by Antal Szerb
“You, the French people, have everything you need for happiness: a fertile land and a gentle climate; good hearts and a enchanting joie de vivre; you have both genius and grace, no equals in the art of pleasing, and no masters in the others. All you lack, my friends, is this one trifle: the right to sleep soundly in your beds while you remain innocent.”
Be that as it may, the French Revolution greatly enlarged our sense of the worth of the individual. However much we might try, few of us nowadays would consider it an offence that cried out to heaven if a young aristocrat wanted to marry a girl from the middle class, and as for any shame that might bring on the family name, we would simply mutter “tant pis”—so much the worse for the family name. While we are no stranger to historical relativism, and agree that every age must be judged by its own standards, we also take the view that under every sky (since it is always the same sky) freedom is better than servitude. And since it was the very first thing they did, it seems clear that the people of Paris felt they really had to demolish the Bastille, and none of the reasoning and statistics of the Funck-Brentanos of the time have ever persuaded them that they were not right to do so.
So, one by one, all the principal actors in our story are gathering in the Bastille. Jeanne arrived on 20th August, Cagliostro and his wife three days later, on the basis of a deposition she had made. Jeanne still felt she had nothing to fear. Very soon, using her juggler-and-monkey tricks, she had worked out a complete system of lies; Cagliostro would be shown to be capable of anything.
But it was to no avail. The truth was beginning to come out, and its instrument was none other than the good Father Loth, the Franciscan monk who acted as Jeanne’s chaplain and major domo. He had set his sights on the office of Preacher to the King, and was angling for an opportunity to speak in his presence one Whitsuntide. He had poured his heart out to Jeanne, and she had promised to have a word on his behalf with Rohan, who as Grand Almoner was head of the spiritual branch of the royal household. Rohan told Loth to show him the speech he would give, then passed it on to his deputy, the Abbé Georgel, who thought it simply inadequate. So Rohan, at Jeanne’s request, gave Loth a better one, so that he might perform more tolerably before the King.
It is possible that Father Loth had been serving the interests of the royal household all along; or perhaps he felt a stronger debt of gratitude to Rohan than he did to his patroness. But it was enough to make him call on the Abbé Georgel after the Cardinal had been arrested. Georgel was to Rohan what Mme Campan was to Marie-Antoinette, the indispensable confidant of French classic drama (we saw how Ducis felt he had to supply even Hamlet with one)—the person who listens to everything, but does nothing in his or her own right. Georgel plays the same role of reliable witness as Mme Campan, and he too has a moment when he both listens and acts, turning Loth’s disclosure to his master’s advantage.
Father Loth had compared Réteaux de Villette’s handwriting to that in the letters signed by “Marie-Antoinette de France”, and lo and behold, they were the same. He revealed that before she fled the house Jeanne had burnt the letters she claimed to have received from Rohan. He recalled the occasion when they took d’Oliva to Versailles; it had struck him then how closely she resembled Marie-Antoinette. He now suspected that the Comtesse had tricked a lot of money out of the Cardinal, and perhaps the necklace with it.
In his Memoirs, Georgel clearly sees Jeanne in the role of the Devil. But she is not the only one he blames for destroying Rohan: delicately and obliquely, he also accuses the Queen. His grounds for this are that when she received the letter from Boehmer she did not immediately insist that she knew nothing about it, or deny that she had ordered it or even received it. Georgel claims that she kept silent in order to implicate the hated Rohan even more deeply. Reading between the lines, he felt that the possibility could not be ruled out that Jeanne de la Motte was indeed working on her instructions, or at least, that she deceived the Cardinal with the Queen’s full knowledge.
