The Queen's Necklace

by Antal Szerb

  To us the most astonishing thing in all this is that Rohan believed this story. Even considering his habitual naivety, it is surprising. He obviously did not take the Queen’s unwillingness to be directly involved in the purchase too seriously, since he actually told the jewellers that he was buying it on her behalf. And when the jewellers questioned his ability to pay, since he was offering her name as security, he showed them the Queen’s well-known signature on the letter of agreement. (We shall return to this signature later.) But if there was no reason to conceal her name, then why did she need him in the first place? Perhaps as a guarantor? But that made no sense either. Even he must have seen that, as a third party to the transaction, the Queen would always command far greater credit than he could.

  Perhaps he thought that her talk of a ‘loan’ was simply a matter of courtesy, when really she wanted the jewel as a present from him. But there can be no doubt that Rohan did not feel quite so gallant as to propose buying the jewel himself. He was depending on her to pay for it. That was the one thing he did show any concern about. He had only let himself become involved once she committed herself to payment in writing.

  So, however you look at it, his role in the whole business was quite superfluous. If the Queen wanted to purchase the jewellery in secret she did not need him as security, either for his name or his wealth. He was perfectly clear about that. Then why did he think the Queen had turned to him?

  Because he was Rohan. We should think back to all that was said about his credulity in Chapter Three, the relevance of which now becomes clear.

  And then again, Rohan was not a man of business. In our more financially aware times it is impossible to imagine just how unbusinesslike he was. He must have been thinking something along these lines: “I really don’t understand why she needs me to buy this necklace. But then I generally don’t understand what happens with money because I have never been without it, as my income is so vast, and I just have to accept that this is precisely the sort of money matter I don’t understand, and which it is below a person of my rank to understand.”

  On 29th January the jewellers called on Rohan at the Hôtel de Strasbourg. They agreed terms: Rohan, acting for the Queen, would pay the 600,000 livres in four half-yearly instalments, the first becoming due on 1st August 1785. Delivery was stipulated for 1st February, as the Queen wanted to have the item by Candlemas.

  Rohan put these conditions in writing himself, and passed them on to Jeanne so that she could inform the Queen. Jeanne returned his submission with the reply that the Queen fully understood the terms, sent her gracious thanks, but did not wish to sign her name. At this point, Rohan dug his heels in. It is really rather strange: he was prepared to believe everything in the world, but he absolutely insisted on the Queen’s signature. This would be, gentle reader, like having someone send to you, quite out of the blue, to say that the Prime Minister, whom you have never met, has asked you to lend him your winter coat. To which you reply, “But of course, most willingly, only I must have his signature.”

  Rohan clearly did not do this because he had immediately become suspicious. Not for a moment did he have the slightest doubt that he really was buying the necklace for the Queen. But it suddenly occurred to him that this was a business matter, so he should act in a businesslike way. He wanted to show that he really was a good businessman, who understood how things were done according to the traditional forms, which must surely be as important in business life as they were in the life of the Court. A document needed a signature—that was the form.

  Jeanne was somewhat taken aback. She had provided the fraudulent letters with an easy mind since he was so blinded, but this agreement would pass through the hands of serious men of commerce … But in the end she made the decision that had been forced upon her. She went back to him with the document. Beside every paragraph the Queen had written the word ‘approuvé’—agreed—and, at the end, the name: ‘Marie-Antoinette de France’.

  “Don’t show this to anyone,” she told the Cardinal.

  Then, at the very last moment, something happened which should have saved Rohan, which might have saved Marie-Antoinette, and indeed the French monarchy: Cagliostro returned from Lyons. If he had merely said “take care”, the scales might have fallen from the Cardinal’s eyes.

  On this point, the Abbé Georgel tells us that the night before the jewel arrived there was a great throng in the Cardinal’s palace, at which a host of heavenly beings appeared, and advised Rohan that the business he had become involved in would bring him great success, and that he would at last win the Queen’s favour, to his own great glory and the inexpressible good of France and all mankind. But the Cardinal—some instinct must have whispered to him that something wasn’t quite right—did not enlighten Cagliostro as to what the great business was about, and Cagliostro was unable to warn him.

  The next morning Rohan wrote to the jewellers asking for immediate delivery of the necklace. The two men arrived soon afterwards. Rohan took the occasion to remind them that it was the Queen who had purchased the jewel, and he showed them her signature.

  Not long afterwards Jeanne also appeared.

  “So, what is the problem with the necklace?” she demanded. “The Queen has been waiting for it.”

  Rohan reassured her—it was there. And at this very last moment, a healthy misgiving crossed his mind. True, it was only a very tiny morsel of misgiving compared to the huge absurdity of the whole. How much, he asked, would the first part-payment be, including interest? Jeanne replied rather grandly that the Queen would take care of that. They agreed that the Cardinal would take the jewel to Versailles that evening.

  That evening, the Cardinal’s carriage stopped in the Place Dauphine in Versailles, where Jeanne lodged. She was alone. He was received in an ill-lit room with an alcove leading off. In his hands lay the treasure.

