How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair (7 page)

The Rohan welcomed the appointment of the
dévot
Vergennes, who was personally indebted to them. The new king, Louis XVI, moved quickly, however, to establish his independence. He particularly wished to escape the asphyxiating sense of obligation that Marsan – the governess he used to address as ‘my dear mama’ – attempted to stoke. His public frostiness towards her became the chatter of the Court. Louis was noisily eager to resume his duties, but his reimmersion in the Parisian beau monde had dimmed his enthusiasm for diplomacy. ‘In actual fact,’ Mercy-Argenteau wrote to Maria Theresa, ‘the prince de Rohan does not wish to return to Vienna, but he asks to in the hope that he will receive some wealthy
abbey in compensation.’ In August that year, Louis XVI named a replacement.

Marie Antoinette received Louis, as instructed by Maria Theresa, though solely, it seems, out of filial deference. Within a few days Mercy-Argenteau reported that ‘she treats him very coolly and
no longer speaks to him’. Was the new queen simply less magnanimous than her mother? Or had Louis yet again preferred raillery to discretion?
*
The baron de Besenval writes in his memoirs that Louis
had vulturously remarked of the queen that she displayed ‘a coquettishness that prepared the way for an accomplished lover to
succeed with her’ and later gabbed about Marie Antoinette conducting an affair with her brother-in-law, the comte d’Artois. The queen, when she heard he had maligned her, refused to exchange another word with him. It is difficult to comprehend why Louis would take such risks – if he did indeed make such statements – since he was desperate to ingratiate himself with Marie Antoinette. He may have viewed infidelity as a staple of life at Versailles, a sign, in fact, that the queen had been comfortably absorbed into the French Establishment. In tightly circumscribed environments such as the Court, rumour-mongering was a token of power – a flash of one’s membership of exclusive networks of information. Someone as conscious of status as Louis might have felt the impulse to gossip in order to assert his importance, especially during the unresolved flux after the death of Louis XV, when it was unclear which faction would triumph.

Whatever the reason for his disgrace, Louis found the finality of Marie Antoinette’s rejection impossible to sublimate. He had thought no woman impervious to his allure. The queen’s refusal even to acknowledge him was a bruise to his self-worth – and it also corked his ministerial ambitions. While in Vienna Louis had boasted that he would replace d’Aiguillon. His tactlessness, sloth and inexperience made him wholly unsuitable for the highest offices, but he believed that, as the standard bearer for his generation of Rohan, he would inevitably be summoned. Now his only occupation was to wait for his uncle’s death. His creditors pestered him; his fellow clergymen despised him for his rapacious acquisition of lucrative benefices; and the queen’s hatred presented a steepling bulwark against his dreams.

Louis’s redundancy and lack of influence became increasingly apparent. The princesse de Guéméné, the new Rohan incumbent as governess of the children of France and a favourite of Marie Antoinette, tried to broker a reconciliation with the queen, but was easily parried by Mercy-Argenteau. There was even a tussle over Louis’s appointment as grand almoner of France, which had been promised to him by both Louis XV and Louis XVI. Despite these guarantees, Marie Antoinette advocated an alternative candidate, and attempted to foil Louis and placate the Rohan by nominating Louis’s
brother Ferdinand, archbishop of Bordeaux, instead. It required a dawn ambush of the king by the comtesse de Marsan to wring out an assurance of Louis’s succession. Louis XVI relented
‘with regret’ but refused to nominate him to the ex-officio cardinalate, which was normally bundled in with the position. Not that Louis minded – the king of Poland proposed him instead.

On 11 March 1779, the near-blind, gout-rouged, dropsy-bloated Louis Constantin died, and Louis, after twenty-three years of expectation, was finally elevated to Principality-Bishopric of Strasbourg and became known as cardinal de Rohan. The diocese straddled the Rhine and so was under the suzerainty of both France and the Holy Roman Empire, though it maintained a degree of fiscal and judicial independence which Rohan strove to preserve against the centralising aspirations of successive French finance ministers.

Rohan desperately needed the one million livres of income the province provided each year – he had debts dating back to his embassy in Vienna and no intention of trimming his expenditure. The early years of his rule show Rohan at his most trivial and self-interested: designing new uniforms for his counsellors; ineptly meddling in church politics; and, though a seasoned spendthrift himself, vigorously and publicly pursuing those who owed him money. Petty despotism came naturally.

