The Queen's Necklace (4 page)

The crucial fact that Rohan had no money remains indisputable, as will be made clear in the story of the necklace. But how could he possibly not have money? His income from the bishopric at Strasbourg and his various abbotships alone brought him 60,000 livres per annum, on paper: in reality, more like 400,000 livres. The value of the livre at that time Funck-Brentano puts at about ten francs; that is, pre-war francs, worth a third of a Hungarian pengő in peacetime.

While we are considering Rohan as a typical representative of his social class, it might be interesting to add a few further details about his income, to compare him with others of his rank. They are taken from Funck-Brentano’s
L’ancien régime
—

“M de Sartine, Chief of Police, was given 200,000 livres (that is two million francs) to pay off a portion of his debts. The Keeper of the Seal Lamoignon received a small gift of 200,000 livres—modest indeed, when his successor Miromesnil accepted 600,000 livres (six million francs) towards ‘furnishing his house’. The Duc d’Aiguillon was awarded 500,000 (five million francs) in compensation when he left the ministry in 1774. The widow
of the Maréchal de Muy, the Minister for War, had an annual pension of 30,000 livres, and when the Comte de St Germain gave up his position of Secretary of State for War he took an annual pension of 40,000 livres and 155,000 in compensation. (Multiply all these last figures by ten!)

“Marie-Antoinette once gave the Duc de Polignac 1,200,000 livres, and the Duc de Salm 500,000. Calonne, during his years in charge of the Treasury, paid out fifty-six million livres to the older of the King’s two brothers, the Duc de Provence, and twenty-five million to the younger, the Comte d’Artois.
C’est à hurler!
” (‘It makes one want to cry aloud!’—not my words, but those of the elderly Funck-Brentano, that most conservative-minded of men.) At any one time the Duc de Condé had twelve million livres to hand, and an annual income of 600,000 (six million francs).

These facts also appear in Taine’s
L’Ancien Régime
, unsurprisingly perhaps, since he appears to be Funck-Brentano’s source. Both writers provide a mass of other similar examples.

You have to cry out, or rather, the facts themselves cry out to Heaven. What was this? What strange madness had seized the hearts of the French kings, that they should hand out such legendary sums (very rarely asking for anything in return) simply as a reward for the possession of noble ancestry? It was of course not madness, but an inescapable consequence of the historical situation. In the Middle Ages France, like other European states, had been controlled by the feudal aristocracy. For some centuries its kings had been struggling to centralise power, that is to say, to prise it from the grip of the great barons and arrogate it to themselves. As is well known, this goal was finally achieved by Louis XIV when, in no sense boastfully, he remarked, ‘
L’état c’est moi
’. The rural feudal nobility had been transformed into one based at the Court. The barons could no longer reside on their estates but were required to remain near the King, who kept an eagle eye on any absences and punished them by the withdrawal of his favour. From this point on the
people were plundered not by the barons but by the King’s
intendants
and the
fermiers généraux
, and the money now went to the royal coffers. That was why it had become necessary to bail out the nobility: with annuities, gifts, offices at Court commanding unheard-of salaries, and positions in the church and army. Later, perhaps, the need for all this fell away: all autonomous power had been leached out of the barons and they were no longer capable of mounting any sort of rebellion against the King (but nor could they provide him with support, one major reason why the Revolution triumphed so swiftly). By then, simple necessity dictated that they remain loyal to him. But by the time of Louis XVI, this once rational and necessary system of ‘reimbursement’ had come to seem a straightforward abuse, a pointless and unjustified luxury that quite rightly drew censure from the workers and provoked revolutionary anger in the people.

The next question is, what did they do with such vast sums of money? It is difficult for us now to believe they could spend so much. A modern American millionaire would struggle to do so. But American millionaires and other people with huge amounts of money are not
grands seigneurs
. The owner of a vast fortune achieved through economic activity will even in his wildest moments retain some degree of business sense, and preserve some sort of method even in his madness. But the old French grandees were never, in their most sober moments, thinking economists, and had no idea of system or method. Just where money went in the age of Louis XVI we shall seek to explain by means of a few extracts from the work by Taine mentioned earlier.

