The Queen's Necklace

Chapter Five. The Bower of Venus

EVERY TYPE OF HOSPITALITY must come to an end, and Jeanne de Valois and the illustrious Comte her husband could not live for ever in the fairytale castle at Saverne. With grieving hearts they returned to Lunéville. But after Saverne the drabness of life in a garrison town had even less appeal for them. Jeanne’s old restlessness reasserted itself, La Motte longed for a more comfortable life, and one fine day they turned their backs on the town and set off to try their luck in Paris.

Luck they certainly needed. Their sole patroness, Mme de Boulainvilliers, had now died. The Cardinal sent them a few pieces of gold from time to time, and the pension Mme de Boulainvilliers had obtained for them was a regular source of income — but what was that in terms of their pretensions?

Thus began for them that peculiar form of penury that anyone familiar with the great realist novels of the eighteenth century, Lesage, Fielding and Smollett, will instantly recognise — endless quarrels with landlords, with restaurant owners, with pursuing creditors, and always the sword hanging over their heads that one day they might be locked up in a debtors’ prison.

Nonetheless in 1782 they rented a house in the Rue Neuve, in St Gilles, among the old palaces of the Marais district.

Under the Valois kings the Marais had been the aristocratic quarter, and in the present Place des Vosges there still stands that relic of Paris’s most supremely interesting architecture, the wonderful Place Royale. You step through an archway into an enclosed square lined with identical houses — it is like diving beneath the sea into a different world, where time has stood still. Rohan’s palace was also in the Marais, next to that of the Soubises. Nowadays this part of the city is full of immigrants from Eastern Europe, of the poorest and most teeming sort, living in dire congestion and poverty. With city districts it is as with the fashions — they make their way steadily down to the lowest strata of society. The once-proud moustache of the Hungarian nobility is nowadays sported by elderly village carpenters, and the old palace of Henry IV’s favourites now accommodates métèque families, all tailors and furriers, with eight children. Like everything else, the metropolis is the symbol of constant change.

So how did they make their living, Jeanne and her husband? Partly by their basic quality as fraudsters, their lordly self-confidence. They could always find trusting souls to believe them. One particular line of business that occasionally did very well for them was to buy dress material or something similar on credit, and immediately pawn it. Sometimes they received donations from high-ranking people, in response to their begging letters. They were even supported by loyal old retainers of the Ancien Régime, and were fed for quite some time by the mother of a chambermaid called Jeanne Rosalie.

But we should not think that Jeanne was idle in her penury, or that, like Rohan, she was simply waiting for a miracle to turn her fortunes round. A miracle, yes, but one she intended to bring about herself. Her plan was to recover her ancestral estates (or supposed estates) through royal favour. In this novelettish fantasy she had worked out in great detail how unjustly her illustrious forebears had been stripped of their land. Now was the moment for the King to put everything right. The estates should revert to the royal fisc, then the King, in a kindly gesture, would return them overnight to his distant relatives, the Valois.

The King had after all done far greater things for his followers in this period. All it needed was for someone who had influence in the Court to sponsor her. Patronage has always existed in the world, but in eighteenth-century France there was only one officially recognised and sanctioned way of getting anything done. It was called the royal favour. The royal favour had of course to be earned. But Jeanne had yet to learn that winning it would not be simple.

In addition to her house in Paris she took a place at Versailles, and she moved constantly between the two venues. Residence at Versailles served partly to make her Parisian creditors, and anyone else to whom she owed money, believe that she was a regular visitor at the Palace, but it also served as a place from which she could watch for any gaps through which she might scuttle into the realm of her heart’s desire, the all-powerful world of the Court.

One day Jeanne ‘fainted’ in the antechamber of Madame Royale, the King’s sister the Princess Elisabeth, and when she came to she informed those around her that the reason was that she, the offspring of the Valois, had been destroyed by poverty. The kind-hearted Madame intervened on her behalf and raised another pension for her. But the tiny amount it brought in was of little use to Jeanne.

However, since the fainting idea had worked so well, she tried it again, this time in the antechamber of the Comtesse d’Artois, the King’s sister-in-law. It failed completely. There was a third such attempt, even more daring than the first two — in the famous Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, where Marie-Antoinette herself was finally to encounter her — but there was such a throng of people around the Queen that she entirely failed to notice.

