How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (18 page)

Rohan travelled from Paris to Versailles on the same day. Hugging the necklace case like a sick child, he climbed the cold stairs to the La Mottes’ rooms, where he and Jeanne chatted amiably. Then, a rap at the door. ‘It’s
someone from the queen,’ whispered Jeanne, bustling the cardinal, like an adulterer caught in flagrante, into a niche curtained with a strip of paper. A slim, pale man with a long face, dressed entirely in black and looking not dissimilar to Rétaux de Villette, entered and handed a letter to Jeanne, who unsealed it, asked the man to wait outside, then crept over to Rohan. She told him the queen wished that the necklace be handed over to the bearer of the letter. ‘Do you know this man?’ Rohan asked. ‘He is a member of the queen’s household – one of the queen’s musicians,’ Jeanne replied. Rohan retreated to his alcove. The man in black was readmitted, picked up the case and left.

Later that evening, on the terrace of the chateau, Jeanne told the cardinal of the queen’s delight at her new acquisition, and the pleasure Rohan’s tact and efficiency had given her. The queen would not wear the necklace, Jeanne said, until she had broached the matter with the king. The cardinal assumed this would be a matter of hours. The following day, Rohan spotted Boehmer and Bassenge as he left chapel. Gesticulating as forcefully as discretion permitted, the cardinal silently attempted to ask them if they had seen the queen wearing the necklace. The jewellers did not appear to understand his flapping so, when he arrived home, Rohan sent two of his servants to watch the king and queen dine and scrutinise the queen’s neck. They
reported it was unadorned, but Rohan presumed that Marie Antoinette had simply not yet found Louis in the right mood to break the news that she had dropped a million and a half livres on something pretty.

The Boehmers were also disappointed their necklace was not on show, but were assuaged somewhat when Rohan explained why. He hoped that the day of revelation would not be long coming. In the meantime, they should write to the queen thanking her for her gracious purchase; the Boehmers agreed to do so. A few days later, Rohan bumped into the Boehmers in one of the corridors of Versailles. ‘Have
you thanked the queen?’ the cardinal demanded – they had not. Rohan reproached them for their disrespect and insisted they rectify the situation as soon as possible. Boehmer gave dilute assent but still ignored the cardinal’s instructions. He had already been scorched by the queen’s temper and was mindful that she had directly ordered him never to mention the necklace again: an injunction, he supposed, that still stood, especially since she had bought the necklace through such circuitous means.

Jeanne’s comportment towards the jewellers was typically contradictory and extemporised. The Boehmers wished to reward her. At first Jeanne chastely refused the offers; she had striven throughout to minimise her role, so that, were her plan to unravel, Rohan would appear the more deeply implicated. Soon, however, demands reached Laporte from cronies of the La Mottes for jewellery worth tens of thousands of livres. When he showed one of the shopping lists to Jeanne, she pleaded ignorance. Yet shortly afterwards he received one of Jeanne’s rings for measurement.

Exasperated, Laporte visited the La Mottes and told them if they wanted an emolument, they would have to speak directly to the Boehmers. Jeanne wore a wilted, silent smile; Nicolas, who had played no direct role in scamming the necklace, thought it bizarre to turn down a present, and with a bovine snort declared that ‘if my wife has the delicacy not to wish for anything, I would happily receive a gift on her behalf because her service was important enough
to deserve a gift’. He drew up a modest list of demands: ‘four earrings, the most fashionable diamond girandoles; two gold watches with diamond chains, two solitaires in diamonds, and enough diamonds to encircle
a portrait medallion’. Jeanne was content to receive the Boehmers’ bounty, so long as she was not seen to beg for it herself. The jewellers gladly gave Nicolas all he wanted, but expressed concern that they were still yet to see the queen wear the necklace. She would only wear it once it had been fully paid off, Jeanne now explained, in order to avoid a public outcry. At this, even the hypertensive Boehmer calmed down – for the time being, at least.

*
Her daughter was in the room.

*
The existence of this letter is disputed. Rohan denied ever having seen it but, during the trial, Bassenge claimed to have been shown it by the cardinal.

