux chaumières!
”—War on the chateaux! Peace among the cottages!
Chamfort is the most important forerunner of nineteenth-century pessimism. Schopenhauer learnt much from him. Many of his sayings still in circulation are wrongly attributed to the great German philosopher, who occasionally forgot to mention his sources. But their construction is lighter, altogether more French, than Schopenhauer’s, and thus more ‘modern’. His aphorisms might have come from the pens of such contemporary French ironists as Paul Morand, Montherlant or Cocteau. With the reader’s permission, we shall translate a few of these, since there is no other document that so consistently and concisely expresses the guilty conscience of the years preceding the Revolution.
The poor are the blacks of Europe.
They govern the people the same way as they think. They feel free to utter stupidities the way ministers feel free to commit blunders.
In France they spare the arsonists and punish those who sound the alarm.
Only the history of a free people is worth studying. The history of a people under a tyranny can be nothing more than a collection of anecdotes.
Consider this: for thirty or forty centuries we have struggled to enlighten ourselves, and the result is that the three hundred million people living in the world are the slaves of some thirty tyrants.
Courtiers are like beggars who have grown rich by begging.
Society, and the world at large, are like libraries. At first glance everything seems to be in perfect order, because the books are arranged by size and shape. But in reality everything is chaotic because the books are not grouped by subject, contents or authors.
There are two great orders of society: those who have more to eat than they have appetite, and those who never have food enough to satisfy their hunger.
Life is a sort of illness which is eased every sixteen hours by sleep. But this is just a palliative. The only cure is death.
I have my doubts about wisdom. According to the scriptures it begins with fear of the Lord. I rather think it begins with the fear of mankind.
In some centuries public opinion is the worst opinion.
Society was made necessary by physical disasters and the misfortunes of the human condition. But society merely adds to the calamities of nature: its problems make governments necessary, and governments simply aggravate the misfortune. Such is the history of the human condition.
It was only the failure of the first floodwaters that prevented God from unleashing the second.
And here are a few aphorisms about women and love—
However badly a man may think of a woman, there is always some woman who thinks even worse of her.
Do you know any woman who does not assume, when she sees another paying attention to one of her male friends, that she is taking too much of an interest in him?
It is a very unlucky man who can bear in mind, when he meets a woman close up, what he knew about her from afar.
In our time, the piquancy of secrets has been replaced by the piquancy of scandal.
I remember meeting a man who broke off with an opera singer when he discovered that she was just as insincere as any respectable woman.
Is it my fault that I always prefer women who are loved by others to those who are not loved?
And so we make our way down the social ladder: Laclos, nobleman; Chamfort,
déclassé
; and the third, Beaumarchais, plebeian. Beaumarchais is from the same layer as his own Figaro—the non-privileged person who lives off the privileged: the flunkey. The Revolution, unfortunately, brought this layer above all others to the surface. The future was with Beaumarchais. Figaro was the New Man.
Or perhaps not. Not yet a bourgeois, only a non-aristocrat, Beaumarchais, like Laclos and Chamfort, is the antithesis of the aristocracy.
Here we might mention an episode from Beaumarchais’s truly dazzling life, as it is distantly connected with our little history. Its title might well be:
Figaro as Diplomat
.
When Louis XVI acceded to the throne in June 1774, Beaumarchais informed his Chief of Police, a M Sartine, that a pamphlet was being printed in London and Amsterdam that was extremely insulting to the royal couple. He asked for authorisation to travel to the scene to stop the writer, one Angelucci, from publishing. As always in his dealings with Beaumarchais, Louis procrastinated for ages and then, as always, ended by granting permission. The writer received a letter of commission from him which he wore at all times around his neck, hanging from a gold chain in a gold box, out of respect for the King.
His negotiations went well. Angelucci agreed to abandon publication on payment of one thousand four hundred English pounds. Beaumarchais personally saw the pamphlet burnt in London, then the two men travelled to Amsterdam and destroyed the print run there. But what a cunning fellow this Angelucci was! He secretly kept back a copy and took it to Nuremberg, where it was finally printed.
But Figaro was still himself. “I am like a lion,” he wrote to Sartine. “True I have no money (author’s note—neither do lions), but I have my diamonds. I shall convert everything into cash and continue on my way with fire in my heart. I don’t
speak German, but I shall travel night and day, and woe to the rascal who has forced me to cover three or four hundred miles when I’d much rather have my feet up. When I catch up with him I shall seize all his papers and murder him, as he deserves, for all the trouble he has caused me.”
On 14th August he overtook the scoundrel in a wood in Liechtenstein. Beaumarchais leapt from his coach, grabbed hold of Angelucci, tore the pamphlet from him, plus 35,000 francs, but then gave him back some of the money out of the kindness of his heart. However Angelucci reappeared shortly afterwards, accompanied by another ruffian. Beaumarchais overpowered the two of them but was wounded in the process.
