How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (40 page)

During two long conversations, Nicolas convinced d’Adhémar that he was a martyr unjustly pursued.
‘He is a young man with an interesting turn of phrase,’ wrote the ambassador in a dispatch, ‘who has quite innocently been caught up in this unhappy affair.’ Nicolas promised to serve time in prison – as long as it was not the Bastille – and return any remaining diamonds (it is hard to comprehend how d’Adhémar reconciled possession of the remnants of the necklace with Nicolas’s self-proclaimed saintliness). The ambassador’s eagerness to secure Nicolas’s repatriation was fed directly from the top: ‘Do not forget’, he implored Vergennes, ‘that the queen dearly desires that Monsieur de La Mothe should be interrogated before the judgement. Her Majesty did me the honour of telling me this most insistently before my departure.’

The differing attitudes of d’Adhémar and Vergennes reflect their loyalties at the climax of the Diamond Necklace trial. From Vergennes’s perspective, as a supporter of Rohan, new evidence from Nicolas at this late stage could only have reinforced Jeanne’s version of events – it was far safer to keep him offstage until judgement had been passed. Conversely, the queen’s party, well informed about the progress of the trial, knew that Jeanne had been discredited as a witness. If they wanted to convict Rohan of criminal conspiracy, they needed corroborating evidence against him.

Vergennes stalled until the point of no return had been passed. Five days after the verdict, he wrote to the king with hypocritical fastidiousness:

If Your Majesty agrees that Monsieur La Mothe surrender himself as he appears disposed, I beg you to authorise me to command the comte d’Adhémar to send him to any other minister apart from me. Nothing would disgust me more than be charged with receiving his deposition. The care that I had to distance myself from the affair has not stopped my silence several times being interpreted as a sign of
partiality and prejudice.

Now the harrowing investigation had concluded, Vergennes knew Louis wished for nothing more than to forget the preceding nine
months. As was disastrously proven during the Revolution, the king was endowed with a phlegmatism that enabled him to untether himself from troublesome events and drift along as though they had never happened. His reply shows he was blind, wilfully or otherwise, to his foreign minister’s endeavours on behalf of the Rohan:

Although you conducted yourself in this affair as you ought to have acted – as an honest man – I understand the disgust you would have at seeing La Mothe, and moreover that it would be useless. He has only one thing to do for himself, that is to return to justice to repent for his absence – it is for him to take on that responsibility. For me, now the judgement has happened, I am not bothered at all any more.

The king regarded the outlay on Benevent as ‘money thrown into the river’, but, he added, ‘if he must be paid, it is better to do that than to hear all of the idiocies which this man will not miss the opportunity to spread in England’.

*
A letter from Mercy-Argenteau to Prince Kaunitz confirms that the comte de La Motte indeed wrote to ministers, requesting permission to see his wife and plan their common defence.

*
The sources do not specify whether this was North Shields or South Shields.

*
In the section of Jeanne’s
Mémoires Justificatifs
dictated by Nicolas, he explains that Benevent planned on giving him an enormously potent sleeping draught – enough to knock out twenty horses – trussing him up in a bag and dragging him onto the boat, from which ‘without doubt [
they would have hurled] him into the sea’. Though the diplomatic correspondence suggests that the French authorities may have preferred Nicolas permanently silenced, the only plan considered was one to seize him.

25

Farewell, My Country

O
N THE SAME
day that the
lettre de cachet
exiling Rohan was issued, Cagliostro received a similar document, ordering him to leave the kingdom within two weeks. On 13 June, he processed towards the coast to catch a boat bound for England. In Boulogne, he wrote, ‘all the good people [were] by the shore! Their hands stretched out towards my boat, calling to me, crying out, heaping me with blessings, asking the same from me . . . thank[ing] me for the good I had done their brethren. They plied me with the most touching farewells.’ As his ship sailed away, he ‘cried out again and again as though they could hear me: “Farewell, Frenchmen! Farewell, my children;
my country farewell!”’

