The Queen's Necklace

Chapter Three. The Grand Seigneur

THE GREAT HISTORIANS OF ANTIQUITY, in particular Livy, would always introduce their account of some major event by detailing the signs and auguries that foretold it. This was partly a religious requirement, since they did after all believe in these things, but it was also, it seems, a device to elevate the tone of the writing. The enlightened modern reader is unlikely to subscribe to any such superstition — we naturally do not ourselves — but everything is after all interconnected, and since the ancients were wise men notwithstanding we might just mention one or two such omens.

Goethe, who spent the most titanic years of his youth in Strasbourg, was there when the fourteen-year-old Marie-Antoinette arrived on her way to Paris. Strasbourg, an island on the Rhine, the then border between France and the Holy Roman Empire, was neutral territory, and here the Dauphine (wife of the Dauphin, the heir to the French throne and the equivalent of the Prince of Wales) was presented to the French. Her marriage had taken place in the Church of the Augustine Friars in Vienna, by proxy, her brother Prince Ferdinand standing in for the absent bridegroom.

On the island they had built a grand pavilion. A few days before the official reception Goethe bribed the custodians and went along with some friends to see the rooms and admire the Gobelin tapestries. Most of the company were delighted, especially with some hangings inspired by Raphael cartoons. But the work dominating the main room filled Goethe with unspeakable horror. It depicted a mythological scene, the story of Jason, Medea and Creusa. “To the left of the throne,” Goethe writes in Dichtung und Wahrheit, “the young bride is seen writhing in the extremity of an agonising death. To the right, Jason stands shuddering, his foot planted on the prostrate bodies of his murdered children, while the Fury (Medea) ascends to the skies in her dragon-drawn carriage …

“‘What on earth,’ I cried out, entirely forgetting there were others present. ‘What utter thoughtlessness is this? How could anyone set this most appalling of all examples of a wedding before the eyes of a young queen, the moment she sets foot in the country? Did none of those French builders, decorators and upholsterers understand that images carry meanings; that they influence our minds and feelings, that they leave profound impressions and arouse ominous presentiments? Not one of them, it seems.’” Goethe’s companions reassured him that no one but he would think of such things.

“The young lady was beautiful, aristocratic, as radiant as she was imposing. I have retained a vivid memory of her face ever since,” he continues, in the courtly manner of his later years. “Everyone had a good view of her in her glass coach, sharing little confidences with her female attendants, as if making a joke about the huge procession streaming ahead of her.” Perhaps even then she gave the impression that she found people amusing.

Goethe goes on to mention that this first ill omen was quickly followed by an even more horrific one. When the Dauphine arrived at Versailles a firework display was arranged in her honour in Paris. Fire broke out, the streets were blocked, and the crowd was prevented from escaping. People were crushed underfoot, leaving thirty-three dead and hundreds more injured.

However he fails to mention the third omen, the strangest of all. The day after she passed through the door of Strasbourg Cathedral, the Bishop appointed his coadjutor, who then celebrated the mass. This was Prince Louis de Rohan, who would later cause her more distress than anyone else in the world.

Even in those aristocratic centuries, the Rohans ranked among the most aristocratic families of France. They enjoyed the status of foreign princes, coming, together with the Ducs de Lorraine, immediately after the royal family. Their proud motto was: Roi ne puis, prince ne desire, Rohan suis—‘I can never be king, I have no desire to be a prince: I am a Rohan.’ One Rohan duchess, Chamfort relates, when asked when she was expecting a family event, replied: “I flatter myself I shall have the honour within a fortnight.” The honour, that is, of bringing a Rohan into the world.

Characteristically, not a single member of this family was ever a statesman or general, or sufficiently distinguished in any other field to justify such overweening pride. In this they were very much as one thinks of the grandees of the Ancien Régime: they “did nothing but be born — and given a choice they would not have taken the trouble to do that”, as Figaro remarks.

The odd thing is that the details of their origin survived at all, against a background of wandering populations and prolific mythmaking. They claimed descent from the rulers of Brittany — their ancestor Guéthénoc, youngest son of the Duc de Bretagne, became the Vicomte de Porhoët in 1021. The family had used the name Rohan ever since 1100. Even so, Brittany remained a small, half-savage domain in the back of beyond until Anna, the last little ‘clog-wearing Duchess’, married Charles VIII of France, taking the entire peninsula with her as dowry. This marks the entry of the Rohans into France.

