by Juliet Grey
Your affectionate brother,
Axel
Throughout the autumn months of 1785, I endeavored to go about my days as I always had. I was grateful for Axel’s strength and solace during these dark days, but I feared I was poor company, for I could do little more than weep. In the late summer, when the court traveled to Saint-Cloud, I became eager to show France that I was hardly the rapacious ogre depicted in the licentious and libelous pamphlets, opening the gardens to the public so they could witness my promenades with my children. I enjoyed carriage rides through the Bois de Boulogne, and cradled the dauphin in my arms—he was far too tiny for his age—as I strolled through the palace grounds.
I have always been proud, and even in my extremity I would not dignify my detractors by permitting them to see me suffer. And so I endeavored to pass my days as though my reputation was not in jeopardy, trusting (in vain, perhaps) that I had made the right decision by insisting that the cardinal be tried before the Parlement, rather than punished strictly by the king for his lèse-majesté, his crime of treason against me, as his sovereign.
On October 10, we journeyed to Fontainebleau, but even there I could not conceal my anxiety, for all I overheard was gossip about the trial, and the onerous imprisonment of the prince de Rohan. I was shocked to the core to discover that courtiers of the highest rank genuinely believed that I had secretly commissioned him to purchase the diamond necklace on my behalf. Yet I had known absolutely nothing of the entire transaction until Herr Böhmer’s visit the previous July and would not be dissuaded from my assumption that the cardinal, aware that he had long run afoul of my esteem, intended to besmirch my good name by using it to swindle the jewelers out of a priceless necklace, which he then planned to sell in order to discharge his embarrassingly massive encumbrances.
But Louis and I had more to fret about than the details emerging from the increasingly sordid trial. France’s economic woes had grown steadily worse, compounded by a bad harvest. In August I had summoned our former Minister of Finance, Monsieur Necker—he of the daughter whom Axel had briefly considered marrying—and begged him to return to the government as Treasury Secretary. “C’est vrai that in the past I have not been enamored of many of your progressive reforms,” I told Necker, “but you have been the only man to have captured the confidence of the people. I appeal to you on behalf of the king and the nation to set aside our differences.”
The winter months of 1785–86 were particularly severe. Peasants flocked from the countryside in droves to the capital expecting there to be enough bread, but the bakers of Paris had not the grain to sustain everyone. Prices soared and people starved.
By February, I was nearly as miserable, enduring my most difficult pregnancy thus far, quickly putting on weight as if I was strapping all the burdens of the world to my belly. And I could not admit, even to the abbé Vermond, that I was displeased about the prospect of bearing another child, as he had been conceived not out of love (for my heart now belonged to Axel), but out of duty. Having turned thirty the previous November 2, I was now as old as the prudish collets-montés I had mocked in my youth when I dared anyone over the age of one-score-and-ten to show their ancient face at a court devoted to gaiety and youth.
February brought frustrating news as well, regarding the affair of the diamond necklace.
Angered that the cardinal should be tried in a civil forum and believing that he should be the one to sanction him for his frivolity, Pope Pius VI was convinced that such an eminent man as the prince de Rohan could not have committed an actual crime. On February 13, 1786, the Vatican meted out its own punishment when twenty-six cardinals voted to suspend the Grand Almoner of France from the exercise of his cardinalic rights and privileges.
“This amounts to little better than a reprimand,” I fumed to Madame Campan. She assured me that, being a civil body, the Parlement would treat the cardinal more harshly. But she could not meet my gaze when she spoke those words. “You have read the trial briefs?” I asked her.