“The lady-in-waiting to Louis XV’s daughters, the three little old ladies known as the
Mesdames
, burned candles to the value of 215,068 francs, and the Queen 157,109 francs. In Versailles they still point out the street, once filled with little shops, where the royal footmen would come and feed the entire town on desserts left over from the King’s table. According to the official
estimate, the King himself consumed 2,190 francs worth of almond tea and lemonade. The ‘round-the-clock’ consommé kept for Madame Royale, the two-year-old daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, cost 5,201 livres a year.” While Marie-Antoinette was still the Dauphine, the
femmes de chambre
ran up a bill against her account for “four pairs of shoes per week, three spindles of thread per day to stitch their hairdressing gowns, and two reels of ribbon to adorn the baskets in which her gloves and fans were kept.” (The rules forbade that one should simply hand them to her: they had to be presented in a basket.)

Naturally, tradespeople were never paid on time. When Turgot was Finance Minister the King ran a debt of some 800,000 livres with his wine-merchants, and 3,500,000 with his caterers. (Multiply these figures by ten, advises Funck-Brentano.)

Next come figures which confirm that the nobility did not lag far behind the Court in the scale of their debts and general spending. “On one occasion the Maréchal de Soubise (Rohan’s relation) entertained the King at his country mansion for dinner and the night. The bill came to 200,000 livres. Mme de Matignon allowed herself 24,000 livres a year for a new coiffure every day. Cardinal Rohan owned a needle-lace silk chasuble valued at over 100,000 livres; his saucepans were made of solid silver. And nothing could have been more natural, when you consider the way they thought about money at the time. To economise, to set money aside, was like turning a flowing stream into a useless, foul-smelling swamp. Better to throw the stuff out of the window. Which is precisely what the Maréchal de Richelieu did, when his grandson sent back the bulging purse he had been given because he ‘couldn’t think what to do with it’. So out it went—to the great good fortune the street-sweeper who picked it up. Had the man not happened to be passing by the money would have ended up in the river.

“Mme de B,” Taine continues, “once intimated to the Prince de Conti that she would like a portrait of her canary as a
miniature set on a ring. The Prince volunteered his services. The lady accepted, but stipulated that the miniature should be kept quite simple, with no accompanying diamonds. She was indeed given a simple gold ring, but the picture was set not under glass but under a finely-cut sheet of diamond. She sent the diamond back, whereupon the Prince ground it to dust which he scattered over the letter she had written. The cost of this little heap of powder was between four and five thousand livres (raising questions about the tone and content of the letter). The highest gallantry often combined with the most extravagant generosity, and the more fashionable the gentleman, the weaker his understanding of money.”

However, the sheer size of these sums does give cause for wonder.

First and foremost: it could well be that Funck-Brentano’s principle of multiplying by ten is wrong. The money can hardly have been worth that much. To establish its value in today’s terms is not easy. Funck-Brentano seems not to have taken into account its actual purchasing power, or he would have found that the livre would have bought a great deal less than ten
pre-war
francs. Here are one or two facts which struck us in our reading around the subject.

During the exceptionally cold winter of 1784 the Comédie Française offered a special evening performance for the poor (it was the premier of La Harpe’s
Coriolan
) where the takings amounted to 10,330 livres. In today’s Budapest Playhouse, with approximately the same seating capacity, a full house would bring in around 7,000 pengős.

Or again, we know what Marie-Antoinette paid for some of the hats she bought from the celebrated Mlle Bertin. They cost her forty-eight, seventy-two, ninety and (possibly) 280 livres. In pre-war Paris the price of a woman’s hat ranged from thirty to 1200 francs. Even the most expensive of those royal purchases hardly justifies the ten-times rule. Further examples: Louis XVI, as I shall mention later, kept a precise record of his petty
cash expenditure. From his notes we learn that he paid twelve livres for one hundred apricots for preserving; three livres for six pounds of cherries and two baskets of strawberries; one livre and ten sols for collecting wood and, for one pound of pepper (much more expensive then than here in peacetime), four livres. On the basis of these figures it seems reasonable to conclude that the purchasing power of the livre was very roughly that of today’s Hungarian pengő.

