The Queen's Necklace

Epilogue

COMING TO THE END OF OUR STORY and reading through what we have written, we are somewhat alarmed to find that however much we have tried to paint a full and many-sided picture of the age, we have still not really succeeded in placing sufficient emphasis on what Talleyrand called ‘the sweetness of life’. The reader might well be left with the impression that the final hours of the Ancien Régime were careworn and oppressive, a ‘moral wasteland’, a time of drought before the storm, and he would perhaps be glad not to have lived then. Which would be quite wrong. To have been alive then must have been to experience one of the most delightful of European centuries.

Huizinga notes in another connection that ‘chronicles’, that is, works of history written as literature, almost always paint a rather dark picture of our period, because they find its grievances so vivid. Anyone who wants to learn about the brightness, beauty and happiness of a particular age has to turn to the record left by artists. And if we follow the great Dutchman’s advice and compare the painters of various centuries from the ‘eudaemonic’ point of view, would we find any other age whose canvases reflect the sweetness of life with the same intensity as that marvellous line of artists from Watteau to Fragonard?

The painters of eighteenth-century France are not much in fashion nowadays — indeed it is almost in bad taste to mention Boucher, the great master of the mid-century, in the presence of those in the know. And this is perfectly natural. They marked the end of one great period, and after them something quite different began. Far be it from us to argue with those who are better qualified, but all the same we cannot help feeling that the time will come when these painters will once again be of interest. Our concern is not with their relative greatness, but with that sense of the sweetness of life reflected in their pictures.

Watteau and Fragonard … according to the Goncourts they are the only poets of the eighteenth century. The verse writers suffer from the dry rationalism of the period, while these two great artists proclaim what in other ages is the subject matter of poets: the world of dream, fable, intoxication and nostalgia.

Watteau lived at the very start of the century. The great representative of our own period is Fragonard, the delegate from the flower fields of Grasse in perennially happy Provence. With a kind of dreamlike intensity, his works conjure up in our souls the eternal myth of the great woodlands: mighty trees, tiny human and animal figures; the trees bent in sorrow, the men and women depicted beneath them existing in a kind of superhuman joy that almost succeeds in making their baby faces seem serious — a joy that, like music, is almost painful. What makes the paintings of Watteau and Fragonard so special is that they seem to depict scenes from an old novel — very beautiful, subtly erotic, and tinged with melancholy — scenes from some wonderful mythological story such as Psyche and Eros. The viewer is seized by a rich, complex yearning, an intense longing to know their secret, their unspoken mystery, a desire to return to the woodland world that is sweeter than anything in this life, and, finally, the desire for something — one knows not what — that great and inexpressible nostalgia which truly creative art awakens in the soul.

And then it begins to dawn on one: this age was as beautiful as the most finely-worked lace, as a piece of Sèvres porcelain with its timeless charm and fragile delicacy; as the noble oozings of the Tokai grape, full and rich with sweetness; as the autumn air in Hungary, when the reddening leaves are scented with the inexpressible sweetness of death.

Only poetry can express this — nothing else. Verlaine’s lines, from the Fêtes galantes.

Clair de lune

Votre âme est un pays choisi

Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques

Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi

Tristes sous leur déguisements fantastiques.

Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur

L’amour vainqueur et la vie opportune,

Ils n’ont pas l’air de croire à leur bonheur

Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,

Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,

Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres

Et sangloter d’extase les jets d’eau,

Les grand jets d’eau sveltes parmi les marbres.

Your soul is a landscape set apart

For charming masques and rustic dances,

Where lovers step and strum their lutes, but seem

Melancholy beneath their fanciful disguises—

Where, even as they sing, in minor key,

Of love victorious and life’s sweet moments,

They seem not to believe in their own happiness,

And their song drifts away in the moonlight—

The calm moonlight, here so sad and beautiful,

That makes the birds dream among the branches,

And jets of water sob with ecstasy

In the tall, slim fountains between the statues.

The necklace trial took place in 1786. Three years later the Revolution broke out.

The revolution was of course ‘carried out’ spontaneously by the people, as an uprising, a devastating volcanic eruption — or more precisely it was the work of the street people of Paris, the dark mob from the St Antoine quarter, the workers who in consequence of a blundering Anglo-French trade agreement were made temporarily unemployed, and who, because of the equally blundering politics of superstition, could not for the time being buy bread; and this was followed on a wider scale by the whole nation, as a people oppressed by local village taxes and emboldened by the example of Paris took revenge for the way they had been ground down over the centuries.