Jeanne and her husband tried everything; but there was one step that did not occur to them — to work. In their defence, this was a possibility that would not have occurred to any member of the nobility at the time, not even those very much wiser than themselves. If an aristocrat became bankrupt he looked to the sunshine of royal providence in the same way as, at a later date, the so-called historical classes sought employment with the state or county authority when their lands and fortunes vanished beneath their feet. But when the nobility sank too low to qualify for royal notice, they became fraudsters, trading on the display of rank: the man would become a card-sharper or gigolo, while the woman sold herself. Actual work would have been unthinkable. It would have offended against the ancient order of things, which assigned that role to the middle classes and the peasantry. The concept is difficult to connect with our modern view of the world, but its very absurdity follows directly from the fact that everything in the old order was so fine and wonderful — with everything in its eternally appointed place and moving in fixed circles like the stars. There was no changing your lot in life at will: it was assigned to you forever, by birth. If you fell below your appointed station, you couldn’t just swap it for another — you simply plummeted into the void. The aristocrat who settled for the life of confidence trickery rather than work for his living (and besides what work could he do, since by virtue of his rank he had neither craft nor skills?) was effectively keeping a kind of inverted faith with the aristocratic order of things, just as the hypocrite keeps faith with the moral order — if he didn’t fundamentally respect morality, he would not pretend to possess it but openly admit his wickedness.

Thus in the eighteenth century, the twilight of the aristocracy, there were a great many fraudsters in France.

All the same, during these years of genteel poverty Jeanne did study for a profession that consorted with her high rank, and even called for a degree of talent. She became a faiseuse d’affaires, or, as we would say in Budapest, a lobbyist. It is in the nature of things that business of this type will thrive in the heyday of favour. Like large numbers of her kind, Jeanne was able to persuade middle-class people and tradesmen that she could be useful to them in all sorts of ways through her connections at the Court.

Mercier writes: “For some years now, women have openly played the role of entremetteuse d’affaires. They write twenty letters a day, are relentless in their demands, lay siege to ministers, weary the draughtsmen of legislation to death; they have proper offices and keep records, and to get the wheels of fortune turning they find positions for their lovers, their favourites, their husbands and indeed anyone who will pay them.”

There certainly were some genuine lobbyists, who produced real results and raised the standing of their trade. But Jeanne was a pseudo-lobbyist. Apart from one royal footman she did not know a single soul at the Court. When she did visit Versailles she shut herself away in an inn to make people believe she was at Court. (It was said that she was not alone on these occasions, but with the hostess’s son — the only service that would secure the accommodation.)

For all that, it does appear to have been a profitable line of business. Before very long we find the Rue St Gilles household apparently thriving. It saw a steady procession of guests, and not all of the lowest class. They included: a genuine Comte, who was later forced to resign his officer’s rank as a result of the necklace trial; the young lawyer Beugnot, who subsequently left some very interesting observations; Father Loth, a Franciscan, who conducted daily mass for the Countess; and above all, one Réteaux de Villette. Villette was a good-looking nobleman of around thirty, from La Motte’s old regiment. His chief qualification was his exquisite, rather effeminate, handwriting. We shall discover soon enough just how important a factor that was.

The household was by now considerable. There were footmen, a cook, a coachman, a jockey, two concierges (a married couple), a chambermaid, a reader (a poor female relation); then Father Loth doubling as major-domo, confessor and drawing-room vicar, in his fine black-lace cassock; a military officer, with whom the Count played a form of draughts called tric-trac; a secretary (Réteaux), a family friend (again Réteaux) … what more could one want?

But the freedom from want was an illusion. In fact the only difference now was the greatly increased scale of their debt, and the even greater peril hanging over their heads. Small-scale measures would no longer serve: they needed a master plan, a stroke of genius.

