Marie Antoinette: The Journey

by Antonia Fraser

  BARON DE BRETEUIL, MINISTER OF THE ROYAL HOUSEHOLD, 15 AUGUST 1785

  The inexplicable letter presented to the Queen on 12 July 1785 had in fact been dictated to the jeweller Boehmer by Cardinal de Rohan. This step on his part marked the culmination of a series of terrible anxieties, starting with the fact that it was he who had actually paid for the diamond necklace. Like Marie Antoinette, the Cardinal believed two things about the situation, both of which were untrue. First, he understood that the Queen had wanted to acquire the necklace but lacked the immediate funds to do so. Second, he was under the impression that by advancing—in stages agreed with the jewellers—the large sum of money required, he would secure his heart’s desire of gaining the Queen’s favour. She had not spoken to him publicly—let alone privately—since that distant day in Strasbourg when she was the bride of the Dauphin, and he, as Prince Louis, had been Coadjutor to his uncle the Bishop.1

  Just as Marie Antoinette could not begin to guess at the meaning of Boehmer’s letter, so the Cardinal was equally at sea with what was happening. He could not understand, for example, why the Queen had not yet worn the necklace, although its public display was, as he thought, to be an indication of her gratitude. Most importantly, he could not understand why there had been no marks of royal favour, not even the slightest acknowledgement of his new status when that, after all, had been the whole object of the exercise.

  Here then were two baffled people, Queen and Cardinal, neither of whom could in all fairness be expected to have guessed at the other’s assumptions; as a result both were to be rapidly seized with a violent sense of injustice. This indignation based on genuine ignorance, these raised passions, felt by both sides, were present in the Diamond Necklace Affair from the beginning and were to have a devastating effect on its course. The enormous gap between their two perceptions of reality, Queen and Cardinal, might indeed have made the whole matter material for a farce—except that in both cases, it turned out to be a tragedy.*63

  A visit by Boehmer to Madame Campan at her country house on 3 August did little to clear matters up so far as the Queen’s role was concerned. Boehmer himself was by now extremely worried at not having received an answer to his letter. He asked the First Lady of the Bedchamber if she had anything to pass on to him, and when Madame Campan told him that the Queen had simply burnt his note, he lost his famous blandness and burst out: “That’s impossible! The Queen knows she has money to pay me!” So the full story emerged, or at least the full story as Boehmer knew it. It was a shocking and also an astonishing tale for anyone who, like the First Lady, had had long experience of the character of the Queen.

  Here was Boehmer declaring that the Queen had acquired the Diamond Necklace for one and a half million francs. He also explained why he had put it about that he had sold the necklace in Constantinople: “The Queen desired me to give that answer to all who spoke to me on the subject.” Even more amazing was Boehmer’s statement that it was the Cardinal who had actually purchased the necklace on behalf of the Queen. When Madame Campan retorted that the Queen had not spoken to Rohan since his return from Vienna, Boehmer suggested that she must have been seeing him in private, for she had already given the Cardinal 30,000 francs.

  “And the Cardinal told you all this?” gasped the First Lady.

  “Yes, Madame, the Cardinal himself.”

  Madame Campan’s advice was that Boehmer should go immediately to Versailles and seek an interview with Breteuil, the Minister of the Royal Household, since as Crown Jeweller, Boehmer was officially in his department. At the same time she expressed her amazement that such a “sworn officer” should conduct an important transaction like this, without direct orders from King, Queen or even Breteuil. At this point Boehmer made the most troubling statement of all: far from acting without direct orders, he had notes signed by the Queen in his possession, which he had shown to several bankers in order to stave off making his own payments. So Boehmer departed, leaving behind a bewildered Madame Campan to consult her father-in-law. The Librarian advised her not to go to the Queen at the Trianon but to leave it to Breteuil to sort out this unhappy business. Boehmer, however, did not go to Breteuil; he went straight to the Cardinal de Rohan in Paris. As a result of their confabulation, Rohan made a memorandum about the results of Boehmer’s visit to Madame Campan: “She told him that the Queen had never had his necklace and that he had been cheated.” The Cardinal and Boehmer now knew that some kind of disaster was in the making although neither of them quite knew the whole of it as yet. Only the Queen remained in ignorance.

