How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (4 page)

During the increasingly lengthy stretches of time Jeanne spent recuperating in the Boulainvilliers’ home, she began to attract the attention of the marquis. He was deeply concerned about the state of her body – more for carnal than medical reasons. In her autobiography, Jeanne records how the marquis would visit her alone, conduct a number of vital diagnostic tests and palliatives (taking her pulse, rubbing her temples, stroking her stomach), offer her money and diamond-encrusted jewellery, before telling her that she must not mention any of this to the servants. ‘Although I deemed this conduct very indelicate,’ she wrote, ‘yet, under the specious pretence that he disguised it, it would have appeared
unreasonable to remonstrate.’ (It is questionable, given Jeanne’s pliancy towards powerful men throughout her life, whether Boulainvilliers’s approaches were entirely unwelcome or without encouragement.)

When the marquis’s daughters found out about these tête-à-têtes they understandably grew frosty towards Jeanne. The marquise concealed her in a hospital, ‘not wishing to expose my youth and innocence to such temptations as the Marquis, availing himself of his station and circumstance,
perhaps might offer’, though Jeanne, finding that the accommodation lacked the plushness of the Boulainvilliers’ town house, bravely risked her chastity by returning home.

Despite Jeanne’s despondency about her prospects, the
Boulainvilliers had been pressing her cause. Bernard Chérin, the royal genealogist, known to be ‘painstaking in his investigations and
unbending in his judgements’, confirmed that Jacques and Jeanne were descended from Henri II. In December 1775, Jacques, now twenty, was presented to Louis XVI by the chief minister, the comte de Maurepas. No monarch takes pleasure in being reminded of the existence of the tenacious offshoots of a previous dynasty, but the king granted Jacques and his sisters pensions of 800 livres a year. Jacques was commissioned as a lieutenant in the navy and departed for
Brest in April 1776.

The pension meant Jeanne was no longer reliant on the beneficence of the Boulainvilliers. Not that she was grateful. She dismissed the amount as
‘trifling’ (in a way, it was – the king’s brother the comte de Provence received 2.3 million livres from the crown each year, and in 1783 was given a separate grant of 7.65 million livres to pay off his
gambling debts). The 800 livres would allow her to live modestly, but if she’d wanted to live modestly, she would have applied herself to needlework. The discontent at receiving such a derisory sum was sufficient to snap her brittle health: ‘I was frequently attacked by convulsions, probably brought on by the concealment of what was
passing in my breast.’ Soon her new family would be in no position to help her any further.

In early December 1776, Jeanne, lying feverish in bed, was tormented by a sulphurous reek. She interrogated the servants about the smell – all of them replied evasively. But she was not the only person suffering; a crowd, beset by the stench and curious about its origin, had gathered outside the Boulainvilliers’ house, where it was ineffectually marshalled by a small detachment of police. It was soon established that the marquis had been running an illegal distillery in his cellars, and there had been insufficient ventilation to disperse the
fermented gases unobtrusively. Though a secretary had attempted to flood the cellar, enough evidence remained to prove that the marquis had been illicitly manufacturing alcohol. This was not the kind of hobby expected of Paris’s chief legal officer. The Boulainvilliers retired to the country in disgrace, and Jeanne’s hopes of establishing herself at Versailles and increasing her pension were punctured.

A little consolation arrived when the marquise engineered a
reunion between Jeanne and her sister Marianne, who had last seen each other fifteen years previously. The two girls moved briefly into a Benedictine convent before they were shuffled, in March 1778, to the Abbaye Royale at Longchamp, an entirely different sort of foundation. Longchamp served as an aristocratic finishing school. It had gained particular notoriety in the middle of the eighteenth century when the opera star Nicole Le Maure retired from the stage to become a novice there. Services were transformed into concerts as Le Maure sung with the backing of an orchestra. Thousands crammed in to hear her, and people began to note that the Mother Superior seemed to have recruited her choristers more for their coloratura
than their religious calling.

By the time Jeanne arrived, Longchamp was no longer a permanent party and she bucked at its strictures. The abbey was not intended, she realised, to polish her up in preparation for breaching Court society with the Boulainvilliers at her back; it was, instead, the culmination of the marquise’s generosity, a place where she would be genteelly preserved. But Jeanne had little appetite to spend her life among the dog-eared memories of spinsters past marriageable age. When the abbess began to pressure her into taking the veil, she and Marianne planned their escape.