9

The Greatest Man in Europe

An Interlude

S
OME SAID THAT
he was an English spy; some
a Jesuit agent. Was he simply a Neapolitan coachman or a Portuguese Jew? Or was he the illegitimate son of an Arabian prince? An Egyptian raised in the pyramids? An amphibian born of the foams of the sea? He was revered as a prophet, another John the Baptist, the Son of Man returned, a demi-god who transcended fractured religions. He was excoriated as a Moravian schismatic come to corrupt the souls of good Christian men, as the Wandering Jew, as the Antichrist. He was rumoured to be five thousand years old; to have travelled through time and witnessed Alexander the Great give battle; to have communed with Socrates and Caesar; to fly through the air on the wings of angels. He could turn hemp into silk, scrap metal to gold and cure men doctors had abandoned.

So much of what we know about Count Cagliostro, the greatest European celebrity of the late eighteenth century, is garbling, exaggeration and slander. The details of his earliest years are especially uncertain, since the first biographies were written either by hagiographers or calumniators, but we know that Giuseppe Balsamo was born on 2 June 1743 in a slum in Palermo in Sicily. His father, a jeweller, died shortly after the birth and Giuseppe was brought up by his mother and older sister. As a child he was a tearaway: he robbed his own uncle and terrorised the authorities and anyone else who unwisely strayed into his parish. According to the word on the street, he had stabbed a priest to death, but no one was brave enough to testify against him.

Giuseppe was given a comparatively extensive education, both from private tutors and at a seminary for orphans, and excelled at chemistry and art. For a short while he enrolled as a novice in a community of country friars, though he had little inclination for monkish disciplines
– he was supposedly expelled from the order for intoning the names of local prostitutes when leading the company in prayer. Afterwards he lived off his wits, his penmanship and his sense of theatre. He was an exceptional counterfeiter, forging everything from wills to theatre tickets. And he cultivated a reputation as a magus, a conductor of the ghosts and djinns that haunted Sicilian folk memory. He manufactured amulets and read as widely as he could about Neoplatonic philosophy, alchemy, astrology and the Kabbalah. At the age of twenty he skipped town after he had extracted sixty pieces of silver from a local silversmith, whom he had promised to lead to a hidden treasure trove, having vanquished the jealous spirits guarding it (the jealous spirits turned out to be a gang of hired heavies lying in ambush).

Giuseppe’s initial movements after this point are uncertain. He may have headed to Rhodes; he may have travelled to Egypt on one of the trade routes that laced together the shores of the Mediterranean. By 1766 he had shipped up in Malta, where he became a lackey of the Knights Hospitaller, the rulers of the island, and was provided with a laboratory to experiment with medicinals and alchemy. Two years later he travelled to Rome with letters of introduction provided by the Knights, and snagged a job as a secretary to Cardinal Orsini. Giuseppe was not a natural bureaucrat. He still hankered after the street – the patter, the wary companionship, the clink of coins slipped into your purse – and set himself up in the piazzas as a hawker of philtres, face creams made out of salad leaves and remarkably convincing knock-offs of Old Masters. Giuseppe also married Lorenza Feliciani – a beautiful, illiterate fourteen-year-old. The Balsamos moved into Lorenza’s parents’ pokey home, but Giuseppe could not abide his parents-in-law’s religiosity, and found his ambitions stultifying.

The couple escaped in the train of the Marquis Agliata, a doubtful nobleman of doubtful character, whom Giuseppe served as a confidential secretary, forging banker’s drafts and military commissions, and as a pimp for his own wife. Agliata soon disappeared with all Giuseppe and Lorenza’s money, so they hit the road. It was the start of a peripatetic two decades, a vagabond Grand Tour, which began in mendicancy and ended in acclaim and notoriety across the continent. The couple begged their way through northern Italy and
southern France – holy pilgrims, they said, seeking alms to pay their way to Santiago de Compostela. In Aix-en-Provence they encountered Casanova, whom Giuseppe presented with an imitation Rembrandt which the old goat pronounced finer than any original.

The Balsamos soon struck upon a formula for survival. They pretended to be Italian nobles: Lorenza, now renamed more grandiloquently Seraphina, would insinuate herself into the bed of a nobleman, while Giuseppe thunderously hinted that he would gladly overlook his wife’s infidelity if a position could be found for him as an artist or an apothecary. Whenever their debts loured too threateningly, the Balsamos slipped out of town towards another European metropolis, where Giuseppe would adopt a different title: Colonel Pelligrini, comte Fenix, comte Harat, marquis d’Anna.

