How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (34 page)

‘You are right to have insulted my credulity. I render homage to all of your skill,’ Rohan told his adversary.

‘Surely, I am less skilful than a member of the Academy,’ replied

Jeanne, her gloating lathered in faux-humility.

‘I have nothing’, said Rohan, ‘but contempt for you.’

On 9 April, Harger and Blin, the two graphologists who had originally examined the forged signature, examined it again, after having been shown a number of Villette’s papers. Harger believed that there had been a deliberate effort by Villette to
mask his handwriting. Confronted with the expert witnesses, Villette did not raise any objections since ‘I myself had admitted that I was the writer of the
approuvés
and the signature’ – in fact, he had not – but denied deliberate counterfeiting. This was the most significant development in the inquiry so far. Finally, the investigating magistrates knew for certain the identity of the signature’s forger, and could link him to Jeanne de La Motte. Rohan’s legal team had also made the connection. Loth had obtained from the director of the post office a letter Villette had written in January 1785. Target compared this with the letters from the queen which Georgel had secretly preserved, and pinned their authorship on Villette.

Jeanne was not eager to reacquaint herself with Villette. After news reached her of his arrest, she was discovered hiding under her bed,
naked and drooling. In their first confrontation, Jeanne distanced herself from her partner in crime. He was not, as Loth had alleged, her
homme des affaires
, but a drinking buddy of Nicolas. She continued to feign ignorance of the garden scene. Even if she had organised such an escapade, Jeanne said, she would not have told Villette, an unrepentant gossipmonger, about it. (Unfortunately, d’Oliva had already testified that Jeanne ‘did not keep anything secret from him [Villette] . . . she did nothing without warning him
and consulting him’.)

Villette havered, speaking only in the most general terms, and refused to commit himself:
‘I am obliged to respond to you on each article with care and precision according to the oath I made to tell the truth and the respect I have for justice.’ He may have ‘misunderstood’ events of which he had no first-hand knowledge. Villette adapted his story to suit whoever was in front of him; despite his admission to Harger and Blin, he now maintained that ‘I did not write the words . . . and the signature.’ The only reason he had offered his counterfactual justification to his interrogator was ‘because of my fear of a judgement against me’.

Weak and obviously terrified, Villette seemed ripe for manipulation by Jeanne. She grew emboldened, demanding that Villette reveal the identities of the letter-writers she had supposedly ordered him to impersonate. He remained silent.

Then, suddenly and without prompting, Jeanne discarded one of the primary crutches of her defence: she admitted disguising d’Oliva as the queen in the Bosquet de Venus to deceive the cardinal. A balletic justification followed. Rohan had sought her assistance in arranging a reconciliation with the queen. Having no connections in the queen’s inner circle, she had been unable to oblige. When Rohan had angered her – Jeanne would not expand on the cause, but her gloss, ‘which decency silences
me from telling’, suggests sexual betrayal – she took revenge by toying with the cardinal’s most dearly held desires, convincing him the queen had forgiven all. In order for her plan to work, she laid claim temporarily to the queen’s friendship, but she insisted the pretence was dropped immediately afterwards.

Jeanne must have realised that Villette, unlike the others who vouched for the garden scene, could not be discredited as a parasite of Rohan, and feared he was not far from breaking before Titon and Rohan. A complete realignment of her defence – even if it now left her open to the charge of
lèse-majesté
– was necessary. Villette saw safety in cloying piety: ‘I would like nothing better than
to say that I wasn’t in the grounds [of Versailles] or in [ Jeanne’s] house that day, but my duty to the truth means that I have to say that I was there.’

By the time Villette was confronted by Rohan, however, he had
stiffened his spine. Rohan was also livelier, reinvigorated by the capture of such an important witness. They sparred over the nature of Villette’s friendship with the La Mottes: Rohan called them ‘as close as
a married couple’; Villette decried his attempts ‘to make me responsible for the actions of Monsieur and Madame de La Motte, as if I had nothing more urgent than busying myself with
their affairs’. The cardinal identified Villette as the man, supposedly a member of the queen’s entourage, he had witnessed collecting the necklace from Jeanne’s Versailles apartment. Villette replied to this
‘infernal audacity’ that Rohan’s description of a pasty-faced, brown haired, beetle-browed man bore no resemblance to him. ‘Without wishing to accuse you of fraud,’ said Rohan, sounding like an Englishman, ‘it is possible that you could have blackened your eyebrows and
whitened your face.’