  Footsteps were heard.

  “De par la Reine!—In the name of the Queen!” someone cried out in the next room. The Cardinal discreetly withdrew into the alcove. A tall, pale man in black entered. Rohan had seen him somewhere before. Where could that have been? Ah, yes, it was the man he had seen in the Bower of Venus, the one who hissed the warning that Madame and the Comtesse d’Artois were approaching. The man gave Jeanne a sheet of paper. She dismissed him, and showed Rohan the letter. The Queen had written to say he should hand over the necklace to the bearer.

  We do not know whether Rohan now had a moment’s hesitation as he let the cursed Nibelung treasure out of his hand. But he let it go, and it set out on its fateful journey. The pale man in black (Réteaux de Villette) and the jewel disappeared into the night. Shortly afterwards, the Cardinal returned home.

  That was how it happened.

  A few days later he received a letter edged with blue. Its illustrious writer requested him to take himself off to Saverne and, in the interests of the business just transacted, not to show his face for while. With his usual passivity he obeyed this instruction too. We find him reposing “deep inside” his wonderful mansion, “dozing on down cushions, far inwards,” in Carlyle’s words, “with soft ministering Hebes, and luxurious appliances, with ranked heyducs, and a valetaille innumerable, that shut out the prose world and its discord; thus lies Monseigneur, in enchanted dream.” Let us leave him to dream; he still has a little time left for that.

  The La Mottes spent rather less time dreaming. They had to solve the difficult question: how could you secretly realise an asset of which there was only one example in the world—an item of jewellery as conspicuous as the sun?

  The wisest course would of course have been to hide it in some safe place, and, after a long, long wait, when the storm had blown over, start turning it into cash, very circumspectly, in some completely different part of the world.

  But that was not what Jeanne did. She couldn’t, because she needed money urgently and she did not have a long, long time. Creditors were pressing her, as, with equal urgency, was the life of greatness, the Valois destiny. Besides, just
two days earlier she had not given it a moment’s thought—so much is clear from the whole story. If you spent time thinking about the future, you wouldn’t be a true adventurer. An adventure is something that happens from one moment to the next; in which there is no yesterday and no tomorrow. Everything else is just petty bourgeois.

  So she did the next best thing—she broke the necklace up into its constituent parts to sell individually. Naturally, this reduced their value. The diamonds were separated by a nervous, unskilled hand and suffered extensive scratching; the mounting was lost, and so was the value of the craftsmanship; all that remained was the raw value of the stones.

  Then she eagerly set about selling them.

  A few days later Réteaux de Villette was reported by a jeweller whose suspicions were aroused by his having a pocket full of diamonds. Réteaux declared that the stones did not belong to him but had been entrusted to him by a lady of noble birth, and he actually named Jeanne de la Motte. Thus the great project almost foundered at the outset.

  However, because of the nature of her profession, Jeanne had been subject to police surveillance for some time. That now proved her good fortune. Thinking she had the diamonds merely in her protection, the police disregarded the report and took no further interest in the matter.

  But it taught Jeanne that she would have to be a lot more careful. She gave a large number of the stones to her husband to take to England for sale there. A second lot she kept herself, and a third was entrusted to Réteaux.

  In England, La Motte set about his task diligently. His line was that an old family had broken up an item of jewellery in order to raise money on the individual pieces. The English jewellers were made suspicious by the low prices he was asking, but were very familiar with the circumstances of members of the aristocracy experiencing financial difficulties. At all events, they raised the matter with the French Embassy, but the people there had no knowledge of any significant theft involving diamonds. La Motte raised almost £240,000 in ready money, leaving so many stones with the English jewellers that they set them up in framed displays; he also traded nearly £8,000 worth of diamonds for other goods: watches, chains, swords, razors, corkscrews, asparagus spoons, boxes of toothpicks and other useless flummery. The Comte was not a man of business, and can have received barely half of what the diamonds were really worth.

  Meanwhile Jeanne too had been busy. She had herself sold about 100,000 livres’ worth of diamonds to jewellers in Paris, settled her debts and gone shopping, paying for everything in diamonds. It troubled her not a whit that she had to tell a few stories about where they had all come from. To prepare the ground for her husband’s return awash with money, she told all her acquaintance that he had won a vast sum of money in England on the horses.

  He was back on 1st June. The money was there in his hands. And now we turn to you, gentle reader, and ask you to rack your brains and think what you would have done in the couple’s place?

  You would no doubt consider where you might invest such a sum profitably. Even in Jeanne’s time, though the practice was not yet common, you could have bought stocks and shares, annuities and national bonds; you could have purchased land, and, given the general upsurge in, and the great strength of, the economy described earlier, you could, above all, have set up some new industrial enterprise. You could even have bought yourself some well-remunerated state office, such as that of fermier général, as a great many financiers were doing.

  On the other hand, you could use it to travel to some distant country, where you could buy plantations and slaves … America was just the place for that.

