The Queen's Necklace

by Antal Szerb

  Beugnot and others confirm that he larded his sentences with bits of Arabic. A German orientalist once addressed him in the language, and he understood not a word. Perhaps his own version was simply mumbo-jumbo. To some extent this might have been forced on him. His command of French was so poor he could not have expressed himself clearly had he wanted to. Another witness said of his performance: “If gibberish (galimatias) equals ‘sublime’, then no one was more sublime than Cagliostro. He would pronounce long words in the middle of his incomprehensible sentences, and the less his audience understood the greater was the miracle he worked on them. They thought him oracular simply because he was obscure. His art consisted of addressing nothing to the understanding and trusting the imagination of the listener to supply a meaning. The truth is always obvious, but only to the wise. The bogus is incomprehensible, which is precisely why it impresses the multitude.”

  This last witness more or less explains the secret of Cagliostro’s power. With these ‘Arabic’ terms he reduced his listeners to a kind of stupor. The people of the time must have been much as they are today—they might give their assent to wise and intelligent words, but they kept their fervour for those they did not understand. The astonishing power the magician has over the half-educated lies in his ill-formed concepts, his nebulous terminology and high-sounding incomprehensibilities. This is especially true in times of impending social upheaval, when people are looking for miracles. Cagliostro’s ‘Arabic’ words made the benign vision blaze before the devout eyes of his audiences. If he did say anything they could understand, they indulgently heard him out simply for the sake of what they did not.

  By 1785, the fatal year of the necklace trial, Cagliostro saw that the time had finally come for him to conquer the capital of the world, and he made his move to Paris. There, he rented a house in the Marais district, as Jeanne had done. The house still stands, on the corner of the Rue St Claude and the Boulevard Beaumarchais. The present writer looked it over, but there is nothing memorable about it.

  As we saw in his dealings with Rohan, Cagliostro was a master of the arts of choosing his moment and waiting for the right time. He arrived just as Paris was beginning to feel the need for a miracle doctor. Its citizens, like those of every great city, and the French by their nature, had a permanent hunger for sensation. This was even more true of the eighteenth century, of which that considerable expert Victor du Bled remarked that no other age was ever so bored. In the second half of the century doctors became highly fashionable. Their connection with the flourishing natural sciences steadily raised their social status, and they began to fulfil the role in aristocratic houses once played by the priestly confessor.

  In his standard history of medicine, Garrison claims that their social position was even higher than it is today. They wore swords like the nobility, and muffs in winter to protect their fingers, whose sensitive touch was so important in reaching a diagnosis. Voltaire and Rousseau’s doctor, Tronchin, was one of the best-known figures of the age. (He was the person who made the then revolutionary discovery that physical activity was not harmful to the constitution.) Also widely celebrated was a M Pomme, who ascribed the vapeurs, as nervous disorders were known at the time, to a general dehydration of the central nervous system, and immersed his patients in water. Medical science had become a kind of mania, like everything else at the time. Women threw themselves into it with a passion. The young Comte de Coigny was so keen on his anatomical studies that he kept a cadaver in his luggage to dissect even when travelling. Followers of the Comtesse du Voisenon smuggled a ‘news’ item into a copy of the Journal des Sages announcing that the society of doctors had elected her as their president, and in true eighteenth-century style the Comtesse found this entirely natural. (L V du Bled.)

  When Cagliostro arrived in Paris, the previous miracle-doctor, Mesmer, who discovered animal magnetism and produced miraculous forces with his magical buckets, had now gone out of fashion and disappeared from the scene, his pockets bulging with cash. Cagliostro’s fame had gone before him, and he arrived in a blaze of publicity. His followers had distributed thousands upon thousands of copies of his portrait, adorned with the inscription:

  De l’ami des humains reconnoisez les traits:

  Tous ses jours sont marqués par de nouveaux bienfaits;

  Il prolonge la vie, il secourt l’indigence.

  Le plaisir d’être utile est seul sa récompense.