The Protestant branch of the family, the Rohan-Gies, produced some stubborn and brave men of conscience during the wars of religion, but the line died out in 1540. In the eighteenth century two major branches remained, the Rohan-Guéménées and the Rohan-Soubises. The latter’s best-known son was the Maréchal de Soubise, a courtier who was made a general through the influence of Mme de Pompadour, despite his complete lack of talent. It was he who, together with an Austrian duke, achieved the remarkable feat of leading an army of 60,000 to defeat against 20,000 soldiers of Frederick the Great at Rossbach, the decisive battle of the Seven Years War.

The other branch, Rohan-Guéménée, is noted chiefly for the fact that despite annual revenues of astronomical proportions, its representatives went bankrupt in 1781, in debt to the tune of thirty-three million livres, taking countless lesser folk down with them, simple Breton sailors who had put their money with them in the expectation of life annuities. The Guéménées, finding what was left of their fortune insufficient to maintain their lifestyle, were forced to give up their courtly status and pretensions. Their bankruptcy contributed significantly to the general loss of respect for the aristocracy.

The Strasbourg bishopric was part of the family inheritance, so to speak. Half-a-century before the grand entry of Marie-Antoinette, another Rohan had received a foreign princess at the cathedral door. This was Maria Leszczynska, who became the unhappy wife of Louis XV.

Duc Louis de Rohan was born in 1734. In 1760 he was appointed coadjutor to his uncle the Bishop of Strasbourg, and simultaneously made Bishop of Canopus in Egypt in partibus infidelium—the honorary prelate of a diocese that had been in the hands of pagans for well over a thousand years. The top echelons of the Church had always included persons of the highest social rank, but by the seventeenth century the aristocratic families associated with the French Court had appropriated the sees of bishops and archbishops exclusively for themselves. Not only was Rohan’s uncle a bishop, his cousin Ferdinand de Rohan was Archbishop of Cambrai, and the ducal La Rochefoucauld family alone filled three episcopal sees: Rouen, Beauvais and Saintes. The Court aristocracy, like the princes of the Church, made few adjustments to their personal lives or outward manner of living — one of the reasons why the French Church was so weak in the eighteenth century. The gulf between its upper ranks and the poorly-endowed lower clergy was every bit as great as that between the aristocracy and the nation at large. At a critical moment in the early days of the Revolution representatives of the lower ranks of the clergy aligned themselves with the citizenry, an act that had decisive consequences.

Louis de Rohan was not just a dignitary of the church. Since 1761 he had also been a member of the Académie Française, counting among the ‘Immortals’. Of its thirty-eight members in 1789 (two places were vacant) there were seven nobles and five senior churchmen — an aristocratic age indeed. Earlier, under Louis XIV, France’s bishops and academicians had been almost entirely of bourgeois origin. The final years of the Ancien Régime were by far the most aristocrat-dominated.

What sort of man was this Duc Louis de Rohan? According to his contemporaries he was extremely refined and well-mannered, a witty companion, and a fine speaker — by no means a disgrace to the Academy. He was both chivalrous and genuinely good-hearted, and his followers noted countless touching acts of charity carried out behind the scenes: a true son of the times, a man of feeling, as indeed was his royal master, Louis XVI.

But these facts tell us almost nothing, and the surviving portraits of the man add little more. They show the refined but somewhat expressionless features of the frail, rather spoilt, offspring of elderly parents: the face of a man almost impossible to describe. The sort of man of whom you might say: had he not been born a prince he would be indistinguishable from anyone else. But that judgement would be superficial. Rohan was a true-born prince — his Rohan qualities were as integral to his being as any inherited predisposition to disease of the organs. They determined his character and his fate as surely as tuberculosis or neurasthenia.

If we wish to understand him, our point of departure must be not his personal traits but his social position.

Rohan was a grand seigneur, in the heyday of his type — a time when to be one implied not merely differentness but a way of life based on aristocratic rule, at a time when the whole of Europe, so to speak, existed to sustain the lofty status of his class.