By now we might be thinking that Jeanne had become every bit as obsessed with the Queen as the Cardinal was. Obsession is part of genius. News would naturally have reached her about Her Majesty’s intense friendships with the radiantly beautiful Princesse de Lamballe and the Duchesse de Polignac. Perhaps the wonderful woman might take up with her too? For her perverse and twisted nature this was a much more appropriate erotic fantasy than the usual banal notion of the ‘wealthy admirer’. To become the King’s favourite mistress would be a wonderful thing — one that every Frenchwoman dreamt about then, and continued to do so for over a century, and that Hollywood dreams about still. But to become the Queen’s minion would be a hundred times more interesting. Meanwhile her Valois fantasies must have taken on ever more colourful hues. One day the Queen would suddenly discover her. “Ma chère cousine,” she would say, “I need someone to whom I can open my heart, someone with whom I can be as one human being with another,” and, taking her hand, would lead her into the secret, velvet interiors of Le Petit Trianon. In Jeanne’s mind the boundary between dreams and reality had long been blurred. Alongside the reality of everyday life, another, more brilliant and surreal reality — the Valois reality — existed for her, as it had ever since her childhood as a beggar. And who could possibly say where the truth began and ended? Thus, by degrees, she persuaded herself that she really was the Queen’s confidante. She must have believed it. Had she not, she would not have been able to lie so convincingly. She felt this ‘Valois-reality’ as an actual something, and it was her duty to find a way to bring it to Paris, and into the Rue St Gilles.

The Queen’s intimate friendships had planted ideas in other women’s heads before Jeanne’s. Earlier, two female fraudsters had put it about that they were royal confidantes. One was Mme de Cahouet de Villiers (or ‘Villers’, according to Mme Campan) who with the help of the King’s financial intendant got her hands on some samples of the Queen’s signature, learnt to reproduce them with remarkable fidelity, and swindled an extremely expensive dress from Mme Bertin; she then wrote herself a letter in the Queen’s name asking her secretly to borrow 200,000 francs on her behalf, and the fermier général Beranger had paid out. The deception duly came to light, the woman was incarcerated in the St Pelagia prison, and her husband had to repay the ‘royal loan’. In 1782, a second lady claimed that she was a close friend not only of the Queen but also of Mesdames de Lamballe and de Polignac. She signed nothing in the Queen’s name, but instead requisitioned goods under a royal seal which the Princesse de Polignac had misappropriated from the Queen’s table. Strangest of all, this woman’s name was also de la Motte, her husband being a relation of Jeanne’s. When she was released from the Bastille, where she too was sent for her various frauds, the two ladies took up the connection.

This latter episode showed Jeanne what she should have realised after the first: that the idea of posing as an intimate of the Queen was not original. She was in the same situation — for a person of genius — as Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Like them, Shakespeare had learnt everything he knew, in terms of subject matter, style and method, from those who had gone before — and yet his work stands at the apex of human achievement, towering over all others.

A rather neat saying of Chamfort, who was one of Jeanne’s contemporaries, comes to mind: “There is no species of virtue that can raise the social rank of a woman; only vice can accomplish that.”

How it all started, no one can say. We cannot be certain at what precise moment the idea struck her, and the artist herself shrouded the circumstances in mystery. We have no idea by what sort of skilful overtures she prepared the way, or even how she broached the subject with the Cardinal. All we can be certain about is the way the plan worked and the unstoppable course it took.

According to the Abbé Georgel it was Rohan who complained to her in confidence about how much the Queen’s attitude and behaviour distressed him. “That confidence,” the Abbé tells us, “suddenly made her proposed deception easy. It was one that has few parallels in the long annals of human folly.”

Jeanne told the Cardinal about her ‘intimate friendship’ with the Queen. Thereafter, from time to time, as in the strictest confidence, she would show him letters written on white, watermarked paper, with pale borders and the royal lily of France in the left-hand corners, supposedly written by Marie-Antoinette to her cousine, Jeanne de Valois.

She must certainly have managed this part with some skill, since the Cardinal finally asked her to put a word in for him with her friend. She quickly brought news that she had spoken about him to the Queen. The Queen had heard her out in silence, but without any show of sympathy. She felt that the situation was hopeless.

Then she appeared with altogether more cheering news of her latest secret trip to Versailles. The Queen was taking her more and more into her confidence, and was slowly starting to reconsider her long-established prejudice against the Cardinal. She was beginning to see through the base intrigues of Comte Mercy-Argenteau, which had always represented Rohan in a bad light, and she had been touched by the magnanimity Rohan had shown over the trouble that had befallen his nephew, the Prince de Guéménée. In short, she was coming round to the view that the Cardinal was a fundamentally decent man. Finally in May, having faithfully promised Rohan that she would do everything she could to advance his interests, Jeanne was able to announce, with a radiant smile, that it would not be long before he was restored to royal favour.

