How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (30 page)

The other purpose of Rohan’s justification was to prompt Titon to hear witnesses who had not yet been called. He showed himself well-informed about Jeanne’s expenditure during the period he presumed her to be poor; about the plush furnishing of the house in Bar; about the jewellers she had commissioned; and about Nicolas’s trip to London. ‘I urge the court’, he implored, ‘to acquire through the legal proceedings knowledge of
all these facts.’

So voluminous was Rohan’s speech that it took Titon five days to absorb the information before returning to questioning. He found Rohan in a feisty mood. The cardinal expressed outrage when presented with the signed terms of sale: ‘I am astonished to see . . . this item, which had not been entered into the investigation through [the normal procedure of ] sealing. I declared its existence to the king out of my profound respect, and I handed it over to the minister for the king alone, and as evidence of the good faith
with which I acted.’ This line of reasoning had previously been engaged by one of the few pro-Rohan judges in the
parlement
: since the cardinal had voluntarily handed over the document as proof of his innocence, it could not be used against him. Such an argument involved a certain sleight of hand. Rohan’s
preservation of the terms of sale were intended to prove that he had not deliberately deceived the jewellers – had he been a fraudster, he would surely have destroyed it immediately – but it still served as evidence for the crime of
lèse-majesté
.

Like the
parlement
, Titon recognised the bombast here. He accused Rohan of using the bill to beguile the jewellers; he accused him of instructing the Boehmers to lie to the baron de Breteuil about the whereabouts of the necklace; and he built up to a corrosive indictment of Rohan’s conduct and character:

I put it to you that not having received any signs of the queen’s patronage, you could not have flattered yourself that she chose you for a job she would only give to someone honoured with her personal confidence. You had not been allowed to believe that the queen might have wanted you to organise a deal such as this. Your condition, office and rank did not permit you to take upon yourself a deal of this kind without having taken the greatest precautions to make certain that you were not being tricked. It’s unbelievable that you could have been deceived by the forged handwriting and forged signature of the queen. According to the defence you have presented, it is highly surprising that you should not have preserved the letters that were brought to you, containing the orders of the queen . . . It follows from the investigation that you wanted to persuade the jewellers and others that you dealt directly with the queen over the necklace. In keeping the bill of sale, which was by rights the jewellers’, you rendered them powerless to take any steps to obtain their payment. It appears, all in all, that you sought to deceive Boehmer and Bassenge by using
the august name of the queen.

For the first time, with terrifying clarity, Rohan saw that the prosecution was willing to shape every piece of evidence into a nail to crucify him. Rohan’s response, in contrast, was dulcet and measured, confessing flaws of temperament but not crimes.

However alarming the picture that has been presented might be, I hope that the explanations and evidence collected in the course of the investigation will dissipate every doubt, if they truly exist. The sign of favour that I believe I had received from the queen when, shamefully tricked, I believed that I had met the queen herself, gave me hope of no longer being in disgrace. The profound desire that I had for it made
me believe too easily, but after this illusion – the cause of my blindness – it appeared to me that not only could I believe without temerity that the queen gave me a sign of her kindness in honouring me with this task but, since every instruction from the queen is a favour, it ought to be seized eagerly. Certainly, without my blindness and illusions, I would not have acted
as I had done.

The interrogation chamber did not cow Jeanne. ‘She speaks to Monsieur Titon like she speaks to the
police and public,’ noted Target, after an evening talking shop with her lawyer. Jeanne began by telling her inquisitor her life story. She spoke of her adoption by the Boulainvilliers, her marriage to Nicolas, her first encounter with the cardinal, her patroness’s death and her resort to Rohan: ‘he assured me that if I was telling the truth about my titles, my affairs and my debts, he would make the effort
to ease them’. Over a single six-month period, the cardinal subsidised her with 80,000 livres. On another occasion at the end of 1784 he gave Jeanne 15,000 livres, saying ‘Invest this as you see fit. Since I know your affairs will become successful, regard this as something to
tide you over.’ When it was put to her that Rohan had only given her a few louis at a time, Jeanne answered with disdain that ‘I was not made to accept such sums of money, nor was the cardinal
made to offer them.’