Western culture was essentially aristocratic. From its birth at the end of the eleventh century down to the French Revolution its aim had been for a small number of the chosen to attain the dream of the beautiful life; a life as pure, ordered and wonderful as a work of art from the hand of a genius, and no less independent of the mundane world and the vicissitudes of fortune. Such a culture finds its most complete expression in the royal court, the idealised life-that-transcends-life. This ideal was served by chivalry, ceremony and protocol, and its underlying aims by art and poetry.

But this is all rather general. The precise nature of Rohan’s status and condition as a grand seigneur can be better demonstrated by some biographical and statistical facts.

There was a general feeling in Marie-Antoinette’s France that he would not long remain a mere coadjutor. His two extremely influential aunts, Mme de Guéménée and Mme de Marsan, Royal Governess to the young princes (the term ‘governess’ not to be understood in the modern sense), supported by Mme du Barry and the government minister the Duc d’Aiguillon (who owed his position to her favour), persuaded the ageing Louis XV to send him as ambassador to Vienna. Since France and Austria were at the time allies, loyal if mutually suspicious, the roles of French envoy to Vienna and of his Austrian counterpart to Versailles were the most important diplomatic postings in Europe. The Austrian representative, Comte Mercy-Argenteau, was among the most eminent people in Paris. His influence was that of a minister. He was counsellor to the young Marie-Antoinette and his mistress was the most celebrated beauty of the opera. And what he was in Paris, Rohan aspired to become in Vienna, a city second only to the French capital in its savoir-vivre, its sense of life as a work of art.

Now for some more personal information. Rohan took with him to Vienna (omitting, for the sake of brevity, a truly astonishing quantity of material goods): fifty stallions, and accompanying personnel; six cadets from the most aristocratic families of Alsace and Brittany; their instructor in the handling of weapons, and their Latin tutor; two noblemen in his own service, ‘pour les honneurs de la chambre’, one of them a knight of Malta, the other a captain of horse; six valets, a maître d’hôtel, a head of household, two liveried attendants, four couriers (their costumes costing 4,000 livres each), to ‘glitter in the sunlight, as in a fairy tale’; twelve footmen; two ‘Swiss guards’, the leaner of them to command the inner door, the other, who was extremely plump, to man the gate; six musicians, to play during meals; a steward, a treasurer, four embassy officials of high social rank; the Jesuit Abbé Georgel as secretary to the legation, and four under-secretaries to assist him. All these persons were fitted out in fairy-tale splendour, and of course maintained and salaried by Rohan himself.

They arrived in Vienna, and soon filled the imperial city with awe. Everyone talked about them, the women in tones of rapture. It was hardly surprising. Rohan arranged vast hunts. His masked balls were spectacular. At Baden he lavishly entertained almost the whole of Lower Austria. Between a hundred and a hundred-and-fifty nobles attended his banquets, which, dispensing with the usual diplomatic practice, were served not at a single long table but at several smaller ones so that everyone might feel at ease. Dinner was followed by cards, a musical concert, dancing and flirting in the miraculous rooms of the Lichtenstein Palace and its garden, which was of course illuminated — just as it would have been at Versailles.

That was one side of the coin. The other was that Rohan had no money — neither he, nor either of the two branches of his family. He is reported to have had royal permission to raise one million livres against his estates, but that did not last very long. He was unable to pay his people regularly, and they in response abused their extra-territorial diplomatic immunity and devoted their time, very successfully, to smuggling. They did this with such typically French openness that Maria Theresa, though reluctant to offend the Court at Versailles, withdrew the privilege of immunity from the entire legation. That at any rate is the story according to Mme Campan, Marie-Antoinette’s Première Femme de Chambre (hardly ‘chambermaid’: she was as much a chambermaid as the Duchesse de Marsan was a governess). Her famous Memoirs, written around 1820, are our single most important source, as they are for everyone who writes about Marie-Antoinette and her times. However Mme Campan was writing specifically to rescue the memory of her mistress, and her portrait of Rohan is accordingly painted in the darkest of hues.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She did all she could to have him recalled. She saw him as the ambassador to her Court not only of France but of the Powers of Darkness. She mobilised her envoy to Versailles, Mercy-Argenteau, and she mobilised her daughter, the Dauphine.

