How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (39 page)

The flailing became more purposeful when the branding implements were drawn out. Jeanne grabbed the executioner by the neck and snapped at his hand with her teeth. It took four men to bring her under control, tie her hands behind her back, noose her neck with a rope and lug her to the gate of the Conciergerie. Her hair coiled wildly, her clothes were half peeled off, her body writhed as though in ecstasy, her mouth filled with curses at the judges, at Rohan, at the queen, and all the while the executioner ‘talked to her like a tooth-drawer, assuring her most politely that it would all
be over soon’. The
parlement
was eager for the punishment to be carried out before midday, to avoid a crush of spectators. In the event, a lacklustre straggle of fifty people had assembled. Some cried out that Jeanne was a scapegoat, a victim of court intrigue.

She refused to remove her blouse so they cut her dress open along
the spine and laid her flat on her stomach. Someone screamed an obscenity at the sight of her naked thighs. The birch flagellated her back, which swirled with a mess of blood. Then the brand, heated to a ruddy gold, was applied. She grew more frantic, bucking like a ship anchored in a storm. The executioner only marked one shoulder; a second thrust, intended for the other, stamped her on the breast. Her bloodshot eyes looked like they would burst from their sockets, her lips contorted like a gargoyle’s. The smell of roast meat curled skywards. She fell onto the shoulder of one of the guards, bit hard into it until she drew blood, and fainted. They placed her in the carriage and took her to the Salpêtrière, where she awoke, asked for a glass of water, and fainted again. Vinegar and eau de cologne were massaged into her face to revive her. An inventory was taken of her possessions: two handkerchiefs, a small gold-encrusted box, a purse containing 21 livres and six sols, and her gold earring, which she sold on spec to one of the doctors. She was then taken deeper into the penitentiary. Her hair was chopped into a round bonnet; she was dressed in a plain blouse. Anonymous as all the other inmates, broken and sore, she was no longer the woman who played the queen. She was left in her cell with a bowl of soup and a hunk of hard bread.

24

Catch Him if You Can

A Burlesque

I
N THE SAME
verdict that sentenced Villette and Jeanne, the court found Nicolas de La Motte
guilty in absentia. Whipping, branding and perpetual service in the king’s galleys awaited him – not that he planned on experiencing them any time soon, even though, by now, the French government knew exactly where he was. The story of how he was tailed and cornered is told by Nicolas himself in an insertion into Jeanne’s memoirs, and appears one of the least credible aspects of a work that is, throughout, a jungle of fabrications. Yet the archives of the ministry of foreign affairs turn up documentary corroboration for nearly everything that Nicolas wrote.

While the Diamond Necklace suspects were being interrogated and confronted with each other, Nicolas spent three months convalescing in Scotland under the assumed name of Monsieur de Saint-Vincent. He had heard no news of his wife’s plight and was down to his last few diamonds. As he regained his strength, Nicolas grew curious about events in Paris. Fortunately, his manservant Georges had encountered an Italian named Costa in a local tavern, who seemed well informed. Costa taught Italian and French in the households of grandees, and had a tinderbox temper: once, he told Georges, in a jealous rage he had soaked a mistress in nitric acid. Under the pretext of taking English lessons, Nicolas engaged Costa as a tutor in order to glean news from abroad.

Costa took Nicolas to a cafe that subscribed to the
Gazette de Leyde
, the most important of the French-language news-sheets. The newspaper carried precis of the lawyers’
mémoires
and gossip about the trial, and the first item that Nicolas glanced at was a rumour that he had been arrested and was being shipped back to the Bastille.

He also read of the mockery that Doillot’s inept defence of Jeanne had been subjected to, and wrote to the lawyer, chiding his cack-handedness but also offering to return to Paris as long as guarantees were given that he would not be imprisoned in the Bastille.
*
The queen herself regarded this approach as yet another intrigue ‘with the purpose of dragging [her] through the
mud still further’. Nicolas was in no position to cut deals with the government, but he was horribly aware that it was only a matter of time before they caught up with him. He had narrowly avoided an awkward encounter at Mass – when accosted with a cry of ‘You’re the comte de La Motte-Valois,
aren’t you?’ – by feigning a German accent. A show of willing, however insincere – there was no chance that the French authorities would let him return on bail – might help in any future plea-bargaining.