Rohan did not manage to squeeze out from Villette an admission that he had actively participated in the stagecraft of the garden scene – though he suspected, correctly, that Villette was the person whose arrival had sent them scramming – but, pelting him with example after example, the cardinal forced him to concede that Jeanne had cozened acquaintances ‘based on the belief that she had credit
with the queen’. Yet still Villette denied any knowledge of the
collier d’esclavage
.

‘It is unbelievable’, said Rohan, whose own behaviour had not been especially believable, ‘that Jeanne would not have spoken about the necklace to such an old friend.’

‘Just because something appears unbelievable to you’, Villette answered tartly, ‘does not make it less true . . . Silence is the lover of success.’

This drew from Rohan a scalding peroration:

Monsieur de Villette was intimately connected with Madame de La Motte. Monsieur de Villette wrote for Madame de La Motte. It was in him that Madame de La Motte confided about d’Oliva’s performance. The handwriting of Monsieur de Villette resembles the words ‘
approuvé
’ and the signature, and the manner in which Monsieur de Villette excused the person who wrote the signature in question – all these point to the fact that he is the
author of it.

Rohan was conscious that Jeanne, not Villette, was his ultimate adversary. After the harangue, the cardinal took a more conciliatory line. Perhaps Villette ‘was tricked’ as the cardinal himself had been. ‘It’s not that I want you to be proven guilty,’ Rohan murmured, ‘it’s that I want the guilty party
to be found.’

Villette was not yet tempted; Rohan’s own conduct still exuded suspicion. Villette countered:
‘In all of your testimony, one never sees clearly why you had so much trust in Madame de La Motte. Perhaps there exists a mysterious reason which you desire or fear seeing the light of day.’

‘I fear no revelation,’ said Rohan, striving to convince Villette that betrayal of Jeanne was no betrayal at all.

But I beg you in your turn to consider you are held back in what you’re prepared to admit by a misguided sentiment, which is the fear you have of compromising the single person who has compromised everyone, who has plunged me and you into unhappiness . . . in wanting not to compromise the single person who is guilty of everything, you push aside the benefit of a confession at the moment when a version of events, which is recognised as true, is supported by more than enough proofs that, even without your own admission, are sufficient to condemn you.

Villette acknowledged Rohan’s kindred sympathy for his judicial persecution, but still held firm until the end of the confrontation: ‘If I am guilty, the strength of evidence against me will necessarily lead to the person who set the plan in motion.’

Cagliostro’s introduction to Villette took a more ludicrous turn. The Great Copt worked himself up to such a pitch that he started gabbling away in Italian, to the great annoyance of Dupuis. He then launched into a ninety-minute sermon on the
‘duty of a man of honour, the power of providence and love of his fellow man’. According to Cagliostro’s own account, he

made [Villette] hope for the mercy of God and of the government . . . My discourse was so long and so forceful that I stopped without being able to speak further. The rapporteur was so touched and so moved, that he said to Villette that he must be a monster if he was not affected, since I had spoken to him as a father, as a man of
religion and of morality, and that all I had just said was a celestial discourse.

The stenographer, too, must have been equally rapt, as, alas, none of Cagliostro’s wisdom was recorded for posterity.

21

The Truth Will Out

T
HE EVIDENCE WRENCHED
from Villette required Rohan and Jeanne to confront each other for a second time. They raked the same ground, furrowing the earth grown over with weeds which smothered the truth; discussions became absurdly involuted – one circled at great length around how much of Villette’s face had been obscured by a handkerchief when, disguised as the queen’s footman, he had collected the necklace.

