The Queen's Necklace

The Verdict

THE HEARING LASTED FOR MONTHS. The arrests of d’Oliva and Réteaux changed everything. Once d’Oliva had confessed to her appearance in the Venus Bower, and Réteaux that he had written the letters from ‘the Queen’, Jeanne’s lies collapsed one after another. On 12th April she was brought face to face with Réteaux and d’Oliva and finally compelled to admit to the Venus Bower charade. The confession was torn from her between a thousand screams and convulsions; her superior manner vanished, and she fainted. A warder took her in his arms and carried her back to her cell. But the moment she recovered herself she bit him in the neck, whereupon he simply let her fall.

With the collapse of her scheme to blame everything on Cagliostro, she concocted a fresh one intended to make Rohan the sole villain and herself merely the blind instrument who had had no idea what she was involved in. When that became untenable, she tried another experiment: taking refuge in secrecy—“the sort of secret,” she claimed, that “she could reveal to no one, not even to the head of the royal household in strictest confidence.” And finally, when that too proved ineffectual, she began to feign madness. She smashed everything in her room, and refused to eat or to go down to the hearing. When the warders entered her cell, she would be found lying on the bed stark naked.

Cagliostro however found himself in top form on several occasions during the trial. He castigated Jeanne roundly, making her so angry that she grabbed a candle-holder, pulled it towards her and inflicted a burn on herself. When Réteaux was brought before him, he unleashed a powerful moral lecture — if we can believe him, he “talked until his lungs could no longer bear it”. Réteaux broke down completely, and the judges thanked Cagliostro warmly.

But by the time he had recovered his normal self the strength had gone out of him, and so it seems had the Ram Apis, and even Zobiachel, and, like all the other accused, he suffered something of a collapse. His Italian temperament made him far less able than his French counterparts to withstand the loneliness, and stress, of imprisonment. It seems that he, the great mystic, commanded the fewest sources of inner strength, which rather confirms the bogus nature of his grand spiritual claims. He needed constant supervision, as it was feared that he might kill himself.

Rohan bore his own ordeal with quiet, sombre dignity. When his case came before the Parlement and he ceased to be the prisoner of the King, he lost the right to maintain a great household and receive visitors. Only his doctors were allowed to see him (he was suffering from inflamed kidneys), and it was they who took his letters, written in invisible ink, to his lawyer. He became increasingly exhausted, and began to lose heart. He was deeply anxious about his friends and allies, Planta and Cagliostro. He even required his lawyer to take an oath that he would always address Cagliostro as Comte, as it pained him so much when people did not. But deep in his heart lay the real concern, which troubled him even more strongly than his own fate and that of his friends — his grief for the Queen. “Write and tell me,” he begged his lawyer, “whether it is true that she is still so upset.”

It was customary at the time for lawyers involved in cases of unusual public interest to print and circulate their memoirs, or rather their own accounts of what happened. The first to do this had been Beaumarchais himself. Now the public were waiting in a fever of excitement for ‘memoirs’ of the necklace trial, which of course duly appeared, with huge success. The version put out by Jeanne’s lawyer Doillot saw ten thousand copies instantly snapped up from his home address, and another five thousand distributed through booksellers. This Doillot was an elderly gentleman who had not been in practice very long. Jeanne had completely turned the old fellow’s head. He believed everything she told him, and faithfully recorded her fantastic tales in his memoir. Which of course only served to make it even more of a success.

Cagliostro’s lawyer, the young M Thilorier, was very aware that this was his great chance to make a name for himself. The basic text was written for him, in Italian, by the magus himself, and he then worked it up, with considerable literary flair, to suit the taste of the time. Grimm and other experts declared that had it been a novel, they would have considered it wonderfully interesting and skilfully wrought. In this work can be found the more fanciful stories about Cagliostro’s youth already quoted. As for the actual legal issues, Thilorier was in a very easy situation, as Cagliostro was able to prove his alibi, having arrived in Paris, from some way away, the day after Rohan first talked to the jewellers.

Nicole d’Oliva’s lawyer, the equally youthful Maître Blondel, produced a lyrical little masterpiece, a gem of sensibilité, and the age lapped it up. It tapped the same vein of sentimentality we find in Manon Lescaut and the later La dame aux camélias. People were shocked by Nicole’s innocence, for who could be more innocent than an innocent courtesan?

Blondel’s work ran to twenty thousand copies. Scarcely less popular were the minor personages, Planta, Réteaux, Mme Cagliostro and others who had been more or less incidentally caught up in the case. But the greatest expectations of all were aroused by the memoirs of the Cardinal’s lawyer, Mâitre Target. Target was an Academician, and the pride of the legal profession. Finally, on 16th May, the long-awaited work appeared. It proved a huge disappointment to the public. Target wrote with wonderful scholarly, indeed Ciceronian, eloquence, but he described nothing but the truth, with not a jot of poetry or fantasy in it.

