WITH HIS USUAL KEENNESS of insight, Napoleon recognised Marie Antoinette’s crowning error in the diamond necklace trial. “The Queen was innocent, and, to make sure that her innocence should be publicly recognised, she chose the Parliament of Paris for her judge. The upshot was that she was universally regarded as guilty.” There lies the truth. This was the first occasion on which Marie Antoinette lost her self-confidence. Whereas she had always contemptuously disregarded evil tongues, ignored chatter and calumny, she now referred her cause to a tribunal which heretofore she had despised—the tribunal of public opinion. For years she had behaved as if she neither heard nor saw the shower of poisoned arrows. But when, in a sudden and almost hysterical fit of temper, she demanded an open trial, she disclosed how bitterly her pride had been wounded by the envenomed shafts. She was determined that Cardinal de Rohan, whom she regarded as the most audacious of the gang, should, being more conspicuous than the rest, atone for all. Unfortunately, however, no one but the Queen believed that the poor fool had acted in bad faith or with hostile intent. Her brother shared the general opinion in this matter. Writing to Mercy under date 2nd September 1785, Joseph II said: “I have always known the Grand Almoner to be inconceivably light-minded and hopelessly extravagant, but I must avow that I hesitate to believe him capable of such a piece of rascality, of so black a crime, as that of which he is now accused.” Still less did Versailles believe in Rohan’s guilt, and murmurs soon became rife to the effect that the Queen had had the Cardinal thus brutally arrested simply in order to disencumber herself of a confederate. Marie Antoinette had rashly yielded to the promptings of the hatred instilled into her by her mother. Her thoughtless and clumsy action served only to deprive her of the protective mantle of sovereignty. By yielding to an impulse of ordinary feminine spite, she exposed herself to the onslaught of general detestation.
Now, at length, it became possible for the Queen’s secret adversaries to make common cause. Marie Antoinette had tempestuously thrust her hand into a serpent’s nest of mortified vanities. She should not have forgotten that Louis Cardinal de Rohan bore one of the oldest and most distinguished names in France. She should have remembered that he was related by ties of blood to the other great lines of the feudal aristocracy, and above all was near of kin to the Soubises, the Marsans and the Condés. Of course all the members of these puissant families felt it to be a personal affront that one of their order had been arrested in the King’s palace as though he were a common pickpocket. The higher clergy, likewise, were outraged. Was it to be expected that they should make no protest when a cardinal, an eminence, dressed in full canonicals, was seized and conveyed to prison by a swashbuckler when on the point of saying mass? Complaints were lodged at Rome, the centre of ecclesiastical authority. Another powerful group whose interests were touched was that of the freemasons, for not only had their patron the Cardinal been imprisoned, but the gendarmes had likewise hurried off to the Bastille the great Cagliostro, worshipful master of a lodge and one of the gods of the godless craft. In a word, a fine chance now opened for the throwing of stones which would break the stained-glass windows protecting throne and altar from the inclemencies of the weather. It was a case for rude measures, since the matter was of supreme interest to the common folk, who as a rule were excluded, not only from the festivals, but also from the piquant scandals of the world at court. At length the canaille was to have a fine sight. A real, live cardinal, wearing a scarlet soutane, was to be publicly accused, as central figure of a galaxy of rogues and swindlers, of thieves and forgers. Best of all, in the background but plainly visible, was the arrogant ‘Austrian woman’! What more amusing topic could there be for the conquistadors of the pen, for the pamphleteers, the caricaturists, the newspaper reporters (in those days when the periodical press was just beginning to become a power), than the scandal of the ‘handsome cardinal’? Neither in Paris nor the world over had even the balloon ascent of the brothers Montgolfier, whose invention opened a new sphere to mankind, attracted so much attention as did this trial instituted by a Queen which by degrees became metamorphosed into a trial of the Queen herself.
Just before the proceedings began, the speeches for the defence were freely printed without censorship, the bookshops were stormed by would-be purchasers, and the police had to regulate the crowds. Not Voltaire’s, not Rousseau’s, not Beaumarchais’s immortal works had, in the course of decades, secured so extensive a circulation as did these pleadings in the course of a single week. Seven thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand copies, were torn from the hands of the hawkers. In the foreign embassies, the staffs had to spend day after day making up packets which would convey without loss of time news of the latest scandal at Versailles to brother members of the trade union of ruling princes. For weeks the trial was the chief topic of conversation, and the maddest suppositions were accepted as truth.