  The La Mottes did nothing of the sort, and we can hardly blame them. They were children of the Ancien Régime, aristocrats of the same breed as Rohan, if not quite so refined in their recent origins. Money-making schemes were every bit as alien to them as they were to the Cardinal. And above all, they were adventurers, people with no yesterdays, and (especially) no tomorrows. They valued life in terms of feeling, and the figure they might cut before it. The whole mighty sum was spent, just as it had come, in the grandiose style appropriate to their station. Jeanne realised the Valois dream, and La Motte went about dressed up like a thrice-compounded pimp.

  From his study of police and other contemporary records Funck-Brentano calculated just how much money the couple spent. He lists the number and variety of tailcoats La Motte purchased for himself (they take up an entire page), and he enumerates Jeanne’s newly-acquired jewels. We have just space enough for one or two interesting details—her new furniture was hauled from Paris to Bar-sur-Aube, where they set up residence, by forty-two drays. At Bar they kept six coaches and twelve horses. They went about in a grey English carriage emblazoned with the Valois crest and motto: Rege ab avo sanguinem, nomen et lilia—I take my blood, my name and the lily from a royal forebear. The coach was drawn by four English stallions ridden by flunkeys, with a negro covered from head to toe in silver standing on the step. They gave soirée after soirée, and their house was permanently full of guests, even when they themselves were away.

  Certainly none of us would have behaved in this way. No one living nowadays could possibly be so stupid: the modern way of life is simply unsuited to indulging one’s desires with such pomp. But we confess a certain sympathy, indeed, a respect for Jeanne, and for her aristocratic style. She, the offspring of the Valois, had to this point been nothing more than a damp rocket at the great party, her fuse poisonously fulminating and fuming in torment; now the flame had reached the dry tinder and sent up a shower of sparks, scattering flowers and garlands in the sky alongside the stars and all the other glowing rockets. She felt that at last she had found her place in the aristocratic cosmos—and she knew, too, that in due course her fire would fade, and she would plunge back down into the eternal darkness.

  Intermezzo

  Figaro and Count Haga

  THE READER who is interested only in the story of the necklace can confidently skip this chapter.

  The Queen could never for a moment have imagined that a phantom figure dressed as herself would lure the dream-locked Cardinal to the edge of the tragic whirlpool. She went about her royal life totally unsuspecting, and in the summer of 1784 received a visit from, among others, King Gustav III of Sweden, who was travelling around Europe under the name of Count Haga.

  Ever since she had met Axel Fersen, Marie-Antoinette had loved everything to do with Sweden. Or perhaps her love of the Swedes might be traced to an even earlier date—even before Fersen’s time she had had a Swedish protégé, Count Stedingk. However her initial feelings towards Gustav III were more likely to have been hostile. She had met him while she was still the Dauphine, when Gustav, as heir to the throne, was spending time at the French Court. But he had thought it wiser to bid for the favour of Mme du Barry and to ignore the young and powerless Princess—an error that, as we know, she and her normally indulgent husband found hard to forgive.

  But since then, much had changed. News of his father’s death had summoned Gustav back to Stockholm. Before leaving he obtained full French support for the strange course of action he was planning. As is well known, Sweden in the eighteenth century was ruled by an anarchic oligarchy, just as Poland had been before its collapse. The King wielded rather less power than the prime minister of a republic: he voted in the state assembly like any other noble, his privileges amounting to no more than that his vote counted twice. The two factions in the assembly, the Hats and the Caps, were at loggerheads. Between them they were unable to agree on the crucial question of who they should sell the country to, the French, as the Hats wanted, or the Russians, favoured by the Caps. This constitutional anarchy was pushing the country, sooner or later, towards domination by the Tsars, just as had happened to Poland. Both Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great were counting on it.

  But France, as Sweden’s traditional ally, was not content simply to watch this resurgence of the eastern powers. So Choiseul and Vergennes, the former ambassador to Stockholm who later became L
ouis XVI’s Foreign Minister, encouraged the returning Prince to make a stand. Gustav was made of considerably sterner stuff than his predecessors—he was in fact a nephew of Frederick the Great on his mother’s side. And he had the same love of light, and the civilised life—literature, the theatre and public pomp—as any French grand seigneur of the time. Ever since the Thirty Years War the Swedish nobility had received an annual subsidy from the French Court, but oligarchical rule meant in practice that this money no longer went into the pockets of the King but was shared among leading members of the nobility. Gustav proposed putting an end to this arrangement and reverting to the historic precedent whereby all the money from France came to the monarch. He received a promise from the French court that if he could put an end to the anarchy, one-and-a-half million livres would be placed in his hand.

  For that happy result he had above all to thank one of the strangest episodes of the eighteenth century, the Swedish revolution of 1772. The revolution was unusual in that in this case it was the King who rebelled against his tyrannical subjects. Every detail of this revolt should be taught in that non-existent school in which ambitious young people are instructed in the art of politics. If we read the book by Jacques Le Scène Desmaisons that appeared in 1781 (and ended up in the bequest of the Palatine Joseph in the University Library in Budapest) we can see the extent to which the King planned and prepared every detail, in the manner of a great—and flamboyant—theatre director.