This constant call to action from her mother was one of the causes of Marie-Antoinette’s tragedy. The Empress regarded her daughter as a diplomatic instrument comparable to d’Argenteau, an attitude inherited by her son, Joseph II. But as far as Marie-Antoinette was concerned, her mother was the closest to her of all living creatures, and she sought to obey her in every way possible. For all her sagacity, the Empress did not know, or did not want to see, that despite the present alliance between her country and France the ancient enmity between the French and Germans was a far more deeply rooted affair; nor could she imagine that the same person could be at the same time a good Frenchwoman and a good German. As she wrote to her daughter: “Be a good German — it’s the best way of being a good Frenchwoman.” In short, she sacrificed her daughter to her political ambitions.

Not every child smothered with love by a mother who makes herself indispensable continues to feel strongly bound by that love. But we do sometimes see examples of the reverse — children who remain permanently tied to mothers who want to dominate them for ever. Maria Theresa did not exactly swamp her children with maternal affection — she would not have known how to. Like all Habsburg rulers, she sacrificed every moment to her implacable sense of duty. The Habsburgs ruled the way a born writer writes, and a born painter paints — in the middle of the night, waking between two dreams. For centuries they had had little time for tenderness. Their style was the direct opposite of the idle and voluptuous Bourbons’, with whom Marie-Antoinette, the most delicate flower of the Habsburg forest, was now entangled.

Of course we might think otherwise when we gaze on Maria Theresa’s imposing baroque tomb in the Capuchin cemetery in Vienna. The Empress sits enthroned amidst her offspring, the multitudinous little princes, like some ancient fertility goddess, a Magna Mater, the very symbol of motherhood. But her actual practice is revealed in the words of Marie-Antoinette, as recorded by that gifted writer, her Première Femme de Chambre (not, we repeat, ‘chambermaid’!), Mme Campan: “Whenever she heard that some foreigner of note (un étranger de marque) had arrived, the Empress would surround herself with her family, sit the little ones at table and create a tableau to suggest that she was bringing them up herself.” It was certainly not the case.

So it might well have been from a sense of duty that Marie-Antoinette adopted her mother’s stance of intense hostility towards Rohan. She had met him only once, in Strasbourg. It is possible she took a dislike to the rising young churchman even then. Carlyle may well be right: “Perhaps even then, her fair young soul read, all unconsciously, an incoherent Roué-ism, bottomless mud-volcano-ism, from which she by instinct rather recoiled.”

Carlyle was the second person, after Goethe, to give literary expression to the necklace trial, in his famous essay The Age of Romance, written from the necessary historical distance at the beginning of the last century. In what follows we shall be frequently quoting his highly compressed, savagely ironic and eloquent phrases. In the lines transcribed above he employs the term ‘roué’. The word is still in use today, but it first became current in Rohan’s time. Originally it signified the sort of man who ended up being broken on the wheel; then, once it became fashionable, someone who simply deserved such a fate. But it was not just the word that came into vogue: so did the behaviour. A great many people aspired to the name. Mercier has some important remarks on the subject, if our reader would care to hear them:

“‘What is an ‘aimable roué?’ a foreigner who thinks he understands French might ask. He is the sort of man of the world who has neither virtues nor principles, but gives his vices a veneer of charm and dignifies them by means of his agreeable wit … If the foreigner is then surprised that such an expression should take root in our language, he will find that gallows humour has a long history in our common parlance. Thirty years ago an abbé was hanged for a banking fraud. The miserable fellow hesitated at the foot of the ladder leading up to the scaffold. ‘Come, come, M Abbé,’ said the hangman, ‘don’t be such a bébé.’ Another time, a drunk came out of a pub in the Place de la Grêve, just as they began an execution. The man on the wheel started bellowing, cursing and swearing in his agony. The drunk raised his head towards the scaffold, took offence at what was being said, and called out: ‘There’s no need for rudeness, even if they are breaking you on a wheel.’ This quip was much admired in aristocratic circles.”