Nicolas needed someone reliable to deliver his letter in person. The only serviceable option was Costa. When Nicolas divulged his secret, Costa seemed ‘petrified with astonishment’, but immediately told him ‘he hadn’t felt for a long time feelings this agreeable, and he swore to me that I could count on him,
life and death’. Costa accepted the mission, then immediately suggested his wife as a more discreet courier. Nicolas consented.

Madame Costa left for Paris in April 1786. Her disguise was unnecessarily elaborate. On arrival, Doillot thought that she was both a man and a spy, only admitting her after she had been anatomically inspected by his wife. The lawyer approached Joly de Fleury with Nicolas’s offer, but the
procureur-général
would not be dictated to over the terms of surrender. It did not take long for others to hear of the emissary. Vergennes, the pro-Rohan foreign minister, and Breteuil, the queen’s standard bearer in council, had their own interests in securing Nicolas’s return. Madame Costa spent three days at His Majesty’s pleasure in the Bastille, after Breteuil had ordered her arrest; then Vergennes had her briefly seized as she returned through Calais.

Nicolas, meanwhile, after his brush with detection, had decided
it was too dangerous to remain in Scotland. He wanted to return to London, where it would be more convenient to intercept Madame Costa, but Costa convinced him to move to Newcastle, on the grounds that it was slightly closer to the capital than Edinburgh. If his logic seems spurious, it was because Costa was not the simple language teacher he purported to be – he was also in the pay of the French foreign minister. A number of letters survive in the ministry’s archives from a freelance agent called François Benevent, who had Nicolas under surveillance and intercepted his post. Benevent was being run by d’Arragon, a secretary in the French Embassy. In exchange for 10,000 guineas for a deeply indebted
‘friend’, who had wormed himself close to Nicolas, Benevent offered to identify the wanted man and his whereabouts.

The treacherous friend was entirely imaginary – Benevent was Costa (one of the letters even refers to his wife as Madame de Costa de Benevent). The comte d’Adhémar, the French ambassador to the Court of St James and a close friend of the queen, bypassed normal diplomatic channels to transmit Benevent’s proposition directly to Marie Antoinette, who informed her husband, who authorised payment. At first, Benevent suggested luring Nicolas to Hammersmith and kidnapping him, though this plan fell through and they looked, instead, north-east. Benevent was thoroughly unreliable and no patriot (not even, it seems, a French subject). Greed was his motivation, and almost immediately he began to cause problems for his handler, chivvying him for more money upfront, goading him with visions of Nicolas slipping through their hands.

At the beginning of May, Nicolas, pretending to be Costa’s nephew, moved to Shields on Tyneside and took an isolated house close to the sea.
*
Almost immediately, Nicolas grew wary of his companion, a sense of unease exacerbated by the discovery of a poisoned dog outside his front door. They had not stayed there long when Madame Costa returned, having been released from prison, with a letter purportedly from Doillot. Short, vague, evasive but filled with encouragement to remain in Shields, it had, in fact, been dictated by Vergennes and only incited Nicolas’s suspicions further.

Later that evening, Nicolas determined to escape the Costas. He surreptitiously gathered his belongings and ordered a coach to wait for him at midnight. Then, pressing his ear to the couple’s door, he overhead them whispering in English. He entered without knocking and saw, spread out over the furniture, a harvest of louis, booty that Madame Costa had bled from the French authorities in exchange for her cooperation.
‘You are busy,’ Nicolas apologised, and walked out with his decision ratified.

Costa now realised that Nicolas had fathomed him, and sought to rectify the situation. During a stroll with Nicolas later that evening, he admitted working for the ambassador, who had offered him 100,000 livres (a gross exaggeration) for securing Nicolas’s testimony at the trial – not, he protested, to deliver him to the king’s dungeons. Costa suggested a counterplot: they would scam the diplomats of the promised money and split it between them. Nicolas, always excited by the prospect of a fast buck, agreed, though he took the precaution of moving to the bustle of Newcastle. Costa wrote to his handler d’Arragon demanding 1,000 guineas immediately. They planned to take the money, then tell the diplomat that a ‘kidnap in a port so full of people and so far from
town is impractical’ and suggest reverting to the previous plan of a snatch from a house by the Thames.
*

Shortly afterwards, d’Arragon arrived in Newcastle with two undercover Paris cops in tow – Grandmaison and the ever-intrepid Quidor, the restitutor of Villette. Their scheme had been for a coal ship, manned by policemen disguised as sailors, to sail from Dunkirk to Shields, where Nicolas would be coshed, gagged and smuggled on board – a stratagem in flagrant breach of British sovereignty. Things, however, were not going entirely to plan. No boat had yet been requisitioned in Dunkirk, and the chosen men were not in
position. Grandmaison and Quidor’s visit had begun equally haplessly: on arriving in London, they were told that d’Adhémar was in Bath, taking the waters. Once they had slogged over there, they learned he had left, a few hours earlier, for London.