  Two or three days later, Marie Antoinette, who was at the Petit Trianon, refused to see Boehmer again. It was not until the Queen casually asked Madame Campan if she had any idea what the persistent jeweller wanted that the latter felt she must speak out, in spite of her father-in-law’s advice. Significantly, it was the question of the notes that she was supposed to have signed that was seized upon by Marie Antoinette: “She complained bitterly of the vexation.” Yet the Queen still could not conceive of the Cardinal being involved in such a business. The whole affair was “a labyrinth to her and her mind was lost in it”—a fair comment, perhaps, then and now.

  Unfortunately the introduction of Breteuil, aided by Vermond, to discuss “what was proper to be done,” ended the Queen’s original non-committal and certainly not ungenerous attitude to Rohan. Breteuil was quite clever enough to see his chance to destroy his enemy, or at least to attempt to do so. Neither Breteuil, nor at a lower level of influence Vermond, nor indeed Count Mercy d’Argenteau, seems to have given any real thought as to the best way to handle this unpleasant imbroglio—as yet imperfectly understood—in a manner sensitive to the nuances of French court politics. Mercy’s agonizing physical condition had flared up again, making even travel to Versailles an endurance test.3 All three of them—the Queen’s protégé-minister, the Queen’s reader, the Queen’s chief advisor over fifteen years—thought of the narrow advantage of destroying Rohan, rather than the protection of the Queen’s reputation. Already so much damaged by the libelles, her good name should have been their prime concern.

  So the stage was set for the confrontation between Queen and Cardinal, in the presence of the King and various ministers including Breteuil, on 15 August, the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary (Marie Antoinette’s patronal feast). Even the method by which this confrontation was engineered was deliberately provocative, rather than firm but discreet. The Cardinal was already dressed in his sweeping scarlet “pontifical” robes, ready to celebrate Mass, when he was summoned to the King’s inner cabinet at noon. Here Louis XVI taxed Rohan with purchasing the diamonds from Boehmer and then asked him what he had done with them. “I was under the impression that they had been delivered to the Queen,” replied Rohan. “Who commissioned you to do this?” asked the King. Then for the first time, the name was mentioned in public that was to haunt all the participants of the Diamond Necklace Affair. “A lady called the Comtesse de Lamotte Valois,” was the Cardinal’s answer. He added that when he received a letter from the Queen at the hands of the Comtesse, he believed he was pleasing Her Majesty by taking the commission upon himself.

  With indignation that had evidently been rising during this colloquy, Marie Antoinette interrupted Rohan. How could he believe that she would select him of all people for her emissary, a man to whom she had not spoken for eight years since his return from Vienna, “and especially through the mediation of such a woman?” With dignity, the Cardinal replied that he now saw plainly that he had been a dupe: “My desire to be of service to Your Majesty blinded me.” He then produced a note from the Queen to Jeanne de Lamotte, which commissioned him to purchase the necklace. It was signed “Marie Antoinette de France.”

  It was the King who took the note and read it. His own outrage now took over. The letter was neither written nor signed by the Queen. How could a prince of the House of Rohan, the Grand Almoner himself, ever think that the Queen would sign “Marie Antoinette de France?” All the w
orld knew that queens signed only their baptismal names. The Cardinal did not answer. Pale and bewildered, he felt unable to speak further in the royal presence. On being pressed by Louis XVI on matters to do with his own notes to Boehmer, Rohan agreed to write down a full account of “this enigma,” in the King’s words, in an inner cabinet. Rohan returned fifteen minutes later with an account that was as confused as his verbal answers had been.

  This forged signature “Marie Antoinette de France” turned out to be a key element in the Diamond Necklace Affair because it prejudiced Louis XVI against the Cardinal. Breathing royal etiquette since birth, the King simply could not understand how a courtier, and above all a Rohan, a member of a family so keen on the details of status, could make such a mistake.*64 There was indeed general amazement on the subject at court. It was not as if the question of queens (and other royalties) using simple baptismal names was blurred. On the contrary, it was a privilege proudly maintained; a friend of the Prince de Ligne once advised him, as a rule of self-advancement at court, to keep close to those whose forenames were sufficient for their signature.4 Marie Antoinette, who had used “Antoine” as a child, still used “Antoinette” alone very occasionally in family letters where she signed them (mainly she did not). On all her formal correspondence, the Queen of France was loftily “Marie Antoinette,” with no need of qualification.5