Alongside the memoirs came the flood of pamphlets. Their authors, whose livelihoods depended on the popular hunger for sensation, naturally had no wish to miss out on the boom. Everyone had some new detail to add. They were able to reveal that Rohan and d’Oliva had spent the night together after the scene in the Bower, Rohan in the belief that he held the Queen in his arms. They reported that La Motte was now in Turkey, where he had been circumcised and made a Pasha. The more gruesome and shameless the pamphlet, the more certain it was of success. In this burgeoning tide of filth, Cagliostro became immensely popular. But as for the Queen …

Of these pamphlets Carlyle writes:

“The mind stops in dismay: curiosity breaks of it, whether this vortex of deception should ever close while delirium becomes general and the human tongue incomprehensible jargon, like the squalling of jays and magpies.”

Images and caricatures of the dramatis personae poured into circulation. The publishers were not overly scrupulous. The face of St Vincent’s wife (he was the President of the Parlement) was circulated over Jeanne’s name, while the Duc de Montbazon stood in for La Motte.

How could the government possibly tolerate all this? Was there no censorship yet in the world? Well, of course there was, and extremely strict provisions regulated the presses. But those provisions were every bit as toothless and impotent as every other function of the Ancien Régime. Any pamphleteer caught in the act would have his work burnt and would be severely punished, but such people were never caught, nor were their distributors. The police had good reason not to arrest them, since it was rumoured that the very worst of these productions was the work of no less a person than the Finance Minister, Calonne, while other pamphleteers enjoyed the protection of the Duc d’Orléans and operated under his direction.

We have already related one colourful tale involving the tracking down of pamphlets by Beaumarchais. Perhaps even more instructive is the tale of police inspector Goupil. Shortly after Louis XVI took the throne, Goupil announced that he had discovered a secret press near Yverdun that was about to print something that was deeply scurrilous about the King, and even more so about the Queen. He had managed to procure one or two examples, but to secure the rest he would need a great deal of money. He was given thirty thousand louis, and shortly afterwards produced both the manuscript and all the copies that had been run off. For these he was given another thousand louis. But at this point another policeman, prompted by envy, revealed that the author of the pamphlet was none other than Goupil himself. Ten years earlier, he had been a prisoner in the Bicêtre, and his wife had been in the Salpêtrière. On her release she had managed to delude Rohan into believing that she could act as a mediator on his behalf with the Queen. (Was that such a very widespread fashion among the women of this period?)

These pamphleteers were repulsive little nobodies, and their productions give pleasure now only to bibliographers and collectors, but their importance was considerable. They played a far greater role in bringing about the Revolution than the truly great writers. It was they who served public opinion, both feeding and directing it. At the time there was no daily press in the modern understanding of the term. In the turbulent years before 1789 one had to look elsewhere for material to supply the ever-chattering and gossip-hungry people of Paris. Hence the pamphlets. They existed in immense variety. There were the ‘little books’ (libelle, source of the modern English ‘libel’), and there were handbills and leaflets carrying pictures and verses. The eighteenth century was extremely fond of the verse form (even for textbooks), so naturally slander too could be versified. There are many such poems written about Marie-Antoinette, each more appalling than the last.

But all the while the shadow of the Bastille hung over the pamphleteer. Any day the little scene might take place which Mercier euphemistically calls the ‘delivery of the exempt’, with the police officer sidling up beside you and fluting softly in your ear:

“There must surely be some mistake, Monsieur, but I am instructed, Monsieur, to order your detention, Monsieur. In the name of the King, Monsieur.”

“The victim might want to howl,” says Mercier, “but the exempt is delivered so very meekly! If you had a pistol you would do better to fire it into the air rather than at him. Better to bow low, and enter into a exchange of politenesses with the man. You could pile up the mutual compliments until nothing stood between you and your rival in courtesy but iron bars.”

One can hardly wonder that the people who directed public opinion felt such venomous resentment towards the prevailing system.

The power of popular sentiment derived from the sociable disposition of the French character and the extroverted, outward-looking nature of French society. “Most foreigners,” wrote Necker, the great banker, who was himself of foreign origin, “have not the slightest conception of the importance of public opinion in France. They find it hard to understand that such an invisible form of power could exist. Without financial resources, official protection or a standing army, it imposes its laws on the city, the Court and even the Royal Palace.” Necker was absolutely right: foreigners do not understand it. Even Wahl, the modern German scholar who is the greatest expert in every aspect of the years leading up to the Revolution, fails to grasp the French mentality. In his book he reproaches Necker, and all those who were in power in the final years of the Ancien Régime, for placing so much emphasis on public opinion. He cannot understand how it could be that while the King could nominate ministers, public opinion could bring them down, and he would certainly have found Chamfort’s remark incomprehensible: “Everyone hates a fishwife, but none of us will accost one when she makes her way through the market hall.” It seems that in Germany either the fishwives hold their tongues, or the self-confidence of the bourgeoisie is so unshakeable that they pay them no attention.

The extent to which the power of popular sentiment had grown is wonderfully seen in this well-known anecdote:

Louis XVI once asked the elderly Richelieu, who had lived through three reigns, what had been the difference between them.

