The cardinal continues. “I believed I was pleasing Her Majesty because I received a letter from Her Majesty commissioning me to undertake the purchase.”
“How could you ever have imagined, sir, that I would ask you to do such a thing?” I cannot mask either my indignation or my anger. “I have not spoken to you in eight years! Not since you returned, rejected, from Vienna have I said a single word to you. In fact, I treat you with nothing but coldness, and despite your stubborn requests, I have never granted you an audience. I would never select as a mediator such a person as the one you name.” I am close to crying, but I gather all my dignity and glare at him hotly instead.
“Witnessing the agitation of Her Majesty,” the cardinal says simply, “I now see quite clearly. Unmistakably, I have been duped. My ardent wish to be of service to Your Majesty blinded me.”
To our amazement, he has come to this meeting somewhat prepared. From his sleeve, he produces a note. With false humility, he inclines his head and holds up the piece of paper. Immediately the King takes it from him and begins to read. My heart drums with astonishing rapidity against my chest.
With full severity, the King pronounces, “This letter was neither written by nor signed by the Queen. Are you, sir, of the House of Rohan? Are you the Grand Almoner? How could you possibly imagine that the Queen would sign herself as ‘Marie Antoinette de France’?” The Queen never deigns to present herself so crudely. Her Christian name, alone, always represents the Queen. Everyone knows who she is. There has never been a single occasion on which she appends the phrase ‘de France.’ What need does ‘Marie Antoinette,’ the Queen, have for ‘de France’? Furthermore, all queens and kings merely sign their documents with their baptismal names. Surely you and your family are aware of the convention! The letter is an obvious forgery, and I can only ask how could you be such a villain?”
The King orders the cardinal to retire to an adjacent room to write out his account of the matter. As soon as he leaves the room, I burst into tears for a moment. Quickly I regain my composure, and we all chatter at once about the stupidity of forging a letter ending in the signature “Marie Antoinette de France.” The King tells us his intention to have the cardinal arrested, no matter what explanation he offers. When the keeper of the seals asks if it is wise to arrest the cardinal while he is wearing his scarlet robes, the King replies, “The name of the Queen is precious to me and it has been compromised.” As soon as the cardinal reappears in the room, now looking rather frightened, the King places Breteuil, the cardinal’s enemy, in charge. I see the prelate blanch as he hears Breteuil’s name pronounced as the person who shall conduct the investigation.
When the King tells the cardinal that he shall shortly be arrested, the cardinal pleads for “the reputation of my family name.”
The King responds in a sharp, ironic tone that he will try to shelter the cardinal’s relatives from the disgrace. “I do what I must do, as a King and as a husband.”
He then orders the cardinal to leave and subsequently arranges for the arrest to occur as the cardinal traverses the Hall of Mirrors, where all the court will be gathered. The cardinal is to be conducted straightaway to the Bastille. Breteuil is to arrange for the sealing of the cardinal’s residence and all his papers there.
My heart overflows with gratitude for the King’s defense of my name, and for his firm decisiveness.
Thus, I am vindicated in a single afternoon by my champion, the King.
IT IS A GREAT PLEASURE to throw myself into the role of Rosine. Even while I am acting the part onstage, a part of my mind is saying, “You are not the maligned Queen; you are the young and simple maid Rosine.” Then I feel her emotions, her gaiety, her alarm, her vibrancy a thousand times more intensely. Artois is splendid as Count Almaviva. Vaudreuil could have played Almaviva just as well, but he is adorable in The Barber of Seville as Figaro. He brings his high spirits to the role, and it amuses Yolande no end to see him as a barber.
I make the very most of my role. Those privileged to see the performance universally exclaim that I play the role as well as any real actress. The King is delighted with my acting, and the tiny theater a few minutes’ walk from Trianon has never been more charming.
Because it is blue inside, I think of the blue interior of the balloon with Montauciel the sheep aboard. In my theater, I feel as though I have entered the balloon and here live in an enchanted world where all turns out well.
