Jeanne had led the Cardinal to believe that if he could write a justification of his misdeeds over the past years I would be willing to consider it and perhaps forgive him.
Delightedly he immediately prepared a long apologia on which he spent days, rewriting and correcting, and when it was finished the Comtesse took it promising that she would deliver it to me at the earliest possible moment.
A few days later Retaux de Villette wrote a letter on gilt-edged paper with a little fleur-delis in the corner.
“I am delighted that I need no longer regard you as blameworthy. It is not yet possible to grant you the audience for which you ask, but I will let you know as soon as it is possible. In the meantime please be discreet.”
This letter, signed “Marie Antoinette de France,” produced the desired effect on the Cardinal. He was overcome with emotion; he was ready to lavish handsome gifts on the woman who could help him to such progress in his relationship with me. The fact that he did not question the veracity of this shows that he must have been the biggest fool in France. Yet he was not in truth that. Cagliostro had looked into the future for him and advised him to carry on with the project nearest his heart. How often have I asked myself what the magician’s re1e was in the mystery I Jeanne knew that she could keep the Cardinal believing I was writing to him, but whenever I was at a gathering in which he was present I refused to look his way. For a while this situation might be explained but it could not go on.
But Jeanne was never at a loss, and she devised a grandiose scheme with her husband—the self-styled Comte de la Motte-Valois—and her lover Retaux de Villette. They were short of money, but Jeanne saw a means of becoming very rich. The Cardinal was a man of tremendous resources; he might suffer temporary embarrassments, but his assets were great. He would be the milch cow who should be milked with the gentlest, cleverest hands. They must plan carefully, though.
The Cardinal must be brought face to face with the Queen; the Queen must show her favour towards him. I can imagine those two men, whose wits were so much duller than here, demanding: “How?” And her cool reply:
“We must find someone to play the part of the Queen.”
How they must have gaped at her; but she was the brains behind the plot. Had it not worked out so far as she had told them it would? They should leave it to her. Now, what they needed was a young woman who looked sufficiently like me to be passed off as me. Everyone knew what I looked like. There were portraits of me in the galleries. They must find someone who had my colouring. They could teach her the rest.
She was a forceful woman; and both men were her slaves. It was the so-called Comte de la Motte who found Marie Nicole Lequay, later known as the Baroness d’Oliva. The girl was young, about six years younger than I; her hair was similar in colour to mine; she had blue eyes and an ample bosom. In fact she was known among her friends as the “Little Queen’; so her resemblance to myself had often been noticed. She was a milliner, but followed another j occupation—though more amateur than professional—besides , that of making hats, and at this time had a protector, Jean Baptiste Toussaint. She was apparently a gentle creature, an orphan who had been placed with a guardian whose means of earning a living was to take in children to board and from whom she had run away after being badly treated. She had had many lovers—not necessarily lovers who paid her; she was an easy-going gentle girl who was generous with her favours.
The Comte de la Motte met her in the Palais Royale, where gay young people sauntered or sat in order to make each other’s acquaintance. He was immediately struck by her likeness to me and brought her to the house in Rue NeuveSaint-Gilles which was where the de la Mottes lived when in Paris.
Jeanne immediately saw the possibilities, and it was she who changed the girl’s name to Baroness d’Oliva—a near anagram of Valois. Soon she was telling the girl that the Queen would be grateful to her for ever if she would do one little thing for her.
The poor simple girl was so’ overwhelmed that she was easily persuaded. Jeanne must have summed her up as too stupid and innocent to do much more than make an appearance and perhaps, with careful coaching, say one sentence; but that would be enough, as long as Jeanne was present to conduct the operation and step in quickly if things should go wrong.
Jeanne de la Motte must be the most audacious woman in me world. Who else would have conceived such a plan? Others might have been as villainous, but who would have been so wildly adventurous? Perhaps it was because she was certain of her power to succeed that she did it.
She had everything ready for the girl. Her hair was carefully powdered and dressed high though not elaborately. She had copied that simple dress of mine in which Vigee Le Brim had painted me the long white gaulle which had been called a chemise, and which had caused such a stir when the picture had been exhibited in the salon a short while before. This was made in muslin. Over the dress was put a mantle of fine white wool, and on her head a very wide-brimmed hat to shade her face. With more than a slight resemblance to me, the girl might well, in the dusk, be mistaken for me.
Rosalie, Jeanne’s maid, a girl of about eighteen, black-eyed and saucy, who found living in the household of the Comtesse de la Motte an exciting adventure, helped her to dress, and during this process Jeanne taught her her words, which were: “You may hope that the past will be forgotten.” The poor girl had no idea what this meant. She had to concentrate on suppressing the accent of the Paris streets, on acquiring a faint foreign accent, on making a graceful gesture with her hands.
I can imagine the poor child, dominated by these people particularly Jeanne excited at playing the re1e of a Queen whom she had often been told she resembled, and at the same time being paid for it. Jeanne had hinted that not only would she be recompensed by herself and the Comte, but that the Queen herself would no doubt wish to show her gratitude. Why should she ask what it was all about? She would not have been given an explanation, and if she had, she would not have been able to grasp it. No! Her part was to do as she was told, and she doubtless only hoped that she could play it to satisfaction. In the pocket of her muslin gown was a letter which she must take out and give to the man whom she would meet; she must also hand him a rose and not forget her words.
