The Queen's Necklace

by Antal Szerb

  We must also consider how very different a king was from an ordinary mortal. From the moment of his birth, he was raised in so rarified and sheltered a world that it must necessarily have weakened his grasp of reality. He could never become familiar with the common people and the difficult raw material of their daily lives. For this reason—because they were an unknown quantity—he was every bit as uncomfortable meeting commoners as his grandfather, Louis XV, had been. The reason why he failed to recognise the danger hanging over his throne, and made no effort to counter it, is, quite clearly, that he was a king. In the clear sunny sky depicted on the ceiling of his throne room he never noticed the gathering storm clouds …

  However, contrary to what I have just argued, we have also to recognise that the rulers of old lived in much greater proximity to life and to their people than those of today. Or more precisely, the people of those days lived in greater proximity to their rulers. They could enter their great halls, stroll in their parks and shout abuse at them with impunity. Louis XVI probably knew much more about his people and their moods than the leaders of society today. Somehow, both monarch and people were cut from the same cloth. The social gulf between them was confined to the external world, not the inner one. The King was more akin in spirit to his serf than the director of a modern business is to his office-boy; and more able to strike the right note when they spoke to one another.

  The sad thing is that it should be necessary at all to draw attention to Louis’ virtues, as opposed to his shortcomings. Those virtues did almost as much to pave the way for the Revolution as did the sins of his predecessors. As Sainte-Beuve expressed it, rather more elegantly: “Louis XVI’s spiritual virtues ran far beyond what was required for the role of king. It was his very kindness and humanity that drove him unremittingly towards the role of sacrificial victim, and, as he stumbled from one act of weakness to another, the only way in which he would ever attain greatness was through martyrdom.” And so this kind-hearted, saintly king proved to have been of the least possible use to the institution he represented at that precise moment in history. Had he possessed the easy-going, sanguine, rococo spirit of Gustav III of Sweden, he might have come up with some stratagem to protect, or at least prolong, its existence. But at that precise moment only a king with the mind of a Machiavelli could have measured up to the situation. Instead, they had Louis XVI, the humane, indulgent soul who loved his people and shed bitter tears over their fate.

  “On that final day,” Sainte-Beuve continues, “Marie-Antoinette poured out her heart, urging him to die like a king, like a true descendant of Louis XIV. But he had resolved rather to die like a Christian, as his forebear St Louis had done.” It was the fate of the French monarchy that this Louis had more in him of his sainted ancestor than of Louis XIV.

  The Verdict

  THE HEARING LASTED FOR MONTHS. The arrests of d’Oliva and Réteaux changed everything. Once d’Oliva had confessed to her appearance in the Venus Bower, and Réteaux that he had written the letters from ‘the Queen’, Jeanne’s lies collapsed one after another. On 12th April she was brought face to face with Réteaux and d’Oliva and finally compelled to admit to the Venus Bower charade. The confession was torn from her between a thousand screams and convulsions; her superior manner vanished, and she fainted. A warder took her in his arms and carried her back to her cell. But the moment she recovered herself she bit him in the neck, whereupon he simply let her fall.

  With the collapse of her scheme to blame everything on Cagliostro, she concocted a fresh one intended to make Rohan the sole villain and herself merely the blind instrument who had had no idea what she was involved in. When that became untenable, she tried another experiment: taking refuge in secrecy—“the sort of secret,” she claimed, that “she could reveal to no one, not even to the head of the royal household in strictest confidence.” And finally, when that too proved ineffectual, she began to feign madness. She smashed everything in her room, and refused to eat or to go down to the hearing. When the warders entered her cell, she would be found lying on the bed stark naked.

  Cagliostro however found himself in top form on several occasions during the trial. He castigated Jeanne roundly, making her so angry that she grabbed a candle-holder, pulled it towards her and inflicted a burn on herself. When Réteaux was brought before him, he unleashed a powerful moral lecture—if we can believe him, he “talked until his lungs could no longer bear it”. Réteaux broke down completely, and the judges thanked Cagliostro warmly.