But it would be pushing at an open door to argue that the populace did not rush off into revolution all by itself, but went there because they were led into it; that they were merely an instrument wielded by their superiors; or that, like Victor Hugo’s famous loose cannon, the uprising went on to destroy the very people who set it off. The revolutionaries, as everyone knows, called one another citoyens—citizens — and the essence of and influence behind the revolution was neither popular nor proletarian but bourgeois. It was the middle-class-dominated Third Estate that put an end to the power of the privileged.

The causes of the Revolution are no longer in question. It was not so much that the populace were destitute as that the bourgeoisie were increasingly prosperous. The peasantry certainly had their sufferings, but that had been the case for centuries, and by Louis XVI’s time people were at last beginning to think that it might be necessary to assist them. Moreover, the situation of the agrarian workers was not uniformly bleak. The notorious abuses of the landowners were not everywhere equally oppressive. Wahl draws attention to the fact that around this time the peasantry were turning woods on the great estates over to arable land without asking permission of the squirearchy and without resistance from them. The institution of serfdom, which the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe had suffered for so long, was by now confined to the easternmost provinces. Louis XVI had freed his own serfs, and his example had been spontaneously followed by many aristocrats. The remainder were given their freedom wherever there was enough money in the Treasury to compensate landowners.

And in fact, where things were at their worst, the people did not revolt. It was Tocqueville who noted that the most mutinous estates, for example the relatively affluent Île de France, were those that had suffered least from the old institutions, while those that had endured the most — in Brittany and the Loire estuary — became the powder keg of the counter-revolution.

The nobility were of course rich, at least in theory, since aristocratic privileges had never been as strong as they became immediately before they were terminated. But in practice this group was also struggling, since the obligation to maintain a style of living was proving ever more expensive, and many great families were going bankrupt.

On the other hand the bourgeoisie, in reality if not in theory, were doing rather better. They had been fostered and enriched by the great economic upswing we discussed at the beginning of this book, and they grew wealthy on the luxurious habits of the aristocracy, not just of France but also beyond its borders.

We are not primarily thinking here of the petit bourgeois craftsmen and shopkeepers. In Louis XVI’s reign, such families would all come together to eat in the kitchen in winter because they could not imagine the luxury of lighting fires in two rooms in the house at the same time. And for people at this level there was one traditional attitude that had not yet been eroded by the Enlightenment — Louis XVI was not alone in his religiosity. It was from a section of the bourgeoisie, in fact if not officially the leading sector, from the noblesse de robe, the lawyers, and the financially and intellectually pre-eminent, that the revolutionary discontent originated.

For a hundred years the higher bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia had felt aggrieved by the fact that while the real power lay in their hands, all the grandeur and distinction that should accompany it remained with the nobility. And the arrogance of the nobility increased as their real power declined. In the second half of the century they attempted to seize power again: not only were the most senior positions in both the army and the law restricted to members of noble families, but they sought on the basis of obsolete documents to enforce their former landowning rights over a peasantry that had long been liberated. The attempt failed miserably: the expropriation of the army and the law took place on paper only, simply because the leading bourgeois families had long before bought their way into the nobility. But that futile attempt, together with the steady ennoblement of the bourgeoisie, simply deepened the rift between the old privileged class and the new leaders of society. The intellectuals and the wealthy, says Rivarol — that grandfather of all right-wing ideologists since — found the arrogance of the aristocracy insupportable, and for that reason many of them purchased rank for themselves; but this simply produced a new form of misery. They had been ennobled, but they were not nobility. “The King’s subjects were cured of their bourgeois condition as from scrofula — it left its mark.”

The indignity of finding themselves not quite noble was felt most strongly by those leading intellectuals who were invited into the salons of those aristocrats who so much enjoyed their wit. They stayed as guests in country manors and were showered with all sorts of gifts and distinctions, and yet — in most cases no doubt unintentionally — they were still not accepted as equals. Of all forms of pride, that of the writer is the greatest and the most aggressive, and this pride was constantly being trampled on by the privileged, by their very acts of kindness and goodwill. The best examples of this are Beaumarchais and Chamfort.

“Your Excellency,” Chamfort said to someone. “I know very well what I ought to know, but I also know that it is much easier for you to patronise me than to treat me as an equal.”

There could be no better expression of a writer’s prickly self-regard. There is an echo of this in our period in what happened to a certain Abbé Rousseau. He, like Abélard before him, fell in love with one of his aristocratic pupils, and “finding no way to resolve the conflict of feelings between nobility and low birth”, as he wrote in his farewell letter, he dined at the Palais Royal and then shot himself in the heart.