‘Is it not true,’ asked Titon ‘that you never stopped telling people you saw the queen and enjoyed great influence over her, and that you had her entire confidence?’

‘I have not said this to anyone,’ Jeanne replied, and explained how such a confusion might have arisen. ‘Because of the wealth that I received from the princes and princesses of the Blood and the benefits that I received from the Cardinal . . . which ultimately came from the king’ – Jeanne implied that the payments from Rohan came from the reserves of the grand almonership – ‘I said insistently to those who congratulated me that the court wished that I be justly treated. Moreover, I never said that I had any access to the queen, because it was quite apparent at Versailles that I never went to the queen’s apartments.’ The suggestion she had shown people letters that had supposedly been written to her by Marie Antoinette was a ‘horrific’ absurdity.

Jeanne also denied duping Rohan into believing he had secretly
met the queen. She knew d’Oliva, that was true, and had even taken her down to Versailles in the summer of 1784 (though ‘for what purpose she was going,
I did not know’). But dressing her up as Marie Antoinette and leading her to a secluded grove for Rohan to press a rose into her hand?
‘What you suggest is fantasy.’ Anyone who falls for such ‘an unbelievable fable of stupidities’ must be ‘touched by madness’ – ‘the Académie Française ought never again be open to the cardinal, after having spoken, or got others to speak, such idiocies’. The accusations about her role ‘make me indignant with so many lies and horrors’.

But Jeanne did not rely on exasperated outrage alone. More than the other defendants, she was aware that presenting a believable account was more important than presenting a true one. The eighteenth century had seen an unprecedented epidemic of such stories, which were winningly captivating while bearing only a limited relation to historical fact – they were called novels. Novels presented a complex dialectic between fiction and truth to their readers: often the title contained the word ‘
histoire
’ or ‘
mémoire
’ – Abbé Prévost’s
Manon Lescaut
, one of the most popular books of the century, was entitled in full
L’Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut.
This language sought to secure the value of the novel, a form which had been frequently attacked as frivolous or immoral, by eliding it with more established genres. This antagonism was not merely rhetorical: novels were effectively banned in France from 1737 (though that is not to say they weren’t read) until the appointment of the liberal Malesherbes as the country’s chief censor in 1750.

Works of fiction were frequently accompanied with introductions or prefaces that purported to show that the book was not simply a figment of imagination.
Les Liaisons dangereuses
was supposedly arranged from a cache of letters entrusted to its editor; the first edition of
Gulliver’s Travels
attributed authorship to Lemuel Gulliver himself. Readers were savvy enough to identify a novel when they met one, but the presence of such features attests to an anxiety about truthfulness among writers, as the novel sought to clothe itself in the trappings of non-fiction. Fascinated readers invested so much in some characters that they hoped they existed
beyond the confines of the book’s covers: Rousseau received fan mail asking him what happened to Saint-Preux after the end of
La Nouvelle Héloïse
.

Literate, cultured individuals – such as, say, you might find sitting on the benches of the
parlement
of Paris – had been attuned to the techniques through which a story might gain credibility without having a basis in proven fact. Classical aesthetic theory was founded on two related concepts:
vraisemblance
(‘verisimilitude’ or ‘plausibility’) and
bienséance
(‘propriety’). Fictional narratives were judged successful if characters behaved as one might expect them to in a given situation, while the laws of propriety restricted people of certain social classes or nationalities to specific kinds of conduct. The seventeenth-century Jesuit rhetorician René Rapin wrote in his
Réflexions sur la poétique d’Aristote
that ‘one must never make a warrior of an Asian, a faithful friend of an African, a Persian ungodly, a Greek honest, a general of a Thracian, a German cunning, a Spaniard modest, nor a
boor of a Frenchman’.