In the autumn of 1779, Mademoiselle de Valois (Jeanne) and Mademoiselle de Saint-Rémy (Marianne), with twelve livres between them, checked into the Tête rouge in Bar-sur-Aube, ‘the most miserable inn, in a town where there was
not a decent one’. Bar-sur-Aube is one of the oldest settlements in Champagne, dating back to the Celts, if not further. The inhabitants were conscious of the place’s antiquity: every New Year they greeted each other with sprigs of juniper, crying ‘to the new wood’ as, they believed,
the druids had done. ‘Its situation is pleasant; the air you breathe there is healthy; they live there
for a long time’, wrote a visitor in 1785.

Fontette lay just over ten miles to the south-west, and Jeanne had persuaded the marquise de Boulainvilliers that moving to Bar would allow her to pursue her claims on her father’s property. The marquise consented to the sisters’ departure and wrote to an acquaintance, Madame de Surmont, the wife of the town’s provost, asking her to look after Jeanne and Marianne. The girls were convinced that, as
the protégées of a great lady, they would be met with flutings of admiration, yet despite the marquise’s endorsement, Madame de Surmont was wary of the new arrivals (perhaps because of their father’s blasted reputation). She was reluctantly persuaded to call on them, and was surprised to find them
demure and winsome. Jeanne made a striking impression on everyone she met, especially the men. Jacques Beugnot, a newly qualified lawyer, was one of those who mooned after her. Later, after being ennobled by Napoleon and serving in the government of Louis XVIII, he remembered her rough charm:

[She] was not what one would call beautiful. She was of medium height, but svelte and compact. She had blue eyes full of expression, under high-arched black eyebrows, a slightly elongated face, a wide mouth but full of excellent teeth and, as is proper for someone like her, her smile was enchanting. She had beautiful hands and very small feet. Her complexion was remarkably white. By a curious circumstance, nature, in making her throat, had stopped halfway through the business, and the existing half made one long for the rest. She was lacking in any kind of education, but she had a great deal of wit, which was lively and astute. Struggling since her birth with the social order, she had defied the law and hardly respected morality much more. One saw her toying with both of these entirely instinctively, as if she didn’t have a clue about their existence. All this created a frightening whole for the observer, which was seductive for the class of men who did not
look too closely.

Marianne, in contrast, was blonde, chubby, placid and markedly stupid – and volubly insistent on being treated with deference. Initially Madame de Surmont was so taken with the pair that, over the objections of her – as it turned out, perceptive – husband, she invited them to stay for a week while they searched for lodgings. The girls all too easily made themselves at home: the day after their arrival, Madame de Surmont lent them a couple of dresses; the next morning she discovered that they had stayed up all night altering them. Jeanne and Marianne long overstayed their welcome – Madame de Surmont told Beugnot that ‘the worst year of her life was the one she spent in the
society of this demon [Jeanne]’. Beugnot, however, found himself utterly captivated: her ‘brazen spirit . . .
contrasted particularly with the timid and strait-laced character of
the women in the town’. But his father, though sympathetic towards the orphaned girls, was terrified of the social complications that might arise if his son, a mere bourgeois, should marry a Valois. He shooed Jacques off to Paris under the pretext of furthering his law studies.

Another suitor had more success. Nicolas de La Motte was Madame de Surmont’s nephew. His father, an army quartermaster, had been killed in 1759 at the Battle of Minden during the Seven Years War, and his mother maintained herself on a small pension. At the age of fifteen, and despite standing at only four feet nine inches, Nicolas joined his father’s regiment and was garrisoned at Lunéville in Lorraine. France was no longer at war, so Nicolas diligently applied himself to the peacetime occupations of idle military officers – duelling and gambling. At the age of twenty-seven he returned to Bar to
live with his mother.