Between Wealth and Intellect, observes Spengler, there was an unspoken pact of mutual resistance to, and contempt for, the common enemy, Blood. Intellect provided the justification for what Wealth brought about by brute omnipotence — the destruction of privilege and the dethronement of irrational, arbitrary selection on the basis of birth, in the interests of rational selection on the basis of talent and wealth. “Who would have believed,” says the same Rivarol, “that it was not the level of debt, or the lettres de cachet, or any other of the abuses of power — not even the intendants—that provoked revenge, nor was it the interminable tardiness of the justice system that so enraged the nation, but the privileges of the nobility; as is confirmed by the fact that it was the bourgeoisie, the writers, the financiers and all those who envied them, who stirred up the little people in the capital and the peasantry in their villages.”

Chamfort complained that he could never afford to keep a coach under the Ancien Régime, when his weak constitution made it absolutely necessary for him to have one. But he later remarked:

“I only continued to believe in the Revolution while there were so many coaches they knocked people over in the streets.”

“In 1782,” Sainte Beuve explains, “everyone wanted their own carriage, but because they couldn’t all have one, they demanded in 1792 that nobody should.”

But that brings to mind the much-maligned Hegel’s always valid lesson: “The Weltgeist uses human selfishness, envy and other passions as the moving force that drives humanity towards its goal, the unacknowledged but ultimate goal of history — freedom”. And that remains true even if we don’t believe in the great German Weltgeist.

When the besieged fortress finally fell, two different processes came to an end: the attackers had seized and occupied it, but the besieged, whether willingly or unwillingly, had already consented to its being taken. And when the monarchy was brought down in the Revolution, that event also had two sides. The Third Estate and the people demolished the ancient edifice, but the nobility and the monarchy allowed them to do so. And this second element is perhaps just as important as the first. The French aristocracy and the monarchy itself, in very large measure, contributed to the making of the Revolution. This is the key to our symbolic narrative, and its true meaning.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, as we have said, that great if gradual shift of sensibility came about to which we assign the all-embracing term ‘pre-romantic’. But in the France of Louis XVI there were signs of another shift in taste which it would be difficult to link with pre-romantic sentimentality and restlessness. At first glance it would seem to be an omen of a very different kind.

From Mercier we know, for example, that by this time the petit-mâitres were no more. These were people who flittered like butterflies from box to box in the theatre, peeped out through gaps in the stage curtain, clung to the necks of actresses in the passageways, and stood around in the foyer or leant over to assess the legs of ladies stepping into their carriages. Gone too were the bureaux d’esprit, salons presided over by blue-stockings where only very clever remarks could be uttered and the ladies had no other ambition than to be learned. The place of the petit-mâitres was taken by the élégants. The word is still in use today and its meaning is little changed.

The élégant no longer drops the names of his aristocratic friends and high-born mistresses. He speaks of his solitude, in which he busies himself with chemistry, but generally he says little. A barely discernible smile of mockery sits on his lips; his face wears a distant, dreamy look; he seldom stays long, leaving early and without fuss. But the women are even more advanced: the only words they utter are ‘délicieux’ and ‘étonnant’, spoken with a studied simplicity and indifference. In a man they admire délicatesse. Mere eloquence is out and the ‘art of conversation’ is in. Very little wine is taken, only water. Parisians speak much more softly than provincials. They keep themselves trim, and should they by chance begin to put on weight, drink vinegar.

The new style expresses itself in déshabillé rather than formal dress. Men now carry walking sticks rather than swords. Questions of honour are less of a concern than in previous generations, and duelling is much rarer. Where once people flaunted their vast wealth, they now boast of being on the verge of bankruptcy. Black clothing is now the fashion, and the extraordinary pomp and splendour of the court of Louis XV is steadily being pushed out.

After all this, even had Mme de Campan had not written her memoirs, we would still have guessed: “This Anglomania had reached such a pitch that Paris was now indistinguishable from London. The French, formerly imitated by the whole of Europe, were now become a nation of imitators … Since the trade agreements concluded under the peace treaty of 1783 not only carriages, but everything from ribbons to common earthenware were of English manufacture.” Young men wore tails and discussed the constitution, the upper house, the lower house, the balance of power and Magna Carta.

And what was the meaning of all these trifles? The end.

However bombastic that may sound, it really was the end — the end of aristocratic culture. Its ideal, savoir vivre, the art of living, had reached its zenith in the Court of Louis XV and the Paris of his time, and been unable to develop any further. People had by then become so distinguished, so refined and so perfect that now the great baroque expressions of that distinction, its classical pomp and dignity, had to be renounced. It was followed by charm and nuance, in that age of the art of delicate little things, the rococo. And then, by the closing years of the reign of Louis XVI, even that was too highly-coloured, too loud; and gave way in turn to the mode for softly-spoken conversation and silence: in a word, ‘Anglomania’.