The proceedings were attended, not only by the curious from Paris and its suburbs, but by persons who had come by hundreds from the provinces—noblemen, bourgeois and lawyers. The handicraftsmen of the capital forsook their work to see the show. The infallible instinct of the populace guided them in this matter. What was on trial was not simply one particular misdemeanour, a petty imbroglio in itself; for from it ran invisible threads to Versailles. It involved the monstrosity of the lettres de cachet, of arbitrary arrest; squandering of money by the court; mismanagement of the state finances. A shaft could now be aimed at all these abuses. For the first time the whole nation was able, through a casual rift in the screen, to secure a glimpse into the secret world of the unapproachable. The trial was not merely a trial about a diamond necklace, but was one in which the extant governmental system was being put to the test; for the indictment, if pressed home, would challenge the behaviour of the ruling class, would damage the Queen, and therewith the institution of monarchy. “What a magnificent, what a fortunate affair! A cardinal disclosed as a thief, and the Queen implicated in a most unsavoury scandal … The crozier and the sceptre are being bespattered with mire! What a triumph for the ideas of liberty!”
The Queen did not as yet suspect that her hasty gesture had thus sown the dragon’s teeth. But when a building is ruinous, when it is rotten to its foundation, the withdrawal of but one nail from the wall will sometimes suffice to bring the whole structure crashing to the ground.
In the court house, Pandora’s box was gently opened. The contents had a disagreeable smell. One thing, at least, was advantageous to the Valois, namely that her husband had been able to get clear away to London with what remained of the necklace, so that no fragments of this ‘exhibit’ remained for production before the judges. Each of the rogues and dupes could endeavour to shift the possession of the invisible object to another of the band, and thus leave open the implication that perhaps, after all, the necklace was still in the Queen’s jewel case. The Valois, who foresaw that her distinguished associate would, if possible, make her pay the shot, had, in order to make Rohan look ridiculous, and in order to avert suspicion from herself, accused Cagliostro (perfectly innocent in this matter) of the theft, and had forcibly dragged him into the trial. She stuck at nothing in the effort to clear herself. When asked how she accounted for her sudden command of wealth, she shamelessly declared that she had been His Eminence’s mistress, and that everyone knew how liberal-handed was this kindly cleric! In fact, matters looked black for the Cardinal, until at length the authorities were able to lay hands upon the Valois’s accomplices, Rétaux the secretary and ‘La Baronne d’Oliva’, the little modiste, and their evidence threw a much needed light upon the situation. There was one name which was carefully kept out of the proceedings both by the prosecution and by the defence, that of the Queen. Not one of the accused, not even the Valois (who was to sing a different tune in later years) had any ill to say of Marie Antoinette, and the adventuress repudiated as an abominable slander any suggestion that the Queen had received the necklace. Yet the very fact that they were all in a tale, that they all spoke with so much reverence of the Queen, worked by contraries upon public opinion, so that among the sceptical majority the idea was more and more widely expressed that the word had been passed round to ‘shelter’ Marie Antoinette. Soon a whisper became general that the Cardinal had magnanimously taken the blame upon himself. Those letters which, by his orders, had so swiftly and so discreetly been committed to the flames—had they really been forgeries, after all? No smoke without a fire! Surely there had been something, though no one could be specific in any accusation, something amiss with the Queen’s behaviour. Although in truth the proceedings cleared up the matter for all reasonable minds, mud had been thrown and some of it stuck. Just because her name was not impugned, Marie Antoinette was invisibly arraigned before the tribunal alongside the other accused.
Judgement was to be given on 31st May 1786. Since five in the morning huge crowds thronged the square in front of the Palace of Justice. There was not room for them all upon the left bank, so that even the Pont Neuf and the northern shore of the Seine were packed with persons waiting impatiently to hear the verdict. Large numbers of mounted police were on hand to maintain order. Already when the four-and-sixty judges were driving to the court house, the passionate exclamations of the spectators must have sufficed to convince them of the importance of their decision, but a yet more decisive warning in this respect was awaiting them in the anteroom of the great hall of deliberation, in the ‘grande chambre’—grand chamber. Ranged there in a double row, apparelled in mourning, were nineteen members of the Rohan, Soubise and Lorraine families. They made obeisance as the judges walked by, but not one of them uttered a word or stepped forwards out of the line. Their dress and their demeanour conveyed enough. This silent adjuration that the court should, by its decision, maintain the honour of the Rohans, must have had a powerful effect upon the councillors, most of whom themselves belonged to the high nobility of France. Before they began deliberating, they knew that the populace and the nobles, that the whole country, was anticipating the Cardinal’s acquittal.
However, the deliberations lasted for sixteen hours. From six in the morning until ten in the evening the Rohans and a mob of ordinary mortals to the number of tens of thousands were kicking their heels in the streets. The judges had a complicated and far-reaching question to settle. It was easy enough to deal with the problem of the arch-adventuress, with that of her confederates, and with that of the modiste. No need for harsh measures against the last, who was a pretty little woman, and had not really known what she was doing that evening in the grove of Venus. The serious matter, the difficult matter, was that of the Cardinal. All were agreed that he must be acquitted, for the evidence had made it perfectly clear that he was a dupe and no cheat. Where the judges differed was as concerned the form of acquittal, since upon this, grave political issues turned.