  Acknowledge the virtues of the friend of humanity:

  Every one of his days is marked by new acts of goodness.

  He prolongs life, succours the needy,

  His sole recompense the joy of service.

  —It doesn’t sound much better in the French!—

  We can see how much stress Cagliostro placed on his philanthropy. It was far more important in winning people over than his mysticism. It is a truly noble age when the charlatan’s first concern is to reassure people that his heart is in the right place.

  He immediately found favour through an announcement directed at Parisian taste—he had founded a Freemasonry lodge for women. Its Grand Mistress was Lorenza, and its membership included names of the highest rank: Brienne, Polignac, Brassas, the Comtesse de Choiseul, Mme Genlis and others. The Grand Master and Protector of the Egyptian Rite was the Duc de Montmorency, its Grand Inspector the fermier général Laborde, and its treasurer the powerful financier Sainte-James. It can be said without qualification that Cagliostro had arrived.

  It is not entirely clear what the women did in their lodges. According to Haven, it was no different from the men. Naturally, the non-initiated were convinced that wild orgies took place, with the ladies’ admirers appearing in the form of charitable genies, and that Lorenza taught them that pleasure was everything. What is certain is that they were given pretty little pyramids as presents, and the Seven Spirits, including Zobiachel, duly appeared before them.

  But while all this was going on, Cagliostro did not lose sight of the one thing that mattered, his main business: Rohan. He took care to maintain a warm relationship with him, and Rohan almost certainly continued to lavish significant gifts on his guide to all things mystical.

  Inevitably, Rohan also sought his advice in the matter of the Queen’s favour. Cagliostro had little enthusiasm for Jeanne, because he knew full well that she was fishing in the same pond, but he did not see her as a serious threat. It served his interests that she should keep Rohan’s hopes alive, since pessimists are not enamoured of prophets, and his prophesies regularly revealed that the Queen would soon be taking Rohan back into her favour.

  La Motte had a little fifteen-year-old relation called Marie-Jeanne de la Tour. It became apparent that this young lady met all Cagliostro’s conditions for a perfect ‘dove’, or medium: an angelic innocence, a highly-strung nature and blue eyes; it was also important that she had been born under Capricorn. Her mother, struggling under the weight of temporary material concerns, and telling herself it would always be advisable to be in the Cardinal’s good books, was happy to put the girl at his and Cagliostro’s disposal.

  Cagliostro received her in the laboratory at the Hôtel de Strasbourg.

  “Young lady, it is true that you are innocent?” he asked her directly.

  “Of course, sir.”

  “We shall soon see. Offer up your soul to God, go and stand behind the screen, and concentrate on the thing you would most like to see. If you are innocent, it will appear to you, but if you are not, you will see nothing.”

  Mlle de la Tour retired behind the screen, while Cagliostro and Rohan remained where they were. Cagliostro drew certain magical signs in the air, and said to the girl:

  “Stamp your pretty little foot and tell me—did you see anything?”

  “I saw nothing,” the girl replied, trusting in the truth.

  “Then you are not innocent.”

  The girl could not bear the suspicion, and quickly called out that she could now see what she wanted to see.

  A surviving notebook
contains a deposition made to the Court about a second visit.

  Marie-Jeanne went with her mother to the Hôtel de Strasbourg, where she was met by the Cardinal and Cagliostro. They gave her a white apron, told her to say a few prayers, and stood her before a table on which a jug of clear water stood between two candles. Cagliostro waved his sword behind a screen and called on the assistance of the Great Kophta and the Archangels Raphael and Michael. Then he asked the girl:

  “Tell me, young lady, did you see the Queen in the glass vessel?”

  Marie-Jeanne had by now realised what would constitute a suitable response in the eyes of the magician.

  “But of course,” she replied eagerly (“so that I could get away,” she later told the court).

  “Young lady, do you see the angels and the little figures” (the so-called petits bonhommes) “who are trying to kiss you?”

  “No,” she replied modestly.