As defenders of novels noted, this meant that history was usually stranger – and more immoral – than fiction. ‘Bizarreness is
a privilege of reality,’ declared the writer Roger de Bussy-Rabutin.
Vraisemblance
is not the kissing cousin of true stories, but their enemy. Baculard d’Arnaud wrote in 1786 in a preface to his
Délassemens de l’homme sensible
that history was nothing more than a ‘disgusting compilation of prostituted praise, calumniatory satires, false judgements, criminal lies, humanity everywhere insulted, everywhere suffering, trampled underfoot, vice everywhere heaped with eulogies,
fawned upon, rewarded’. He objects, in part, to the failure of historical narratives to reward the just and punish evildoers; but alongside this sits distaste at the shapelessness of history, its gruesome extremes.

Legal narrative is torn between these two genres. Like history, it reconstructs past events through evidence. But, since these narratives are invariably contested, it must, like fiction, deal in likelihoods – and the more plausible an interpretation, the greater the chance of convincing a court. Jeanne was conscious throughout the trial that Rohan’s case rested on the
parlement
believing that his mind had been rendered captive to strange delusions, so she repeatedly invoked psychological plausibility as the standard for judging Rohan’s story:
would Rohan really have observed the handing over of the necklace concealed in an alcove? ‘Surely he would have himself spoken to this man, and wouldn’t he himself have handed over such a precious item, and would he have hidden himself at a time when he ought to have been taking the
most stringent safeguards?’ Suggestions she had accepted large sums of money after the alleged event were
‘madder and madder’, since who would hand over such amounts without demanding a receipt? Jeanne argued that Rohan’s version of events should be rejected, precisely because it did not reach the standards of successful fiction.

The allegation of
lèse-majesté
checked the cardinal with a conundrum, as Jeanne was quick to seize upon: ‘It was not possible that the cardinal might have imagined the queen would participate in such an extraordinary and deceitful performance [in the gardens of Versailles], and that the cardinal should blind himself to the point
of not recognising the queen.’ Rohan could only rebut it with a defence which, in admitting conduct unbecoming of his station, breached the bounds of narrative propriety. The verb
devoir
(‘ought’) contains a telling ambiguity. Take, for example, the sentence, ‘The cardinal ought to respect the queen’: it implies both obligation (the cardinal has a duty to respect the queen) and probability (the cardinal is likely to respect the queen). In real life – especially the life of a womanising prelate, a free-thinking churchman, a near-bankrupt almoner, a gullible
philosophe
– the one does not necessarily entail the other. Jeanne’s indignation on Rohan’s behalf – she could not believe he had acted in this shameful way, because his story appeared so unlikely – knifed the cardinal with a smile. Titon never asked her why, in that case, Rohan had made a series of humiliating admissions. Herein lay the canniness of Jeanne’s approach – it was not her question to answer.

Jeanne was also aware that details, often superfluous, lent a colouring of reported truth – what Roland Barthes called the
‘reality effect’ – to every tale, a sensation of accuracy that might be taken for the real thing. Dates, times, and sums of money were arranged like trinkets in a drawing room. Jeanne admitted to walking on one occasion in the park at Versailles with d’Oliva, but the girl certainly did not have a
gaulle
on: instead she wore ‘a dress in the English style of embroidered Indian chiffon, with a pink petticoat
underneath, and with a calash of white gauze that she had borrowed because her own bonnet
was very dirty’.

Jeanne made her case with vigour, even in the face of corroborated testimony to the contrary. She gave Titon the following account of her dealings with the jewellers: when Boehmer and Bassenge approached her to help find a home for their necklace, she replied that
‘I’m very sorry not to be of use, but no one I know could possibly acquire such an object.’

‘But can’t the cardinal buy it on behalf of the king?’ the jewellers were supposed to have asked.

‘I don’t meddle in such affairs,’ Jeanne had said primly.

Only after the event did the Boehmers tell her Rohan had purchased the necklace.

‘You are being very discreet,’ she joshed her friend. ‘You did not tell me that you had seen the jewellers and bought the necklace.’