Beaumarchais’s rather less imaginative coachman gave a different version of the story. According to him, Beaumarchais got out in the wood to shave himself, leaving the driver to go slowly on ahead. When they met again, his hand was bandaged up. He claimed he had been attacked by robbers, but the driver had the impression that he had simply cut himself while shaving.
In Vienna Beaumarchais was received with considerable suspicion. It transpired that he had not given Angelucci the one thousand four hundred pounds, but had promised him an annuity instead. They thought it best to lock the eccentric diplomat up.
He was however subsequently released. He returned to Paris and presented his bill. Louis XVI’s government generously, if reluctantly, met his claim for expenses amounting to 72,000 pounds. Sartine excused the actions of the Viennese court with the words:
“Look here, old chap, the Empress took it into her head that you were some sort of adventurer.”
The suicidally bad conscience of the French ruling class is best seen in connection with Beaumarchais’s masterpiece,
The Marriage of Figaro
. Its popularity, together with the outcome of the necklace trial, is regarded as the most notable harbinger of the Revolution.
The King read the play in manuscript and expressed the view that it should not be performed. The Censor was of the same opinion, as were the Keeper of the Seal (the Minister of Justice) and the Chief of Police. This aroused so much popular discontent, Mme Campan relates, that “Never, in all the years preceding the collapse of the monarchy, were the words ‘oppression’ and ‘tyranny’ uttered with more passion than at this time.” After much wrangling, the play was performed in April 1784. In the leading role was the Comte de Vaudreuil, Marie-Antoinette’s intellectual friend and thus an indirect link to the Queen herself. The King’s two brothers were present on the opening night. The aristocratic audience received it with wild enthusiasm, whereupon Beaumarchais became even more impudent than ever. To a duke who had asked for a box in the theatre so that his female relatives could see the play masked and incognito, he sent this churlish reply. “I cannot respect, Your Excellency, the sort of woman who is willing to see a play she considers immoral provided that she herself is not seen …”
Not long afterwards Breteuil did lock him up for one of his impertinences—not in the Bastille, which would have been too good for someone like him, but in St Lazare. But by then the time of reckoning was close at hand. The few days Beaumarchais spent in prison produced a far greater outcry than the fate of all of the thousands who, under the three successive Louis, spent years, or their entire lives, without access to trial, in the Bastille, St Lazare and other prisons.
The royal family did their best to placate enraged public opinion and its orchestrator, the mutinous Figaro, by staging
The Barber of Seville
at Trianon with Marie-Antoinette as Rosina. Moreover, which perhaps pleased the great financiers even more, they finally honoured the claim brought against them for 2,150,000 livres.
Meanwhile, night after night at the Comédie Française, Figaro continued to pour his irony and impertinence onto the enthusiastic nobles filling the auditorium.
“No, Count, don’t do it!” he roars, when he hears that his master Count Almaviva intends to seduce his bride Suzanna. “Don’t even try! Just because you are a
grand seigneur
, do you think that instantly makes you a genius? My, how birth, riches, rank and office make a man proud! But what did you ever do in return for those privileges? You took the trouble to be born, and that was all. Otherwise you’re just like anyone else. But I, damn it, when I was just one of the nameless crowd milling around down there, I had to show more learning and wit just to make ends meet than the entire Spanish Empire did in a hundred years; and you want to start something with me? …”
And sitting there in their boxes, Almaviva and all the other counts rejoiced that at last someone had spoken the truth.
Viewed from a distance, Beaumarchais was not the most ‘left-wing’ of the writers in his time. The Marquis de Condorcet was much more of a revolutionary. In his works he waged war on every kind of social abuse, from forced labour to Negro slavery, and later, when a prisoner of the Revolution, wrote his most resolutely optimistic masterpiece, in which he showed how humanity progresses irresistibly towards freedom and equality … and then took poison. The Abbé Reynal described the behaviour of Europeans in the two Indias, East and West, combining geographical, historical and economic facts with eloquent diatribes against the wars of conquest against the natives. He was introduced to Frederick the Great, and given a ceremonial reception by the Lower House in England; for twenty years his book was a Bible on two continents, and even the young Bonaparte, in his student days, would echo his sayings.
And then “the party of the lost children”, as Taine calls them: “Naigeon and Sylvain Maréchal, Mably and Morelly, the fanatics who laid down the binding dogmas and highest duties of atheism, the socialists who proclaimed a common weal in order to exterminate selfishness, and wanted to establish a society in which all who sought to retain their ‘contemptible private property’ would be declared public enemies, treated
as dangerous lunatics and locked away for lifelong solitary confinement.”
These people were sometimes imprisoned by the Ancien Régime, sometimes not, but Mably addressed one of his books to the Duke of Parma, and the Poles asked him to write them a constitution.