The figures may diminish our sense of the scale of the sums involved, but they are still monstrous. One wonders how it was possible to pay out such amounts in the coinage of the day. Ever since the collapse of the system introduced by John Law at the start of the century the French had been extremely wary of paper money. In 1776 they set up the Caisse d’Escompte to issue banknotes, and those notes were generally preferred to the not always reliable coinage. But in our particular period only very small numbers of banknotes were issued, and by 1783 there were no more than forty million livres’ worth in circulation.

And that gives rise to another little puzzle: whether the aristocracy really did always get their hands on their supposed income. We have seen that Louis XVI owed huge sums to his caterers and wine merchants, so it is possible that the Treasury itself was in debt, and the reason why Rohan and his peers found themselves in permanent financial difficulty was that their stipends were purely nominal, or were received only in part.

Despite all this, they must still have had access to vast sums, which brings us to the third question: where did it all come from? We have seen the size of the bills presented to the King and his nobles, both by their suppliers and by those who billed them in the name of those suppliers, for almond-tea, lemonade or whatever. They suggest a very cosy relationship between two social groups: on the one hand, the tradespeople and merchants supplying the Court and the aristocracy, and on the other, the
intendants
(financial administrators for the Court and nobility)
with their army of clerks and assistants, together with the many different orders of flunkey.

As regards this last group, we find some interesting notes in our treasured guide to the old city, Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s
Tableau de Paris
: “The principal footman of a high-ranking man at this time would enjoy an annual income of 40,000 livres, and he too would have a footman, who in turn had one of his own. This lowest functionary’s task was to brush Monseigneur’s coat and straighten his wig. The head footman would take the wig from the last of four hands in line, and had merely to arrange it on the head in which reposed the great questions of state. This momentous task being duly accomplished, it became his turn to be dressed by his men. He would order them about in a loud voice, scolding them fiercely: he was expecting visitors, he would explain loftily, as he ordered them to make his carriage ready. The footman’s footman did not have a carriage, but that too suited him perfectly well … The principal footman’s possessions included an engraved gold watch, lace apparel, diamond buckles and a little vendor of fashionable goods as his mistress.

“This pointless and purely ostentatious army of servants was viewed in Paris as a most dangerous form of corruption, and as their numbers grew ever larger it seemed only too frighteningly obvious that they would one day bring a major disaster down on society.” In the backyards and basements, a new social class was coming into existence—Figaro’s class. Intelligent, affluent and sharp-tongued, they had seen the aristocracy from close up, with no real experience of what lay behind the facade: they knew only one side, the weaker. As Hegel reminds us, no man is a hero to his valet.

On the other hand, the luxury enjoyed by the nobility enriched the citizenry both directly and indirectly. The money might drain away through the hands of the privileged, but it came to rest in the reservoirs of the bourgeoisie, and increased the general prosperity we spoke of earlier—which, paradoxically, was itself one of the most important reasons behind the changing times.

But to return to Vienna. The city had its own
grands seigneurs
, but the scale of Rohan’s magnificence astonished and enchanted everyone, and no one, it seems, was troubled by those financial concerns that, from the distance of a century-and-a-half, are so obviously disquieting. Rohan charmed everyone, even the cynically superior Emperor Joseph II and his wise and canny chancellor Kaunitz. He charmed everyone, with one exception—the one person who mattered—Maria Theresa.

Maria Theresa probably disliked him simply because everyone else was charmed, and here we can see just how blind Rohan could be. The Empress did not take kindly to a foreigner overshadowing her royal household in pomp and splendour—something the Habsburgs had quite understandably never liked. Their censor had even suppressed József Katona’s opera
Bánk Bán
on the grounds that it cast aspersions on the imperial house. And how could the Episcopal Coadjutor, accustomed as he was to French ways of doing things, understand how deeply his manner of life—so often unworthy of his position—might offend her religious sensibilities? No doubt the Empress saw him as the embodiment of the French frivolity and immorality that so alienated her. But perhaps, in the end, it wasn’t Rohan himself that she loathed so much as the people behind him, the vast entourage from whom she wished to protect her people.