The cardinal fenced more aggressively than before, no longer holding himself aloof in distaste. He bored through Jeanne’s defence as though with a sharp, straight awl. On 24 April, Jeanne was compelled to admit to Rohan, as she had to Villette, that she had disguised d’Oliva as Marie Antoinette. It had never been her intention ‘to deny that Mademoiselle d’Oliva was presented to the cardinal in the park as being the queen, and it was not by chance
that they met’. She reluctantly admitted compromising the queen’s dignity but believed that Rohan’s crime in imagining ‘that he could have
such a meeting’ was far worse. Her reticence up to this point had been to spare the cardinal more humiliation: ‘If I delayed in revealing the truth, it was only because I did not want everyone to know the
misdeeds of Rohan.’

Rohan immediately pounced, proclaiming that ‘no credence should be lent to anything that Madame de La Motte might dream up from now on, because she has been convicted of falsehood in everything
she has said’. And he decried Jeanne for suggesting they had once been lovers:

I have hesitated up to this point from replying with a very natural repugnance to all the
doubles entendres
proposed by Madame de La
Motte about my relations with her . . . she has kept such an allegation on stand-by for a long time, a calumny that she has had prepared to excuse her lies when she is forced into a position in which she can no longer
sustain her case.

The cardinal’s forcefulness rattled Jeanne. In a snatched conversation out of earshot of Dupuis, she told Rohan, ‘if I admit a great deal in anger, I will become cautious when I’m no longer
in this state’. Jeanne returned to Villette’s betrayal, scratched it to make it disappear, pondered aloud how she could be revenged without slitting her own throat along with his:

if Villette had forged the document as he has been accused, his first priority would have been to keep quiet about the scene involving d’Oliva with which he has compromised me greatly [but], in confessing this, he would have feared that this admission would have provoked me in turn to reveal that he was the person who wrote the
approuvés
and the signature.

Once self-interest is summoned as proof of innocence, there are no other places to hide.

Willing Jeanne over the brink, Rohan begged her

not to keep holding things back and to admit the crimes that are not personally yours. You would prove by your admission that you were merely incriminated. This thing has gone on much longer than you thought it would. You did not have the intention of doing all this evil and causing the unhappiness you have caused. You should admit everything you have so stubbornly concealed, which has pushed you towards the abyss that is opening before you and which causes our current misfortune. Finally, you should make this admission because of honour, religion and humanity . . . I am more worried for you
than for myself.

Not a criminal, merely incriminated – these were distinctions which Rohan knew, and knew that Jeanne knew, would have no traction with the court. Rohan’s outburst does not reveal a man who has happily entrusted himself to providence and the law: there is frustration at Jeanne’s unnecessary prolongation of the proceedings – everyone else recognised that she would be found guilty – and despair at the torment she had caused, and might still cause him when the verdict
was reached. (Target was clear-sighted about the consequences of Jeanne’s obstinacy: ‘Thus’, he told Rohan, ‘does the duck cut its own leg and wring
its own neck.’)

While Rohan and Jeanne scrapped, Titon worked over Villette again. The formidable magistrate did not permit the retractions and contradictions which the more lax Dupuis had previously let slide. Villette, feeling the breath of justice moist on his neck, had already written to Vergennes, begging for the king’s mercy in exchange for illuminating
‘certain details’. The foreign minister did not respond, but Titon harvested them anyway: Villette had replied, at Jeanne’s dictation, to Rohan’s letters addressed to Marie Antoinette, which betrayed an ‘ambition [to become first minister] that was the
cause of his blindness’ and led the cardinal to be duped:

It was sometime in January 1785 that Madame de La Motte showed me the terms of the sale for the necklace, which needed to be signed. I did so on the assurance given to me that it would never leave the cardinal’s possession, that he would never put it to any other use apart from being shown to the jewellers.

He had suffered more than anyone: betrayed by ‘Madame de La Motte [who] promised me she would retrieve the document in order to destroy it’; stiffed of his share of the proceeds (‘I owe it to the truth to say that she had again promised me a great reward and she did not keep her word’); and exploited by a seductress who took advantage of ‘my weakness and malleable character’. The reason for the near-complete confession was readily offered to Titon: ‘I fear’, said Villette, ‘of being the only person against whom proof will be legally established’ – and, therefore, of bearing the full brunt of the king’s vengeance.