The bishop’s seat at Saverne was a doll’s-house royal court, with its own chamberlains and equerries and Grand Huntsman. The chateau itself, built by the first cardinal de Rohan between 1712 and 1728, was admired as the Versailles of Alsace. For weeks after Rohan’s installation, dinners were thrown each night for dozens of guests. The new bishop did not enjoy the palace for long: six months after his election a fire broke out under the mansard roof, when an abandoned candle ignited drying linen. He was woken only when his smoke-maddened dog tried to throttle his valet. Rohan escaped in his nightshirt but the chateau was consumed in the conflagration; all that was left was a crusty wing at the back. Rohan’s response to the destruction of his home was phlegmatic – ‘Yesterday, I had a chateau; I was deprived of it today. I offer it as a
sacrifice to the Lord’ – perhaps because he viewed the destruction more as an opportunity than a loss.

Though Rohan had two other palaces in the province – the similarly proportioned Palais Rohan in Strasbourg, and a dinkier one in Mutzig – he was intent on rebuilding an even more imposing edifice at Saverne, to the horror of his bookkeepers. The acquisition by the cardinal of the wealthy Abbey of Saint Vaast merely replaced two-thirds of his diplomatic pension of 157,000 livres, which was to be terminated in 1780. So furniture in other residences was auctioned off; a tax rise of 15 per cent and a substantial contribution by the clergy were announced; the Jews were squeezed; and large tracts of Alsatian forest were hewn for scaffolding and joists. Rohan was determined that the palace should be furnished sumptuously: he gathered a magnificent
collection of Chinese porcelain – urns camouflaged with cobalt foliage; a pair of prancing, grimacing terracotta lions; a foot-wide basin glazed with stag-antlered, ox-eared, camel-headed, vulture-taloned dragons; and a pair of miniature pagodas whose awnings furled upwards like riffled newspaper. The chateau’s architect, Nicolas Salins de Montfort, also designed a t’ing in the gardens that combined neoclassical colonnades, a pair of squatting buddhas and a belvedere surmounted by a rhubarb-and-custard parasol.

It took eleven years to complete the new palace, and there was widespread resentment at the burden the population shouldered to underwrite Rohan’s titanic architectural fantasies (the finished building’s muddy red facade is so monotonously extended that it looks as though the builders began unfolding it from the middle and forgot to stop). When Rohan’s reputation was perilously poised later on, he received no support from his cathedral chapter or local politicians. But it was at an optimistic, purposeful building site that Jeanne and Nicolas de La Motte arrived one September day in 1781.

*
Louis Hastier, author of
The Truth about the Affair of the Necklace
, has argued that this letter was apocryphal. But Georgel and Madame Campan – whose accounts of other parts of the story diverge dramatically – are in agreement on this point and clearly received their information from independent sources (Rohan and Marie Antoinette respectively).

*
Louis was unable to stifle his compulsion for gossip, however stale, even in tranquil recollection at the writing desk. On one occasion he wrote to Marie Antoinette of his sincere belief in the discredited rumour that Choiseul had poisoned the old Dauphin.

3

Faith, Hope and Charity

S
OMEONE IN NEED
of succour could not hope to meet
a more suitable person than Rohan. Not only was he personally generous – indeed, he was pathologically incapable of thrift – but, as grand almoner, he had been charged with disbursing alms on behalf of the crown. At Jeanne’s interview, however, the cardinal was not in a giving mood. He responded to her tale with shopworn sympathy and buttery promises of assistance when he was next in Paris. Immediate respite came from the well-thumbed generosity of Madame de Boulainvilliers. This allowed the couple to return to Lunéville, where Nicolas paid off his debts and obtained a
certificat de service
, discharging him honourably and terminally from the Gendarmerie.

By the time the La Mottes returned to Paris, they found Madame de Boulainvilliers parlously ill with smallpox (one of Jeanne’s less charitable early biographers suggested that she rushed back in order to snatch as much of the Boulainvilliers’ bounty as she could). In her autobiography, Jeanne depicts herself as a medical and moral heroine: nursing the marquise herself, soothing and poulticing at risk to her own health, while fighting off the marquis who, though his wife lay blotchy and shivering, was shameless enough to persist with his overtures. Jeanne’s ministrations were initially successful: the marquise recovered sufficiently to ask her son-in-law, the baron de Crussol, captain of the
garde du corps
of the comte d’Artois, to obtain a commission for Nicolas in the regiment.