But those who saw this Anglomania as mere imitation failed to notice the social significance of its roots. By this stage the English, having concluded an alliance of the aristocracy and the upper bourgeoisie, and taken, by way of the slow but steady transformation begun in 1688, to the upper-middle-class way of life, had become as we have seen (or imagined) them ever since. Earlier, they had been the noisiest people in the world, as evidenced by the uproar and garrulousness of Elizabethan drama. In imitating the English, the French nobility was taking its cue not from another aristocracy but from a quite different section of society, the upper bourgeoisie. This was the moment when aristocratic culture over-reached itself.

In his writings on the sociology of power Max Weber asserts that every historical regime that is not rationally based rests on a hidden principle which he terms ‘charisma’—a kind of divine power or grace which one person is regarded by his fellows as possessing, and by reason of which he is obeyed. Such power depends on direct personal contact and thus cannot survive long — usually only until the death of the charismatic individual. To consolidate and perpetuate this power, the charisma must be ‘routinised’, institutionalised by substituting symbolic acts for the real thing. The early Carolingian kings, for example, still exercised such charismatic power over their people, while later French monarchs were merely invested with symbols of that sacred power by the act of coronation and anointment with holy oil. The allegiance paid by their subjects was no longer to some irresistible force emanating from the royal person, but to the institution of kingship as a surviving sanction against non-obedience.

The special ‘chosen’ nature of the charismatic individual’s power extends to his entourage, and so the concept of a nobility comes into being. In time, this nobility also becomes a mere institution, its power deriving not from itself but from the law that sanctions it.

In our earthly existence, everything living in time must obey time. Through time, everything wears out and ebbs away. Palaces fall into ruin, and the silk and velvet of formal dress fade. But ideas wear out too—“after many a summer dies the swan”—and with the passing of so many centuries the force of charisma also becomes attenuated. There were many ‘reasons’ for the demise of the French Monarchy, but if we take a longer view, from the sort of distance at which the details start to dissolve into one another, then perhaps this might emerge as the one fundamental reason that gathers all those details into one single causation. The charisma faded, people no longer felt the specially chosen nature of the King and his entourage, and neither the King himself or his nobility felt it either.

Very few people die of pure senility. Even very old people generally fall victim to illness or accident, but usually these are the sort of illnesses and accidents that in their younger days they would easily have survived. In the final analysis, one might say that time had simply finished with them. And so it was with the Ancien Régime.

The aristocracy, partly as the result of its own prolonged inactivity, and partly under the influence of intellectual trends, had, as we have already noted, lost its sense of vocation. It no longer believed in itself. Its desire was simply to s’encanailler, and this above all showed its bad conscience. Perhaps that might explain the significance of what Wahl considered one of the most important causes of the Revolution: that eighteenth-century France produced no great men of action. There were none, because the social arrangements were such that men of this type could emerge only from the old aristocratic families, but the loss of a sense of vocation among those families also meant the loss of their whole raison d’être—to produce leaders for the country.

But it was the singular misfortune of the monarchy that the last two kings before the Revolution, Louis XV and even more importantly Louis XVI, suffered from that same bad conscience. The latter’s kindly heart was filled with fine intentions, and his ministers with plans for reform. He was the first king in many decades who sincerely, from the goodness of his heart, wanted to help his people. That proved fatal. As Tocqueville once again observes in his great work: “Only real genius can rescue a prince who sets out to ease the lot of his people after a long period of oppression.” Such a course can lead only to even greater oppression — or to surrendering power altogether.

Tocqueville also suspected, but it was Wahl who showed with his mass of incontrovertible facts, that the Revolution broke out not because the Monarchy was especially tyrannical but because the last French kings were not tyrannical enough. They introduced arbitrary measures, but lacked the strength to see them through. There were no revolutions in other countries where abuses were far worse but where royal power remained strong, and perhaps one might have been averted in France too. That is of course a rather lazy expression — the casual and playful use of the historical ‘might have’. And yet there are so many moments in the approach to the Revolution when one feels that it might indeed have been avoided if only Louis XVI had behaved differently.

The highly symbolic episode we have narrated was just one of those moments. Contemporaries saw the necklace trial as an example of absolutist royal and ministerial behaviour that cried out to the heavens, but now that the details have been clarified we can see it rather as the King’s incompetence that did so. Even the revolutionary Condorcet recognised this: while the people imagined themselves to be groaning under tyrannical oppression, properly speaking they were the victims of a headless anarchy.