Cagliostro still loved the people of France, but his forgiveness did not extend to its rulers. Shortly after his arrival in London, a
Letter to the French People
was published under his name (it was almost certainly ghostwritten); like other tracts written in the tremoring days before revolutions, this did not attack the king directly but lashed at his evil counsellors:

I have been hunted from France. The king has been deceived. Kings are to be pitied for having such ministers. I mean to speak of the baron de Breteuil. What have I done to this man? Of what does he accuse me? Of being loved by the cardinal, and of not deserting him; of seeking the truth; of assisting suffering humanity, by my alms, my remedies, my counsels. Those are my crimes! . . . He cannot bear that a man in irons, a stranger under the bolts of the Bastille, in his power . . . should have raised his voice, as I have done, to make him known – him, and his principles,
his agents, his creatures.

The
Letter
proceeded to indict the whole system of justice, which was open to abuse by officials who slip directives for imprisonment and confiscation of goods among the papers which the king hurriedly signs each day. All men risked internment on the basis of ‘unknown complaints, obscure evidence that is never communicated, sometimes even on simple rumours, on scurrilous talk, sown by hatred and
received by envy’.

The Bastille was a shrine to government’s most vindictive tendencies – ‘cynical impudence, odious falsehood, sham pity, bitter irony, relentless cruelty,
injustice and death’ – which nullified all of the king’s pretensions to benevolence. Cagliostro remembered:

For six months I was within fifteen feet of my wife without knowing it. Others have been buried there for thirty years, are reputed dead, are unhappy in not being dead, having, like Milton’s damned souls, only so much light in their abyss as to perceive the impenetrable darkness that enwraps them. I said it in captivity, and I repeat it as a free man: there is no crime but is amply expiated by six months in the Bastille . . . Someone asked me whether I should return to France supposing the prohibitions laid on me were removed? Assuredly, I replied, provided that the Bastille became
a public promenade.

Cagliostro also sought more tangible recompense for his suffering. Safe in England, he accused de Launay, the governor of the Bastille, and Chénon, a senior police officer, of having destroyed or sequestered at the time of his arrest 100,000 livres-worth of goods, including diamonds and other jewels,
‘balms, drugs, elixirs’, rolls of banknotes, gold coins and important documents. He also sought damages for the humiliating manner of his arrest. Chénon, in return, denounced Cagliostro as a combustible insurrectionary: ‘We remember the terrible effect his
mémoire
had on the public . . . The retailing of it
brought sedition nearer.’

Loath to hear the events of the Diamond Necklace Affair turned over again in a public court, the king appointed a special committee of state counsellors to investigate the case (a decision viewed as a stitch-up by Cagliostro’s supporters). Cagliostro was offered a safe-conduct for the duration of the hearing by Breteuil, but refused to trust the man he had so recently denounced. Inevitably, the panel found that
de Launay and Chénon had no case to answer. In London the verdict was condemned as a conspiracy to ruin Cagliostro and destroy Masonry. Even before crossing the Channel, Cagliostro had been feted by the English: his translated trial brief was described by
The Times
as ‘perhaps the most extraordinary publication that ever engaged a
body of people’. On his arrival, the king’s sons paid court to the thaumaturge, and Whig dignitaries such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire clustered about him.

Cagliostro soon latched on to a new patron who provided him with a house in Knightsbridge, furnished with Indian mahogany, Italian porcelain and Persian carpets. Samuel Swinton was the founder of the
Courier de l’Europe
, a leading French-language newspaper edited in London and distributed across France. Swinton, a hard-bitten businessman and not someone who swelled with enthusiasm for alchemy, or sympathy for a downtrodden vagrant, spied the potential for profit in Cagliostro’s celebrity.

Through Swinton, Cagliostro met Charles Théveneau de Morande, the editor of the
Courier
, and the first of two swaggering figures who discomfited Cagliostro’s sojourn in England. In 1770, Morande had fled Paris and his gambling debts for London. A year later he published
The Armour-Plated Gazetteer
, a compendium of lewd anecdotes about noblemen, politicians and clergy, along with obscene stories about Louis XV and his mistress Madame du Barry. On completion, three years later, of a second work devoted exclusively to du Barry’s cornucopian sexual techniques, Morande wrote to the French Court asking to be bought off. Beaumarchais was sent to negotiate a pay-off and supervised the burning of the entire print run one night in April 1774 (the noxious smoke that wafted across the Channel was said to have poisoned Louis XV, who died shortly afterwards). To earn his living, Morande became a prolific French spy, feeding three different departments with his reports – after he became editor of the
Courier
in 1784, he encoded intelligence into the newspaper’s pages. At first, Morande looked favourably upon Cagliostro, lauding his compassion for the sick and poor.