The inspectors had not been briefed in Paris on the exact nature of their mission – their boss, de Crosne, had described it as
‘intelligence-gathering’. When they finally caught up with d’Adhémar, and once he explained their role, they both expressed a
‘great repugnance’ for what was asked of them. Were they to be captured if the plot misfired, they risked hanging – in 1781, a French spy, François Henri de La Motte (no relation), had been strung up in London. In Versailles, Vergennes worried about the delays and his officials’ competency. Rather than wait for a French ship to be prepared, he suggested, could not Benevent commission an English collier to transfer the
‘prey’ to France? At the same time, he sent another police officer, Inspector Subois, to Dunkirk to expedite matters.

Having cajoled the reluctant policemen into following him up north, d’Arragon discovered that Shields was not the somnolent village they had been promised, but a busy port in which every ship was kept under guard. A customs official inspected each vessel on arrival and departure and watchmen were stationed fifty paces apart at night. A surreptitious rendition stood no chance. When d’Arragon finally met Costa, the latter admitted that the target had embedded himself in the even more unpromising location of Newcastle. So cautious was Nicolas, Costa explained, that simply getting him to leave Edinburgh had been a struggle.

Costa offered a tempting alternative to rendition: Nicolas was ready to travel to London and negotiate, face to face with the ambassador, mutually satisfactory terms for handing himself in. ‘He continues to insist that he is not guilty, but when he received the letter from his lawyer which advised him to return to Paris, he said to me that “it must be that this man thinks
I’m an idiot”.’ D’Arragon agreed to pass on the offer to his superiors.

His superiors, meanwhile, were floundering their way through the rapidly disintegrating operation. D’Adhémar had ordered Inspector Subois to set sail from Dunkirk, without knowing whether
Quidor and Grandmaison were willing – or even able – to secure Nicolas. A pennant was affixed to the topmast so the policemen would recognise the boat. They, in turn, would signal with white handkerchiefs, like women waving off their husbands. Unfavourable winds meant that three more days were eaten up before the ship left Dunkirk; when it finally arrived in Shields, try as he might, Subois could see no white flecks fluttering on the shore. His colleagues had left five days earlier.

The ambassador was out of his depth. D’Adhémar asked Vergennes on 23 May if he should attempt the kidnap of Nicolas in London, or meet with Nicolas and try to broker a less violent solution? Nicolas’s evidence might be crucial in the trial. But d’Adhémar refused to feign goodwill in order to tempt Nicolas into a deadfall: ‘I would arrest Monsieur de La Motte myself,’ continued d’Adhémar, ‘if the law would order me to, but I do not want to be the instrument of betrayal, whether in drawing him to my house, or filling him
with false confidence.’ Vergennes was unimpressed by the emissary’s scruples. ‘I am more distressed than surprised by the changes that you have reported,’ he wrote in response. ‘It is quite clear that your man [Benevent] only wants easy profits . . . only seeks to prolong the negotiation in the hope of beguiling from
you new benefits’. Vergennes refused to guarantee Nicolas safe conduct and ordered d’Adhémar to stay in touch with Benevent, but trust nothing he said.

Nicolas arrived in London towards the end of May. The spy-runner d’Arragon proposed denouncing Nicolas as a debtor, and bribing the bailiff to allow them to load him onto a French ship. Benevent refused to countenance such a risky manoeuvre. Before they devised an alternative, Nicolas took matters into his own hands. He wrote to d’Adhémar on 30 May, requesting safe conduct for a meeting, then turned up at the ambassador’s residence, protected by two meaty Irish bodyguards, on the same day. While he was kicking his heels in the vestibule, d’Adhémar dashed off a dispatch to Vergennes:
‘Our man is here . . . I’ll inform you tomorrow of the meeting that I’ve had with him.’ D’Adhémar, who had not yet received the foreign minister’s admonitory response to his earlier letter, again urged Vergennes to make arrangements so that Nicolas’s testimony could be heard, even asking that the judgement, now imminent, be delayed to accommodate
it. ‘I am certain’, he wrote pointedly, ‘that you will do that which is most agreeable to the queen.’