“Sire,” the Marshal replied, “in Louis XIV’s day no one dared utter a word; when Louis XV was on the throne, they spoke in whispers; under Your Highness they shout at the top of their voices.”

And now public opinion began to influence the necklace trial. Initially, people were against Rohan. He had brought this on himself long before, by his worldly behaviour and general voluptuousness so unbefitting a man of the cloth; the word now was that he kept a harem, consisting of all the women featuring in the case. Everyone ‘knew’ that Jeanne, d’Oliva and Mme Cagliostro were his mistresses. Much play was made of his position of Grand Almoner, and caricatures showed him collecting alms to pay off his debts. The age of Voltaire, with its underlying contempt for the clergy, wallowed in this slander.

But then the mood changed. He soon came to be seen as the pitiable victim of ‘despotism’ and signs of sympathy for him began to appear. The ladies, who, as we have seen, liked to express their opinions through their coiffures, now started to sport red and yellow ribbons on their heads: red above and yellow below, to signify “the Cardinal lying on straw”, that is to say, in a dungeon. These women, as a contemporary noted, were eternally grateful to the gallant Rohan for taking care, even in his hour of crisis, to burn the love letters which would have compromised so many fine ladies.

This reversal of public opinion strongly affected the Parlement, which, proud as it was of the independent spirit displayed by its judges with regard to the supreme power in the land, was prepared to make any number of compromises to preserve its popularity, and was by no means independent-minded where its public standing was concerned.

The change in the public mood was so rapid and so complete that one has to assume a degree of orchestration from above. This originated at the highest level, from government ministers and Versailles. Marie-Antoinette had lost her popularity with the public long before, but her real enemies remained those at Court. It was only there that anyone had a real interest in her emerging from the trial in disgrace. First of all, there were the Rohan clan, Mme de Marsan, Mme de Brionne and all the fairy godmothers, who had always despised the young Queen for her attack on protocol. But she had even more powerful foes, such as Calonne, the Finance Minister, who had never forgiven her for opposing his appointment; and there was the powerful family of the late Prime Minister Maurepas, who were still furious that she had wanted the banished Choiseul to be put in charge.

And, in the background, there lurked even loftier enemies: the two royal princes, counting on the demise of Louis XVI to bring one of them to the throne. One was the Comte de Provence, that witty and cunning free spirit; the other was the Duc d’Orléans, Philippe-Égalité, who flirted with revolution, and who, as the elder son, was waiting for the throne to become vacant. There is something rather eerie about the fact that at the time of our story there were three people living at Versailles who would attain the French crown through the beheading of Louis XVI: the Comte de Provence, later Louis XVIII; the Comte d’Artois, as Charles X and the twelve-year-old Duc de Chartres, the son of Philippe-Égalité, who became Louis-Philippe, the Citizen King. And there was a fourth, the infant Duc de Normandie, who after his father’s death became the legitimate King of France, Louis XVII, but never ascended to the throne. His story was lost during the Revolution in circumstances of insoluble mystery. One thinks of Macbeth when the witch conjured up the ‘horrible sight’ of the line of future Kings of Scotland, not one of whom carried his own features.

Representatives of the Church also met and drew up a statement of protest, asking the King to allow Rohan to be tried under their jurisdiction, as the Parlement was not an appropriate body to arraign a prince of the Church. Even the Pope protested, though when he understood the more intimate details of the case he backed off. People sang this satirical song:

Mais le Pape, moins honnête

Pourrait dire a ce nigaud:

Prince, à qui n’a point de tête,

Il ne faut point de chapeau!

A man with no head has no need of a Cardinal’s hat!

But at the same time the rabble ‘knew’ that Marie-Antoinette certainly had the necklace and was simply denying the fact.

Mme Cagliostro, whose complete innocence became clear in the course of the trial, was duly freed. She was the first of Rohan’s entourage to leave the Bastille. It now became apparent for the first time just how far popular feeling had shifted towards Rohan and away from the Queen. Mme Cagliostro was enthusiastically fêted, was received in the highest places, and three hundred people signed the visitors’ book at her home on a single day.

Another sympathetic female prisoner in the Bastille also had a happy result: the comely Nicole d’Oliva gave birth to a healthy boy, who was christened Jean-Baptiste Toussaint, his natural father Toussaint de Beausire having had no hesitation in acknowledging him.

At last the Procureur Général, Joly de Fleury, completed his indictment. He read it out on 30th May. It invited the jury to agree that the documents signed ‘Marie-Antoinette de France’ were fraudulent; that the Comte de la Motte in absentia and Réteaux de Villette should be sentenced to the galleys for life; that the Comtesse de la Motte should be birched, branded with a hot iron and imprisoned for life in the Salpêtrière. Rohan was to be given eight days to confess before the Grand chambre that he had recklessly given credence to the meeting in the Venus Bower, and that he had contributed to the deception of the jewellers; and should therefore express his full repentance, and ask pardon of the King and Queen; in addition he should resign all his official positions, give alms to the poor, and keep away from the royal residence for the rest of his life.