We urge you, dear reader, not to misunderstand us. It is far from our intention to mourn for the French Monarchy in the manner of modern French historians, nor is it to grieve, like Wahl, that they did not deploy the most powerful weapons at their command. In some strange and indefinable way, we do believe, amongst all the other forces at work in history there are also moral ones, and that in the great deeds of nations the struggle between Good and Evil will go on for ever. Louis XVI’s good-heartedness and weakness arose from a bad conscience, and the French King’s conscience certainly had reason to be bad. Because neither the lace-frilly, sweetly-autumnal beauty of the Régime, nor the King’s always heartfelt good intentions (themselves a reflection of the prevailing sensibility and the habit of living in the constant expectation of miracles) — ever quite amounted to the salt-sweet spring gale that was really needed. And what came after Louis XVI … we do not of course forget the horrific aspects of the Terror, but nonetheless, the glowing twilight of those years … permit me, reader, once again, for the last time, to give you the words of Tocqueville:

“… it was an age of youthful enthusiasm, of noble and sincere feelings, and for all its blunders it will live for ever in the memory of mankind and serve to shock people out of their reverie whenever they seek to destroy or enslave their fellow men.”

In Carlyle’s words, “The diamond necklace vanished through the horn gate of dreams”; but its fame spread throughout Europe. None of the events that occurred in the decades leading up to the Revolution received press coverage, but contemporaries instinctively felt its fatal significance.

And even here, in far-away Hungary, at that time so desperately cut off from the mainstream of world events, it haunted people’s imagination. This is shown by the fact that a Jesuit father and neo-Latin poet, György Alajos Szerdahely, celebrated it in verses written in his fine Jesuit-humanist manner, mentioning each of the mythological personages who came to grief through the necklace.

DE MONILI FAMIGERATO, QUOD IN GALLIA MAGNAM LITEM, IN EUROPA EXPECTATIONEM CONCITAVIT ANNO MDCCLXXXV. ET VI

Quae Furia est? Certe illa fuit; fortasse Megaera

Quae Stygio retulit tale Monile specu?

Parcite Francigenae dirum adfectare Monile!

Thebaidem Statii Patria vestra legat.

Harmonie, et Semele, Iocasta, nocensque Eriphyle,

Atque alii interitu vos monuere suo.

Fatale est; et quisquis adhuc mortalis habebat,

Morte, vel infami labe Monile luit.

Lemnius huic varias pestes, laetumque venenum

Miscuit, et propriis hostibus ipse dedit.

Frustra ago. Romano vestitus murice Princeps

Heu! domino semper triste Monile petit.

Quid tibi femineo cum cultu et merce Sacerdos?

Femineum nescis sic recubare malum.

Infelix, quicunque putat se posse placere,

Dum sibi feminea credulitate placet.

Vos damna et poenas emitis? La Motthe feroces

Ad furias salvus triste Monile tulit.

Concerning the infamous necklace, the subject of a trial in France, which aroused great interest in Europe in 1785 and 1786.

Which Fury was that? For certain it was one; perhaps Megaera

Bringing the necklace back from the Stygian cave?

Beware, children of France, that dire necklace!

Let your countrymen study the Thebeiad of Statius.

Harmony and Semele, Jocasta and the mischievous Eriphyle

And others shall warn you of the ruin it brings.

It is fatal; and whatever mortal has so far possessed it

Has paid for it by death or deep shame.

With various plagues and deadly poison Apollo

Has infused it, and gives it to his very own enemies.

I speak in vain. A prince dressed in the purple of Rome

Pursues, alas! the unhappy necklace.

Oh priest, what have you to do with female adornments and hire?

You should know to beware of feminine malice.

Unhappy the man who thinks he can please

While pleasing himself with womanish credulity.

Will you purchase condemnation and imprisonment? It was La Motte

Who, himself unharmed, took the unhappy necklace to the wild Furies.

But the strongest literary response to the trial came from the greatest writers of the age, the giants of German classicism. Goethe, as we have already mentioned, visited Cagliostro’s family in Palermo and wrote a play about it called Der Gross-Kophta. The play does not rank among the best of his great Weimar productions, but on the other hand it is certainly not his weakest. The principals have no names, only titles. Some are slightly reduced in rank. The Queen is a mere duchess, the Cardinal a Domherr. True, Cagliostro remains a count, and the La Mottes are a marquis and marquise. The play, clearly for stage reasons, has a happy ending: a Ritter (knight) who is in love with the character corresponding to d’Oliva discovers the intrigue just in time, and the guilty parties receive their due punishment immediately after the truth is revealed about the scene in the Venus Bower. In the play the Graf, or Cagliostro, represents the comic element, and is a highly entertaining figure, a fine example of Goethe’s humour and gaiety.