Whether the strength of the disease grew irresistible or Jeanne’s attentiveness wandered once Nicolas had been gratified will never be known, but the marquise soon relapsed. She died, according to Jeanne’s self-dramatising memoirs, in the embrace of her adopted
daughter, rather than her natural ones. ‘Live, live, my dear mother, or I am ruined for ever! You are my soul,
my support, my life,’ pleaded Jeanne as she was dragged away delirious from the dying woman’s bedside. It is noticeable that, while wishing to portray herself as selfless, Jeanne’s worry over her own future muscles out any pity for her stepmother. This concern was well grounded – the spurned marquis was unlikely to prove as benevolent. It is also hard to believe that the loss of a maternal figure was devoid of emotional repercussions. Jeanne writes about the marquise with a tenderness that she rarely extends to the rest of her acquaintances. It would have taken little effort to vilify someone who, by Jeanne’s own account, had established her adopted daughter in the kind of menial life she abhorred, as another of those who frustrated Jeanne’s justifiable ambitions. Instead, Jeanne refused to blame her, even though they disagreed.

Grief and the hours of watching sapped Jeanne to exhaustion. She raved feverishly for four days, then fell into convulsions at every stabbing memory. Her adopted sisters, who had digested their mother’s death less intemperately, tried to console Jeanne. But neither they nor the marquise’s doctor could
‘raze the written troubles in her brain’. The most effective medicine, it transpired, was the carriage put at her exclusive disposal by the baron de Crussol, at which point Jeanne rapidly reacquired the strength to venture abroad.

Sympathy and carriages were provided for a limited period only, and Jeanne was forced to flee the unshackled marquis and the trivial revenges he exacted for refusing his bed (intercepting her letters, substituting tallow candles for wax ones). There may have been, in actuality, a less Gothic sequence of events: Jeanne may have taken revenge in her autobiography for the marquis’s less lucrative concern by portraying him as a figure of unquenchable lechery. In Jeanne’s account of the first meeting on the road to Passy, there is a marked attempt to contrast the two Boulainvilliers: the marquis responds incredulously to her family history while the marquise is enthused by it. Perhaps, as Jeanne grew older, the marquis baulked at her demands to be treated as a princess and resented the way she grafted herself onto his wife’s affections. After the marquise’s death he may simply have dismissed her.

In early spring 1782 the La Mottes moved to Versailles so that Nicolas could join his regiment. They took a
chambre garnie
in what is now the Place Hoche, seconds away from the front of the chateau.
Chambres garnies
tended to be grimy and draughty, the dry-rotted attics of wigmakers and wine-sellers wanting to make a bit up above. They were favoured by footpads, prostitutes, debtors lying low, and unwitting foreigners who thought that a ‘furnished room’
sounded comfortable.

A hundred thousand people lived in Versailles, a thrumming colony of worker bees that supplied and serviced those
hived off in the chateau. There were more than two hundred innkeepers who housed the servants of courtiers; running repairs to liveries and the continual demand for new outfits – Marie Antoinette led a permanent revolution in fashion – inflated the numbers of mercers and haberdashers, dressmakers and tailors; weather-stiffened soldiers grumbled about their emaciated pensions and the pusillanimity of the country’s foreign policy. At the town’s western edge stood the palace – the original, modest stone and faux-brick building enveloped on three sides by vast marble wings the colour of a smoker’s teeth – which was approached through the yawning maw of the Place d’Armes. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s minister who reluctantly supervised his master’s grandiose designs, thought the building
‘an architectural monster’ – ‘a little man with big arms and a large head’. At the rear, the groomed gardens sloped in a series of groves down to the cruciform canal; bronze and marble figures from classical mythology disported themselves within them. Louis XIV had devoted over forty years to transforming his father’s hunting lodge into a magnificent, domineering, hideous residence, the architectural condensation of absolutist principles of kingship into stone and silver and gilt. The Court swelled at its apogee at the turn of the eighteenth century to 20,000. The stables could house 12,000 horses and the palace was stuffed with thousands of servants. There was a horologist whose sole duty was to wind the king’s watch each day and a man whose job was to deliver a copy of the newspaper to each member of the royal family.