SAD DAYS
I am happy to be with the King these days, for I continue to be as grateful as I was the moment when he spoke in my behalf as a husband and as a king. I give him a warmer warmth when he comes to me, and I am more determined than I ever have been that he will take pleasure in our bed. Although I know that I am utterly innocent in the imbroglio involving the cardinal, I feel guilty—perhaps for past extravagances. It gives me a sort of wicked pleasure to feel when the King and I are together that I am doing my duty, as a good wife should, be she queen or peasant or shopkeeper’s spouse.
As soon as the performance of The Barber of Seville is over, we leave for Saint-Cloud. As September with its change of season comes on again, I am outdoors a great deal, riding in the open carriage with the Comte d’Artois, whose mischievous and naughty tongue makes me laugh and laugh and forget his ambitious side.
Sometimes I ride in the Bois de Boulogne. I have had the large painting made in 1783 of me riding in the hunt with the King brought to Saint-Cloud. It is not in the tender style of Vigée-Lebrun, this painter being Louis-Auguste Brun, but Elisabeth does not paint horses. Actually I look as though I am about to fall from the horse, but the posture displays my gray riding habit and tall plumed hat to great advantage. My horse is painted in the very act of leaping a ditch. Under the arch of his forelegs one sees in the distance a miniature line of other riders. It is really quite charming, but I suppose it is a sign of my age that I now prefer to look at the painting and derive vicarious enjoyment instead of actually riding at such a clip.
Occasionally I hear gossip or actual information that adds to the increasingly scandalous tale of the diamond necklace. Some people, as is only to be expected, believe that the cardinal actually gave me the necklace in exchange for certain favors of the flesh. Such a preposterous notion almost makes me laugh, but then I find my eyes full of tears at the outrage of the idea. The King told me that he gave the cardinal a choice of trial by the Parlement of Paris, or a royal verdict and sentence, and the cardinal has chosen the trial.
Someone said that at the time of his arrest, Rohan was able to slip a note to his valet directing that his papers, in a certain red valise, be destroyed at once. In any case, Breteuil’s investigators found little left at the cardinal’s residence to merit its sealing.
Here at Saint-Cloud, I allow people who come out from Paris to stroll around the grounds and to gawk at the royal family. It’s quite different, in that way, from life at my Trianon. Cafés have actually sprung up along the way to feed the people on their Sunday outings. They seem so delighted to see me with the Dauphin or my other children that I feel loved again by the populace.
I indulge a whim to have a yacht built for myself, and in October I very much enjoy gliding down the Seine to Fountainebleau. When we pass the Invalides, cannon go off in a fine salute, as they did when I first entered Paris. But we do not stop at Paris.
Fontainebleau is always a sparkling setting for concerts and entertainments, but I prefer to stay in my own chambers there. Often I find myself half–lying down doing nothing, not even my beloved needlework. A great lassitude comes over me. Until this scandal is settled, I seem disengaged from myself and my life.
THE STORY HAS IT that I was impersonated in the gardens of Versailles, that the cardinal was sent a forged letter by Jeanne La Motte, pretending to be me, calling for a rendezvous with the cardinal. She actually hired a prostitute, a woman named Oliva, who bore an uncanny resemblance to me, to speak with him. Their meeting was brief, and she was heavily veiled in black, they say, but he was
certain it was I.
At the trial, I feel sure, people will see this trollop, and those who know me will remark the resemblance. I myself will not be there, and the King has promised that my name will be pronounced as little as possible.
HERE IS THE KING, all sweaty and dusty from hunting in the woods of Fontainebleau. He says he has come in early, that he had a premonition that I might be in some despair. He has come to comfort me. I hold out my arms to him.
The silk counterpane is ruined when he comes to me half-clothed, but there are many others like it in the storage closets. The careful matching and shading of colors in the room will not be disrupted.
After his bath, the King and I sit together with a small round table between us. “People are saying,” the King remarks, “that the cardinal is more fool than knave, that he was quite deceived by Jeanne La Motte, who was his mistress. He was not her accomplice, perhaps, but her victim.”