Schiller, also under the influence of the event, wrote a great and sadly unfinished ghost story, Die Geisterseher—The Man Who Sees Ghosts. And while we are with Schiller, we cannot resist mentioning our hypothesis, difficult as it is to prove, that the necklace trial may also have inspired one of the truly great creations of world literature, his Don Carlos. We know of course that Schiller wrote the play on the basis of a conversation with an author called Saint-Real, and that Lessing’s Nathan der Weise encouraged him to stress the yearning for freedom; but if we study or even just glance through Don Carlos with the necklace trial in mind, we find interesting similarities of mood and atmosphere. The play begins in medias res: Don Carlos has long been languishing in despair of ever speaking face to face with the Queen. Someone goes between them and helps him to a meeting. Like Marie-Antoinette, the Queen is the unhappy and protesting prisoner of protocol.

In what follows, the entire action turns on letters that are stolen, handed over, recovered, and fall into the wrong hands, and you can find yourself quite lost among the huge number of documents (analogous to Marie-Antoinette’s letters to Rohan, Rohan’s to Jeanne, and the whole fog of mystery about this correspondence that Jeanne spreads around herself). Then there is the King’s secret and tragic suffering as he sits in solitude on the throne brooding over his wife’s fidelity — could Schiller have been thinking of Louis XVI? Chronology seems to confirm our theory. Schiller took a long time writing the play. One act was finished in 1785, and the completed work appeared in 1787, so it was composed precisely during the period of the necklace trial. That Schiller always followed, and indeed took the greatest interest in, the more sensational French criminal trials, is well known.

But now, as is proper, we must say some brief closing words about the subsequent fate of our dramatis personae — brief, because their later careers are of little real significance. The royal party are of course excepted: after the conclusion of our immediate narrative, they really did step into the centre stage of history, as their portion of suffering and martyrdom increased. The reader doubtless knows their story; so we will speak only of the others.

Jeanne de la Motte escaped to England in 1787. For a short while she lived off the éclat of the necklace trial, her malicious memoirs and supposed persecution. Thereafter she sank into the London underworld, fell into dreadful poverty, and in 1791, perhaps in one of her hysterical fits, threw herself out of a window and died. Her husband lived on. Little is known of his fate, but it could hardly be much to his credit. He ended his days in 1831, in a beggars’ hospital in Paris. The cursed Nibelung treasure had not brought him luck, or even wealth — but rather the “death or deep shame” predicted in Szerdahely’s verses.

Prince Rohan spent two years of banishment in his former cloister, then was allowed to return to Strasbourg just as the Revolution broke out. As a prelate he was also a member of the Estates General. He was later charged with counter-revolutionary practices, but never appeared before any court. From 1793 onwards he lived in his Ettenheim diocese as a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, one of his many titles. When in year nine of the Republic the Pope signed a Concordium with the new French state which gave the Assembly the right to appoint bishops, Rohan resigned his office and returned to his chateau, where he lived in retirement until his death in 1803, a proud, taciturn and forgotten relic of the Ancien Régime.

As a consequence of the sensational trial, Nicole d’Oliva’s market value soared. Aristocratic young suitors competed for her favour. Its first recipient, if only out of gratitude, was her clever young lawyer Blondel. Later, from a wide field, she chose Toussaint de Beausire, the father of her child. Carlyle records that he became a well-known informer and played a significant role in the Revolution.

Mme Campan served her mistress with touching and heroic loyalty. Following the Queen’s death, she founded a girls’ school in St Germain-en-Laye, after which Napoleon put her in charge of an academy for young ladies at Écouen. It is an irony of fate that Mme Campan, who had the good fortune to live through the Revolution, the end of the monarchy and finally the return of the Bourbons to the throne, was eventually dismissed from her post by her former employers. At which point she wrote her superb memoirs, to set the record straight about the Queen. She died in 1822.

For Cagliostro and his wife, fate still had years of trouble in store. The trial proved a tragic turning point in the magician’s life; thereafter his road led downwards. His weeping disciples followed the Great Kophta to Boulogne, where he set sail and crossed the Channel. In London his luck ran out. Nothing he started went well for him.

