by Antal Szerb
Chapter Nine
The Necklace Explodes
NOW PAY ATTENTION, Reader! “Dramatic scenes, in plenty,” promises Carlyle, “will follow of themselves, especially that fourth and final scene, spoken of above as by another author—by Destiny itself.”
We recall that Jeanne had told Rohan that the Queen wanted to have the necklace by Candlemas. On the following day, 2nd February 1785, Rohan dispatched a footman, accompanied by an Alsatian officer, to attend the King’s public breakfast and note what the Queen was wearing. It seems that Boehmer and Bassenge must also have sent someone, because the day after that they paid an anxious visit to Rohan to ask him what was the matter, that she had not been wearing it. Rohan reassured them, and told them they should rather write and thank the Queen for ridding them of their burdensome treasure. But by this stage the jewellers had irritated her so much that they did not dare go anywhere near her, and preferred to wait for a suitable opportunity. None came, and the months passed. The Queen had of course no idea that Rohan and Boehmer believed that the necklace was in her possession. Jeanne had reassured the interested parties that she would wear it only when she went to Paris. Another time she said it would be worn only when it was fully paid for. Then Rohan had a letter from ‘the Queen’, saying that he should go back to Saverne for a little while.
At the end of May Jeanne turned up at Saverne, in disguise and dressed as a man (for greater effect), to tell the Cardinal that on his return he would be granted an audience. Once again, Rohan could sleep soundly. “Oh unhappy man!” Carlyle shouts at him at this point. “This is not a world which was made in sleep; which it is safe to sleep and somnambulate in.” But Rohan did not wake.
July. The first payment was due on 1st August. Now growing anxious, Rohan asked Jeanne why the Queen was still not wearing the necklace. Because, Jeanne replied, she thought it too expensive. Unless the jewellers dropped their price by 200,000 livres she was going to return it. Boehmer and Bassenge pulled a face, but agreed the discount. This ‘real-world’ business operation reassured Rohan once again: he felt his feet once more on terra firma. All the same, the jewellers used the occasion, at Rohan’s prompting, to write that letter of thanks, which the Cardinal himself polished up into a little masterpiece of decorum.
On 12th July Boehmer went to Paris to give the Queen some jewels she had ordered for the christening of the Duc d’Angoulême, the son of the Comte d’Artois. This was the opportunity he had been waiting for. He handed her the letter, but as fate would have it, at just that moment in came the Finance Minister, Calonne, the most important man at Court. Boehmer made his exit, bowing deeply all the way, to give her time to read the letter and ask for an explanation.
Some while later she did read it, then gave it to Mme Campan to decode, since she was a clever woman and good at solving mysteries. But Mme Campan could make neither head nor tail of a single word. So the Queen burned the letter over a candle, and told Mme Campan that if ever the lunatic returned she should throw him out.
Thus fate spins its web. Since Marie-Antoinette had accepted the letter and said nothing more about it, the jewellers were convinced she did know about the necklace, and nothing would ever drive this notion out of their heads. Unwittingly, but none the less directly, Marie-Antoinette had become involved: she had contributed to deluding the victims.
We are now in the middle of July, and Jeanne is still her calmly superior self. Someone will eventually pay—after all, there are so many rich people in the world. For example that parvenu, the fabulously wealthy financier and Naval Treasurer Baudard de Sainte-James. Sainte-James was a close friend of the Cardinal, a devotee of Cagliostro, and a pillar of his lodge.
“The Queen is experiencing a short-term financial difficulty regarding the first payment,” she confided to Rohan. “Perhaps you should turn to Sainte-James—400,000 livres is nothing to him.”
The trouble was that others too were thinking of Sainte-James: Boehmer and Bassenge had also asked him to lend them the sum for which they were selling the diamond jewel. Sainte-James scratched his head: he was supposed to lend 400,000 livres so that Boehmer & Co could pay for what they already owned? What sort of business was that? But perhaps he should agree, for the sake of the Queen—he was just the sort of parvenu who doted on titles: it would delight him to do her a favour, in the hope of getting some little medal. So he asked Rohan to bring him a letter, written in the Queen’s own hand, asking him, by name, for the money. Rohan went back to Jeanne. But the letter never came.