Neither he nor I can grant any credence to this account.
FOR CHRISTMAS, I ask the factory at Sèvres to prepare settings of porcelain with inset jewels. They will be the most expensive I have ever ordered, but when I hold one of the sample cups in my hand, the large ruby on the cup catches the light in just such a way as to make me feel that I am about to drink liquid light. The fancy pleases me. “Ah, this cup takes me to fairyland,” I say to the King, who always leaves the holiday selection of porcelain entirely up to me.
“Then you must have plates and dishes galore,” he says.
“Some with topaz stones,” I suggest, “some with emeralds.”
Neither of us mentions diamonds. Indeed, the stone itself with its hardness and sharp edges has come to seem to me both evil and ugly.
I would hesitate to make a purchase of bejeweled dishes, but the porcelain industry depends on our annual endorsement. The silk industry accused me of trying to ruin them when I began to wear muslin.
IT IS CHRISTMASTIME, and I am feeling that I have put on too much flesh. In the morning, all too often, I experience a nausea. I believe that it is all due to my anxiety about the developing story surrounding the cardinal. People love to hear details of his debauched and stupid life. We learn about his liaison with Jeanne La Motte but also about a scoundrel who pretends to mystical powers as a reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian, the Count de Costilgiano, who has pulled the wool over the cardinal’s gullible eyes. Someone has said that the cardinal will believe in almost anything—except God.
While the stories make great sport of him, they hardly make less so of me.
Not even the carols of the season, sung in German, can raise my spirits.
I write to Charlotte, and she answers always that I must be brave and believe in my innocence. I am innocent. Belief is not the issue.
Not even Count von Fersen can cheer me through these dreary winter months.
FEBRUARY. I CAN no longer deny the truth: I am pregnant again. I feel that I have had enough children. I do not wish for more.
Every sight and sound reminds me of something doleful.
Out my window, I saw hunters, and the sight caused me to remember when I took a bad fall from a horse. Later, when my daughter saw me, someone told her that I had fallen and could have been killed. She said she did not care. My friend did not believe that my daughter understood what she was saying, but little Marie Thérèse averred that she did: if one were dead, she went away and never came back. My daughter said she would be glad if I suffered such a fate. She said that I did not love her, that when we went to visit the aunts, I never looked back to see if she were behind me or quite lost, though her Papa always took her hand and cared about her.
Somehow I fear that this story will come out at the trial of Rohan, and the jurors will decide I am not a person worthy of respect or love, though at the time, I merely inflicted some mild punishment on the child for her saucy tongue and soon forgot the matter.
She is not a beautiful child, though Elisabeth paints her so, and I fear sometimes that her inner being, which is so much more important, may also be less attractive than one would hope.
Although the Empress felt it her duty to impress on me that I am not beautiful—despite the flattery of the world—I will never hold up a harsh mirror before my daughter.
They say that the Comtesse La Motte sent the dismantled necklace to London, with her husband or her new lover—the three have something of a triangular arrangement—and that the recovery of the necklace is unlikely. It makes me furious to think how Rohan’s schemes have made poor, foolish Boehmer suffer. I have heard that he has applied to the du Barry, who is also one of his customers, for help.
Sometimes I wonder if her fate has not been more fortunate than my own. Everyone says she is like a queen in her château in the village of Louveciennes, that she is much loved, and that no one lives in poverty there. The populace of France as a whole is far too large for anyone to work such miracles of rehabilitation. I wonder if Zamore, her little black page boy, still attends her. Sometimes she dressed him as a hussar in boots and with a darling saber, sometimes as a sailor lad. So, now I am burdened with another pregnancy. Only the King can maintain his good cheer in my company. The others mirror my own long face.
THIS MARCH 1786, the trial brief of the prostitute Nicole d’Oliva who impersonated me has sold 20,000 copies, so keen is the public’s appetite for rotten scandal.