De Fleury’s indictment acquitted the Cardinal of fraud, but found him guilty on the higher charge that he had insulted the Queen’s honour by the assumptions he had made. Considered objectively, this was entirely justified, and the punishment proposed not especially severe.

But those who were determined both to humiliate the Queen in every possible way and to undermine the King, did not think so. When Joly de Fleury had finished reading out his statement, M Séguier, the Avocat Général, who stood above Fleury in rank, rose to speak. He protested vehemently, demanding that the Cardinal be acquitted on all counts. His raised tones were hardly in keeping with the dignity of the occasion; it was like a foretaste of the embittered rantings soon to be heard in the courts of the Revolution.

“You, who already have one foot in the grave,” he roared, “want to heap the ashes of shame upon this man, and to bring that shame upon the Parlement itself.”

“Your anger, sir, is not surprising,” replied Fleury. “People like you, who are so deeply sunk in debauchery, have no choice but to take the Cardinal’s side.”

“It’s is true that I know a few ‘girls’,” retorted Séguier, “and in fact my coach does sometimes wait at their door. But that’s entirely my business. No one could say of me that I basely sold my opinions to those in power.”

His meaning was that Fleury was in the pay of the Court. The accusation shocked him so much that he couldn’t speak.

Such were the circumstances in which the hearing began. Réteaux did not deny that he had written the letters in question, but, he pleaded, he had done so with good intentions, since he and everyone knew that the Queen would never have signed herself ‘Marie-Antoinette de France’.

Jeanne responded to the judges’ questions with indomitable courage. Rohan and the Queen had certainly corresponded: she had personally seen some two hundred letters written between them. In hers, the Queen used the intimate ‘tu’ form with him, and most of them involved arranging rendez-vous. And they really had met.

This assertion deeply offended the judges, even those who were passionately against the Queen. They were aristocrats, and they felt that enough was enough. Jeanne curtseyed with a saucy, mocking smile, and left the room.

The Cardinal was next. He was very pale, utterly exhausted: a broken man. Observing that he could barely stand, the court gave him permission to sit, not on the bench for the accused but on a seat reserved for their own use. When his submission was over and he was about to leave, they gave him a standing ovation.

Next should have been the turn of Nicole d’Oliva, but she had asked to be excused for a short while as she was suckling her child. The judges were men of sensibility, and readily gave her permission. Finally she did appear, and won everyone’s hearts. Her winsome innocence and charming disarray put them in mind of a popular painting by Greuze, The Broken Jug. Some had tears in their eyes. They did not trouble her for very long; everyone took her innocence for granted. Decidedly she was their favourite.

Then Cagliostro stepped up. He too was an instant success. Even the way he wore his hair, with locks dangling in little plaits down to his shoulders, gave them something to smile at. To the standard opening question about who he was and where he was from, he replied in his most metallic tones:

“I am a noble traveller.”

That put an end to any solemnity in the proceedings. There were no further questions, as he held forth about himself, happy in the knowledge that at last he had an audience. The sophisticated, acerbic judges found him a breath of fresh air, a kind of southern bumpkin, an especially amusing market-hall barker, or an organ-grinder with his monkey. At the end they even congratulated him, which Cagliostro naturally took as his due.

When the prisoners left the Palais that evening to return to the Bastille by coach, a huge crowd was waiting to cheer Rohan and Cagliostro. The Cardinal was less than comfortable with this reception, but Cagliostro was in his element, gesticulating, shouting and throwing his hat into the throng, where (he claimed) people fought for it in their thousands.

On 31st May, at six in the morning, the Parlement sat in judgment. Despite the early hour, there for all to behold stood those late sleepers and late risers, the assembled aristocracy of France. Since five am nineteen members of the Rohan family and the related house of Lotharingia (Lorraine), including Mme de Marsan, Mme de Brionne, the Duc Ferdinand de Rohan (the Archbishop of Cambrai), the Duc de Montbazon and others, had been standing at the gate of the Grand’chambre in full mourning garb. It was like that scene in the Spanish Romanzero when the sons of Count Lara process before the King after their father’s honour has been impugned. Everything about the scene was charged with a sense of ancient aristocratic feudal — and Spanish — grandeur. Mme de Brionne, the most formidable of the fairy godmothers, had already called on the leader of the Parlement at dawn and upbraided him furiously, as only these formidable old ladies can, hurling it in his face that he had sold himself to the Court. (“How proud people are of their own independence when they betray that of others for money!”) When the judges filed past, the nineteen Rohans and Lorraines met them with a profound and sombre silence. The judges, even those who were of noble birth, were all from families far younger than the two Illustrious Houses, and were deeply moved.

