by Antal Szerb
Jeanne was now twenty-five. Her hair was naturally curled and chestnut brown, her eyes blue and expressive, her mouth equally so, if a little on the large side. Her smile was enchanting. As Beugnot, speaking from experience, put it, it “spoke to the heart”. Her bosom was considered by contemporaries to be rather underdeveloped. Her main attractions, it seems, were her voice and her conversation. “Nature gave her the dangerous gift of eloquence,” said one of the leading actors in the necklace trial, who added: “—eminently suitable for discussing those matters of civil law and ethics of whose existence Mme de la Motte, in all her innocence and eternal naturalness, had not the slightest suspicion.”
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 Re
volution 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.