According to the Abbé Georgel, this was because Réteaux de Villette was not in Paris at the time to forge one. Funck-Brentano prefers to think that Jeanne was unwilling to place a false document in Sainte-James’s hand. Aristocrats and Cardinals were one thing, but she could not assume the same credulity in a man of business. So this was not the answer.
Meanwhile time was passing, and now even she began to worry. After all, she too was human. In the inspiration of the very last moment she found a provisional solution: she pawned some of the remaining diamonds and gave the 30,000 livres they raised, together with an appropriate letter, to the Cardinal. Rohan passed the sum on to the jewellers, and asked, in the Queen’s name, if he could delay the payment of arrears until 1st October. But that was too much for the jewellers. Sainte-James had told them, they said, that they absolutely had to have the full amount that was due. Only now, it seems, did Jeanne, that glorious mayfly and mistress of the art of living from one day to the next, begin to realise just what danger she was in. Her husband, who had been pottering about in Bar without a care in the world, was summoned to Paris forthwith. And then a great new, and extremely bold, idea occurred to her.
On 3rd August she suddenly informed the jewellers: “You’ve been taken in. The documents in the Cardinal’s possession are forged. But don’t worry—he’s rich enough. He’ll pay.”
She made this statement out of conviction. She had very sensibly calculated that that was what must happen. Rohan, as she well knew, had become involved in such a ghastly and complicated intrigue that he would be afraid of the consequences of having presumed that the Queen would enter into an intimate correspondence and arrange a private rendezvous with him in the Versailles Park, and, last but not least, he would dread the general mockery that his appearance in the Venus Bower, and his credulity, would incur. He would surely pay up, and his entire family would pay up, even if it brought the combined Rohans, Guéménées and Soubises crashing down.
But once again fate made a little move of its own. The jewellers did not dare tell the grandee that the signature had been forged. Instead they turned to Marie-Antoinette, and Boehmer scuttled off to Versailles that very day.
Here the story becomes somewhat less clear. Funck-Brentano does not explain why Boehmer should be less afraid of the Queen than he was of the Cardinal. And what business was it of hers at all, if the letter really had been forged? Let us be silent while Mme Campan, who was one of the principal actors, tells us herself:
At Versailles, Boehmer failed to gain access to the Queen, so he rushed off to Mme Campan’s summer lodging, where the lady had retired for a few days. She happened to have guests with her, and could see him privately only that evening, in the garden.
“I believe I can recall the dialogue that passed between us word for word. From the moment he began to lay bare his extraordinarily base and dangerous intrigue he was so agitated that his every word is deeply engraved on my memory. And the more clearly I began to see the danger, the more distressing it was, so that I did not even notice when thunder and lightning erupted in the middle of our conversation.
“As soon as we were alone, I asked him:
“‘What was the meaning of that letter you gave the Queen last Sunday?’
“‘The Queen must know that perfectly well, Madame.’
“‘Pardon me; she has instructed me to ask you.’
“‘She must have been joking.’
“‘I can’t see why the Queen would want to joke with
you! Even you must be aware that she very rarely wears formal dress nowadays; you yourself have remarked how much the austerity here at the Court is affecting trade. The Queen rather fears you’ve concocted another of your schemes, and her message is, most decidedly, that she won’t be buying any diamonds from you, not even one for twenty louis.’
“‘I’m sure she has less need of them than she used to, but then why did she make no mention of the money?’
“‘Because you had it some time ago.’
“‘Ah, Madame, you are very much mistaken. I am still owed a very great deal.’
“‘What do you mean?’
“‘I shall have to tell you everything. It seems the Queen has been keeping this a secret from you. She has purchased that large necklace.’
“‘The Queen? But she refused it. When the King wanted to give it to her she refused it!’
“‘And so? Since then she has had second thoughts.’
“‘In that case she would have spoken to the King. Besides, I have never seen that necklace among her jewellery.’
“‘The fact is, she bought it at Whitsun. I was most surprised to see that she wasn’t wearing it.’