London, 1771: Giuseppe sets himself up as a broker of Brazilian gemstones and moves into rooms in Compton Street in Soho, an Italian neighbourhood. But his business flops: he does time in a debtors’ prison and works as a tough for a crim called the Marquis Vivona – as much of a marquis as Agliata – blackmailing respectable bourgeois who inexplicably found themselves locked in a bedroom with the naked Seraphina. Paris, 1772: Seraphina leaves Giuseppe for a Monsieur Duplessis, a wealthy lawyer she is only supposed to be sleeping with for the money. Giuseppe accuses Duplessis of trying to kill him with a rotten egg and a poisoned glass of wine. He despatches Seraphina to a convent for four months, as punishment for trying to escape a life of perpetual motion and enforced prostitution. London, 1776: Giuseppe establishes an alchemical laboratory in Whitcomb Street and runs a racket selling winning lottery numbers. He is terrorised by a Mr and Mrs Scott who first try to cajole and bribe him into revealing his secrets, then, when he refuses, frame him for robbery and sorcery.

Giuseppe’s second stay in London was significant for two reasons: for the first time, he called himself Count Cagliostro; and he became a Freemason. Modern Freemasonry first appeared in Scotland during the seventeenth century, having emerged when guilds of stonemasons – medieval in origin – began to admit non-masons to increase their income. During the eighteenth century, it became one of the most vibrant elements of the European public sphere, combining
Enlightenment ideals – fraternity, disinterested scientific and philosophical enquiry, the perfection of human nature, opposition to censorship and religious persecution – with mystico-architectural rituals and a mythology that traced its origins back to Solomon’s temple. Behind the arcana, Masons enjoyed like-minded company and joined with each other in charitable works. Members of lodges took their places in a strict hierarchy but the organisation was, in theory at least, underpinned by an ethos of equality: Protestants and Catholics, deists and pantheists, atheists and Jews were all admitted and conversed with each other without hauteur or obsequiousness. King Gustav III of Sweden was a Mason; one Parisian lodge had a
‘Negro trumpeter’ on its books.

In practice, many lodges were organised along class lines. Cagliostro was not inducted into the Grand Lodge of England, which the year before had purchased two houses on Great Queen Street that would become Freemason’s Hall. His lodge was altogether more common, comprising, for the most part, working-class immigrants – its members included ‘a hairdresser, a ladies’ shoemaker, a pastry maker, a waiter, a musician, and
a couple of painters’ – who met above a pub in Gerrard Street in Soho. At his initiation, Cagliostro was blindfolded, trussed up, raised to the ceiling on a block and tackle – at which point the haulier accidentally let go of the rope and Cagliostro plunged to the floor, bruising his hand. He was then handed a pistol and ordered to shoot himself in the forehead – the gun was loaded only with powder – before swearing to obey his superiors and never reveal Masonic mysteries.

Cagliostro immersed himself in Masonic esoterica. He discovered a manuscript that argued Freemasonry had been founded in ancient Egypt by a hierophant called the Great Copt, who had lived for thousands of years. Cagliostro devised his own rite from a bricolage of sources that ecumenically traversed the Bible – Jesus was ‘the first and greatest magician
who ever lived’, though Moses was admired less because of the plagues he had viciously inflicted upon the Egyptians – Zoroastrianism, Norse Sagas, Rosicrucianism and Pythagorean and Neoplatonic teachings. He had been sent, he said, from the Great Copt himself to spread enlightenment through the world, and fight off the necromancers, evil spirits who sought to tempt mankind from the way of truth and righteousness.

Cagliostro promised communion with the godhead and immortality to those who applied themselves to his rule. A number of ascetic practices, so extreme that no one could ever have actually attempted them, were devised for physical and moral rebirth: devotees who wished to live for ever had to spend weeks on end in the forest, subsisting only on water and grass, until their hair and teeth fell out and their skin peeled away. He performed telegnosis through child mediums, correctly predicting what was simultaneously happening miles away (he informed friends of the death of Maria Theresa five days before the news reached town). He carved magic circles in the air with a fling of his sword – people crossed them at their peril. Sometimes he babbled in tongues, sometimes he thrashed on the ground as though possessed, cranking his legs and arms. Despite these bizarre ceremonials, the Egyptian rite was profoundly unrevolutionary: though Cagliostro himself preferred ‘the simple and
pure cult of natural religion’, he welcomed anyone – Jews and Muslims included – provided they maintained faith in a supreme being; and he ordered his followers to respect the established Church, the king and the laws wherever they were.