Short, stocky and dark-skinned, Nicolas was lively and good-humoured, if not endowed with the sharpest of minds. Even Beugnot, who thought Nicolas ugly, admitted that, ‘despite [this] his face was
friendly and sweet’. He met Jeanne when they performed together in an amateur production of Voltaire’s
The Prodigal Son
. As so often in the theatre, onstage passions led to backstage entanglements. Jeanne discerned in the comparatively worldly Nicolas a more expansive way of living than the one on offer in Bar. He ‘possessed’, she wrote

‘a sincerity of heart seldom found but in the country, blended with those polished manners which are not often
excelled in the metropolis’. This probably means he was a flashy dresser with an arsenal of crude chat-up lines.

They carried on their affair in private but matters were complicated when Marianne, after falling out with the Surmonts, flounced off to live in a convent, enabling Madame de Surmont to train all her powers of surveillance on Jeanne. The couple, however, saw enough of each other for Jeanne to fall pregnant, and there was no option but to get married – though this solution had little appeal to the interested parties. Nicolas’s mother had hoped that her son might snare a wealthy wife to pay off his debts; Jeanne must have realised that a good marriage offered one of her only chances of
scaling the social ladder. Nicolas, penniless and thoroughly common, would not help her ascent at all. Nonetheless, Jeanne was not one to sacrifice immediate benefits to long-term considerations: the wedding would shield her from some of her neighbours’ opprobrium, and offer an escape from the provincial pettiness that was beginning to grate. Nicolas, for his part, saw that the respectability of having a wife might win him a promotion.

Nicolas and Jeanne were married on 6 July 1780 at midnight, in accordance with local custom. Jeanne had mortgaged her royal pension for two years in order not to stint on the celebrations. After the ceremony, the couple, without any justification, minted themselves the comte and comtesse de La Motte (there were, in fact, noble La Mottes living in Bar who were unrelated to Nicolas). Such appropriation of titles was widespread; one jurisprudent griped that

‘usurpers are operating without restraint . . . persons well known to be commoners are having themselves announced as marquesses,
counts, barons, and viscounts’. In 1788 the royal genealogist Antoine Maugard estimated that, at most, a quarter of noble
titles were genuine.

There was little point adopting a title if you couldn’t support yourself in style – but the La Mottes had no source of income. Shortly after the wedding, Jeanne bore twins, baptised Jean-Baptiste and Nicolas-Marc, who died within a few days. Whatever grief she must have felt would have been tempered by relief at not having to feed two more mouths. It is possible, too, that the deaths caused her some resentment: she had been funnelled into marriage with Nicolas to legitimate her children; when they didn’t survive, she may have regretted lashing herself to an oafish man who hampered her quest for acceptance. It’s striking that Jeanne, despite her carefree and eclectic sex life, never conceived again, as though the double abandonment – by her parents and her children – left her wishing to be accountable to no one.

Nicolas was unable to justify his absence from his regiment any longer and in April 1781 returned to Lunéville. Jeanne billeted with the local Benedictines, though not through a sudden reflux of piety – it was an ineffective attempt by Nicolas to stop her flirting with his fellow officers. Even in the convent Jeanne ‘delivered herself
up to all pleasures’,
including those administered by the garrison commander, the marquis d’Autichamp. Humiliated and suffocated by debts which no amount of renegotiation would postpone, Nicolas left Lunéville for good, with his wife and without any idea what to do next.

Help arrived from the Beugnots. Jacques’s father retained sentimental memories of Jeanne as a ragged child, and his concern was reignited now it was impossible for his son to marry her. He loaned the La Mottes 1,000 livres, which they decided to use to fund a campaign to reclaim the land that Jeanne’s forebears had whittled away. Nicolas would head to Fontette to investigate first-hand; Jeanne went to Paris where she would ‘put her husband’s discoveries
to good use’.

Jeanne took rooms at the Ville de Reims on the rue de la Verrerie, a busy thoroughfare on the edge of the Marais. It was the nearest inn to the coach stop at which travellers from Champagne alighted and its reputation glowed about as brightly as the Tête rouge’s in Bar. Jacques Beugnot had agreed to provide any legal assistance Jeanne required. He drew up for Nicolas a list of archives near Fontette in need of examination, while he himself rummaged through the papers lodged at the
chambre des comptes
in Paris, the court that dealt with financial matters. Though the documentary record was scrappy, Beugnot established that most of the Saint-Rémy lands now belonged to the king. This offered a measure of hope: it was possible that Louis, who had already proved himself well disposed to the family, could be persuaded to return the property.