Read Days of Splendor, Days of Sorrow Online
Authors: Juliet Grey
Madame Campan insisted I was making myself ill by entertaining them at all. “You should be resting,
Majesté
.”
“Maman can’t rest, madame; she’s teaching me the satin stitch.” Seven-year-old Madame Royale was seated on my lap with an embroidery hoop in her small hands.
“You must lay the stitches right next to each other with equal tension—like this,” I said taking the needle and silken thread to demonstrate. “The flower should look just like the one on the princesse’s sleeve.” I nudged my daughter off my knees. “Why don’t you practice in the green chair?”
I rose and removed two of the ugly broadsheets from the hands of the princesse de Lamballe. “If you will not read these calumnies, I will.
Écoutez bien
.” Propped up by the bolster on my daybed at le Petit Trianon, I began to read two of the ditties aloud.
“Oliva says, ‘He’s such a goose!’
Lamotte insists, ‘He’s morally loose.’
His Eminence claims he’s just obtuse
Hallelujah!
Red are his robes from the Holy See
.
‘Black is his heart,’ said Queen Marie
.
‘We’ll whitewash his name,’ the judges agree
.
Hallelujah!”
“Regrettably, this completely sums up public opinion,” I bemoaned, thinking perhaps I should have held my impressionable daughter’s ears. “
Eh bien
, this one pretends to be a dialogue between myself and the demimondaine who impersonated me in the gardens.
“ ‘Vile harlot, it becomes you ill
To play my role of queen!’
‘I think not, my sovereign
,
You so often play mine!’ ”
My hands flew to my breast. “I am going to be sick.” Madame Campan fetched a Sèvres basin and held my head while I vomited into the bowl.
Beneath the gilded medieval vaulting a crush of perspiring and over-perfumed spectators sat brocaded elbow to satin elbow on the benches in the two galleries of the Palais de Justice’s Grand Chambre. Even the worst seats were being sold for astronomical sums, and on any day a lucky man might make his fortune by retailing his privilege to sit on an unforgiving bench for nine hours to a soul even more desperate for sensationalism. The preliminary investigation had been conducted in secret, with the lawyers’ fictionalized trial briefs the only way for the public to learn what was transpiring behind the walls of the Palais de Justice.
Lengthy as those hearings had been, they were, however, merely a tantalizing appetizer. The succulent main course of this bizarre feast was the public trial that was about to commence before the magistrates of the Parlement, all of whom were members of the nobility or the clergy.
The trial was being presided over by a rare joint session of the Grand Chambre and Tournelle magistrates, Paris’s two courts of
Parlement. Because of the unusual nature of the case and the illustrious personages involved, the courts would convene as a single body within the larger venue, the Grand Chambre.
The proceedings opened on May 22 with Maître Titon de Villotran’s reading of the report detailing the months of preliminary proceedings, a recitation that continued for a full week. The culmination of his recital on May 29 signaled the transfer of the accused from the Bastille to the Conciergerie, the prison fortress adjacent to the Palais de Justice. From there, they would be escorted to the Grand Chambre for the concluding hearing of the trial.
The following morning, the flamboyant Count Cagliostro declared before the sixty periwigged magistrates, “I am a noble voyager, Nature’s unfortunate child.” His exotic accent and mélange of languages amused the Parlement, but the carnival atmosphere quickly turned grim.
Clad head to toe in black satin, a weeping Rétaux de Villette faced the justices, hoping to avoid the punishment for larceny and forgery by maintaining that he had been acting merely as Madame de Lamotte’s secretary.
The lady herself was attired in her lucky gown, blue-gray satin banded in black velvet. About her slender shoulders she had draped an embroidered muslin cape trimmed with fine net. Perched upon the small stool called the
sellette
, reserved for the defendant in a court of law, for the next three hours the comtesse faced the judges and remained regally defiant.