“When I questioned Bassenge in Basle in 1797,” Georgel writes, “he did not deny but in fact formally acknowledged that statements he made during the trial, like the evidence submitted by Boehmer, sounded very much as if dictated by Breteuil, and that, if the two of them had not actually followed his orders blindly, they had, at the very least, been forced to remain silent about matters he did not want them to mention. After that revelation, how can one possibly exonerate Her Majesty of a degree of culpable connivance—which sits very ill with her own standards and her social rank? The dishonourable actions of the woman La Motte, abusing the Queen’s name in order to carry out her monumental theft with greater audacity and impunity, ought to have outraged any royal person. How could anyone not be shocked by it? If the Queen had acted on her initial feelings of insulted honour, it would almost certainly have prompted the jewellers to tread more carefully. But even if we accept that she did want to take revenge on the Cardinal and be rid of him, the fact remains that what had already happened, and what she already knew, were more than enough to force him to resign his position at the Court and return to his diocese. No one would have been able to challenge the justice of her actions; the Grand Almoner would have been properly humiliated for his credulity; the house of Rohan would have been disgraced, with no grounds for complaint against her; there would have been no scandal, no Bastille and no criminal proceedings. And that is what Marie-Antoinette clearly might have done, had she followed her own line of thinking. But she listened instead to two men who persuaded her to act quite differently.” The two men Georgel refers to, the Abbé Vermond and Baron Breteuil, were the Cardinal’s sworn enemies.
Like Georgel, Mme Campan also went on to write her memoirs. She makes it clear that she does convict the Queen of a certain complicity, in that, when she received the jeweller’s letter and failed to understand a word of it, she gave it no further thought. But it also appears from Campan’s book that the Queen and her entourage were every bit as suspicious—without justification—of the Cardinal as his people were of her. Marie-Antoinette was convinced that Rohan had used her name in the forged letters to defraud Boehmer and Bassenge of the necklace, in order to repair his notorious financial position. Her phobia about Rohan was such that it even made her fear that he and his co-conspirators might have hidden the necklace in her bedroom with the intention of ‘finding’ it at a suitable moment and laying a false charge, the way people did in medieval legends. But however it was, if we knew nothing else about this episode, the Grand Almoner’s opinion of the Queen, and her opinion of him, constitutes the most frequently discussed topic in connection with the last days of the French monarchy.
From her prison Jeanne managed to send word to Nicole d’Oliva that she had been arrested on the basis of an evil slander, and that, because of the episode in the Bower of Venus, the same danger threatened her if she did not leave forthwith. The girl set off at once for Brussels with her current beau, Toussaint de Beausire. The Paris police quickly discovered her address and informed the French legation in that city. D’Oliva and her suitor were arrested and imprisoned. But their extradition was not a simple matter. Amongst the ancient privileges of the land of Brabant was one waiving the obligation to return refugees except in cases where they themselves requested it. So the police sent their wiliest operator, a man called Quidor, who quickly persuaded d’Oliva that it would be in her own interests to apply for extradition. Which is what happened; whereupon the French government, which revealed its economising tendency on the most surprising occasions, paid her full travel expenses, then locked them both up in the Bastille.
A few months later they were followed by Réteaux de Villette. Réteaux had fled to Geneva, had been arrested there and then extradited. The situation regarding La Motte was rather more complicated. He had gone to England, but even in those days the English were punctilious about such matters. They would not send refugees back for any reason; moreover, the French government was not especially popular in London at the time.
Since th
ere was so little hope that the English authorities would return him, the Paris police decided on abduction. Their efforts in this direction read like a true-life detective story—it seems there are eternal truths even for crime writers. La Motte was living in Edinburgh as the paying guest of the family of an elderly Italian language teacher called Benevent Dacosta. He reckoned that this arrangement would attract the least attention to himself, since people would take him for a member of the family. But Dacosta was not just a language teacher. He was also a man of business, and the French ambassador to London, the Comte d’Adhémar, persuaded him to hand La Motte over for ten thousand guineas. He felt rather bad about doing it, he wrote, but poverty dictated his actions.