Rohan, the most uncritical child of that most critical age, believed everything. Success increased Jeanne’s boldness. She told him to observe the Queen carefully when she passed beside him in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, when she would make a sign with her head in his direction. (When I was a child, my father similarly suggested that the Emperor Franz Josef would acknowledge me in Fürdo˝ street.) And Rohan believed that too. When the Queen raised her head, it would be a subtle indication of her increasing friendliness. The gesture was of course intended not for him but for anyone who happened to be standing there.

Then Jeanne took another step forward. She instructed him, in the Queen’s name, to write a petition justifying his actions vis-à-vis the accusations made against him. Rohan composed his document with the greatest of care, tearing it up twenty times before finally handing it over.

The reply was swift. “I am most glad,” the Queen wrote, “not to have to consider you guilty any longer. I cannot at present grant you the audience you ask for, but I will send you a sign as soon as circumstances permit. Be discreet.”

This was the Queen’s first letter to Rohan. “Those few words,” the Abbé Georgel wrote afterwards, “threw the Cardinal into raptures it would be difficult to describe. Mme de la Motte was from that point onwards his guardian angel, smoothing his path to happiness. From that moment on, she could have whatever she wanted from him.”

On her advice, the Cardinal replied expressing his delight. The Queen’s next response was followed by a rapid exchange of letters. None has survived, for reasons which will be made clear. But the Abbé Georgel, who saw and read them, affirmed that those written by the Queen showed a clearly discernible progression. The tone becomes increasingly cordial, seeming to promise more and more. They give the impression of Jeanne’s well-judged pleadings and Rohan’s well-worded letters working their effect, and the Queen’s heart steadily softening towards her admirer.

Now the Cardinal sat, in his official residence, the Hôtel de Strasbourg, in almost continuous conference with his advisors, Cagliostro and the Swiss Baron Planta. The whole Palace was filled with a hopeful, springlike air of expectation. Perhaps nothing was said openly, but everywhere he was met with conspiratorial smiles of congratulation. Those letters were about more than the Queen’s general goodwill. She was letting him know personally that she would receive him back into favour as soon as she could summon him openly. And then, in the silence of the night …

Elsewhere too, the days were spent in a fever of excitement. Everywhere the very ground under people’s feet seemed to be becoming less certain. Finance Minister Calonne was a kind and intelligent man, but he could do nothing: that terrifying chasm the deficit yawned wider and wider, threatening to swallow everything. Paris sweltered in the appalling, pestilential heat of summer. Far better at such a time to be at Saverne … but Rohan continued to wait in the Hôtel de Strasbourg — to wait, and believe that his star was approaching its zenith.

Finally the longed-for moment arrived. The Queen’s message read: “Be in the park at Versailles, tomorrow night, in the Bosquet de Vénus.” ‘Tomorrow’ would be 11th August 1784.

In the Bosquet de Vénus: Venus’ Bower … How much promise lay in that name!

The following evening Rohan was in the park. He wore a large black cloak, as agreed, and a broad-brimmed hat pulled down low over his eyes and, thus attired, wandered along the deserted pathways. From time to time he encountered amorous couples out late; sometimes he was startled by the sudden calling of birds. If the romantic drama had then been in existence, we might have thought of him as one of its heroes. But it wasn’t. Rohan was a precursor.

He walked until late. The night was very dark. He finally withdrew beside a broad flight of steps. This was the Bower of Venus, so called because there were plans to set up a statue to the goddess there. It was never erected, and the bower was later named the Bosquet de la Reine, in memory of this particular night.

Inside the bower it was particularly dark. Not a single light shone in the windows of the vast palace. The eternal fountains were silent, the trees tossed and whispered to one another, and the statues of classical gods were a ghostly white presence among the bushes.