Jeanne de la Motte’s fate was the first to be decided. In flat, unvarying tones her crimes were read out. When the time came to determine the sentence, two Councillors, one of them Robert de St Vincent, a passionate opponent of the monarchy, called for execution. This was just a manoeuvre. Had the discussion really got on to the death penalty, the clerical members of the Parlement would have been obliged to withdraw. It was a way of ensuring that thirteen of them would stay out of the debate, since, with two exceptions, they would have taken a stand against Rohan as a disgrace to his religious order. And so the two Councillors now demanded the ultimate penalty for Jeanne: “to be taken from this place and put to death”. The actual form her punishment would take, we shall see.

The Comte de la Motte was sentenced to the galleys for life. Réteaux got off extremely lightly, with lifelong banishment from the kingdom. D’Oliva and Cagliostro were acquitted, but on differing terms. D’Oliva was deemed hors de cour—dismissed from the court — while Cagliostro was acquitted on all counts. The first of these acquittals was less absolute than the second, having a certain implication of disgrace attached to it.

All these decisions had been handed down in a relatively routine manner. Now the real business began — deciding what to do about Rohan.

The discussion lasted seventeen hours, and the result was announced only at ten pm. Those who were sworn enemies of the Court, Fréteau de St Just and Robert de St Vincent, had made powerful speeches in Rohan’s defence. The outcome was that everyone voted for his acquittal, but they could not agree on the precise manner of it. Twenty-six speakers voted for outright acquittal, while twenty-two wanted simply to discharge him hors de cour. In the end there was a majority decision — Cardinal Rohan was completely cleared on all charges, with no shadow of infamy attaching to his name.

Paris received the verdict with widespread rejoicing. The Parlement’s popularity had increased yet again, and everywhere people drank to its health and the Cardinal’s. The fishwives, those proud representatives and symbols of the people, stood waiting for him in the courtyard with bunches of roses and jasmine, and clasped him to their bosoms with joy.

The next day he and Cagliostro left the prison. Later Cagliostro painted this moving picture of his return home:

“I left the Bastille towards eleven-thirty in the evening. The night was dark, and the quarter where I live was relatively abandoned. So, great was my surprise when I was suddenly greeted by some eight or ten thousand people. They had broken down the gate to my house. The courtyard, the staircase, the rooms — everywhere was packed. I took my wife in my arms. My heart could not endure the many feelings that contended for mastery within me. My knees were shaking. I fell unconscious to the floor. My wife shrieked and fainted. My friends gathered around me. They were trembling, not knowing whether this most beautiful moment of our lives was also its last, and the loud rejoicing turned into a grim silence. But I recovered myself. Tears poured from my eyes, and at last, as if in death, I clasped her to my bosom … but here I must leave off. Oh you privileged beings, on whom Heaven has bestowed the rare and melancholy gifts of ardent souls and sensitive hearts, only you could understand; only you could know what such an exquisite moment of happiness might mean after ten months of suffering!”

But let us intrude no further on the happy couple. We should rather consider how a somewhat more important, and much less happy couple, the King and Queen, received the news. The Queen’s sense of humiliation and grief was boundless. She had trusted that in the end the law would unequivocally condemn those who had brought scandal upon her, and the very opposite had happened. She could not understand how it was possible. She knew of no precedent for such a thing in all the annals of royalty. When her Habsburg relations had been on the Spanish throne, anyone who chanced simply to touch the Queen’s foot could expect the death sentence, but here someone could lay sacrilegious hands on her good name, her womanly honour … and the highest court in the land would find him not guilty. It was incomprehensible. She had no way of knowing that this incident no longer belonged in the annals of royalty but was the first hunting cry of the Revolution.

“So there you are,” writes Funck-Brentano: “The King entrusts the defence of the Queen’s honour to a court of law which is independent of him and is generally hostile to him. During the course of the trial the Finance Minister, the Minister of Justice and the King’s Librarian, Le Noir, all of them therefore in his confidence, are more or less openly manoeuvring to have Rohan acquitted. And no one is the least bit surprised. Is there any government today that would allow the freedom people enjoyed at that time?” This hypocritical sophistry, which insists that people were never so free as under the Ancien Régime, is the extraordinary conclusion, typical in its mauvaise foi, of French royalist writers. Funck-Brentano must surely have been just as aware as we are that what happened was not a sign of freedom but of impotence. Such events did not occur in the last days of the Ancien Régime because there was no tyranny, but because that tyranny had become weak. And an enfeebled tyranny is even more odious than a violent one. The situation cried out for the cleansing storm of 1789.

Louis XVI, incidentally, hastened to crown the two blunders he had made over the trial with a third. The one wise thing he could have done in the circumstances would have been to behave as if nothing had happened; a true king would never have admitted that his subjects had so upset him. Instead Louis gave free reign to his resentment, and set out to punish the pardoned Rohan as much as he could without risking a furore. The Grand Almoner was forced to resign his position and leave Paris within three days, to return to the Chaise-Dieu, the cloister where he had been a monk. Cagliostro was given eight days to leave Paris and three weeks to be out of France.