So far as the two Queens were concerned, Rohan’s chances were ruined for ever by the indiscretion of Mme du Barry. At the time Prussia and Russia had just carved Poland up between them. Maria Theresa, while strongly condemning their actions, could do nothing about them and demanded a share for Austria. Rohan, who had a justified reputation among his contemporaries as a wit, took the occasion to write to the Duc d’Aiguillon: “Maria Theresa holds a handkerchief in one hand to wipe away her tears, and a sword in the other, hoping to becoming the third partner in the spoils.” D’Aiguillon sent the letter to Du Barry, who took great delight in reading it aloud to her guests over dinner, and they were quick to repeat the contents to Marie-Antoinette the following day.

But while the blundering ambassador slandered Vienna in Versailles, he took every opportunity to slander Versailles in Vienna. Stories that he was spreading about Marie-Antoinette reached Maria Theresa’s ear. Her maternal heart was so aggrieved that she sent Baron Neni to find out what truth there was in them, and the Baron established that Rohan’s source was baseless chatter emanating from the Du Barry-Marsan-Guéménée clique, who so despised the young Queen.

So it was perfectly understandable that Marie-Antoinette too should do everything in her power to have the doubly indiscreet ambassador brought home. But Rohan was protected by his powerful aunts, and while Louis XV was alive, and Mme du Barry remained who she was, it was impossible to remove him.

In April 1774 Louis XV contracted smallpox. Du Barry took herself off to Rueil, and only his daughters remained at his bedside. The Court continued at Versailles, waiting impatiently for the candle burning in his window to signal that his appalling death struggles were over, so they could then leave the infected Palace and withdraw to Choisy. Finally, on 10th May 1774, the flame was extinguished.

The King’s corpse lay there, slowly breaking open. It was already half-decayed, and a hideous stench was pouring from it. The Duc de Villequier, Premier Gentilhomme de la Chambre, called on the surgeon, Andouillé, to carry out his traditional office and apply balsam to the body. Andouillé knew that it would inevitably mean catching the infection himself, and replied: “Very good; but it is your duty, Your Excellency, to hold the head while I do it.” Villequier dispensed with the embalming.

“The Dauphin was with the Dauphine,” records Mme Campan. “They were awaiting news of Louis’s death together. A dreadful noise, absolument like thunder, was heard in the outer apartment above them. It was the crowd of courtiers who were deserting the dead sovereign’s antechamber, to come and do homage to the new power of Louis XVI. This extraordinary tumult informed Marie-Antoinette and her husband that they were called to the throne; and, by a spontaneous movement, which deeply affected those around them, they threw themselves on their knees; both, pouring forth a flood of tears, exclaimed: “O God, guide us and protect us. We are too young to reign.”

Thus Marie-Antoinette ascended the French throne. That same year Rohan was recalled from Vienna.

His departure was not very dignified. Maria Theresa refused to receive him before he left. Rohan sent his friends a portrait of himself engraved on a thin layer of ivory, and such was his popularity that it was much copied onto rings and encircled with pearls and diamonds. Even Chancellor Kaunitz wore one, to the Empress’ intense annoyance.

He was replaced as ambassador to Vienna by Baron Breteuil. Rohan could not forgive the man for succeeding him, and Breteuil was even less forgiving of the hostile treatment he received. When the time came, his loathing would be fatal for Rohan.

Still greater discomfiture awaited the ex-envoy in France. The King received him coldly; the Queen refused even to see him. She simply sent word that he should forward the letter he had brought her from Maria Theresa. Rohan was in disgrace.

In the Ancien Régime, to be disgraced was not necessarily fatal in a material sense. There was no chance of his starving to death. In fact, during his time in this supposed wilderness he achieved one enviable distinction. In 1777 the post of Grand Aumônier—Grand Almoner — which had long been promised him, fell vacant. The incumbent would be the King’s chaplain, the head of his household clergy, and by that token the highest dignitary in the Court. The King was naturally reluctant to let him have it, and Marie-Antoinette protested vehemently. But once again the powerful aunts prevailed — fairy godmothers indeed! — and Rohan was appointed. From then on, the Queen refused to speak to him.