Footsteps were heard. Three people were approaching: two women and a man. The man Rohan recognised as the Comte de la Motte. One of the women was Jeanne de Valois. The other woman …

The Comte and Comtesse stopped outside, and the woman stepped hesitantly into the bower. Now he recognised her: it was the face … or rather, he seemed to discern the contours … the way she walked … the dress he knew very well: it was the full Gallic cloak recently painted by Mme Vigée-Lebrun in the portrait now hanging in the Salon. Rohan made a deep bow and kissed the hem of her dress. It was not an empty gesture: it was the only way he could express what he was feeling.

The lady murmured something in a low voice; extremely low. But Rohan understood, or thought that he understood, the words:

“You may hope. Let us forget the past.” And a rose fell from her hand.

“Monseigneur, down on thy knees,” Carlyle shouts at this point to Rohan, from the distance of half-a-century. “Never can red breeches be better wasted.” Rohan knelt.

Then a shadow loomed.

“Quick, quick, you must be off!” it hissed, with theatrical huskiness. “Madame and the Comtesse d’Artois are coming.”

La Motte stepped into the bower and plucked the Queen away, while Jeanne took the Cardinal by the arm and led him off. Rohan pulled his hat even further down over his eyes. A sweet delirium filled his soul. It did not occur to him to wonder what the King’s sister and sister-in-law might be doing in the darkness of the park.

We can inform our gentle readers that the husky theatrical tones were those of Réteaux de Villette, Jeanne’s confidant (no doubt in the fullest sense of the word) and the one who had written the Queen’s letters, at her dictation, in his exquisite, feminine hand. Later he admitted that there had been an element of inclination—seductiveness — in the letters, but he then withdrew the remark and would only concede that the their tone had been agréable.

But who was ‘the Queen’?

La Motte would often stroll in the garden of the Palais Royal, the residence of the Duc d’Orléans. It was during this period that the building attained the form and outline we see today, but while it was being built the garden remained open to the public. It was here that all sorts of lesser nobility, people like La Motte himself, would take the air — cardsharpers, rumour-mongers, gigolos, the whole aristocratic underworld, whose prince was the palace’s owner, Philippe-Égalité. Of course they were not the only people moving about. “There is nowhere like it in the round world,” writes Mercier. “You can visit London, Amsterdam, Madrid and Vienna, and see nothing that resembles it. A prisoner could live there and never get bored: it would be years before he even thought about freedom. They call it the capital of Paris. Here you can find everything: a young man of twenty with an income of 50,000 livres might enter this fairy garden and never be able to leave.”

Here, under the trees, came all those children of the age whose passion was for free and open talk about the deepest questions of the time — religion, politics, the future of the monarchy, and the great changes impending. This is where public opinion was born. This is where the Revolution was born.

All Europe has at some time or another had much to thank the Palais Royal for. You too, gentle reader, will at some point take a stroll there, or we hope you will. When you do, take a good look at the statue of Camille Desmoulins. He seems to have leapt up into his chair just this instant; his huge head of hair flies in the wind, like the hair of a madman. The very air around him trembles with the excitement of youth — the youth of all mankind.

The Palais Royal was in effect a coffee house. People sat, either beneath the arcades or outside, in the kiosks dotted about the garden, sipping those cunning potions you can still buy in St Mark’s Square in Venice, which they so closely resembled. Inside was the Exchange, where the life of commerce pulsed and raged before it was given a palatial building of its own. In the eighteenth century the speculator was still part of a colourful democracy, rubbing shoulders with the gigolo, the oral reporter (that is, gossip columnist) and the streetwalker. It was all very Bohemian, not yet lent a corpulent dignity by wealth. And there were foreigners here too. Foreigners usually end up in the Bohemian district, as a consequence of their own lack of social position. (The English were making trips to Paris for a bit of immorality even then.) In August 1785 five theatres were playing in the Palais Royal: the Ombres Chinoises, the Pygmées Françaises, the Vrais Fantoccini Italiens, Les Variétés Amusantes and Mme de Beaujolais’s Petits Comédiens.

Beneath the arcades stood a cheerful assembly of jewellers’ shops and boutiques selling women’s things, in front of which paraded les filles, as the French euphemistically termed those young ladies whose careers guaranteed that filles—maidens — was the one thing they were not. At the time of our story the Palais Royal was the most famous place not just in Paris but in the whole world, for such maidenly gatherings.