The plan involved two police officers travelling to Newcastle, where they were to meet Dacosta and La Motte. Two more officers, one of them the wily Quidor, would be waiting for them in a port called South Shields. French ships regularly called in there for coal, so their boat would not attract any particular notice. There, Dacosta was to betray La Motte. They would pour a soporific into his wine and carry him onto the boat while he was asleep—the classic formula.
The French police proceeded in a very circumspect and low-spirited sort of way. They knew that if the English collared them they would be hanged without mercy.
But the plan failed. First, because La Motte became suspicious and refused to go to South Shields. Secondly, because the agents were unable to find a suitable house in the port, and even if they had found one, Dacosta had insufficient money to pay the rent. Thirdly, and principally, because the Italian took fright. He feared that the scheme would fail and he would be hanged. Instead he revealed the whole plan to La Motte. La Motte, whose sunny disposition we have already observed, was not in the slightest bit angry, and helped his good friend spend the one thousand guineas he had had as an advance from the French.
Rohan, however, remained a prisoner in the Bastille. He could have had no complaint on grounds of comfort. The largest suite in the staff officers’ building was placed at his disposal. He took three footmen in with him, and was given a daily allowance of a hundred and twenty francs. (Should that be multiplied by ten?) He dined in princely style, and could receive any visitor he chose. He gave banquets for twenty people, with oysters and champagne. Because of the extraordinarily large number of his visitors the drawbridge was, most exceptionally, left down all day. Every afternoon he took his walk around the tower terrace, in his brown overcoat, with a large hat drawn down over his eyes, to the delight of the vast crowd of Parisians gathered below. In the city the only topic of conversation was the trial, and interest in it was just as strong abroad.
The King, following the rules, began by appointing Breteuil, as his Paris Minister, and Thiroux de Crosne, the Chief of Police, as examining judges. But Rohan rejected the first as a personal enemy, and the second as being of too low a social rank to question him. Vergennes, the Interior Minister, and Castries, Minister for the Navy, were brought in. The Cardinal gave his evidence coolly, shrewdly, and in strict accordance with the truth.
Jeanne’s hearing was somewhat stormier. She sat on the sellette (the prisoner’s bench, or rather stool) day after day for months, directly facing each witness. If they attacked her defences in one place, she would plug the gap in the wink of an eye with some impromptu remark that introduced three or four random new points; above all, she made fine use of that perennial woman’s weapon, hysteria. This Rohan, who had called her to account, how much money did he have? She hurled it in his face that he had been her lover. To Baron Planta, who had brought separate charges against her, she replied that he was only saying what he did because he had attempted violence on her, and got the worst of it. Father Loth she accused of living a riotous life, especially for a monk, and of procuring women for La Motte. She gave lurid details of Nicole d’Oliva’s moral life. She screamed at Cagliostro that he called her his “lamb” and was always billing and cooing, raising his eyes to the heavens, pronouncing great sayings, calling on God to witness, and pouring out his Italian and so-called Arabic jargon. There was no stopping her. The moment she opened her mouth a filthy and obscene atmosphere poured out and clouded the entire hearing.
Jeanne’s methods of defence always bring to mind that fearful scene when a pack of dogs have driven a cat into a corner. Realising that it cannot run up the wall, it suddenly turns on its attackers, seems to become twice the size it was before, hisses and makes the terrifying sound of a time bomb about to explode. If we were to erect a statue symbolising courage, it would have to depict a cat in this situation.
Carlyle, however, questions Jeanne’s courage. “Had Dame de Lamotte a certain greatness of character; at least, a strength of transcendent daring, amounting to the bastard-heroic? Great, indubitably great, is her dramaturgic and histrionic talent; but as for the rest, one must answer, with reluctance, No. Mrs Facing-both-ways is a ‘spark of vehement life’, but the farthest in the world from a brave woman … Her grand quality is to be reckoned negative: the ‘untameableness’ as of a fly; the ‘wax-cloth dress’ from which so much ran down like water.”