  But by the time he had recovered his normal self the strength had gone out of him, and so it seems had the Ram Apis, and even Zobiachel, and, like all the other accused, he suffered something of a collapse. His Italian temperament made him far less able than his French counterparts to withstand the loneliness, and stress, of imprisonment. It seems that he, the great mystic, commanded the fewest sources of inner strength, which rather confirms the bogus nature of his grand spiritual claims. He needed constant supervision, as it was feared that he might kill himself.

  Rohan bore his own ordeal with quiet, sombre dignity. When his case came before the Parlement and he ceased to be the prisoner of the King, he lost the right to maintain a great household and receive visitors. Only his doctors were allowed to see him (he was suffering from inflamed kidneys), and it was they who took his letters, written in invisible ink, to his lawyer. He became increasingly exhausted, and began to lose heart. He was deeply anxious about his friends and allies, Planta and Cagliostro. He even required his lawyer to take an oath that he would always address Cagliostro as Comte, as it pained him so much when people did not. But deep in his heart lay the real concern, which troubled him even more strongly than his own fate and that of his friends—his grief for the Queen. “Write and tell me,” he begged his lawyer, “whether it is true that she is still so upset.”

  It was customary at the time for lawyers involved in cases of unusual public interest to print and circulate their memoirs, or rather their own accounts of what happened. The first to do this had been Beaumarchais himself. Now the public were waiting in a fever of excitement for ‘memoirs’ of the necklace trial, which of course duly appeared, with huge success. The version put out by Jeanne’s lawyer Doillot saw ten thousand copies instantly snapped up from his home address, and another five thousand distributed through booksellers. This Doillot was an elderly gentleman who had not been in practice very long. Jeanne had completely turned the old fellow’s head. He believed everything she told him, and faithfully recorded her fantastic tales in his memoir. Which of course only served to make it even more of a success.

  Cagliostro’s lawyer, the young M Thilorier, was very aware that this was his great chance to make a name for himself. The basic text was written for him, in Italian, by the magus himself, and he then worked it up, with considerable literary flair, to suit the taste of the time. Grimm and other experts declared that had it been a novel, they would have considered it wonderfully interesting and skilfully wrought. In this work can be found the more fanciful stories about Cagliostro’s youth already quoted. As for the actual legal issues, Thilorier was in a very easy situation, as Cagliostro was able to prove his alibi, having arrived in Paris, from some way away, the day after Rohan first talked to the jewellers.

  Nicole d’Oliva’s lawyer, the equally youthful Maître Blondel, produced a lyrical little masterpiece, a gem of sensibilité, and the age lapped it up. It tapped the same vein of sentimentality we find in Manon Lescaut and the later La dame aux camélias. People were shocked by Nicole’s innocence, for who could be more innocent than an innocent courtesan?

  Blondel’s work ran to twenty thousand copies. Scarcely less popular were the minor personages, Planta, Réteaux, Mme Cagliostro and others who had been more or less incidentally caught up in the case. But the greatest expectations of all were aroused by the memoirs of the Cardinal’s lawyer, Mâitre Target. Target was an Academician, and the pride of the legal profession. Finally, on 16th May, the long-awaited work appeared. It proved a hu
ge disappointment to the public. Target wrote with wonderful scholarly, indeed Ciceronian, eloquence, but he described nothing but the truth, with not a jot of poetry or fantasy in it.

  Alongside the memoirs came the flood of pamphlets. Their authors, whose livelihoods depended on the popular hunger for sensation, naturally had no wish to miss out on the boom. Everyone had some new detail to add. They were able to reveal that Rohan and d’Oliva had spent the night together after the scene in the Bower, Rohan in the belief that he held the Queen in his arms. They reported that La Motte was now in Turkey, where he had been circumcised and made a Pasha. The more gruesome and shameless the pamphlet, the more certain it was of success. In this burgeoning tide of filth, Cagliostro became immensely popular. But as for the Queen …

  Of these pamphlets Carlyle writes:

  “The mind stops in dismay: curiosity breaks of it, whether this vortex of deception should ever close while delirium becomes general and the human tongue incomprehensible jargon, like the squalling of jays and magpies.”