Naturally, the fairy godmothers could not acquiesce in this. Mme de Marsan called on the King and reminded him for the umpteenth time that she had nursed him as an infant and brought him up, and she implored him to send Rohan into exile somewhere else, as the climate at Chaise-Dieu would be so bad for his knees; and she threatened never to set foot in the Court again. But now that there was no need for it, Louis was obdurate. However this time he did not push the matter too far. He did eventually agree that Rohan could base himself at Marmoutiers, in the beautiful Loire valley.

And now we come to the final scene, in which Jeanne de Valois de la Motte undergoes her appropriate punishment. When she learnt that the Cardinal had been acquitted, Jeanne had one of her usual fits and began to rage. A soul filled with malicious fury finds its own misfortunes much easier to live with than the good fortune of others. She could not bear the fact that the Cardinal, who had always been so good and so chivalrous to her, should have escaped from the danger that she had brought on his head.

On 21st June 1786, she was woken by her warders at five in the morning. Thinking it must be something to do with another court hearing, she refused to get up. Finally, after much delay, she decided she would and went out into the courtyard. There she was seized by four powerful executioners assisted by two footmen, and bundled along to the foot of the stairs. She kicked out and bit, and the usual deluge of never-ending curses poured from her mouth. She was forced to her knees and made to listen while the sentence was read out. When she heard that she was to be birched, she shrieked:

“You will shed the royal blood of the Valois!”

Her screams filled the whole palace.

“How can you bear to let these people shed the blood of your kings?”

Even at this early hour, the commotion drew an audience of some two or three hundred people. They watched while her clothes were ripped from her as she fought with her hands, her feet and her teeth, and was beaten over the shoulders with a birch.

Then she tore herself free and flung herself about on the stone floor in a hysterical fit. She pulled up her skirt and thrust herself forward obscenely, to express her defiant, diabolical feelings about the world. At that moment everything else fell away from her — that pose was the most sincere gesture she ever made.

The executioner managed to brand her with only one of the Vs (for voleuse, ‘thief’). When he tried to apply the second, as she thrashed about in agony, the scorching iron slipped onto her breast. She leapt up and bit the shoulder of one of the executioners through his clothing, drawing blood. Then she collapsed.

Later she was moved to the Salpêtrière hospital, which also served as a prison. There she was made to wear prison uniform, and the gold ring was removed from her ear. A doctor offered her twelve livres for it. Jeanne, who up to that point been sunk in taciturn silence, suddenly came to herself:

“What? Twelve livres? The gold alone is worth more than that!”

She was not going to be cheated.

Shortly afterwards the second part of the sentence was carried out. At Bar-sur-Aube all the La Motte possessions, both fixed and personal, were sold off on behalf of the Treasury.

In its days of greatness the French monarchy would surely have found a way of removing Jeanne from the land of the living without the publicity attached to locking her up in the Salpêtrière. No true governing power could have tolerated the restless, malcontent nature of such a creature. In this too, the Ancien Régime was simply weak.

And so it happened that, in time, and with the help of a kindly nun, Jeanne quietly and effortlessly slipped out of prison. The nun is said to have shouted this pleasantly ambiguous piece of advice after her:

“Adieu, Madame, prenez garde de vous faire remarquer.”—Farewell, Madame, and try not to draw attention to yourself.

She went to London, where her husband was waiting for her. And there she lived, perhaps on money left over from the sale of the diamonds, or perhaps secretly helped by the King’s enemies — possibly the Duc d’Orleans himself; but above all, she lived by her writing. Neither she nor Réteaux de Villette allowed the popular sympathy for her cause to go untapped, and both of them poured out a stream of pamphlets and memoirs.

Jeanne’s literary imagination, unlike the practical imagination revealed in her intrigues and machinations, was not of the first rank. Her literary fantasies are those of a hysterical parlour maid who concocts interminable fictions to the discredit of her employers. It seems that the Valois blood did not predominate after all; she too belonged rather to the house of Figaro.

The most notable of these masterworks appeared in London in 1788, entitled: Mémoirs justificatifs de la Comtesse de la Motte, écrits par elle-même. According to this testimony, the affair between Rohan and Marie-Antoinette began back in Vienna. Their relationship finally ended when the Princess left him for a German officer, whereupon Rohan, wounded in his manly pride, committed various indiscretions and brought her wrath down upon himself. He hoped he might win her heart again when she came to Paris, but now the Comte d’Artois had come between them.