She nodded. “But it was difficult to find them; they are selling like mad. And they are disgusting. Nothing but lies from one lawyer after another. Professionally penned propaganda with but three purposes: to exonerate their client, enrich themselves, and delude an unsuspecting public into believing that the pamphlets contain the truth. Regrettably, these fictions influence the magistrates as well. It seems that everyone would prefer to glean their information from the trial briefs, which are written in some chilly garret across the courtyard, than from the testimony itself. I would not wish Your Majesty to see them, for they might affect your condition,” she said, with a glance at my swelling belly. “The best news I can give you is that there was such an outcry over the privileges accorded to the cardinal by the comte de Launay, that once the depositions were completed and the trial itself began, he was remanded from the governor’s apartments to a subterranean cell.” I was pleased to hear that my nemesis no longer slept on a feather bed and dined on wine and oysters. Nor was he permitted visitors any longer, deprived from spreading his falsehoods and calumnies to the sympathetic souls, many of them his friends and relations from the upper reaches of the nobility, who had made pilgrimages to the prison fortress bearing gifts intended to ease the exigencies of his incarceration. I had heard, however, that he consistently reminded his inquisitors of his rank and title by wearing his full ecclesiastical attire—the scarlet robes of office, calotte, hose, and biretta—whenever he was taken for questioning.
The trial itself had finally commenced in January 1786, after more than three months of depositions. The witnesses testified in the Palais de Justice, while the the prisoners were interrogated in the Bastille’s council chamber; the prince de Rohan was personally conducted to each appearance by the prison governor—not a mark of distrust, but of respect.
The magistrates had discussed the unpleasant notion of dispatching a delegation of notaries to Versailles to depose me as well, but the king refused, sparing me the indecency and indignity. Instead, I graciously consented to forward the information in my possession to the Parlement. The document was titled “Information Considered of Sufficient Importance to be Communicated to the Keeper of the Seals for the Purpose of the Enlightenment of the King and of his Parlement de Paris in the Cause of Justice in the Diamond Necklace Affair.” There was now nothing for me to do but wait—and pray daily that the magistrates would mete out the proper, weighty sentences commensurate with a crime against the Crown.
TWENTY-SIX
Justice
SPRING 1786
At the beginning of the third week in May, I journeyed to the capital to speak with the marquis d’Aligre, the president of the Parlement de Paris; and Maîtres de Villotran and de Marcé, the two justices chosen to conduct the initial investigation and hearing of the witnesses and defendants. We met at the Tuileries Palace. I scarcely noticed the shabby condition of the château—the peeling paint and crumbling walls—for they were not the subject of my errand.
“I hear they are all accusing one another,” I said. “And everything has become like a circus instead of a trial. I have read in the nouvelles about all manner of insults flying, even candlesticks being hurled. That must be good for the Crown, non?”
Maître de Marcé chuckled. “It is the law, Majesté. The defendants have the right to cross-examine one another.”
“So if one of them can challenge the lies another has been telling during the investigation, tell me, why has no one stood up and shouted, ‘The comtesse de Lamotte-Valois is not the queen’s lover!’ ” The magistrates looked at me, their jaws agape. “You are supposed to be reasonable men. Do you believe this woman? It seems to be clear from the testimony of her secretary, Monsieur de Villette—who was also one of her paramours—that he forged all of the letters written in my name, as well as the contract of sale for the diamond necklace, and falsified my signature every time it was required. And yet Madame de Lamotte-Valois has the gall to say in court, in the sight of God, that she and I—mon Die
u! I have never yet laid eyes upon this so-called comtesse, who I have heard also testified that I gave her wagonloads of jewelry, plate, and furnishings. And yet not a single voice has been raised in the Grand Chambre to challenge these monstrous lies!” I offered to send my first lady of the bedchamber Madame Campan, the duchesse de Polignac, the princesse de Lamballe, or all three, to testify on my behalf if necessary, but the marquis d’Aligre insisted that there was no need, that it would merely lessen the dignity of the Crown.
“It is best, Your Majesty, if you remain as discreet as possible and allow the wheels of justice to turn without endeavoring to manipulate them,” said the president of the Parlement. I regarded his countenance; I have never trusted men with small eyes. Nor would the queen of France be chided by a bureaucrat, especially one who might truly be the paramour of the comtesse de Lamotte-Valois.