  Images and caricatures of the dramatis personae poured into circulation. The publishers were not overly scrupulous. The face of St Vincent’s wife (he was the President of the Parlement) was circulated over Jeanne’s name, while the Duc de Montbazon stood in for La Motte.

  How could the government possibly tolerate all this? Was there no censorship yet in the world? Well, of course there was, and extremely strict provisions regulated the presses. But those provisions were every bit as toothless and impotent as every other function of the Ancien Régime. Any pamphleteer caught in the act would have his work burnt and would be severely punished, but such people were never caught, nor were their distributors. The police had good reason not to arrest them, since it was rumoured that the very worst of these productions was the work of no less a person than the Finance Minister, Calonne, while other pamphleteers enjoyed the protection of the Duc d’Orléans and operated under his direction.

  We have already related one colourful tale involving the tracking down of pamphlets by Beaumarchais. Perhaps even more instructive is the tale of police inspector Goupil. Shortly after Louis XVI took the throne, Goupil announced that he had discovered a secret press near Yverdun that was about to print something that was deeply scurrilous about the King, and even more so about the Queen. He had managed to procure one or two examples, but to secure the rest he would need a great deal of money. He was given thirty thousand louis, and shortly afterwards produced both the manuscript and all the copies that had been run off. For these he was given another thousand louis. But at this point another policeman, prompted by envy, revealed that the author of the pamphlet was none other than Goupil himself. Ten years earlier, he had been a prisoner in the Bicêtre, and his wife had been in the Salpêtrière. On her release she had managed to delude Rohan into believing that she could act as a mediator on his behalf with the Queen. (Was that such a very widespread fashion among the women of this period?)

  These pamphleteers were repulsive little nobodies, and their productions give pleasure now only to bibliographers and collectors, but their importance was considerable. They played a far greater role in bringing about the Revolution than the truly great writers. It was they who served public opinion, both feeding and directing it. At the time there was no daily press in the modern understanding of the term. In the turbulent years before 1789 one had to look elsewhere for material to supply the ever-chattering and gossip-hungry people of Paris. Hence the pamphlets. They existed in immense variety. There were the ‘little books’ (libelle, source of the modern English ‘libel’), and there were handbills and leaflets carrying pictures and verses. The eighteenth century was extremely fond of the verse form (even for textbooks), so naturally slander too could be versified. There are many such poems written about Marie-Antoinette, each more appalling than the last.

  But all the while the shadow of the Bastille hung over the pamphleteer. Any day the little scene might take place which Mercier euphemistically calls the ‘delivery of the exempt’, with the police officer sidling up beside you and fluting softly in your ear:

  “There must surely be some mistake, Monsieur, but I am instructed, Monsieur, to order your detention, Monsieur. In the name of the King, Monsieur.”

  “The victim might want to howl,” says Mercier, “but the exempt is delivered so very meekly! If you had a pistol you would do better to fire it into the air rather than at him. Better to bow low, and enter into a exchange of politenesses with the man. You could pile up the mutual compliments until nothing stood between you and your rival in courtesy but iron bars.”

  One can hardly wonder that the people who directed public opinion felt such venomous resentment towards the prevailing system.