The housefly image is apt. But is the housefly not brave? We are not saying that Jeanne’s hysterical courage has any moral worth—but that she showed courage, indeed great courage, we would not venture to question. Carlyle himself says of her elsewhere: “O worthy … to have been Pope Joan thyself, in the old days;” and surely it took a devilish amount of courage for anyone to become a female Pope?
Louis XVI offered Rohan the choice of being tried either by himself, under royal jurisdiction, or by the Parlement. In a letter, co-signed by members of his family, which made clear how much they identified with him, Rohan chose to go before the Parlement. The letter was finely calculated, and indeed somewhat defiant:
Sire,
I had hoped, given the opportunity of a proper hearing, to be able to provide sufficient evidence to persuade Your Highness that I have been the victim of an intrigue. In that situation I could wish for no other jury than your own sense of justice and goodness. But since your refusal of a direct meeting between us deprives me of that hope, I accept with the most respectful gratitude Your Highness’ permission to establish my innocence through legal process.
This in fact meant: ‘If you accept the fact that I am innocent, I should be willing to submit myself to your sentence; but if not, the Parlement must decide between us.’
Rohan well understood the nature of his choice. The Parlement was the King’s greatest enemy. By giving way to Marie-Antoinette’s womanish anger and insisting, in contrast to Rohan’s openness, on having him arrested in an atmosphere of great scandal, Louis had committed his first major blunder. And now he made another, a hundred times greater and this time quite irreparable—he allowed those hostile to him to adjudicate the matter, so that, if they chose, they could pass judgement both on it and on the King.
Our Nordic friend Count Haga would certainly not have done that. Referring to the necklace trial, the Swedish King wrote to his confidant, Count C F Scheffer, as follows:
“I should have advised him, had I been asked, not to give such great éclat to this affair, which does not really concern the Queen, but which, if it does come to trial, might require a lot of uncomfortable explaining. We monarchs, though just as likely to be tripped up as the rest of humanity, have the advantage that we are not held to account for mistakes involving small amounts of money, and are generally trusted. But once we attempt to excuse ourselves, then we appear to acknowledge the possibility of blame on that side, something that would never occur to the common people of their own accord.” He felt that the necklace affair would damage the universal respect for the institution of the monarchy, and he was right.
Apart from the incompetence he showed, should we really blame the King for allowing the matter to pass into other hands and submitting it to the Parlement? It is possible to assume that he did this under the Queen’s influence. It is very interesting what Napoleon said in connection with this to
a confidant on St Helena, where he had plenty of time to reflect.
“The Queen was innocent, and in order to give maximum publicity to her innocence, she wanted the Parlement to pass judgement on the case. The result was that everyone considered her guilty, and that undermined trust in the Royal Court.”
As is well known, the Paris Parlement of the day was neither a legislative body nor a house of representatives but the highest court of law. It was the Parlement not just of Paris but also of several other large provincial cities. Its members were paid for their services, like all judicial officers in the kingdom. Thus they had for many centuries been drawn from the wealthy upper bourgeoisie. One of the most important developments in French society was that the power of the King became entrenched at a very early date, and in consequence the bourgeoisie did not evolve into an urban patriciate ambitious for self-government, as in Italy, Germany and Flanders. Instead, they served the King, and in that service made their way as lawyers and state officials.
The most high-ranking section of the upper bourgeoisie consisted of those who held the administration of justice in their hands. A great many of them had attained nobility, the collective term for them being the noblesse de robe—the robe here signifying the judge’s gown.
Some were extremely rich, with palaces in the cities and mansions in the countryside, and lived like the true nobility, who were distinguished from them by the term noblesse d’épée—nobility of the sword. Some even came to rival the blue-blood aristocrats in the matter of debt. Their incomes were generally very considerable. M d’Aligre, the leader of the Paris Parlement who presided over the necklace trial, was worth 700,000 livres a year. But while there were those who displayed all the vices of privilege, the greater part were extremely respectable, almost puritanically solemn and plain-living people, exhibiting the true bourgeois mentality: sobriety, integrity and unquestionable probity.