How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (32 page)

Dupuis de Marcé, the junior investigating magistrate, was slated to oversee the confrontations. Target had hoped for someone less dopey, but admitted that it did not matter especially, since the questions were as formulaic as a
‘catechism’. ‘A good man, humane and no schemer’, Dupuis was also ‘very slow and let himself be led by impulse’. The absence of the self-confident and intellectually vigorous Titon presented Rohan with an opportunity to impose himself on the proceedings.

Other forces countermarched in anticipation. Breteuil strove to weaken Rohan, exiling Georgel, the cardinal’s advisor, bottle-washer and morale booster, to
Mortagne-au-Perche in Normandy. The proximate cause was a Lent sermon, inspired by Paul’s Second Epistle to Timothy, that Georgel had written in Rohan’s name, and nailed up in all churches under the grand almoner’s purview. Paul wrote the letter while held captive by Nero in Rome: ‘Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor
of me his prisoner.’

It did not require a steeping in biblical hermeneutics to construe the allegory: Georgel was Timothy, Rohan Paul, and Louis Nero, the canonical example of an arbitrary, capricious tyrant. Georgel denied that he had any such implications in mind – ‘if this terrible thought had occurred to me, I would hardly have had the brazenness and the confidence to nail this pastoral address under the eyes of the
king in his own chapel’. Breteuil, who despised Georgel and had been looking for an opportunity to dispose of him, banished him from Paris with a
lettre de cachet
. On 11 March, Georgel wrote to Target: ‘I must leave at six and will not have the consolation of embracing you . . . I will make myself worthy of
my modest courage.’

One intriguing piece of circumstantial evidence points to Breteuil’s meddling at this juncture. During the
récolement
, Bassenge was the only witness to make a significant change to his testimony, one that threatened to stove in Rohan’s defence. The jeweller belatedly recalled the conversation with Rohan on 4 August – just after Jeanne told Rohan she had been banished by the queen – in which he questioned whether the cardinal had complete confidence in his intermediary:

‘I ask you this because you informed me on a few occasions that there was an intermediary employed in this business.’

Rohan hesitated: ‘If I pause before replying to you, it is only so that my answer should be completely prepared. I am only contemplating about whether to tell you everything . . . if I were to say that I dealt directly with the queen, would you relax?’

‘Yes,’ replied Bassenge.

‘Well,’ continued Rohan, ‘I assure you that I dealt with her in person.’ But he added threateningly: ‘Never mention this conversation because
I will deny it. I can say many things to you which I can’t tell your associate because he has a very weak head.’

Bassenge’s addition was so poisonous because it accused Rohan of consciously appropriating the queen’s name to smooth out his business arrangements. There is, however, something unnatural about Bassenge’s language. Why did he need to gloss his mention of the intermediary with a reminder that Rohan had spoken of this person a number of times previously? The language rings of a mediocre playwright inexpertly crowbarring in backstory, of playing to the gallery. This version of the conversation is also contradicted by another witness – Philippe-Jacques Serpaud, a tax collector and friend of the Boehmers. Bassenge recounted this conversation to him a fortnight after he had spoken to Rohan. According to Serpaud, the cardinal made no mention of speaking directly with the queen – he simply swore that he had always spoken the truth.

In 1797, a dozen years after the affair, Georgel bumped into Bassenge in Basel. In his memoirs, the abbé records that the jeweller admitted his and Boehmer’s depositions had been invigilated by Breteuil – ‘they had not followed blindly all that he had desired, but they were obliged to be silent about things which he did not wish
them to declare’. Georgel is highly partial and there is no other evidence that Bassenge was pressured by the queen’s party to modify his testimony – but his initial deposition was the longest of all the witnesses, displaying a meticulous command of detail and describing at length his exchanges with the cardinal. It is almost unbelievable that he forgot such a significant conversation first time around. There were mutterings through the trial that ministers connived to fabricate evidence against Rohan – one can smell it, if not quite see it, in Bassenge’s
récolement.
*

The confrontations were painstaking and relentless. Day after day, the witness statements and interrogations were unpicked line by line. Every claim could be challenged, countered, reinforced, dismissed,
derided or tweaked. Constant vigilance was required through the draining hours in a cage with enemies who sought to tear you apart. Each morning that Rohan was required, he placed his red skullcap on his head, pulled on his red stockings, strung his medallions round his neck and was led by de Launay, the governor of the Bastille, to the
salle de conseil
, where he was
handed over to Dupuis.