  “Make as if you were angry, and stamp your pretty little foot,” he said, “to summon the Great Kophta here instantly, and tell the angels to come and embrace you.”

  “Oh yes, they’re here already,” the girl replied (“just to get away”), and she gave the petits bonhommes a kiss.

  Whereupon Rohan fell to his knees and prayed. Then he asked Marie-Jeanne to tell no one about what had taken place.

  Three days later the girl returned to the Cardinal’s palace. This time they gave her a long white shirt with a “great sun” in the middle and two blue ribbons forming a cross—a costume designed by Cagliostro himself. She was taken into Rohan’s bedroom, which was ablaze with candles. Once again there was a glass vessel on a table, filled with water and surrounded by stars, petits bonhommes and other symbols she had not seen before—Egyptian hieroglyphs representing Isis and the bull Apis. Cagliostro again brandished his sword, and asked:

  “Young lady, do you not see a lady inside the jug, dressed in white?”

  “Oh, but of course,” Marie-Jeanne dutifully replied.

  “Tell me, young lady—but think about this carefully, because much depends on what you say next: does that lady dressed in white bear a resemblance to the Queen?”

  “Oh yes, very much so.”

  Rohan raised his head and glanced at the girl, his eyes clouded with happiness.

  “Tell me, young lady,” the magician went on: “do you not also see a rather older bonhomme, also dressed in white, walking in a garden and embracing the Queen?”

  “Oh yes, very much,” she wisely returned (“just to get away”).

  “Well then, would you please ask once again for the aid of the Great Kophta, the Archangel Gabriel, and perhaps also Zobiachel.”

  The girl put her hands together and mumbled something.

  “Now pay attention, young lady, and gather up all the strength of your innocent little soul. Do you not see His Eminence the Cardinal, on his knees, with a tobacco box in one hand and a little platter in the other?”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” she replied. “Now I see it, oh yes: My Lord Cardinal kneeling and holding a tobacco box in one hand and a little platter in the other.”

  In his excitement Rohan exclaimed: “Incredible! Extraordinary!”

  His face, Mlle de la Tour tells us in her deposition, was radiant with happiness and satisfaction. He fell on his knees sobbing, and raised his hands to the heavens.

  Poor Rohan! His gestures—throwing himself to the ground, falling on his knees—must have come from his profoundest being, the intense devotion that was the deepest yearning of his heart. Such was his fate, that in all his life he never met anyone who could lead him to where he could fall to his knees with a tranquil heart, before the one true Absolute.

  Chapter Seven

  The Queen

  MARIE-ANTOINETTE, the chief victim of the necklace trial, has probably been more written about than any other woman in world history. Only Mary Stuart—that other Queen Maria to end up on the scaffold—can rival her. The revolutionary years poured out a venomous stream of slander about her; then, with the restoration of the monarchy in the early nineteenth century, she was turned into a sainted royal martyr. More recent writers, in their quest for objectivity, have looked for an answer somewhere between the two. To us it seems she was neither a demon nor a martyr but a woman neither better nor worse than any other woman placed on the throne by fate. Since the portraits by the brothers Goncourt and Stefan Zweig are readily available, and practically everyone has read the latter, there is no need for us to show Marie-Antoinette in premier plan, like the other actors in our story. It will be enough to summarise the facts very briefly and then turn the spotlight solely on those areas that are critically important for the historical argument. What we do need to explain is why Rohan should have believed the things he did about her. To answer that we must examine her prodigality, her war on Court etiquette, her friendships with other women and the erotic legend that grew up around her.

  Marie-Antoinette was born on 2nd November 1755, the day of the great earthquake in Lisbon. Her mother was Maria Theresa, her father the genial Lotharingian Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. As a young girl she learnt to dance extremely well, to play music and to recite. Taught by the resident poet at the Viennese court, Metastasio, she memorised the libretti of the great operas in Italian. It was an excellent upbringing—for a future diva. In later years she developed an implacable hostility towards any kind of intellectual occupation or difficult reading matter, no matter how much her wise mother urged her in her letters to study seriously. But one can hardly blame her for that. There is no doubt that she was intelligent and witty, perhaps excessively so. When receiving a delegation she would respond with a formal little speech she had earlier composed with great care. This habit infuriated the female members of the royal household, who thought it quite inappropriate for a princess to speak at such length to ordinary people, rather than simply mumble a few incomprehensible words of greeting.