  Echoing the question of Louis XVI, how could the Cardinal have been taken in by such a signature? This is to assume that the Cardinal did not actually forge it himself. Although for some time this would be the King’s angry conviction, he was wrong on this issue. Rohan’s own trial brief for his defence would later make the reasonable point that if the Cardinal had really been either the forger or his accomplice, the matter would have been handled more intelligently. “While it was certainly surprising that he accepted such a signature as genuine, it would have been quite amazing if he had been the author of it.”6

  The simplest explanation of the Cardinal’s credulity is probably the true one. It lies in humanity’s infinite capacity for self-deception where some perceived (and in this case long-desired) advantage is at stake. In short, the Cardinal was part of a system that made the royal favour so essential that people resorted to desperate measures to acquire it. Added to this must be the undoubted genius of that seductive “Circe,” Jeanne de Lamotte Valois, as a con woman. The Cardinal was not the only prey of tricksters to find his own gullibility impossible to credit afterwards when the spell was broken. Besides which there was something naive about his character. This streak no doubt was the product of his vanity, the vanity of a man brought up since childhood to believe himself superior just because he was a Rohan, and thus unused to being checked; it was this that made the Queen’s hostility—inexplicable to him—so hard to bear.

  The Cardinal de Rohan was, for example, equally impressed by the brilliant charlatan known as Count Cagliostro, who, despite origins in the Sicilian peasantry, “seduced him into the treacherous bypaths of the occult and supernatural,” in the words of his own Grand Vicar, the Abbé Georgel. It is true that Cagliostro’s claims to know the mysteries of the ages, having been born an Egyptian thousands of years ago, fascinated all Europe at the time, along with his hypnotic appearance; the expression in his eyes was “all fire and yet all ice,” wrote the Baronne d’Oberkirch. (But she did at least spot that his accent was Italian, despite his supposed Arab birth.) This was, after all, a society in which the claims of Franz Mesmer to effect cures by the use of “animal magnetism” were also taken seriously. The Baronne d’Oberkirch visited him too, and he fascinated among others the Marquis de La Fayette as well as Marie Antoinette herself, although it was the scientific-minded Louis XVI who initiated the investigation that caused Mesmer’s fall from Parisian favour.7 But the fact was that Prince Louis was no match for adventurers in whatever guise they came. Where worldly wisdom was concerned, he may have been a Rohan, but he was also a fool.

  Psychologically the King could not accept that, so he took the easier step of believing Rohan to be a villain. By now Marie Antoinette, who had begun as a sceptic, found it only too easy to agree; her low opinion of Rohan was only reinforced by the production of the forged signature. Armand de Miromesnil, who was present as Keeper of the Seals, had the sense to query the propriety of arresting the Cardinal in such a sensational manner while he was wearing his pontifical robes. But that is in fact exactly what now happened, when the Cardinal returned from writing down his personal account of the affair. Breteuil, Rohan’s enemy, was put in charge, ordered to seal all the Cardinal’s papers in his Paris house and have him taken to the prison of the Bastille.

  Perhaps the King still smarted inwardly over Rohan’s appointment as Grand Almoner in 1777; on that occasion the former Governess to the Children of France had defeated the wishes of Marie Antoinette, leaving Louis XVI himself to cope with his wife’s resentment. When Rohan was told of his fate, he protested by invoking the names of his powerful relatives, the Comtesse de Marsan and the Prince de Soubise, and “the reputation of my family name.” This certainly exasperated the King. He replied sharply that he would try to console the Cardinal’s relations as best he could. In the meantime, he did what he must “as a king and a husband.” It was a reiteration of his words to Miromesnil over the need for immediate action: “The name of the Queen is precious to me and it has been compromised.”

  Louis XVI’s instinctive and honourable support of his wife was the next key element in the affair. The King’s chivalry was evoked, and as has been noted over the various libellous publications, he was always quick to rush to the defence of her reputation. Commenting on the news to Vergennes about how the Cardinal had made use of the Queen’s name to secure a valuable necklace, Louis XVI declared that “it was the saddest and most horrifying business that he had ever come across.”8 From the Queen’s point of view, this firmness from a man normally so vacillating was a heartwarming development. Ironically enough, the royal couple, still not quite grasping what could happen to them in terms of public opinion, were entering a newly harmonious stage in their relationship. Marie Antoinette repeatedly and happily praised the King’s behaviour to her brother, relating how she had been much touched by the prudence and resolution he had displayed. When details of the affair were discussed with his ministers, the King took care to do so in the presence of the Queen; this was quite a new development, which sprang directly from his feeling that his wife had been hatefully traduced.