“And what of the cardinal?” I continued. “He is certainly guilty of lèse-majesté. He has dishonored my name and deserves the harshest possible penalty for compromising the reputation of the monarch.” Daily I bore the insult anew when ladies of the court dared to appear wearing the bonnets that were all the mode in Paris—straw birettas “au Cardinal,” trimmed with red and yellow ribbons—couleur du cardinal sur la paille—the color of the cardinal in straw, a reference to the pallet he was said to sleep on in his damp and chilly prison cell.
As he finally began to appreciate the full measure of my distress, with cautious deference President d’Aligre assured me of his support and that of the pair of examining magistrates. “Maître de Villotran, in particular, is especially persuasive, and he will no doubt exert both his knowledge of the matter and his influence upon the balance of the tribunal during the final interrogation of the accused.”
A few days later, Messieurs de Marcé and de Villotran submitted the entire dossier of the case to Maître de Fleury, the Prosecutor General, in an envelope bound with a red wax seal. His report and recommendations would then be presented to the judges of the Grand Chambre and the Tournelle, who would preside over the final phase of the trial.
My anxiety about their verdict weighed heavily upon me, exacerbating my physical discomfort. By now I was more than five months’ gone and larger than I had been during any of my previous pregnancies. The duchesse de Polignac had borne the brunt of my irritability, for I had grown exasperated with her perpetual requests for more and greater favors. “When a sovereign raises up favorites in her court, she raises up despots against herself,” I lamented to Madame Campan, who had been by my side throughout the affair of the diamond necklace. Heartily sick of the duchesse’s domestic tyranny I cheerfully granted Gabrielle’s request to visit England, but the gossips spun a different, and fantastical tale, asserting that the Polignac had journeyed to London to convince the comte de Lamotte-Valois to surrender himself.
Public interest in the trial of l’affaire du collier was unprecedented, as were the proceedings themselves. Never had one of the highest men in France been accused of a crime against the person of the Crown. The lawyers’ trial briefs continued to sell faster than bread and nearly every day the young boys hawking the news sheets could be heard in the streets of the capital crying “Du nouveau! Du nouveau!” announcing the publication of yet another preposterous effort to exonerate one of the defendants.
Vile verses and cruel on-dits were circulated about the salons and cafés; some had such lengthy tentacles that they found their way to the court of Imperial Russia. And who was most vilified by these poems and songs? I—the one innocent figure in the entire sordid ordeal!
Madame Campan insisted I was making myself ill by entertaining them at all. “You should be resting, Majesté.”
“Maman can’t rest, madame; she’s teaching me the satin stitch.” Seven-year-old Madame Royale was seated on my lap with an embroidery hoop in her small hands.
“You must lay the stitches right next to each other with equal tension—like this,” I said taking the needle and silken thread to demonstrate. “The flower should look just like the one on the princesse’s sleeve.” I nudged my daughter off my knees. “Why don’t you practice in the green chair?”
I rose and removed two of the ugly broadsheets from the hands of the princesse de Lamballe. “If you will not read these calumnies, I will. Écoutez bien.” Propped up by the bolster on my daybed at le Petit Trianon, I began to read two of the ditties aloud.
“Oliva says, ‘He’s such a goose!’
Lamotte insists, ‘He’s morally loose.’
His Eminence claims he’s just obtuse
Hallelujah!
Red are his robes from the Holy See.
‘Black is his heart,’ said Queen Marie.
‘We’ll whitewash his name,’ the judges agree.
Hallelujah!”
“Regrettably, this completely sums up public opinion,” I bemoaned, thinking perhaps I should have held my impressionable daughter’s ears. “Eh bien, this one pretends to be a dialogue between myself and the demimondaine who impersonated me in the gardens.
“ ‘Vile harlot, it becomes you ill
To play my role of queen!’
‘I think not, my sovereign,
You so often play mine!’ ”
My hands flew to my breast. “I am going to be sick.” Madame Campan fetched a Sèvres basin and held my head while I vomited into the bowl.