Then Rohan’s uncle died, and he became Bishop of Strasbourg. It was the richest diocese in France. Next, through the intervention of King Stanislas Poniatowski of Poland, he was made a cardinal. He was now a truly imperial prince, the Comte d’Alsace and Abbé de Saint-Vaast (where his stipend of 300,000 livres exceeded even that from Strasbourg), Proviseur of the Sorbonne, Supérieur Général of the Royal Hospice of the Quinze-Vingts, and a Commander of the Order of the Holy Spirit. And all the while, the Queen refused to speak to him.

You, dear reader, would surely, in such circumstances, believe yourself hopelessly lost to her favour; and you would console yourself that its loss was of no material significance, since retaining it was so difficult in practice. But that, my dear reader, is because you are thinking in practical terms — in francs, pengős and honorary titles, and you fail to imagine just what the loss of royal favour would mean to a person of that time. It is an old cliché, but we must spell it out — the King’s favour was the ray of sunlight that gave life to his courtiers, and without it they withered. The King’s favour was the very air, and without it they could not breathe. The King’s favour was the metaphysics through which a courtier was admitted to matters eternal, and without it life was as meaningless as that of a true believer who has lost his God. The loss of favour had broken greater hearts than Rohan’s — think of Racine!

Rohan mobilised everyone and everything. In 1777 Joseph II came to France, and tried to bring his sister round to the cause. The intervention was not a success. Marie-Antoinette heard her brother out coldly, and exasperated him by her non-stop hectoring tone: ‘I am prepared to take advice from my mother,’ she seemed to say, ‘but to my brother I shall speak my mind.’ The only two men she was ready to listen to were the Comte Mercy-Argenteau and her old tutor, the Abbé Vermond. She was too mindful of the Empress’ advice ever to let Rohan worm his way into her favour.

“Men have, indeed, been driven from Court; and borne it, according to ability,” says Carlyle. “A Choiseul, in these very years, retired Parthian-like, with a smile or scowl, and drew half the Court-host with him. Our Wolsey, though once an ego et rex meus, could journey, it is said, without strait-waistcoat, to his monastery, and there, telling beads, look forward to a still longer journey. The melodious, too soft-strung Racine, when his King turned his back on him, emitted one meek wail, and submissively — died. But the case of Coadjutor de Rohan differed from all those. No loyalty was in him that he should die; no self-help, that he should live; no faith, that he should tell beads.” Rohan lived on, to put it in poetical terms, like a winter tree waiting for some fairy-tale spring.

For Rohan — and this really comes as a surprise — was ambitious. Rank and fortune were not enough. He yearned for power. This is particularly surprising because he was clearly not the sort of person for whom power is his natural element, who finds his greatest happiness in determining the fate of others. Had he been that sort of person he would have put his time in Vienna to far better use, and in his role as bishop he would have made his subordinates feel the weight of his authority. But there is no evidence that he did anything of the sort.

What then was the source of this burning ambition? We all live out our lives in terms of roles — or aspire to do so. At the simplest level, this role-play takes an elementary form: a woman might smile and do her hair in the manner of her favourite actress, and even strive to assume her supposed mental attributes. A man will take on the persona of the distinguished physician, the self-sacrificing paterfamilias, the charming bohemian or some other traditional part. On a higher level, nobler and more complicated souls are tempted by the nobler and more complicated roles offered by history and literature — the Muse, the Martyr, the Poète Maudit, the Great Statesman (like Széchenyi) or Voice of the Revolution (like Peto˝fi). The phantom that hovered so teasingly over Rohan’s consciousness was the gloriously visible one of the all-powerful Cardinal — Wolsey, Richelieu, Mazarin and Fleury. But here the pampered grand seigneur, with his tendency to corpulence, was quite out of his depth. Richelieu was a gaunt ascetic, who out of his dreams forged himself a character of bone and steel. Working with his secretary Baron Planta — a Swiss Protestant, no less — he laboured away at his great plans to make his country a happier place, and only when his guests had finally gone to bed, as dawn approached and he had a few brief hours to himself, did he allow himself to dream of ‘taking power’.