The royal party insisted, not without reason, that the acquittal must be accompanied by a reprimand for “criminal presumption”. Nothing less than this could account, in their view, for Rohan’s belief that a queen of France would give him a secret rendezvous in a dark thicket. His Eminence’s lack of due respect for the Queen’s sacred majesty must, claimed the accusers, be expiated by a humble and public acknowledgement of guilt in this respect before the grande chambre, as well as by the resigning of his official posts. The other faction, that of those who were antagonistic to the Queen, demanded that the affair should be non-suited. The Cardinal had been humbugged, and was therefore blameless. An acquittal of this sort would have a sting in its tail. For, were it but admitted that the Cardinal had reasonable ground for supposing the Queen capable of such unseemly and secret practices, the latter’s light-mindedness would have been pilloried before the world. Here was a thorny issue to decide. If Rohan’s behaviour were at least censured as disrespectful to the Queen, Marie Antoinette would have been compensated for the misuse of her name, but if he were unreservedly acquitted, this would imply a moral condemnation of Her Majesty.
The judges, the rival factions, the populace (inquisitive and impatient) knew this well enough. It was obvious that the decision would decide something far more important than the particular case which was the ostensible matter at stake. It was no private concern that was under discussion, but the grave political issue, whether the Parliament of Paris still regarded the Queen’s person as sacred, as inviolable or as subject to the laws of the state just like that of any other French citizen, male or female. For the first time the red dawn of the coming Revolution was reflected in the windows of that building which contained, not only the Palace of Justice, but likewise the Conciergerie, the sinister prison from within whose walls Marie Antoinette would, eight years later, be hurried to the scaffold. The beginning of her doom and the end took place under the same roof. Moreover, the Queen would in due time be called to account in the very hall where the Comtesse de Lamotte-Valois had now to answer for her sins.
The judges debated for sixteen hours, the conflict of interests being no less strenuous than the conflict of opinions. The royalist party and the anti-royalist as well had set all possible influences at work, including the potent influence of money. For weeks the members of the Parliament of Paris had been subjected, not only to persuasions, not only to threats, but likewise to bribery and corruption. In the streets people were singing:
Si cet arrêt du cardinal
Vous paraissait trop illégal,
Sachez que la finance
Eh bien
Dirige tout en France,
Vous m’entendez bien!
(If this ruling by the cardinal seems too illegal to you, know that finance, well, it rules everything in France, you hear me!) Now at length the contemptuous indifference which, for years, the King and the Queen had manifested towards the Parliament of Paris was bringing vengeance in its train. There were many among the judges who opined that it was time to read the autocracy a lesson. By six-and-twenty votes against two-and-twenty (so nearly balanced were the respective parties!), the Cardinal was acquitted “without a stain upon his character”; so was his friend Cagliostro; and so was the ‘Baronne d’Oliva’, the little modiste of the Palais Royal. The minor confederates, too, were let off lightly, banishment being thought sufficient punishment for them. It was the Valois and her husband who had to pay for all. He was sent to the galleys. She was sentenced to be flogged, branded with a ‘V’ (voleuse—thief), and imprisoned for life in the Salpétrière.
But one of those indirectly implicated in the affair, one who had not appeared in the dock, was also given a life sentence through the Cardinal’s acquittal—Marie Antoinette. Thenceforwards she was pitilessly exposed to the shafts of calumny, to the hatred of her enemies.
From the steps of the Palace of Justice, the news of the acquittal was enthusiastically shouted to the assembled crowd. So loud were the acclamations that the noise was heard on the northern bank of the Seine. “Long live the Parliament; long live the Cardinal,” rose the cry, instead of the customary “Long live the King!” The judges found it hard to protect themselves against rough manifestations of affectionate delight. They were vigorously embraced; the market-women kissed them; flowers were strewed in their path. As for the acquitted, they made a triumphal progress. Ten thousand, at least, followed the Cardinal to the Bastille, where he had still to spend a night; masses, continually reinforced, jubilated around the walls of the ancient fortress. Cagliostro was likewise idolized, and the metropolis would have been illuminated in his honour had it not been for a police prohibition. Here was a notable sign of the times when the whole nation devoted itself to extolling two men who had done nothing more for France than to inflict a deadly blow upon the prestige of the Queen and of the monarchy!