  The power of popular sentiment derived from the sociable disposition of the French character and the extroverted, outward-looking nature of French society. “Most foreigners,” wrote Necker, the great banker, who was himself of foreign origin, “have not the slightest conception of the importance of public opinion in France. They find it hard to understand that such an invisible form of power could exist. Without financial resources, official protection or a standing army, it imposes its laws on the city, the Court and even the Royal Palace.” Necker was absolutely right: foreigners do not understand it. Even Wahl, the modern German scholar who is the greatest expert in every aspect of the years leading up to the Revolution, fails to grasp the French mentality. In his book he reproaches Necker, and all those who were in power in the final years of the Ancien Régime, for placing so much emphasis on public opinion. He cannot understand how it could be that while the King could nominate ministers, public opinion could bring them down, and he would certainly have found Chamfort’s remark incomprehensible: “Everyone hates a fishwife, but none of us will accost one when she makes her way through the market hall.” It seems that in Germany either the fishwives hold their tongues, or the self-confidence of the bourgeoisie is so unshakeable that they pay them no attention.

  The extent to which the power of popular sentiment had grown is wonderfully seen in this well-known anecdote:

  Louis XVI once asked the elderly Richelieu, who had lived through three reigns, what had been the difference between them.

  “Sire,” the Marshal replied, “in Louis XIV’s day no one dared utter a word; when Louis XV was on the throne, they spoke in whispers; under Your Highness they shout at the top of their voices.”

  And now public opinion began to influence the necklace trial. Initially, people were against Rohan. He had brought this on himself long before, by his worldly behaviour and general voluptuousness so unbefitting a man of the cloth; the word now was that he kept a harem, consisting of all the women featuring in the case. Everyone ‘knew’ that Jeanne, d’Oliva and Mme Cagliostro were his mistresses. Much play was made of his position of Grand Almoner, and caricatures showed him collecting alms to pay off his debts. The age of Voltaire, with its underlying contempt for the clergy, wallowed in this slander.

  But then the mood changed. He soon came to be seen as the pitiable victim of ‘despotism’ and signs of sympathy for him began to appear. The ladies, who, as we have seen, liked to express their opinions through their coiffures, now started to sport red and yellow ribbons on their heads: red above and yellow below, to signify “the Cardinal lying on straw”, that is to say, in a dungeon. These women, as a contemporary noted, were eternally grateful to the gallant Rohan for taking care, even in his hour of crisis, to burn the love letters which would have compromised so many fine ladies.

  This reversal of public opinion strongly affected the Parlement, which, proud as it was of the independent spirit displayed by its judges with regard to the supreme power in the land, was prepared to make any number of compromises to preserve its popularity, and was by no means independent-minded where its public standing was concerned.

  The change in the public mood was so rapid and so complete that one has to assume a degree of orchestration from above. This originated at the highest lev
el, from government ministers and Versailles. Marie-Antoinette had lost her popularity with the public long before, but her real enemies remained those at Court. It was only there that anyone had a real interest in her emerging from the trial in disgrace. First of all, there were the Rohan clan, Mme de Marsan, Mme de Brionne and all the fairy godmothers, who had always despised the young Queen for her attack on protocol. But she had even more powerful foes, such as Calonne, the Finance Minister, who had never forgiven her for opposing his appointment; and there was the powerful family of the late Prime Minister Maurepas, who were still furious that she had wanted the banished Choiseul to be put in charge.

  And, in the background, there lurked even loftier enemies: the two royal princes, counting on the demise of Louis XVI to bring one of them to the throne. One was the Comte de Provence, that witty and cunning free spirit; the other was the Duc d’Orléans, Philippe-Égalité, who flirted with revolution, and who, as the elder son, was waiting for the throne to become vacant. There is something rather eerie about the fact that at the time of our story there were three people living at Versailles who would attain the French crown through the beheading of Louis XVI: the Comte de Provence, later Louis XVIII; the Comte d’Artois, as Charles X and the twelve-year-old Duc de Chartres, the son of Philippe-Égalité, who became Louis-Philippe, the Citizen King. And there was a fourth, the infant Duc de Normandie, who after his father’s death became the legitimate King of France, Louis XVII, but never ascended to the throne. His story was lost during the Revolution in circumstances of insoluble mystery. One thinks of Macbeth when the witch conjured up the ‘horrible sight’ of the line of future Kings of Scotland, not one of whom carried his own features.