Business matters took him back to France for a short while. He brought an action against de Launay, the Governor of the Bastille, and Chenon, the police inspector who had sealed off his home while he was in prison. He sued them for some 150,000 livres for cash and jewellery stolen from it through their negligence, and a further 50,000 livres in compensation for ill-treatment. Unfortunately, as he acknowledged in his notebook, all his possessions had been recovered without loss, and he had on numerous occasions declared that he had been very satisfied with the way he had been treated in prison. He did not win his case.

In London he made an attempt to renew his miracle-doctoring, but somehow the locals proved less susceptible to his cures. He tried to get in touch with his former students of the occult, and picked up the threads of his Freemasonry, but the sensible English simply made fun of the absurd, exaggerated gestures of the Italian.

And then to top it all he made a formidable enemy, in the person of Théveneau de Morande. Morande was a member of the lowest underworld of French journalists and pamphleteers based in London. But by this time he was no longer producing pamphlets. He had no need to — the poacher had turned gamekeeper. The well-paid spy of the French King, he edited the Courrier de l’Europe, a French-language paper printed in London as a source of information for the French government about British public opinion.

Cagliostro became Théveneau’s favourite theme. He could attack whoever he chose and the French government loved it: it is quite possible that his attempt to discredit Cagliostro was carried out on instructions from Paris. The journalist brought a detective-like zeal and thoroughness to his inquiry into Cagliostro’s former doings, especially those in London, and including his disgraceful little court cases. No detail was spared. Amongst other things, scorn was poured on his claim that his relations the Arab sheikhs controlled the numbers of marauding lions and tigers by raising pigs on fodder laced with arsenic (the gradually increased doses would permeate their flesh without harming them, but would be strong enough to kill any wild animal that devoured them).

Cagliostro replied to all this with rather surprising wit. He disdainfully (and wisely) ignored references to his minor, more squalid, misdemeanours, and wrote instead that he had so much enjoyed M de Morande’s French style that he would like to meet him personally, and to that end was inviting him to breakfast on 9th November. He would like Monsieur the editor to bring the wine and other provisions, while he, Cagliostro, would provide the meat, a suckling piglet he had reared according to his method. Morande would be entrusted with killing and preparing the pig and would be free to eat whichever part he found most to his taste. “The next day four things would be possible. Either both of us would be dead, or neither of us; or I would be dead and not you; or you would be dead but not I. The first three results would be a win for you, the fourth a win for me. But I will lay 5,000 guineas that you would be dead the next day and I would be hale and hearty.”

Morande backed away from this. For all he knew, he said to himself, Cagliostro might be right. With typical eighteenth-century credulity, he considered that such a wily (and fat!) rascal might well be immune to poison. So he suggested that perhaps either a dog or a cat should try the pig instead of himself. To that Cagliostro replied with biting scorn:

“You propose that a meat-eating animal should stand in for you at the breakfast. It would certainly represent you well. What other carnivore so aptly reflects what you are among men?”

To his shame, Théveneau de Morande withdrew, but Cagliostro’s victory was a Pyrrhic one. As a result of what they had learnt during the dispute, his followers mobbed him and tried to strangle him. He rapidly decided to leave London. He went off with his wife’s diamonds, leaving her behind without a penny. In revenge she spread it abroad that Théveneau de Morande had been right on all counts.

Once again Cagliostro travelled around Europe, but this was a very different journey from the one he had made in his heyday. Everywhere his infamy went before him, and poverty was his constant companion. He was driven out of Switzerland; then the Austrians expelled him from Trient, where he had met a well-disposed archbishop who in time might well have become a second Rohan to him.

Meanwhile his wife joined him. The lovely Lorenza was now desperately homesick. After so many years of restless wandering she longed to be back with her family in Rome, where she dreamt of a quiet, simple married life. Perhaps she hoped that one day Cagliostro would become a respectable citizen, give up his visionary dreams and perhaps even get himself a job. Her weary, ageing, persecuted husband finally gave in to her wishes — gave in, and stepped into the jaws of the wolf.

Cagliostro, it seems, if only from force of habit, made contact with the local Freemasons. Even here, at the very heart of the hostile city, they maintained a presence. Their number was small, but even so they had to take their vow of secrecy most seriously, for fear of falling into the hands of the Holy Inquisition.

But in fact the Inquisition had been following the noble traveller’s every step, and in 1789, once they had gathered enough evidence against him, he was arrested and locked up in the Castel Sant’Angelo — compared to which the Bastille was a seaside resort.

The Inquisitors were delighted to have caught such a well-known Freemason because they intended to make an example of him. Moreover, they had acquired an undue sense of his importance as the result of his ceaseless bragging. He had written to his friends abroad urging them that if he were ever arrested they should engage in a world-wide action of Freemasons to besiege the Castel Sant’Angelo. The Inquisition believed that this amounted to a serious plot.