  Her fate was decided by the Duc de Choiseul, Louis XV’s Foreign Minister. To enable France to turn her full might on England and Prussia, he broke a long tradition of French policy and made an alliance with Austria, her rival of many centuries. The alliance was sealed and underwritten by the marriage of Princess Marie-Antoinette to Louis XV’s grandson, the future Louis XVI.

  Marie-Antoinette’s face and figure have been immortalised in countless contemporary pictures and writings. Mme Vigée-Lebrun alone painted her twenty times.

  She was certainly beautiful. A tall, queenly figure, with fine arms and bosom, a full head of ash-blonde hair and a most attractive face—admittedly rather a babyish face, by no means the sort that people nowadays find piquant or very interesting. But the fact is that the women of any particular period do all seem to resemble one other, the way men’s handwriting always does. In the eighteenth century women had baby faces, mainly because of their rounded chins. History of course reminds us that these baby-faced duchesses and princesses were cleverer, more passionate and, if necessary, often more vicious than those who came either before or after them. It is only the women of one’s own period that one can judge by their looks—and even then the results are completely unpredictable.

  But for beauty the raw material, the body, is not enough. It depends on what you do with it. Marie-Antoinette’s contemporaries could never praise her smile, her facial expression or her deportment highly enough. Mme Vigée-Lebrun, the painter, said of her afterwards that she had the most elegant walk in the whole of France. That was written after the Queen’s death, and may be too generous. We should bear in mind that women were never more versed in the art of deportment than they were then. It was a difficult art and a highly important one, which young ladies studied with great care over many years. Another expert, Count Tilly, who had been one of her pages, disapproved of her eyes and protruding Habsburg lower lip, and thought that her posture could have been more elegant, but even he thought her carriage marvellous. “She had two kinds of walk,” he said: “one very decided, rather brisk and extremely aristocra
tic, and one that was altogether more sinuous, a kind of rocking movement, though that term should not be taken to imply disrespect. No one could curtsey with more grace than she. She could greet ten people with a single dip, while her glance gave proper due to each in turn … in a word, if I am not deceived, a man would instinctively want to lead her to a throne, the way he would offer another woman a chair.”

  (That curtsey! What would Proust have given to see it!)

  Yes, she must have been very beautiful. Perhaps we should be less delighted for her than ashamed of ourselves. Ashamed of our own plebeian century.

  These details are offered by way of introduction. We must now move directly on to the subject of the Queen’s extravagance.

  We have already mentioned that she lived and died for jewellery, and spent vast sums acquiring it. Another of her expensive passions was cards. At the Château de Marly she gambled constantly, always for substantial sums, following royal tradition. The card games here were a form of public ritual, like mealtimes. Any member of the nobility or gentry could attend provided he was properly dressed, and he would be free to play against the nobility seated at the table. The vast octagonal salon was lined with balconies, where the women, who were not admitted to the area below, were seated. The passion for card games in this period was generally ruinous. Both male and female members of the aristocracy who, as we have seen, were often in longstanding financial difficulties despite their vast incomes, would seek to remedy their situation through the gaming table. The stakes were fantastic. The Marquis de Chalabre (the godfather of the card game Kalaber?) lost 840,000 livres at a single sitting, and the next day won almost two million. He later became the banker of the royal casino. At Fontainebleau one epic game of Faro lasted an unbroken thirty-six hours. The King’s younger brother the Comte d’Artois was said in 1783 to have lost 14,600,000 over seven years. Nor were these princes above the occasional bit of trickery, and it became necessary to introduce various regulatory measures.