The instant Marie-Antoinette met Jeanne she took her to her heart and gave her ten thousand livres, as friendship is strengthened by such little gifts. Out of pure kindness Jeanne mediated between them on Rohan’s behalf, but he had another, far more powerful, patron, the Emperor Joseph II, who thought it in the Austrian interest to demand that his friend Rohan should be made Prime Minister of France. (Here she neatly worked in the greatest of all the accusations levelled at Marie-Antoinette, that she served the interests of a foreign power.) Marie-Antoinette did not really like Rohan, but she blindly obeyed her brother and so made her peace with him, and their passion flared up again. The expression is of course colourful rather than precise, since both were merely feigning, Marie-Antoinette for political reasons (the Austrian cause) and Rohan from ambition. Rohan was at the time both morally and physically a broken man, who needed to take Cagliostro’s magic pills with him to the assignations; and on the way — oh masterstroke of the parlour maid’s imagination! — he would call in on his young mistress at Passy to “get his head up …”

Then she comes to the letters. She had not kept all two hundred of them, only some thirty or so — copies — supposedly made at the time. They are indeed love letters, but not very entertaining. Here, all the same, is a brief example — a graphic illustration of just what the French were capable of believing about their royalty:

16th August 1784

Yesterday someone made a rather nosy and suspicious remark, and that has prevented my coming to T… [Trianon] today, but it will not make me deprive myself of the sight of my darling slave. The minister (the King) is going at eleven to hunt at R … [Rambouillet]; he may be home later, but more probably only in the morning; I hope to compensate myself for his absence by taking revenge for the boredom I have endured these past two days …

… Since you will play the leading role in my plan, it is essential that there should be perfect understanding between us à propos this subject, as there was last Friday on the s … [sofa]. You will smile at the comparison, but since it is appropriate, and since I want to give you proof that it is this evening while we are talking about serious things, you must dress as a messenger, with a parcel in your hand, and walk up and down between the columns of the chapel at eleven; I will send the Comtesse who will lead you up a hidden staircase to a room where you will find the object of your heart’s desire.

The time has come for us to say a few words about Marie-Antoinette’s dire and ever-increasing unpopularity, that shift in sentiment which played such a significant part in the outbreak of the Revolution.

When she arrived in Paris with her new husband in 1773 she was given a rapturous reception by the people. As she stood on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, that fine old cavalier Maréchal Brissac said to her:

“Voila, Madame—two thousand admirers stand before you.”

And it was no exaggeration. The French passionately admired the beautiful little princess who had brought a touch of youth to the ageing Bourbon Court. She sensed this, and was happy in the knowledge of it. At around this time she wrote to her mother:

“As we withdrew, we waved to the people and they were so delighted. How happy is our situation when we can win the friendship of an entire people so cheaply!” This did not mean that she would not have been prepared to pay a great deal for it.

But as the years passed and the impatiently-awaited Dauphin failed to appear, her popularity began to wane. When a son was born to the Duc d’Artois, the fishwives pouring into Versailles demanded to know why she was not following the example. But when the Dauphin did finally arrive, the enthusiasm was not what it would once have been, at the start of the reign. Without ever noticing it, Marie-Antoinette had lost the people’s love.

By degrees she came to be held responsible for everything the public disliked. Even the King’s refusal to be vaccinated was laid at her door. People knew that the Queen was all-powerful — so she must have been to blame for whatever happened or failed to happen. But seen from this distance, Marie-Antoinette was not all-powerful. Her greatest wish in the field of politics, that Choiseul should be recalled from exile, was never fulfilled. Instead, despite her every protest, Calonne was made Contrôleur Général (Finance Minister), and it was as a result of his profligacy, his ineffective and doomed financial policies, that people turned against Marie-Antoinette and ridiculed her as Madame Déficit.

When, in March 1785, Marie-Antoinette attended the thanksgiving service held in Notre Dame for the birth of her second son, the Duc de Normandie, she was received by the crowd in icy silence. She returned to Versailles in tears.

“Mais que leur ai-je donc fait?”—But what have I done to them? — she asked her companions, in bewilderment.

For a year now, ever since the affair of the necklace, she had been so passionately hated by all sections of society that the kindly old Duc de Penthièvre advised the King to lock her up in the nunnery at Val-de-Grace in the interests of public order.

Mais que leur ai-je donc fait? What had given rise to such bottomless hatred?

According to the brothers Goncourt, it originated in the Court, from where it was skilfully fostered, and made its way out into an ever-widening sphere. We have already discussed why the majority of courtiers so disliked her: the more elderly, because she was young and so much at ease with younger people; the zealots, for the general gaiety of her life; the ‘old French’ party, because she stood for the Austrian connection; those who did not belong to the Polignac circle, because they felt themselves slighted; and everyone else, because the witty superiority of her entourage diminished their self-esteem.

History provides many examples of courtiers taking to a new queen with less than total enthusiasm, but it is unusual for them to foment such powerful and far-reaching intrigues against one; and it is quite without parallel for them to involve the common people. This itself was a sign of the times. But it is more than that. Not only does it suggest that public opinion had become a factor in a purely internal palace revolution; it also shows the extent to which the Court had lost its political instinct. Its chief source of strength was now to make common cause against the authority of the King with his greatest enemy, the mob. That alone would have been enough to bring down judgement on the leading section in society. Had the power of the aristocracy not been ended by the Revolution, it would have collapsed of its own accord, precisely because it had lost its most fundamental instinct, its whole raison d’être, which derived from the same instinct that brought it to leadership in the first place: its capacity to survive.