To the ‘taking’ of such power, Rohan felt in his more optimistic moments, there was only one obstacle: the Queen’s anger. The King he probably considered a quantité négligeable, as he usually was. It was not the King’s favourite but the Queen’s who exercised power. For a child of the age of Pompadour and Du Barry the notion of a favourite carried essentially erotic implications. In France, the real ruler was the person who ruled the Queen’s heart. And why should that not be him, Rohan, the Belle Eminence, as his followers called him? Mazarin, with far less manly appeal and grand-seigneurial charm, had once ruled his queen, Anne of Austria, and through her, France.

But a person who falls under the spell of erotic dreams does not remain immune to their power for long. Rohan had dreamt for so many years that the Queen was in love with him that he ended up falling desperately in love with her himself. In this he showed some taste, especially when we consider who he was, and who the Queen was, and we can forget the shades of Mazarin and the other great cardinals. Marie-Antoinette was both young and one of the most beautiful women in France. Rohan, however, was approaching fifty, and in those days, as we all know, people aged more rapidly and died younger: the average life expectancy in France was twenty-eight years and nine months. Perhaps Rohan was seized by Torschlusspanik, the sexual passion bordering on madness that is triggered by approaching old age.

And here is something else. The varieties of sexual attraction can be analysed in terms of sociological type. There are some people who can love only those of lower standing than themselves — gentlemen of birth who pursue female servants, and ladies of rank who adore coachmen. There are those whose passions are strictly confined to members of their own stratum, and those who can love only those from a bracket higher than their own — people in whose minds sex and ambition are inseparably fused. These are the main groups, and most of us fall into one of them or another. And if Rohan was indeed one of those who could love only their superiors, then there was just one woman of higher rank than himself — the Queen. He was like the very tall man whose fate is to be attracted only by women taller than himself. In Rohan’s adoration of the Queen there may well have been a similar element of fatal compulsion.

Neither contemporary sources nor later historians like Funck-Brentano raise the question of Rohan’s actual feelings for her. But there is one piece of information well known to scholars that supports my theory, psychologically improbable as it might seem. Mme Campan records the following story, which makes very little sense unless we assume that Rohan was indeed in love with her.

In the summer of 1782 Archduke Paul Petrovics, the son of Catherine the Great who became Paul I of Russia and later went mad, came to Paris with his wife. They travelled incognito, as the Count and Countess North — a poetic name indeed. The Queen gave a banquet in their honour at Trianon, and the park was illuminated. Rohan bribed the concierge (a ‘janitor’ in the sense that Mme Campan was a ‘chambermaid’? Indeed not, but a genuine concierge) to let him into the park, claiming he wanted to see the lights after the Queen had left for Versailles. So he hid himself in the porter’s lodge. But he failed to keep his promise to go out only after the Queen’s departure, and when the man’s attention was distracted he slipped out into the park. He was ‘in disguise’, but that consisted only of a greatcoat beneath which his purple stockings were clearly visible. Once in the park, he stood, thus strangely attired, and with a ‘face of mystery’, as Mme Campan writes, peering out, from two separate locations, at the royal family and their train of attendants. Marie-Antoinette was deeply shocked and wanted to sack the porter the next day, but Mme Campan successfully intervened on his behalf.

What was His Eminence hoping for in the park? Was it to reveal himself in the confident expectation that her heart would melt when she saw him? Rohan was not that stupid: he had a paunch, he was no longer young, and the ludicrous disguise would hardly have advanced his cause. The only possible explanation is that he desperately wanted to see the Queen, and that was why he had gone there.

But whatever the case, there is no doubt that he was driven by the desire, verging on compulsion, to diffuse the Queen’s anger and win her favour. This is the second such idée fixe in the story, according to Carlyle, the first being Boehmer’s with his necklace. And when two such obsessions come together, a force comes into being that could destroy a nation. All that is needed is for them to combine with a third.