It was a dark night no moon, no stars ideal for the scene. Everything was quiet in the park the only sound that would be heard would be that of the water playing in the fountains. The Comtesse and her husband led the young girl in her muslin dress across the terrace and through the pines and firs, the elms, willows and cedars to the Grove of Venus.
A man arrived dressed in something which the girl would readily accept was the livery of one of the gentle men of my household.
“So you have come,” said the Comte; the man bowed low. This part was played by Retaux de Villene.
Oliva was told where to stand and wait while the Comte and Comtesse and Retaux disappeared among the trees. Poor girl! She must have found it rather eerie standing there alone in the grove at night. I wonder what her thoughts were at that moment.
But a man had appeared tall, slim, in a long cloak and a wide-brimmed hat turned down to hide his face. It was the Cardinal de Rohan.
Oliva held out the rose. She must have been astonished by the fervour with which he accepted it. I imagine him, kneeling kissing the hem of her muslin gown.
Then he lifted his eyes and she said what she had been told: “You may hope that the past is forgotten.”
He rose, approached, and a torrent of words burst from him. He was in ecstasy. He wanted to prove his devotion and so on. Poor little Oliva.
What could she understand of this? She was unaccustomed to such fluency. How relieved she must have been to find the Comtesse at her side, taking her arm, pulling her into the shadows!
“Come quickly, Madame. Here comes Madame and the Comtesse d’Artois.”
The Cardinal bowed low and hurried away. The Comtesse, still gripping Oliva, was full of triumph. Oliva had forgotten to hand over the letter, but the plan had succeeded even
beyond her hopes.
And after that they had the foolish Cardinal in their web. He really believed that the Comtesse had arranged that meeting with me. How could he have been so foolish? Did he really think that I would come out into the park at night to meet a man? But then he had heard those scurrilous lampoons which had assigned to me a hundred lovers, and like so many people in France he believed them. Perhaps that was why he had this impossible dream of becoming one of them.
A friend of Jeaime’s, a young lawyer, happened to have called at the house at Rue NeuveSaint-Gilles and was there when the carriage arrived bringing the adventurers back from the Grove of Venus; he wrote an account of what he saw, which I have since seen:
“Between midnight and one in the morning we heard the sound of a carriage from which emerged Monsieur and Madame de la Motte, Retaux de Villette and a young woman from twenty-five to thirty years of age with a remarkably good figure. The two women were dressed with elegance and simplicity…. They talked nonsense, laughed, sang, so that one scarcely knew whether they were on their head or their heels.
The lady I did not know shared in the general hilarity, but was timid and kept within bounds. The face of this woman had from the first thrown me into that sort of restlessness which one experiences in the presence of a face one feels certain of having seen before without being able to say where. What had puzzled me so much in her face was its perfect resemblance to that of the Queen. “
Maitre Target of the French Academy, who was one of the counsels for the Cardinal’s defence, wrote:
“It is not surprising to me that in the darkness the Cardinal should have mistaken the girl d’Oliva for the Queen the same figure, same complexion, same hair, a resemblance in physiognomy of the most striking kind.”
So the first little plot had succeeded, and now it was time to begin the greater one. Target put the case clearly when he stated on behalf of his client:
“After this fatal moment [the meeting in the Grove of Venus] the Cardinal is no longer merely confiding and credulous, he is blind and makes of his blindness an absolute duty. His submission to the orders received through Madame de la Motte is linked to the feeling of profound respect and gratitude which are to affect his whole life. He will await with resignation the moment when her reassuring kindness will fully manifest itself, and meanwhile will be absolutely obedient.
Such is the state of his soul. “
Madame de la Motte realised this. She must have been anxious as she felt her way for even her optimistic mind must have realised that one false step could bring the entire edifice of fraud and deceit tumbling to the ground.
Jeanne sought an interview with the Cardinal very shortly after the meeting and told him that the Queen most clearly favoured him, for she, who was the most generous of women, wished to bestow fifty thousand livres on a noble but impoverished family. She was a little short of money at the moment but if the Cardinal could lend her this amount . and give it to Madame de la Motte to bring to her . she would know he was truly her friend.
How could the man be such a fool! —the old question which I and countless others have asked ourselves since this wretched business came to light.
He believed what they said because he wanted to believe; but all the time he was in close touch with Cagliostro, who assured him that he could see into the future and there he saw the Cardinal reaping benefits from his association with a person of very high rank.
That satisfied the superstitious and gullible Cardinal.
Being short of money he borrowed from a Jewish money lender, assuring him he would be honoured if he knew to what purpose the money was to be put.
In this manner Jeanne began to extract more money from the Cardinal, enough for her to be able to buy a mansion in Bar-sur-Aube, where she had once lived in such wretchedness and where she could continue with the fiction that she was now respectfully received at Court on account of her relationship with the Royal Family.
