by Antal Szerb
It would be tedious to cite every such detail concerning the Queen. But in 1792 a leaflet announced itself with the following title: “A price on their heads. Here follows a list of the names of those with whom the Queen has had illicit relations.” The list is a long and varied one. Alongside the aristocrats we also find a guardsman, an official in the Ministry of War and the son of an actor, Guibert. Eventually, the pamphlet becomes bored with its own inventory and summarises it as toutes les tribades de Paris. E de Goncourt calls the copy in his possession a “pamphlet imbécilement enragé”. It names rather more women than men. The more surprising entries include Jeanne de la Motte, Cardinal Rohan, Mme de Marsan (whom the Queen hated more than anyone) and M Campan, that excellent lady’s pious and devout husband.
There is also one self-volunteered entry, the Duc de Lauzun, the greatest Don Juan in an age of Don Juans and a supreme example of the cynical attitudes that prevailed at the end of the century. To explain why he had abandoned his wife, the charming Amélie de Bouflers, he observed: “Well you see, in the end Mme de Lauzun brought me no more than 150,000 livres a year.” “In those words,” wrote Sainte Beuve, “you have the whole vanished Ancien Régime and the complete vindication of the Revolution, which in the end, and considering all the other similar outrages, was justified.” It was Lauzun who, being at breakfast when they arrived (during the Revolution) to take him off to be executed, remarked:
“With your leave, I’ll have another dozen oysters first.”
In his memoirs he claims that the Queen was desperately in love with him. She begged him for a heron’s feather and thereafter wore it ostentatiously in public; she would not allow him to stray from her presence, and on one occasion, when they were alone together, she threw herself on his breast and, in the refined phraseology of the eighteenth century, offered herself to him. But he declined the honour, because he did not wish to let his mistress, the Duchesse de Czartoriska, down, and his manly soul had no desire to play the dubious role of Queen’s favourite. But all the same he allowed her to think that he might nonetheless relent at a later date. In the meantime he went off to the East Indies for a year with the army, and when he returned the Queen kept her distance from him, and the whole court treated him with a derisive coolness.
Lauzun’s memoirs became very influential after the restoration, and Mme Campan protested bitterly against his slanders. The heron’s feather story was true in that he had bullied her into accepting it from him via the Princesse de Guéménée, but not long afterwards Mme Campan was standing in an adjacent room when she heard the Queen pronounce the words: “Go, sir!” Lauzun left the room dumbfounded, and Marie-Antoinette gave orders that he should never be allowed back. This throws considerable doubt on the veracity of his memoirs. Perhaps they were written not by a successful Don Juan but by a miserable hack.
Rather more serious than all this (not inconsiderable) gossip and conjecture hovering in the air, was the story involving Baron Besenval.
Besenval was a Swiss, a member of the Queen’s own inner entourage and the Polignac circle. He was the Naturbursche of the Court—its raw, straight-talking hillbilly, who expressed his opinions in open, unguarded language but with the courtier’s confident belief that he knew just how far he could go.
It happened that Artois and the Prince de Bourbon fell out over some issue, and all the talk at Versailles was that there would be a duel. Marie-Antoinette, who was intensely curious by nature, would peer out through a lorgnette from her bedroom window to see who was walking in the park, and kept asking who had been in the theatre on those evenings when she hadn’t been there, calming down only when reassured that “there hadn’t been so much as a cat”. She was especially curious about the details of the duel and wanted Besenval to explain them. So Campan brought the Baron, in great secrecy, into the upper level of the palace, into a suite of apartments he had never seen before, consisting of an antechamber and a bedroom. The bedroom, in practice, was for the use of the Dame d’Honneur when the Queen was ill. Campan let him in and told him to wait for the Queen. And there, inspired by the location, the grizzle-haired Baron fell to his knees before her and offered her his heart.
“Rise, sir,” she said. “The King shall be ignorant of an offence which would disgrace you for ever.”
And Besenval remained at the Court.