“‘When did the Queen tell you she had finally decided to buy it?’
“‘She has never spoken to me about it in person.’
“‘Then who was the go-between?’
“‘Cardinal Rohan.’
“‘The Queen hasn’t spoken a word to him these ten years! I can’t see what lies behind your little plot, but one thing seems very clear, my dear Boehmer. Someone has robbed you.’
“‘The Queen is simply acting as if His Eminence is in her bad books, but they are getting along all the better for it.’
“‘What do you mean? The Queen is only pretending to dislike someone who is such a laughing stock at Court? Royals are more used to treating people as if they approve of them. For four years now she has made it clear she does not want to buy your necklace, or even to have it as a present! And yet she bought it all the same, and is pretending she has forgotten, because she hasn’t worn it! You must have gone mad, my poor little Boehmer, and got yourself tangled up in some little scheme. I really tremble for you, and am most displeased with you, on Her Majesty’s behalf. Six months ago I asked you what had become of the necklace, and you told me that you had sold it to the Sultan’s favourite.’
“‘My reply was made according to the Queen’s wishes; she left a message by way of the Cardinal that that was what I should say.’
“‘So is that how you got your instructions from the Queen?’
“‘By letters, bearing her signature. And for some time now my creditors have been demanding to see them.’
“‘So you’ve not received any payment?’
“‘Excuse me; I received 30,000 livres, in banknotes when I reduced the price of the necklace. That was the amount the Queen sent to My Lord Cardinal, and they must certainly have met in secret, because when His Eminence gave it to me he told me that he was present when she took it from the portfolio in the Sèvres Porcelain secretaire in her little boudoir.’
“‘This is all lies. But you have made a very grave error. When you accepted your appointment you took an oath of loyalty to the King and Queen, and yet you failed to make the King aware of this very serious matter, even though you were acting without the direct instructions of the Queen.’
“This last expression really shocked the dangerous lunatic—ce dangereux imbécile—and he asked me what he should do. I advised him to go to Baron Breteuil in his capacity of Royal Jeweller, to tell him everything quite candidly, and trust to his guidance. He replied that he would rather I undertook to tell the Queen what had happened. This I refused to do. It seemed wiser not to get involved in that sort of intrigue.”
But a truly brave and loyal soul would have done just that.
If this conversation between Mme Campan and Boehmer really did take place, there are two possibilities. One is that for once Funck-Brentano is wrong, and that Jeanne had not told Boehmer that the letter was forged, so he still believed absolutely that he was dealing with the Queen. The other is that Jeanne did indeed tell him, but that Boehmer took this to mean that the Queen had quite deliberately signed it under a wrong name in case she was found out, calculating that she could then disclaim it. This is a very dark suspicion, though at the time Marie-Antoinette was suspected of even darker things. What gave strength to Boehmer’s suspicions was that Marie-Antoinette had not responded to his letter with a single word of acknowledgement or asked to discuss it, so that he had only a tacit understanding that she had received the necklace at all. We have to consider the appalling climate of suspicion that surrounded the Queen. Besides, Boehmer was just another Figaro, and what he assumed about his royal masters was not so very dire.
Meanwhile Jeanne did not remain idle. She gave Réteaux de Villette four thousand livres to make his escape. She did not want him appearing before the police a second time and saying something stupid. Then she urgently summoned the Cardinal. She told him that her enemies were accusing her of committing an indiscretion and bragging about it (which sounds probable enough), so she no longer felt safe in her home, and needed to hide. She begged him to give her refuge in his palace. At eleven that night, accompanied by a chambermaid, she crept through his gates. With this particular chess move she achieved two of her intended aims: first, to reassure the Cardinal once again—would she have gone there if her conscience were not crystal clear? Second, to link her own fate even more closely with his, so that she could hide behind him in case of danger, and to compromise him even more profoundly.
The next day Rohan sent for Boehmer. His partner Bassenge came instead. Bassenge dared venture only one question:
“Does Your Eminence have complete confidence in the person who went between you and the Queen?”