Heightening the curiosity of the spectators on the unforgiving benches in the hall and in the galleries above, she had vowed as she first drew her skirts about her on the
sellette
, “I will expose a great rascal”; yet she proceeded to name no one, instead deflecting the magistrates’ questions about the letters purportedly exchanged between the cardinal and the queen. Pretending to protect her
sovereign’s name, the comtesse laid the guilt upon her ecclesiastical lover, sending the tribunal into an uproar when she confessed that the Grand Almoner had shown her more than two hundred letters sent to him by Marie Antoinette, addressing him as “thou” and “thee,” and appointing the times for their clandestine trysts.
Defending his name and honor and that of the House of Rohan, the cardinal refused to sit, preferring to stand before the Parlement. “If I am guilty of anything,” he said with a rare display of humility, “it is the crime of having a blinding, overwhelming desire to acquire the good graces of Her Sovereign Majesty.”
Dawn had not yet risen when the cardinal’s relations, a panoply of sumptuously attired Rohans, Guéménés, and Soubises, filed into the Grand Chambre and like silent sentinels ringed the stone walls frescoed with fleurs-de-lis. An hour later, at five o’clock, in anticipation of His Eminence’s testimony that morning the streets surrounding the Cour de Mai, the courtyard of the Palais de Justice, teemed with humanity, sorely testing the resources of the Paris foot guard and the mounted police. The courtyard itself was packed so tightly with people that one couldn’t exit through the iron gates without risking bodily injury.
The septuagenarian Prosecutor General Joly de Fleury, stooped and wizened, opened the proceedings at six, unsealing the recommendations for sentencing. The crown was not permitted to make any direct suggestions, although it had been clearly understood that Her Majesty, who was awaiting the news at Versailles, expected the harshest penalties to be levied, especially against the comtesse and the cardinal. The spectators in the galleries grew breathless; gloved hands clutched the embellished sleeves of adjacent strangers.
Having concluded unanimously that the approvals and signature of the queen on the contract of sale for the infamous diamond
necklace were false, the forger Rétaux de Villette was to be henceforth banished from France, with all his worldly possessions forefeited to the king.
He had evaded the gallows. As the handsome Villette wept with relief, the galleries hummed with murmurs; was the sentence too lenient? But the spectators were quickly hushed by the guards so the next recommendation could be heard. Nicole Leguay, also known as Mademoiselle de Signy, also known as the baronne d’Oliva, absent sufficient evidence to convict her, was being acquitted with a reprimand from the court for her criminal impersonation of the monarch. The lovely demimondaine, whose face was as pale as her gown, fainted on the spot, resuscitated after a genuine baronne seated in the gallery lobbed her vinaigrette at the
sellette
.
Upon the recommendation of the court, the Count Cagliostro was completely exonerated of all charges against him, at which the galleries, populated by many of the mystic’s “patients,” erupted into cheers. But they were soon sobered by the reading of the sentence against Marc-Antoine Nicolas de Lamotte. Although he had not been extradited to France from his London mole hole, he was condemned to be flogged naked, scourged with rods, and branded with a hot iron on his right shoulder with the letters GAL, the identification required for His Majesty’s galley slaves. Not only was he to be chained to an oar for all eternity, but the entirety of his possessions were also forfeit to the Crown; the public was to be so notified by the affixing of a plaque proclaiming his punishment in the Place de Grève, the plaza where Paris’s public executions took place.
“
Sacre Dieu
, how terrible!” a young lady in the gallery commented to her father.
He chuckled. “A mere formality,
ma petite
. Let them try to find him! But hush—here come the bigger fish!”
The spectators grew silent as the judgment was pronounced upon Jeanne de Lamotte-Valois. In another unanimous recommendation, her sentence was much like the one handed down to her husband, except that, judged to be a thief, she was to be branded on both shoulders with the letter V, for
voleuse
, thence to be imprisoned for life in the women’s house of correction, the infamous Salpêtrière. Amid a considerable amount of murmurs and whispers, there was a general agreement in the gallery that, although it was shocking for a woman to be accorded so violent a punishment, the penalty was hardly a surprise.
Opinions, barely audible above Jeanne’s ear-shattering shrieks, were tossed about in the galleries like so many horseshoes.
“
L’Autrichenne
desecrates the memory of the Valois!”
“Clearly the queen doesn’t wish her to reveal everything she knows; remember yesterday when the comtesse said she would name someone powerful?”