From this story it naturally appears that Besenval was simply another ‘volunteer’, so much so that his name does not even feature in the extremely long list. His behaviour could be put down to the unbounded stupidity and arrogance of the male sex, which was even more in evidence in this licentious age of pampered knights. To drive a final nail into the gentleman’s coffin, Besenval, though an intelligent man and one who knew the Queen well, actually believed that, in spite of his grey hairs, she had invited him into the little room with amorous intent.
We get something of the measure of all this unfounded gossip if we can believe, with the Duc de Ligne, that the basis of the slander was “the Queen’s coquettishness, with which she hoped to please everyone”, and that “the Queen’s supposed flirtatiousness was simply an extreme form of amiability”. But even if we also accept the noble, elevated portrait painted by Mme Campan and the nineteenth-century writings that followed her, there remains absolutely no doubt of her feelings for Axel Fersen.
That love, far from destroying the overall charm of Mme Campan’s idealised portrait, actually completes and enhances it—the noble passion of a noble mind, the one serious, deep and truly romantic attachment in an age of coldly elegant and frivolous love games.
In the middle of the last century, suitably bowdlerised to fit the prudishness and discretion of the times, Marie-Antoinette’s letters to Fersen were published. “That publication,” says Stefan Zweig, “totally changed the received image of her as a thoughtless woman. A profoundly dramatic story was laid bare, a story of danger and power played out half in the royal court, half in the shadow of the scaffold—like one of those tear-jerking novels whose plots are so improbable that they can occur only in real life—two people, one of them the Queen of France, the other a minor Scandinavian nobleman, united in passionate love yet compelled by duty and prudence to conceal their secret in the depths, to be separated over and over again, forever yearning for one another across the terrible gulf between their two worlds. And in the background of this tale of two individual fates, a world collapsing, a time of apocalypse …”
The most significant expressions of this great love were enacted only after the main event in our story was over, when the Queen found herself completely isolated following the necklace trial. But its origins went back to a time long before it, and Rohan must have known about them.
Axel Fersen was a nineteen-year-old Swedish count who arrived in Paris in 1774 while on a grand tour of Europe. The Dauphine met him at a ball, in which they were both masked, and the young man discovered only later who it was that he had spoken with at such length. When he returned to Paris in 1778 she greeted him like an old acquaintance. The young man had grown into the most beautiful person in all Europe: tall, slender, blond—like the youthful hero of a Nordic saga. Both outwardly and inwardly he was worlds apart from the likes of Lauzun, the roués, the sort of men most Frenchwomen idolised. Fersen was both shy and proud, pure of soul, reticent and discreet; a sensitive and yet order-loving northerner—almost aridly so. The efforts of the Abbé Vermond and the French Court to turn Marie-Antoinette into a Frenchwoman had not succeeded; instead, the mysterious workings of racial type led this blonde Germanic woman to the fair-haired Nordic man, with his Northern richness of feeling and spiritual purity. While the French courtiers around them seemed to have stepped from the pages of Les liaisons dangereuses, these two inhabited the world of the young Werther.
Although they both concealed their feelings with true northern modesty, perhaps even from each other, the gaze of the Court was always on them. The Swedish ambassador Creutz took a certain fatherly pride in telling King Gustav III of his young comp
atriot’s success.
A stanza of Verlaine’s comes to mind—it is from the Fêtes galantes, which captures the whimsical mood of the eighteenth century in its most exquisite form:
Ce fut le temps sous de clairs ciels,
(Vous en souvenez-vous, Madame?)
Des baisers superficiels
Et des sentiments à fleur d’âme.
It was a time of cloudless skies,
(My lady, do you recall?)
Of kisses that brushed the surface
And feelings that shook the soul.
And when they could no longer deny what they meant to each other, the wise and sober Fersen thought it better to put an ocean between the two of them, and went off to fight for freedom, as Lafayette’s aide-de-camp in America.
But in 1783 he was back.