Cagliostro also found himself in the protective embrace of Lord George Gordon, a man of peppery temperament and extreme politics. Known as ‘Lord George Flame’ or ‘Lord George Riot’, on
account of the anti-Catholic disturbances he instigated in 1780, he was a virulent Francophobe, who saw in Cagliostro’s resurrection the eventual downfall of the Bourbons. He managed a press campaign which accused the sinister – and entirely fictional –
‘queen’s Bastille party’ of attempting to kidnap and re-imprison the count. He also became the Cagliostros’ gatekeeper, aggressively interrogating each visitor as though he was potentially a French spy. Their home became a new prison, oppressively constricting the man who for months had dreamed of liberty. ‘If I had not that dear creature, my wife’, Cagliostro said, ‘I should go and live with the wild beasts of the jungle, certain of finding
friends among them.’ Eventually Gordon extended himself too far in his jeremiads and was convicted of criminal libel against Marie Antoinette. Since Gordon had long been ostracised from polite company, Cagliostro lost most of his society friends through their association.

Meanwhile Morande, whose support required the regular lubrication of coin, turned against the unforthcoming Cagliostro. The
Courier
expended great energy in debunking his self-mythologising; among the feats mocked was Cagliostro’s boast of foddering livestock on arsenic, when living in Arabia, in order to slay predators. In response, Cagliostro issued Morande in the
Public Advertiser
with a challenge to a singular duel:

Of all the pretty tales you tell of me, the finest is surely that of the pig fattened with arsenic, who poisoned the lions, tigers and leopards in the forests of Medina. I am going, mister jester, to make a joke at your expense. In matters of physics and chemistry, arguments prove very little, persiflage proves nothing; experiment is everything. Allow me, then, to propose a little experiment that will entertain the public, at either your expense or at mine. I invite you to eat with me on November 9, at 9 o’clock in the morning. You will provide the wine and all the accessories; I will furnish only a dish done in my way; it will be a little sucking piglet, fattened according to my method. Two hours before dinner, I will present it to you alive and well, you will be responsible for killing and preparing it and I will not come near it until the moment when it is served on the table. You will cut it into four equal parts, you may serve me the part that you judge to be suitable. The day after this dinner, one of four things
will happen: either we will both be dead, or neither of us will be dead; or I will be dead and you will not; or you will be dead and I will not. Of these four chances I will give you three and bet you 5,000 guineas that the day after the meal you will be dead and I will be well. You must either accept this challenge, or acknowledge that you are an ignorant fellow, and that you have foolishly ridiculed a thing which is totally
out of your knowledge.

Morande cavilled – his conscience, he claimed, would not bear Cagliostro’s death. Instead, he suggested ‘what carnivorous animal you think proper’ should fight on their behalf, since he was ‘unwilling . . . to submit to that degradation of assimilating myself
to a Cagliostro’. The mealy reply was treated contemptuously: ‘It is not your representative’, said Cagliostro, ‘but it is you that
I wish to dispatch.’ He never received satisfaction; Morande continued to scourge him in print and sought his imprisonment for debt.

For a time, Cagliostro found a measure of sanctuary with Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, a fashionable Alsatian painter and set designer with occult interests, who provided a laboratory and a library filled with alchemical texts. The pair planned to found a new lodge, with a view to the eventual annexation of British Masonry. But when Cagliostro paid a comradely visit to a lodge in Bloomsbury, he was treated as a buffoon. His authority was further undermined when Morande reported that in one seance, instead of summoning angels, he had raised ‘a fearful horde of orang-utangs whose grimaces, insults, and unworthy promiscuity the chaste idealists had to
endure all evening’. In April 1787, pilloried beyond endurance, the Cagliostros left London for good.