Had she been content with what she had managed to purloin she might have lived for the rest of her life in comfort. But she was an insatiably ambitious woman, and she conceived the plan for the necklace.
It was at one of her parties that she had heard of the jewellers’ trouble. Boehmer and Bassenge talked of nothing but the diamond necklace which they could not sell. They had built their hopes on the Queen, and the Queen did not want their necklace. Madame de la Motte had been boasting about her influence with the Queen; she and her husband had already extracted money from various people on the pretext that they could help them to rich posts at Court. So it was natural that the anxious jewellers should speak to her about the necklace and ask her if she could use her influence to interest me in it.
Madame de la Motte replied that this might be possible-and from that moment the scheme was conceived.
She would do her best to advise the Queen to reconsider buying the necklace. Could she herself see it? Nothing easier. The jewellers would bring it to the Rue NeuveSaintGilles.
I can well imagine how the de la Mottes were dazzled by it. I remembered when I had first seen it how startled I was. It was in truth composed of some of the finest gems in Europe. I would never have wished to wear it. Secretly I thought it vulgar; but it was certainly a magnificent piece-in fact the most splendid I have ever seen.
I can remember it perfectly now. I have seen it so often in the drawing of me which circulated through Paris, for there were many ready to believe that I had stolen the necklace and when they wished to be particularly insulting they drew it about my neck.
In a necklace fitting closely to the neck were seventeen diamonds almost as large as filberts, and this in itself would have been dazzlingly beautiful; but the jewellers had added to this, loops with pear-shaped pendants, clusters and a second rope of diamonds; there was even a third row decorated with knots and tassels of the precious stones, and one of the four tassels in itself would have been worth a fortune. There were two thousand eight hundred carats in the necklace and there had never been one like it. There never would be again neither such a valuable necklace nor such a fateful necklace.
Once having seen it Madame de la Motte could not get it out of her mind. She did not want it as a necklace, but through those brilliant loops and tassels she saw herself living like a queen for evermore. If she possessed the neck lace and broke it up and sold the stones she would be a rich woman for the rest of her life.
Her energetic mind was working fast.
“We would give a thousand louis to anyone who could find us a buyer for the necklace,” tempted Boehmer and Bassenge.
How she must have laughed. A thousand louis. And the necklace worth sixteen hundred thousand livres! She would speak to the Queen, she replied haughtily, but she would not wish her friends the jewellers to reimburse her if she were able to arouse the Queen’s interest.
I can readily imagine their joy. Meanwhile de la Motte was planning her most ambitious scheme of all. The purchaser must naturally be the Cardinal de Rohan. A few letters purporting to come from me, and the foolish man was like a fish on the hook. Of course he would enter into negotiations for the necklace if it were my wish.
Madame de la Motte told the jewellers that the purchase would go through. A very great nobleman would make it on behalf of the Queen.
She, Madame de la Motte, did not wish her name to be mentioned in the affair it would be between Cardinal de Rohan, the Queen and the jewellers.
Overcome with joy, seeing a way out of all the anxieties of the past,
the jewellers offered Madame de la Motte a precious stone in payment for her services. This she refused. She was only too happy to help, she said.
To the Cardinal she explained that I wished to buy the necklace without the King’s knowledge; and that I should need to do so on credit since I was short of money at the time.
“Her Majesty will pay by instalments,” she explained, ‘and this will fall due at intervals of three months. Naturally for such an arrangement the Queen must have an intermediary
. She at once thought of you. “
The Cardinal during the trial explained what had happened:
“Madame de la Motte brought me a supposed letter from the Queen in which Her Majesty showed herself anxious to buy the necklace, and pointed out that, being without the necessary funds for the moment, and not wishing to occupy herself with the necessary arrangements in detail, she wished that I would treat the affair and take all the steps for the purchase and fix suitable periods for payments.” On receipt of this letter the Cardinal was delighted. He would be happy to do anything for Her Majesty. He would feel honoured to make any arrangement she desired. The price was fixed at sixteen hundred thousand livres, payable within two years in four six-monthly instalments. The necklace would be handed to the Cardinal on February 1st and the first instalment would be due on August 1st 1785. He drew up this agreement in his own hand and gave it to Madame de la Motte to show to her dear friend the Queen. Back came the note on gilt-edged paper with the fleur-delis in the corner signed “Marie Antoinette de France’ to say that the Queen was satisfied with the arrangements made and deeply grateful to the Cardinal.
It is strange when the Cardinal saw the necklace he had his first doubts. This man who believed that I would meet him by night in the Grove of Venus, who believed that he had a chance of becoming my lover, was astonished that I could wish to wear such a vulgar ornament as the diamond necklace.
He wavered. He would wish, he told Madame de la Money, to have a document signed by the Queen authorising him to buy the necklace for her.
Madame de la Motte was not disturbed. Why not? Retaux de Villette had provided other documents. Why not this one? In due course it was produced, signed in the usual way, “Marie Antoinette de France,” and the word “Approved’ was written beside each clause in what purported to be my handwriting.
How could the Cardinal have looked at that signature and not known it false? How could he have believed I would sign myself thus?
The Queen`s Confession Page 33