Beneath the gilded medieval vaulting a crush of perspiring and over-perfumed spectators sat brocaded elbow to satin elbow on the benches in the two galleries of the Palais de Justice’s Grand Chambre. Even the worst seats were being sold for astronomical sums, and on any day a lucky man might make his fortune by retailing his privilege to sit on an unforgiving bench for nine hours to a soul even more desperate for sensationalism. The preliminary investigation had been conducted in secret, with the lawyers’ fictionalized trial briefs the only way for the public to learn what was transpiring behind the walls of the Palais de Justice.
Lengthy as those hearings had been, they were, however, merely a tantalizing appetizer. The succulent main course of this bizarre feast was the public trial that was about to commence before the magistrates of the Parlement, all of whom were members of the nobility or the clergy.
The trial was being presided over by a rare joint session of the Grand Chambre and Tournelle magistrates, Paris’s two courts of Parlement. Because of the unusual nature of the case and the illustrious personages involved, the courts would convene as a single body within the larger venue, the Grand Chambre.
The proceedings opened on May 22 with Maître Titon de Villotran’s reading of the report detailing the months of preliminary proceedings, a recitation that continued for a full week. The culmination of his recital on May 29 signaled the transfer of the accused from the Bastille to the Conciergerie, the prison fortress adjacent to the Palais de Justice. From there, they would be escorted to the Grand Chambre for the concluding hearing of the trial.
The following morning, the flamboyant Count Cagliostro declared before the sixty periwigged magistrates, “I am a noble voyager, Nature’s unfortunate child.” His exotic accent and mélange of languages amused the Parlement, but the carnival atmosphere quickly turned grim.
Clad head to toe in black satin, a weeping Rétaux de Villette faced the justices, hoping to avoid the punishment for larceny and forgery by maintaining that he had been acting merely as Madame de Lamotte’s secretary.
The lady herself was attired in her lucky gown, blue-gray satin banded in black velvet. About her slender shoulders she had draped an embroidered muslin cape trimmed with fine net. Perched upon the small stool called the sellette, reserved for the defendant in a court of law, for the next three hours the comtesse faced the judges and remained regally defiant.
Heightening the curiosity of the spectators on the unforgiving benches in the hall and in the galleries above, she had vowed as she first drew her skirts about her on the sellette, “I will expose a great rascal”; yet she proceeded to name no one, instead deflecting the
magistrates’ questions about the letters purportedly exchanged between the cardinal and the queen. Pretending to protect her sovereign’s name, the comtesse laid the guilt upon her ecclesiastical lover, sending the tribunal into an uproar when she confessed that the Grand Almoner had shown her more than two hundred letters sent to him by Marie Antoinette, addressing him as “thou” and “thee,” and appointing the times for their clandestine trysts.
Defending his name and honor and that of the House of Rohan, the cardinal refused to sit, preferring to stand before the Parlement. “If I am guilty of anything,” he said with a rare display of humility, “it is the crime of having a blinding, overwhelming desire to acquire the good graces of Her Sovereign Majesty.”
Dawn had not yet risen when the cardinal’s relations, a panoply of sumptuously attired Rohans, Guéménés, and Soubises, filed into the Grand Chambre and like silent sentinels ringed the stone walls frescoed with fleurs-de-lis. An hour later, at five o’clock, in anticipation of His Eminence’s testimony that morning the streets surrounding the Cour de Mai, the courtyard of the Palais de Justice, teemed with humanity, sorely testing the resources of the Paris foot guard and the mounted police. The courtyard itself was packed so tightly with people that one couldn’t exit through the iron gates without risking bodily injury.
The septuagenarian Prosecutor General Joly de Fleury, stooped and wizened, opened the proceedings at six, unsealing the recommendations for sentencing. The crown was not permitted to make any direct suggestions, although it had been clearly understood that Her Majesty, who was awaiting the news at Versailles, expected the harshest penalties to be levied, especially against the comtesse and the cardinal. The spectators in the galleries grew breathless; gloved hands clutched the embellished sleeves of adjacent strangers.