Rohan replied that he had never spoken directly with the Queen, but said he had every bit as much confidence in her as if he had. Finally he agreed to ask Sainte-James to give the jewellers more time. A few days later he actually did meet Sainte-James at a social gathering, and asked him to be patient for a little longer.
After this, on 6th August, Jeanne went back home to Bar. Why did she not make her escape? Why not flee to England? Was the reason, as we rather suspect, her wonderful mayfly insouciance, or was this deliberate cunning? Running away would amount to a full confession, but while she stayed she testified to her innocence and shifted responsibility onto Rohan. Besides, she continued to assume that Rohan and his family would quietly put everything right behind the scenes. Perhaps too she comforted herself with the thought that tomorrow everything would be just the same as it had been the day before.
Meanwhile Rohan must have been living through the greatest crisis of his life. The jewellers’ doubts must surely have been driving nails into his head. He turned for advice to his master, Cagliostro. Cagliostro knew nothing of the necklace business, as will become clear beyond all doubt in the course of other things. Jeanne obviously had not wanted a second fraudster involved, and had succeeded in persuading Rohan to keep him in the dark. Cagliostro, as we have mentioned, had prophesied a triumphant outcome to the whole undertaking, of whose real nature he was unaware. Which was somewhat careless, for a prophet.
But now Rohan kept it a secret from him no longer. He told him everything, with perfect candour, and showed him the letters. And then something very surprising happened. Cagliostro thought the matter through, and gave Rohan the wisest and most sensible advice anyone could have given in the circumstances. No Apis ram, no Dove, no candles, no Zobiachel. The magician who posed as a man possessed was secretly a shrewd and circumspect individual. It was as if, between two lines of iambic pentameter, a Shakespearean actor were to pull off his wig and declare: “If you please, we will now continue in plain English!” Perhaps Cagliostro actually liked Rohan. He certainly had good reason to.
“The Queen could never have signed this letter ‘Marie-Antoinette de France’,” he told h
im. “You have been duped, without question. You have been the victim of a fraud, and there is only one thing you can do. Throw yourself at the King’s feet without delay and confess everything.”
There was no doubt that that was what he should have done. The kindly Louis XVI, seeing Rohan’s sincere remorse and distress, would clearly make sure the matter was settled quietly and without fuss—and he would do so in his own interest. Once again we find ourselves at a moment in time when everything might still have turned out for the good—and didn’t.
It was Rohan’s good-heartedness—his eighteenth-century sentimentality and gallantry—that stopped him taking the only appropriate step.
“If I did that,” he told Cagliostro, “that woman would be destroyed.”
“If you don’t want to do it yourself, then a friend could do it for you,” the magus replied, discreetly offering his services.
(The scene he proposed was grotesque—Cagliostro before the King, recounting the story of the necklace to the full accompaniment of oriental mumbo-jumbo!)
“No, no, let me think about it a bit longer,” said the Cardinal.
This vacillation was his undoing. But how could anyone who had lived such a sheltered life, whose every choice had been made for him by fairy godmothers, come to a quick decision? On the other hand, like Milton’s Adam, he was also destroyed by an act of gallantry, protecting the sinful Eve.
This naturally raises the question of whether there was a rather more intimate relationship between Jeanne and the Cardinal. Funck-Brentano, as befits a Frenchman, devotes an entire chapter to the debate. Jeanne did later testify before the court that she had been Rohan’s mistress (though he rejected the allegation with considerable dignity). According to Funck-Brentano this ‘confession’ was meaningless—it was entirely in her interest to appear closely identified with the Cardinal, the better to take advantage of his privileged position. Her confidant Beugnot claimed to have seen some passionate love letters Rohan had written her, but according to Funck-Brentano that too signified nothing, since we know how much she enjoyed composing fictitious billets-doux. Besides, it was part of her nature to be forever making up romantic stories about herself. Against this is the fact that until almost the last minute the Cardinal had been supplying her with pocket money, but this was in the sort of petty amounts that a grandee might casually dole out to a passing beggar, hardly to a mistress. Jeanne asked for and accepted these small sums so that he would not realise that she had meanwhile made herself rich at his expense.