Did Rohan know of the love that the Queen felt for the Nordic Count? Perhaps not. Fersen was not French. He did not brag about his conquest, and, as a wealthy, independent foreigner, he wanted nothing from her. He was seldom at Court. Probably they met in secret in Le Petit Trianon, or the rustic village. But if Rohan did know about it, it was all the more French of him not to have understood it. He would not have been capable of grasping that, given the nature of their relationship, he could not possibly draw hope from it that the Queen, having given her love to one man, would then bestow it on another; but that, on the contrary, such a love would be truly moral—and the full force of the marriage vow, as well as the Queen’s sense of honour, would set a wide gulf between her and any man who was not Axel Fersen.
So far we have spoken of an ‘external morality’; there is also the ‘inner’ morality that Rohan would have been able to understand, and which may well have supported him in his belief.
Appearances certainly suggest that Marie-Antoinette shared the frivolous tastes of her age, including its love of refined and not-so-refined scandal. The eighteenth century had discovered Pompeii and made much use of the motifs of Pompeian art. This was not a chance thing—since the time of Pompeii there had been no period in European culture in which the erotic played such a central role as in the rococo. The novels, plays and paintings of the period are often, by our notions, quite shocking, especially the plays, such as those by Charles Collé, which were performed in the private theatres of the aristocratic houses for the delectation of the noble ladies. It is even possible that Marie-Antoinette acted in these herself. Certainly the conversation in her little circle would not have differed from that in the other salons. People quickly realised that they could say whatever they liked in front of the Queen, and that it delighted her when they did. And perhaps it was no secret to Rohan how much she loved reading dubious literature. In her boudoir were the beautifully bound adventures of Les amours du Chevalier Faublas and other such works, which in the prudish centuries that followed could not even be mentioned And perhaps he also knew that the beautifully-bound prayer book she was so busy reading at Mass contained nothing more than a titillating novel.
Above all, people in the eighteenth century thought it rather odd, even vulgar, for married people actually to love each other. Married love had not yet become associated with bourgeois values but with the lower orders. Should it occur in ‘good’ society, it would be something to hide. Husbands connived at their wives’ affairs. In aristocratic circles, according to Mornet, these ‘open marriages’ were the necessary compromise between arrangements forced on young women and the need to attend to the ‘words of the heart’.
There is a well-known story of the Count who opened the door to his wife’s room and discovered her in a surprising situation, with a man.
“For God’s sake, Madam!” he cried. “How could you be so thoughtless, as to leave your door unlocked! … Imagine if anyone other than myself came in!”
Chamfort’s anecdotes show a constant preoccupation with the extent to which jealousy had fallen out of fashion. Someone says to a jealous husband:
“You are jealous? You are very conceited, sir. N’est pas cocu qui veut—it is not enough to want to be cuckolded—you have to know how to do it. You need to understand the running of a great house, and be very polite and kind. Who would want to cuckold the sort of person you are at the moment?”
“What a pity that people nowadays have so little respect for cuckolded husbands,” says another of his examples. “It used to be an honourable title, now it’s just a game—it means nothing.”
“One day,” Chamfort adds, “Monsieur de Nesle, whose wife was the mistress of the Duc de Soubise, said to her in his presence:
“‘Madame, I hear that you’ve been having an affair with your wig-maker. That sort of thing is extremely bad form.’
“And with the air of a man who has done the right thing, he left the room and Soubise slapped her face.”
Another husband said to his wife:
“Madame, I realise that this man has his claims on you, and I have no wish to stop whatever it is that he does with you when I am not here, but I cannot tolerate his demeaning you in my presence. It’s an insult to me.”
Another man knew that his wife was having affairs left, right and centre, and for that reason exercised his conjugal rights from time to time. One day the lady repelled him with some violence:
“I can’t, now. I love Monsieur X.”
“What’s this? I thought you loved Messieurs Y and Z?”
“That was just a phase. This is true passion.”
“Ah, that’s different,” the husband said, and turned away.
Marmontel, one of the most popular writers of the time, in one of his novellas—Heartwarming Legends—makes the following remark:
“Freedom is the soul of love. Without freedom the object of one’s choice is no better than a husband.” (That is to say, nothing.)