At first, Jeanne continued to play the untroubled innocent, as though expecting an acquittal. With Rohan she remained cheerful: ‘she uses her strength’, he wrote, ‘to
hide her troubles’. He told Target that she, unheard by the officials, admitted in a whisper to having lied. She bantered with Dupuis, trying to project ‘the confidence
of an innocent soul’. But the chafing of her isolation and vulnerability became increasingly obvious.

Jeanne broke down in tears in front
of Nicolas’s valet.
She harangued Loth for doing the devil’s work. Sometimes the guards had to drag her, wriggling defiantly, to the interrogation chamber. On other occasions she collapsed in fits, which may have been simulated to avoid answering awkward questions. The baron de Planta’s obstinate responses brought on a swoon – after Jeanne had been revived with
eau de vie
, and was being returned to her cell, she clamped her teeth around her jailer’s forearm. Once, the turnkey entered her cell to find her completely nude, and had to dress her forcibly. Jeanne believed everyone around her was conspiring to destroy her: the Bastille’s confessor transmitted her confidences to Rohan; the court clerk, Frémin, refused to transcribe her responses accurately.

But she could still be savage and cunning in her own defence. Her ferocity whipped
tears out of d’Oliva; she had believed d’Oliva
‘an honest woman’, until discovering that the girl had seduced her own husband. D’Oliva remained resolute in the face of the bullying, and Jeanne grew pale on hearing d’Oliva’s deposition read out, surreptitiously gesturing that she should retract the mention of Marie Antoinette’s letters.

D’Oliva responded: ‘Madame, it’s no good making signs at me. I will maintain all my days what I’ve declared to the judges.’

This enraged Jeanne: ‘I make signs at you! Yes, I make signs at you that you are a monster, for having said the things you have said.’

‘Alas, madame, it is you who are the great monster, for having
made me do the things that, unfortunately, I have done, as the blind instrument of your intrigues.’

The cajoling realised minor triumphs with weaker witnesses. Jeanne’s chambermaid, Rosalie Brissault, proved pliant, meekly deferring
to her objections. But her aggression could make her cavalier: in one confrontation, Rohan expressed amazement that she had claimed the patronage of people who might easily be called to confound her, ‘exposing herself by using lies, which she knew
would be refuted’. More obdurate opponents were slathered with pitch. She insisted that Planta was entirely unreliable, since, one day in October 1784, he had cornered her in her husband’s room and ‘pressed her strongly to
respond to his desires’, while maniacally shaking his cane and promising to make her fortune.

Jeanne repeatedly argued that the unlikelihood of her own audacious actions was proof they never happened. How could she have shown d’Oliva letters from the queen, since discovery of such an outrage would have condemned both of them? How could she have boasted about her friendship with Marie Antoinette, for, had the queen found out, she would have been crushed? She refused to admit deceiving the cardinal by disguising d’Oliva as the queen: ‘the whole story of the garden about which the witness [the baron de Planta] speaks is
absolutely false’. Every accusation that she could not counter was explained by the amorphous conspiracy against her, and Jeanne warned that a guilty verdict against her would unleash a scandal of much greater magnitude: ‘I certainly see that there is a plot formed to destroy me; but I will only perish while revealing the criminal mysteries that expose people of great standing still
hidden behind smiles.’

Rohan began the confrontations with the witnesses
in ailing health. His nose ran, his leg ached. Continuous medical attention, he wheedled, was required. Prolonged exposure to the Bastille had certainly debilitated the cardinal, though in this case he was hamming furiously; he needed a friendly doctor – whom the prison authorities eventually agreed to admit – to smuggle messages into prison once contact with the lawyers was again cut off. It turned out to be all too easy: ‘I need a printing press
for my correspondence,’ he joked.