“What a terrible price to pay for keeping Her Majesty’s secrets!”
It was several minutes before the crowd could be quieted, and the outcry only ceased with the reminder that the cardinal’s fate had yet to be pronounced.
The Grand Almoner was attired as if he was preparing to conduct High Mass. Courtly and distinguished, his hair threaded with silver at the temples, he wished to remind the temporal judges of his princely birthright and the clerical magistrates on the tribunal of his lofty ecclesiastical stature. The effect was both humble and intimidating as he stood before the bar, once again refusing to lower his body by accepting the
sellette
.
At last, Monsieur de Fleury intoned the final recommendation of the court. “The cardinal-prince de Rohan is to appear in this hall eight days hence to make a public statement of repentance for the crime of lèse-majesté—the wanton disrespect of his
sovereigns—in arranging a midnight rendezvous in the Grove of Venus under the pretext of meeting the queen, and in continuing the deception that Her Majesty was a party to the purchase of the diamond necklace. He is to be stripped of all offices, exiled for life from all royal residences, and compelled to make a contribution of alms to the indigent people of France. And it is the verdict of this court that he remain imprisoned until the completion of this sentence.”
The prince de Rohan maintained his composure, permitting himself only the hint of a smile. His punishment had amounted to little more than a formal scolding, a slap on the ruby-ringed hand. He could manage without his offices, and perhaps in time, his family might persuade the king to overturn the sentence and return his sinecures and perquisites. But—he exhaled, the musty air of the Grand Chambre seeming now as fresh as a new-mown meadow—he was alive and would remain unscarred. No flogging, branding, or permanent incarceration! He scarcely heard the clamor of the crowd in the galleries, the hearty congratulations of his smug relations, who had correctly predicted that the clerical justices of the Paris Parlement, which traditionally tussled with the kings of France, would never destroy one of their own by voting to condemn him to indentured servitude, exile, or death. Many of the secular magistrates, too, chafed at the omnipotence of the Crown and might have declared that the moon was red, purely because the king had declared it to be blue.
But they knew that the sovereign was powerless to override a trial verdict. It was not the same as exercising his right to hold a
lit de justice
if the Parlement refused to ratify one of his reforms or edicts. This time, the magistrates had the last word.
The galleries erupted into a clamor, a cacophony of voices, both exultant and disbelieving. Had Justice been served this day?
Peut-être? Non? Oui, absoluement!
“Vive le cardinal!”
they cried, from one man to a chorus of hundreds, who would have leapt from the balconies if they could and hoisted the victorious, if now visibly exhausted and relieved, prince de Rohan on their shoulders.
The dreadful news was broken to me by Madame Campan. I could not curtail my weeping, so I beckoned her to sit beside me, although such proximity to the sovereign was far above her place. I tore at my hair like a madwoman; I clutched at my skirts until the gray-blue satin bore the impressions of my angry fingernails. “If the queen cannot get justice, what does that bode for a woman such as yourself, for your reputation and your fortune?”
Henriette rose and crossed the room as Louis entered, his eyes both sympathetic and sorrowful. “I don’t know what to say,
ma chère
.” He sighed heavily, taking my hand in his. He looked as defeated as I. “The Parlement refused to see the cardinal as anything but a man of the church.”
“And not the corrupted, over-perfumed swindler that he is!” I interrupted.
The king nodded. “I should like to give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that he will find a way to pay the jewelers. They are honest men and their business should not be made to suffer because the prince was a credulous fool.”
I felt sick, from my head to my stomach to my heart. “I feel as though I shall never dance, nor ever smile again,” I murmured through my salty tears.
But I did rouse myself; perhaps it was my Hapsburg blood that taught me never to admit defeat. A few days after the verdicts were rendered, I journeyed to Paris to attend the Opéra with my ladies—except for the princesse de Lamballe, for the sympathetic soul had angered me by visiting the comtesse de Lamotte-Valois
in her prison cell. Perhaps she sought to learn why the comtesse had so vociferously endeavored to destroy me, and still persisted in maintaining that we shared an intimate bond. Or perhaps Marie Thérèse believed she must have been touched in the head and was in need of prayers.