If we were to ask a sober-minded French citizen of the time what his complaint against the Queen was, he would no doubt have summarised it under three headings: her extravagance, her immoral life and her lack of patriotism. The first charge — whether founded or not — we have explored elsewhere. The second we touched on in the discussion of the vast number of lovers she was imagined to have. And of course, after the necklace trial, this particular accusation was greatly reinforced by the influence of the literary productions of Jeanne de la Motte and the pamphleteers.

By this stage there was nothing the Queen could do to stop those Parisians with filthy minds and the souls of concierges instantly ‘seeing through’ her schemes for debauchery. If the Queen was so fond of spending her summer evenings out on the terraces overlooking the park at Versailles, it was perfectly clear what she got up to in the dark … Thus it rapidly got abroad that she and her intimate circle — Coigny, Vaudreuil, Besenval and the rest — had ordered costumes representing wild animals, and “after dressing up as harts and hinds, had strayed through the park, giving themselves up to the pleasures of harts and hinds”. That could only speak for itself. According to others, Marie-Antoinette would wander through the Versailles gardens dressed as an Amazon, offering herself to anyone — man or woman — she came upon. One young man in particular, an official from the War Ministry, a real Adonis, had caught her eye, but Artois became jealous, the young man vanished without trace shortly afterwards, and his family never saw him again. And so on, and on, and on …

Popular opinion demeaned and besmirched her gaiety of spirit, her love of a beautiful and freer-flowing life, her desire for friendship, and the innocent flirtatiousness by which she sought to please everyone: in short, les plus belles vertus de sa jeunesse—the loveliest qualities of her youth — as the brothers Goncourt put it. But even if the Queen were not a Vestal Virgin, did that really deserve such moral outrage from the not-so-puritanical French? “It was a strange kind of censoriousness,” the brothers exclaim, and they are right to do so, “that even in the so-called century of women the Queen was to be forgiven nothing that expressed real femininity.” French historians of this most frivolous of periods seem to tolerate everyone else’s peccadilloes as something to be expected, and find them perfectly natural — so why not those of their queens?

The answer to this question becomes clear when we confront the third of these accusations. The French did not dislike Marie-Antoinette because she was immoral. On the contrary, they found her immoral, and piled the decaying products of their basest fantasies on her, because they did not like her … And the chief reason why they disliked her, it seems to us, can only have been that she wasn’t French.

The Queen, it cannot be denied, was bound by a thousand ties, emotional and political, to the house of her birth and the powerful family from which she had come. Sanguine by nature, it never occurred to her for a moment that the interests of the two allies, Austria and France, might not always exactly coincide. Public opinion, which had never felt much enthusiasm for the Austrians (the French had always passionately hated any alliance with them) exaggerated her links with that country, spoke of the millions of livres she sent back to her brother, and took great delight in passing on stories by word of mouth, such as the following:

When Joseph II of Austria ordered the closure of the Schelde corridor, Marie-Antoinette defended him with all her might before the French Court, and told the Foreign Minister Vergennes:

“All you ever think about the Emperor is that he is my brother.”

To which he replied:

“I do always bear it in mind. But before all else I have to consider that Monsieur the Dauphin is your son.”

France was a closed society, in which outsiders had no place. There has never been a European country in which foreigners were shown less sympathy. A foreign-born queen, tainted with foreign interests, could never be popular, and when the hostility towards her reached its peak, the very worst term of abuse they could find for her was L’Autrichienne: ‘that Austrian woman’.

This fact can perhaps only be fully understood, and felt on the skin, by people from outside the country. If someone in Hungary remarks that “You’re not Hungarian”, it is of course not exactly flattery, but nor is it necessarily an insult. It could be a simple statement of fact. If an Englishman happens not to be pure English, and has Scots or Welsh blood in his veins, he will be openly proud of it. But if someone in France tells you, “You are not French!” it denotes something lacking, some fundamental moral deficiency. You probably go around at night with a false beard stealing small change from the caps of blind beggars, are furthermore physically deformed, and carry Lord knows what weapons concealed beneath your garments; in short, you are a subhuman creature, though rather less likeable than an animal.

As can be imagined, this powerful French xenophobia may well have been the basis of Marie-Antoinette’s unpopularity.

However, as we have said, Marie-Antoinette was neither a demon, as the Revolution painted her, nor the angel portrayed by the counter-revolution. Perhaps Stefan Zweig is right: the real problem was that she was simply mediocre. Her final martyrdom is very touching, but there really is nothing in her life to make us think of her with particular veneration or emotion. As we take our leave of her, we should quote, in their original beauty, the words of Lamartine, in which he characterises her as follows:

Favorite charmante et dangereuse d’une monarchie vieillie, plutôt que d’une monarchie nouvelle, elle n’eut le prestige de l’ancienne royauté, le respect; ni le prestige du nouveau règne: la popularité. Elle ne sut que charmer, égarer, et mourir.

The charming and dangerous favourite of an ageing monarchy, rather than the queen of a new one, she lacked the prestige of old royalty, the respect due to it; and she also lacked the prestige accorded to a new reign — popularity. All she knew was how to charm, to lose her way, and to die.