Rohan cultivated a calm, forensic demeanour, in contrast to Jeanne’s
hysteria: ‘I am not responding to my interrogator in a manner that will pander to the
parlement
,’ he wrote to Target. ‘I prefer to fill [my defence] up to bursting with proofs that will demonstrate to everyone the
falsehood of my adversaries.’ He was energetic and forthright, only occasionally lapsing into the harrumphings of ‘false, all false’ that had marred his interrogations. A keen tactical awareness emerged in his confrontation with d’Oliva: both realised that their best chance of acquittal was in corroborating each other’s accounts – d’Oliva had confused matters in her deposition by misdating her performance at Versailles by a number of months – so both admitted that they were so flustered with trepidation in the Bosquet de Venus that they could not remember clearly what was said and done. Like dancers, they sprang responsively to the other’s steps:
‘Were the letters that Madame de La Motte claimed to have come from the queen written on a paper with a blue pattern?’ asked the cardinal. ‘I believe they were,’ replied d’Oliva compliantly.

The confrontation with Sainte-James was one of the most important. Here was the opportunity to convince the navy treasurer that he had not boasted of seeing 700,000 livres in the queen’s own hands. The terrace on which they had snatched a conversation was noisy, Rohan argued, and Sainte-James must have misheard him. But Sainte-James remained resolute: ‘I do not have any motive for imagining or making up such a conversation and
maintain what I said.’

Bassenge also required challenging on the purported conversation he had suddenly remembered during the
récolement
, which Rohan vehemently denied ever took place. Target held the jeweller in contempt: ‘The behaviour of this man is clearly shown’, he wrote, ‘in how he tries in his deposition to flatter the cardinal, and how he tries to fix the blame on him. We must pick this deposition to pieces to
make it fail.’ ‘He will be hard and self-satisfied,’ the cardinal told his lawyer, but
‘he will not be stubborn.’ In the event, the jeweller did not bend, and Rohan was forced to plead that, since Bassenge was a lone witness, his testimony should be ignored – yet still his allegation clung to him like thorns.

A major development occurred in Rohan’s confrontation with Père Loth, when Loth was shown the document outlining the conditions of the necklace’s sale. ‘It appears to me’, he told Dupuis, ‘that the
four “approuvés” and “Marie Antoinette de France” are
similar to Villette’s handwriting.’ For the first time, a suspect for the forgeries had been identified. Loth admitted he had never actually seen Villette compose letters from the queen, but remembered once walking in on Villette and Jeanne at work, and noticing a note on blue-bordered paper – it was exactly the kind of paper on which Rohan received Marie Antoinette’s letters and it was covered in Villette’s writing.

*
In this incident, Bassenge did not simply suppress information he should have divulged, but actively invented a conversation. But then, had he not been entirely honest during the trial, there is no reason to assume he would have been entirely honest to Georgel.

20

An Extraordinary Rendition

G
ENEVA, A WARM
evening in early spring. By the side of the square, a young man is strumming a guitar. For some reason – perhaps irritation at his strangulated playing, perhaps he is provoked – a brawl breaks out. The man is arrested and hauled before the magistrate where, it emerges, he is none other than Rétaux de Villette. He had been living since he fled Paris in a spa not far from Geneva under the name Marc Antoine, though the discipline required to remain incognito was clearly beyond him: his
‘acts of libertinage’ had already brought him to the attention of the stern Calvinist authorities, who had threatened him with expulsion.

Everyone in Europe had heard of the Diamond Necklace Affair, and French embassies and consulates had circulated a description of Villette to local law officers – the Genevois authorities knew something of the character of the man in their custody. Villette admitted to the magistrate that he was an acquaintance of Jeanne and had been asked by her to sell some diamonds. Then, the previous summer, he had been told by Jeanne that her business ventures had collapsed; she advised him to travel to Italy and provided a stipend for the purpose. Villette said that, having heard the news from Paris over the past months, he had been
‘incapable of resting easy, since the queen had been compromised’. What he did not know, however, was that d’Oliva had also been arrested. When her name was mentioned, he stammered guiltily: ‘It could only have been this girl who compromised me, because I am sure that Madame de La Motte would not talk about me. If this girl has spoken, I am a lost man.’