And that was how Jeanne de la Motte found Rohan when she met him at Saverne, the Bishop of Strasbourg’s country seat. The old manor house had burnt down in 1779, but Rohan had rebuilt it in fashionable pomp and splendour and fitted it out, again in the taste of the time, with collections of natural history and art, and splendid libraries. The number of his guests had not diminished since his days in Vienna. He lived like a prince. They came in such numbers, from all over Germany and France, and even from the Court at Versailles, that often there was no room for them all in the mansion, despite its seven hundred awaiting beds. “There was no noblewoman of such good family that she did not dream of Saverne,” wrote a contemporary. “The hunts were especially magnificent.” Six hundred peasants drove the game into the gentlemen’s guns, with the women following on horseback or in carriages. At one o’clock the entire party assembled for luncheon, in a marquee erected in some picturesque spot on the banks of a stream. So that the pleasure should be shared by everyone, there were even tables waiting on the lawn for the peasantry: it was Rohan’s wish that every one of them should have a pound of meat, two pounds of bread and half a bottle of wine. At Saverne they certainly enjoyed to the full what Talleyrand calls ‘the sweetness of life’.

It was to this fairytale castle that Jeanne de la Motte, dissatisfied and inwardly eaten up as ever, came with her husband. Her great patron Mme de Boulainvilliers introduced her to the Cardinal and commended her to his favour. She told him her story while he listened in rapt silence — which is hardly surprising, given the details that might have come from a novel. The unvarnished realities of a defenceless life, the bitter taste of poverty, would have been particularly fascinating to a man whose own days had been passed in the most cushioned elevation, and to whom the woes of ordinary life were comprehensible only as some sort of exotic and compelling tale. And Jeanne knew supremely well how to present her tale with steadily mounting effect. On a number of occasions her later writings reveal — it is quite noticeable — that she had practised extensively and this was the form she finally evolved. One can imagine her using her spare moments to rehearse it over and over again, honing it down to one particular version with its ever-increasing drama.

So Rohan listened, and believed everything. He usually believed what people told him. Two days before his arrest, Cagliostro persuaded him that he would be dining with Henry IV, though he would not actually see his illustrious guest. If one were writing a play on the subject one would have to ignore everything else and focus on this trait alone, because in the entire drama of the necklace it is the most significant. He showed the most extraordinary, indeed unbelievable, gullibility. The most problematic aspect of the whole affair, Funck-Brentano tells us, was the degree of credulity we are required to attribute to him. It is the most improbable feature in the whole improbable story — but it is undeniable.

The most obvious explanation for it, other than some character trait of unknown origin, can once again lie only in his social position. How would anyone born into the purple, and destined to become a cardinal, get to know people, the circumstances of their lives — and the sheer nastiness circumstances can provoke in them? Any other nobleman, busying himself with affairs of state or military matters, would have rapidly discovered what people are really like. But Rohan was a man of the Church, and he took no interest in his diocese. People showed him only their better side and revealed only the noblest of their motives to him. And Rohan was himself a thoroughly benevolent man. Where would he possibly learn about the sheer malice of ordinary people? He was as innocent as a king — as his own King, Louis XVI.

To this social conditioning was added another determinism, that of blood — which, again, and most remarkably, not one of the great historians of the necklace affair considers worth a mention. Rohan was a Celt. His family origins were Breton. True, by this time several hundred years had passed since they had left Brittany, but there must have been constant intermarrying with the Breton nobility, and there is always the possibility of genetic regression. The Celts, as we know, are a fantastical and superstitious people. Matthew Arnold, the great English essayist of the last century, writing in his study of Celtic literature, tells us they lived “in a state of permanent rebellion against the tyranny of facts”. In the Arthurian Cycle, which lasted from the time of the Middle Ages through to Tennyson and Wagner, and had such a seminal influence on European poetry, it was the old kings of the Irish and the Highland Scots who could produce the greatest giants, the tiniest dwarves, and the most magical fairylands. By the eighteenth century the Highlanders had added many other proudly distinctive gifts, including second sight, by which they could see the souls of those who had just died. Dr Samuel Johnson, the leading light of eighteenth-century English literature, made a special journey to Scotland to enquire into it. Until very recently, all four Celtic peoples — the Irish, Welsh, Highland Scots and Bretons — inhabited a world that verged on the theocratic. They consulted their priests in almost everything and looked to their magical powers for instruction in even the most mundane of matters.

Thus Rohan too, with the blind faith inherited from his Breton ancestors, turned for guidance to the great magus with whom fate had linked him — Cagliostro.