SPRING COMES ON slowly but my girth increases rapidly. I must now write down my own version of what happened concerning the necklace. I have nightmares of the scene between d’Oliva and Rohan in the Grove of Venus. How cunning La Motte was to arrange a meeting in such a secluded bosquet, and one with such a suggestive name! They say La Motte wrote him dozens of love letters, pretending to be me, and these are the papers that were destroyed before the seal was set on his house. Thank goodness he ordered them destroyed. In my dreams, I begin to write a respectable letter to Fersen, but it turns out I have written the name Rohan instead.
When I insisted that Fersen tell me how the scandal was received in the courts of Sweden, he looked grieved and then spoke truly: everyone thinks the King has been fooled.
No one who knows me can look at me without pity. And yet it is all undeserved! I did nothing. I knew nothing. I did not even think the July note from the jeweler worth keeping but burned it with my candle for making seals. All my preoccupation was with Rosine, an imaginary figure!
It does give me some pleasure to think that the performance of the play was a success. I had no idea that the necklace affair would drag on and on. Still, when I think of my enchanting little theater a small smile teases the corners of my mouth.
Now I have no energy for theatricals or for dancing. I would rather play backgammon or other table games. Artois is so kind to try always to bring me out of my depression.
THE VERDICT OF THE TRIAL OF CARDINAL DE ROHAN, ETC.
31 May 1786
The question before the jurors is whether Rohan was an accomplice in a swindle or whether he was duped, as he claims to be.
Nicole d’Oliva, who played the role of the queen, did so unwittingly, they decide, and she is acquitted with a reprimand. (Surely she knew of our resemblance, and it was for that resemblance that she was paid to meet someone in the Grove of Venus. But it is pitiful to read that she thought she was serving me in some way, that she was performing before the eyes of a hidden Queen. I look at her and remember the girl who haunted Versailles many years ago who resembled me. Could this be she? I don’t wish to inquire.) She wore a simple white muslin dress with a ruffled neckline, like the one I have been painted in by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. Like the one declared indecent—underwear—by those who saw it in the salon exhibition. That most innocent and unpretentious of frocks!
The man who forged my letters—he admitted to having written hundreds of love letters in my name to the cardinal—was banished, and all his belongings became forfeit. They were not much. I suppose they meant a great deal to him. And how much had he enjoyed pretending to be me when he took u
p his vile pen?
The La Mottes, man and wife? The man is sentenced in absentia, for he is safely in England (selling diamonds), to flogging, branding, and life imprisonment. Jeanne La Motte, the instigator of all this misery, has been stripped naked, then beaten by the public executioner. Next she was branded, screaming and fighting so hard that the red-hot letter V, for voleuse, to mark her as the thief she is, is burned into her breast instead of her shoulder. It saddens me to think of her pain, though she has been hateful in besmirching my name. She was taken to the women’s prison at Salpêtrière, where she will spend the rest of her life.
And the Cardinal de Rohan. He entered the session of the Parlement de Paris in his purple robes, which is the color a cardinal may wear to express mourning. His entire powerful family, dressed in black, attended the trial. In addition, all of Europe, figuratively speaking, was watching him. As Frederick the Great said, “The Cardinal de Rohan will be obliged to use all the resources of his considerable intellect to convince his judges that he is a fool.” The cardinal’s own lawyer, a man named Target, argued that the cardinal was the victim of deceit. The forger having already confessed; the impersonator in the Grove of Venus, Mademoiselle d’Oliva, having admitted she played the part of the Queen; the cardinal himself having urged the two jewelers to go and thank the Queen on the very day the contract was made—“With all these facts established,” the attorney argued, “it can be convincingly proved that the Cardinal is a fool” and has already received his disgrace.
After imposing certain requirements, the court acquitted my tormentor, and he is to remain free.
The court requires that the cardinal apologize for criminal temerity in believing he had had a rendezvous at night with the Queen of France, and he is to seek pardon from the monarchs. He must give up his position as Grand Almoner, donate alms to the poor (from his own coffers, not the King’s), and be banished from court.
Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette Page 37