Marmontel also writes:
“You should realise, my friend, that when women transfer their affections elsewhere, they do so out of delicacy and the desire for novelty.”
Was the young Queen, the most fashionable woman in France, really any different from the rest of her kind? And would she at some point transfer her affections “out of delicacy and the desire for novelty” to Prince Louis de Rohan? Qui vivra, verra—What will be will be—he told himself.
Chapter Eight
How it Happened
THE AUTHOR, dear reader, experiences an onset of emotion as he comes to the most important moment in our tale. He has done his best to put it off, talking about other things at great length and hoping all the while that some miracle will turn up, that someone else will write it for him. The writer dislikes responsibility, and finds himself on the point of collapse as the great scene approaches. But he can prevaricate no longer. Taking a deep breath, he will try to get it over with as quickly as possible.
A frequent visitor to Jeanne’s house, a Monsieur Laporte, happened to know that Boehmer still had the wonderful bauble that no one wanted to buy. One day he remarked casually to Jeanne:
“If you really are on such good terms with the Queen, you should tell her to buy that necklace.”
“Have you seen it?” she replied.
“I have. It’s a real miracle. The stones alone are worth a fortune, not to mention the work that went into it.”
Negotiations began. Monsieur Achet, Laporte’s father-in-law and the Public Prosecutor, called on Boehmer and Bassenge to reveal the prospect that lay before them. The jewellers replied that they would gladly give one thousand louis to anyone who could get rid of it for them. Laporte was up to his ears in debt.
On 29th December 1784 Achet and Bassenge took the jewel to Jeanne’s house at St Gilles in the Rue Neuve. The box was opened. There, before her eyes, glittering with the lights of a thousand diamonds, lay the long-awaited miracle—the Valois miracle. There lay the accursed treasure of the Nibelungs, finally raised from the depths into the light of day, and now radiating its sinister charm. For a moment she felt quite faint: this was the moment which she had lived for, and relived: the moment that meant that her b
irth had not been in vain. The inspiration that had so long heaved incoherently inside her soul had found a form. The great plan was born: it brought together two great idées fixes, those of Boehmer and the Cardinal, and in so doing fulfilled a third—her own.
The Cardinal, following her instructions, remained at Saverne. But in January he returned to Paris. Baron Planta had brought him a letter from the Queen. “Come quickly,” it read. “I wish to entrust you with a secret commission, one that concerns me personally. The Comtesse de la Motte will explain this riddle to you.”
At the end of January Jeanne met with the jewellers again, and told them there was a chance they might sell the necklace in the next few days. The purchaser would be a certain nobleman; they would have to be on their guard, because the aristocracy were poor payers. She mentioned no name. The jewellers, intimidated by her high social rank, said they would be presenting her with a rather special gift; they dared not offer her money.
“Thank you, but I shall not accept it,” the Valois blood replied. “I’m only doing this to help you.”
It was, after all, the age of charitable giving.
On 24th January Jeanne and her husband rose early, and by seven in the morning were at Boehmer’s premises in the Rue Vendôme.
“Today will you receive a visit from Cardinal Rohan. He is your buyer. You must not mention me by name.”
Soon afterwards Rohan arrived in the shop. He saw the jewel, and did not like it. His refined rococo taste found it gross, barbaric, dated. For a moment he was filled with disappointment.
“But will the Queen like it?” he wondered. “I don’t understand this. I thought she liked dainty, airy, joli little things. But perhaps not. After all, she isn’t French.”
Still, the Queen’s wish was his command.
The groundwork leading up to this had been as follows: Jeanne, using her tried and trusted method, had told Rohan that the Queen wanted to buy the jewel but was temporarily short of cash. So she wanted to have it on credit, against a bill of exchange, to be paid off by instalments and in secret, without the King knowing. That was why she needed Rohan. She asked that he should not act officially on her behalf but rather pose as the buyer himself. Rohan would be in good standing with the jewellers because of his wealth and good name; she, in turn, would then send him the money. She would explain what she wanted through Jeanne, and by letter if he so wished.