  The trouble was that the chivalry of the husband prevented him from appreciating the wisest course for the sovereign. Whatever the Cardinal had done—and it was quite reasonable at this point for both King and Queen to see him as a conspirator, if not a forger—he still held a prominent ecclesiastical position at court and was a member of a family powerfully vociferous in the interests of its own. Vergennes, supported by the Marquis de Castries, who was not normally in agreement with him, believed that some special discreet tribunal should be used. If only Vergennes, an experienced and sagacious negotiator who was on good terms with Rohan, had been allowed to manage the affair! But Vergennes and Breteuil were enemies, while Mercy, who might have offered wiser counsels, also disliked Vergennes personally and was jealous on the Queen’s behalf of his influence over the King. Instead Rohan was offered a choice of pleading openly for clemency to the King or being tried by the Parlement de Paris. Rohan’s choice of the Parlement, whatever the verdict, both prolonged matters and took them into the political arena. Matters such as the rights of princes and the independence of the Parlement became inextricably entwined with the quite separate issue of the Cardinal’s guilt and the Queen’s reputation.9

  Breteuil had a face “beaming with satisfaction” as on 15 August he issued the orders of the King: “Arrest the Cardinal de Rohan!” He did not know that there was in fact very little cause for rejoicing. A performance of Beaumarchais’ Le Barbier de Séville at the Trianon Theatre found Marie Antoinette playing the girl Rosina, the young Duc de Guiche as her crabbe
d guardian Doctor Bartolo, Vaudreuil as Figaro and Artois as the amorous Count Almaviva. The Queen was equally unaware that it was to be her last appearance on the stage there.10

  Even now the Cardinal showed that, gullible as he might be in many ways, he remained quick-witted. Taking advantage of an inexperienced guard, he managed to get a rapidly pencilled note to Georgel back at his house, instructing him to burn all his papers to do with the Comtesse de Lamotte. By the time Breteuil came to impose his seals, much of the evidence about the Diamond Necklace Affair, the “labyrinth” in the words of Marie Antoinette, this “enigma” in the words of Louis XVI, had vanished for ever. Added to this must be the fact that Jeanne de Lamotte Valois herself proved to be an imaginative liar on a grand scale, so that very little she said can be trusted.

  The result is that the affair can never be unravelled with complete conviction as to all its details, although some things can be stated with absolute certainty about it. One of these is the innocence of the Queen; she had no prior involvement with or advance knowledge of the affair. Wild suggestions that Marie Antoinette manipulated the whole case in order to ruin the Cardinal not only ignore the fact that she had for years been successfully using her own best weapon of the freezing royal silence against him, but they also seriously misread her character. Never politically machiavellian, as Mercy constantly complained, the Queen was incapable of conceiving, let alone carrying out, such an elaborate conspiracy. It involved among other things deliberately signing “Marie Antoinette de France,” first to hoax Rohan, then to expose him, a ploy that could, of course, easily have gone wrong if Rohan had exercised normal common sense about the signature of the Queen.*65

  The Queen’s complete surprise and shock is well attested, as is the way she persistently underrated the seriousness of what was happening in the months to come. On 22 August she told Joseph II about the “catastrophe” of the Cardinal de Rohan in a letter that reiterated the fact that she had never in her life signed “Marie Antoinette de France,” the point on which she felt so keenly. She now thought the actual signature was that of Jeanne de Lamotte, a woman of low rank who had never had any access to her personally. Marie Antoinette was confident that all the details would soon be made clear to the whole world, which would put an end to the matter. A month later, it was the Cardinal whom Marie Antoinette castigated as a “vile and clumsy forger,” motivated by the need for money to pay his own debts to the jewellers. “For my part I am delighted we shall hear no more of this horrible business,” wrote the Queen blithely to her brother.12 Her main concern was the inoculation of the Dauphin, who was not quite four, against smallpox, which took place at Saint Cloud under her supervision. It went well enough although the poor delicate little boy had suffered terribly with two different sets of pustules erupting.