He made regular appearances before their court, but to the very end he hoped they would release him. He did not think of himself as a great criminal. He had always spoken of God and encouraged religious feelings among his followers. Though he seems to have been well versed in theology, he entirely failed to understand the hair-raising nature of the heresy he was proclaiming.

So at first he took it all quite calmly, full of good faith that there was no truer son of the Church than himself. He even asked if he might have a personal word with the Pope to persuade him of this. It still took him a while to see that his teachings were heretical. At that point he declared that he was fully repentant, he would return to the true faith, and when they freed him he would convert a million adherents of the Egyptian Rite as a favour to the Church.

The court’s main interest lay in whether or not, in the course of his occult practices, he had ever had dealings with Satan. It was just his fate that at this point his ‘baby angel’, the ever-unreliable Lorenza, who could never grasp the importance of anything, betrayed him in a momentary fit of exasperation. She told them that most of the time the mediums had been told what to say in answer to his questions; however, on more than one occasion, Satan had indeed appeared.

Sentence was finally passed in April 1791. The court stopped short of handing him over to the secular arm, which would have meant the death penalty, but as a dangerous heretic and Satanist he was given life imprisonment.

It was probably only at this point that it began to dawn on him that everything was lost. The gates of the world had finally closed against him, and he would remain a miserable inmate of the Castel Sant’Angelo until his death — he who had always lived amid uproar and popular acclaim, in exhilarating escapades and the theatrical limelight, with the added perpetual frisson of proximity to the supernatural. He was still only forty-five.

No portrait of a true adventurer would be complete without mention of a daring attempt to escape. Cagliostro told the prison governor that he wanted to confess his sins and show proper remorse. A Capuchin monk was sent to him, delighted to think he would be receiving the sincere repentance of a famous heretic. In his confession Cagliostro went so far as to invite the monk to join in his flagellation. The Capuchin agreed to the request, unbuckled his waist-cord and struck him a few blows across the shoulder. Then Cagliostro suddenly wrenched the cord from his hands, pulled it round his neck and began to strangle him. But fate had decreed that this monk was not the senile, gaunt ascetic he had been banking on but a strapping son of the peasantry, who threw the flabby magician off and summoned help. The plan went up in smoke.

One night, not long afterwards, the Papal authorities took him to a faraway fortress somewhere behind God’s back in the Duchy of Urbino. Here his path reached its eternal end. He is thought to have died some time in 1795.

We must not forget Count Haga. He may not be central to our story, but it is instructive to note how everything went so well for this relaxed and easy-going monarch, while for Louis XVI it all went so wrong. Slowly but steadily he dismantled all the remaining constitutional power of the nobility, established a flourishing royal dictatorship with the support of the Third Estate, and forced the privileged classes completely into the background. Meanwhile his country prospered. He fought heroically against Russian numerical superiority before signing the Treaty of Värälä in 1790, none of whose terms was humiliating to Sweden, and a year later concluded a pact with Catherine the Great. The Tsarina guaranteed him 300,000 roubles annually, which he now thoroughly needed, having lost his French subsidy with the Revolution. On 16th March 1792 he fell victim to a conspiracy of nobles: a Captain Anckarström shot him from behind, at a masked ball. Where else should a great rococo prince have died?

And now only one of the actors remains, the non-human, demonic principal, the necklace itself. Or rather, not the actual necklace but its ghost, the debt that lingered after it.

The ever-gallant Cardinal fully intended to reimburse the jewellers, despite the fact that they had lied in their evidence against him during the trial. He offered them the annual revenue of 200,000 livres from his richest diocese, St Vaast, to pay off the debt by instalments. They rejected this, because if he died early the money would remain forever unpaid. They consented only when the King decreed that the revenues from St Vaast would continue to go to them even after his death until the cost of the necklace had been fully met.

But then the Revolution intervened, and the assets and revenues of the diocese were confiscated. Boehmer turned to the National Assembly and claimed payment from the Treasury. The Treasury did not pay. The huge social changes taking place had left the two men bankrupt; Boehmer died, and his wife married his business partner, Bassenge. But the suit continued.

In 1860 the heirs of a M Deville, one of the creditors of the Boehmer estate, sued Prince Rohan-Rochefort, a successor to the Rohan heirs, for the sum of two million francs, including interest. In 1863 the Civil Court gave its judgment, rejecting the claim. In 1864 the Imperial Curia ratified the decision, and subsequently turned down an appeal made in 1867. With that the trial came to an end.

But to this day the necklace has not been paid for.