Among the regulars was a young woman called Marie-Nicole Leguay. By day she was a worker in one of the fashion shops where Jeanne had begun her career. In her free time she walked the Palais Royal, and it was there that La Motte first came across her.

He must have been instantly struck by her single interesting feature — her remarkable resemblance to Marie-Antoinette. On this every contemporary source agrees. The portrait still in Funck-Brentano’s collection reveals the same round, listless face, the slightly protruding lower lip, the soft features, the tall, fine head of hair. La Motte stood before her as before the Angel of the Lord.

He instantly propositioned her.

Next, he accompanied her to her home, where what passed between them took the same course as it would between many thousands of similar acquaintances made at the Palais Royal that evening. But at first La Motte preserved a deep silence about his real intentions. Some time later he invited the girl back to his house, where the Comtesse received her with a conspicuous display of friendliness. Soon, she even gave her a more suitable name so that she could deal on equal terms in the fashionable quarter. She became the Baronne d’Oliva — the letters deriving from ‘Valois’, further evidence of Jeanne’s strange obsession.

The young woman was completely charmed by the Comtesse, especially when she came to understand whom she was dealing with — the intimate friend of Marie-Antoinette. And since the Baronne d’Oliva was a particularly, indeed infinitely, well-intentioned soul, how could she possibly refuse when the Comtesse asked her one day if she would do her a personal favour, really just a trifle, but it would be doing the Queen a very great service. And of course she could count on the Queen’s gratitude. She would get 15,000 livres, and a present, my dear, a personal present, to at least the same value, though what it would be she couldn’t yet say. What she would have to do, it was really nothing, just hand over a letter, and a single rose, to a noble gentleman at Versailles.

“It wasn’t difficult persuading her,” Jeanne admitted later. “She was really stupid.”

“O Ixion de Rohan, happiest mortal of this world!” exclaims Carlyle, comparing the Cardinal to the character in Greek mythology who fell in love with Hera, the Queen of the Skies, and was made by the malicious gods to embrace her in the semblance of a cloud. If ever there were happy days in Rohan’s life they must have been those that followed the scene in the bower. What an experience for his soul, with its deep yearning for mysticism and wonder: the park, the dark night, the Queen’s appearance out of the gloom — almost like something imagined — the fevered words, the rose let fall to the ground, and the secrecy surrounding everything. Why had the Queen been so nervous? What lay behind that? Perhaps she was ashamed of her feelings that night? … And indeed perhaps it was better that she did vanish, like an apparition. Had she stayed there a moment longer the truth would have come out — and the Cardinal had had his fill of truth, which had lavished too many of its gifts upon him:

You who are weary of the truth,

Embrace the slippery pearls of dreams.

Jeanne was indeed a kindly villain. Like Faust, and other devils of myth and legend, she gave Rohan what his heart desired. No other mortal could have done more than that.

And she seemed to realise it, because she quickly set about cashing in. On the Queen’s behalf she let Rohan know that she would look very kindly on it if he could lend her 50,000 livres: an impoverished relative was in urgent need of assistance, and just at that moment she did not have the ready cash to hand. Rohan was delighted that the Queen had taken him so far into her confidence as to ask him for money. He quickly raised the sum from a moneylender, since he too had no cash to spare at that time …

Jeanne waited in suspense for the packet to arrive. It was late. Perhaps Rohan after all … perhaps he was not as gullible as she had thought? Had it all come to nothing — the Baronne, the bower, that memorable night? But behold, it arrived, delivered by Baron Planta. Shrewd as ever, Jeanne now urged Rohan in the Queen’s name to return to Saverne for a while, and send her another 50,000 livres from there. The Cardinal duly obeyed.

So — as no doubt many a gypsy had assured Jeanne it would — money came at last to the La Motte household. But Jeanne was not the sort to lack ideas of how to squander it all at the first opportunity. She immediately bought two houses, one back home in Bar-sur-Aube, and a summer holiday home; she paid the Baronne d’Oliva 4,000 livres and promptly threw her out; and she ran up a vast amount of debt.

We believe that this last 50,000 livres, together with the 100,000 francs she had borrowed from Rohan in the Queen’s name, was not an end in itself. It was just an experimental balloon, to satisfy her curiosity as to whether the Cardinal really would send her the money for the Queen. The real business, the great and fateful business, was still to come.