Vainly did Marie Antoinette try to hide her despair. The whiplash on her face had struck too painful, too public a blow. Her ladies found her in tears. Mercy reported to Vienna that her distress was “greater than seemed reasonably justified by the cause”. It was instinct rather than intelligence which made the Queen recognise that she had sustained an irremediable defeat. For the first time since she had assumed the crown she had encountered a power stronger than her own will.
Yet the King was still a last court of appeal. By taking energetic measures he could have saved his wife’s honour and could have intimidated the members of the opposing faction. Had Louis and his spouse been resolute, the insurgent Parliament of Paris might have been rudely disbanded. That was the course Louis XIV would have followed, and perhaps even Louis XV. But Louis XVI lacked courage as well as determination. He did not dare to take steps against the Parliament, being content (hoping to compensate Marie Antoinette in some measure for her humiliation) to rusticate the Cardinal and to banish Cagliostro from the country. These were but half-measures, which angered the Parliament of Paris without effectively challenging its usurpation of authority, and affronted the representatives of justice without re-establishing the Queen’s honour. With his customary weakness he chose a middle course—which in politics is invariably futile. Therewith he entered upon a steep descent, so that, in the conjoined destinies of husband and wife, there now began to be fulfilled the curse that weighed upon the Habsburgs, the doom which Grillparzer embodied in immortal strains:
It is the doom of our great ruling line
To rest inert at some poor halfway house
Deaf to the call for strenuous endeavour.
The King was incapable of strenuous endeavour, of decisive action. The judgement of the Parliament of Paris was a judgement against the Queen and the monarchy, and was therefore the opening of a new epoch.
The same laodicean behaviour was shown by the royal party in its treatment of the Valois. Here, also, there were two possibilities open. The chief criminal might have been spared her cruel punishment, and this exercise of clemency would have made a good impression. Or, on the other hand, the sentence might have been carried out with the utmost possible publicity. But in this instance, too, as the result of inward hesitation and perplexity, a middle course was chosen. The scaffold was erected in the open, so that the populace was led to anticipate the barbarous spectacle of a public branding; the windows of the adjoining houses had been let at fancy prices, but at the last moment the court was alarmed at its own courage. At five o’clock in the morning, an hour when few witnesses were likely to be on hand, thirteen of the myrmidons of the law dragged the culprit, who was screaming and struggling and trying to strike her conductors, to the steps of the Palace of Justice, where the sentence to flogging and branding was read aloud to her. But they had a raging lioness to deal with. Seized with a fit of hysterics, the woman began yelling at the top of her voice, shouting invectives against the King, the Cardinal and the Parliament of Paris, so that all the sleepers in the neighbourhood were awakened. She panted for breath, spat, kicked, and it was necessary, instead of baring her shoulder in a seemly manner, to tear the clothes from the upper part of her body in order to expose it to the branding iron. At the moment when the hideous deed was being done, the agonized creature struggled convulsively, so that all her nudity was disclosed to the onlookers, and the fiery ‘V’ was imprinted upon her bosom instead of upon one of her shoulders. With a beast-like howl, she bit the executioner savagely through his jerkin, and then collapsed in a dead faint. Like a corpse she was carried off to the Salpétrière where, as the sentence directed, she was to spend the rest of her life, clad in sackcloth with nothing but sabots for footwear, and nourished only on black bread and lentils.
Scarcely had the abominable details of this punishment become generally known when public sympathy veered round in favour of Madame Lamotte. No more than thirty years before, as we can read in Casanova’s memoirs, when the half-wit Damiens had slightly wounded Louis XV with a penknife, the courtiers and court ladies of France assembled to gloat for four hours over the poor wretch’s tortures and horrible death—to see his right hand being consumed in a slow fire, to watch how his flesh was torn off with red-hot pincers, melted oil, lead and resin being then poured into the gaping wounds, while at last, when his hair had been turned white by the prolonged agony, he was torn in sunder by four horses. Since then, however, philanthropy had become the fashion, and ‘good society’ was full of compassion for the ‘innocent’ Valois. Here was a new and perfectly safe way of forming front against the Queen, by manifesting compassion for the ‘victim’, for the ‘unfortunate’. The Duchess of Orléans initiated a public collection in her behalf; the nobility sent gifts to her in the penitentiary; day after day fine carriages were in waiting outside the Salpétrière. To visit this convicted and punished thief became the ‘dernier cri’—all the rage. With astonishment, the abbess in charge of the institution recognised among these kind visitors one of the Queen’s best friends, the Princesse de Lamballe. Had this lady come on her own initiative, or (as was promptly whispered) under secret instructions from Marie Antoinette? Anyhow, the ill-judged visit threw a distressing shadow upon the Queen’s connection with the affair. Was Marie Antoinette’s conscience pricking her? Did she want to come to some sort of secret understanding with her ‘victim’? Naturally gossip upon these lines was rife. When, a few weeks later, the Comtesse de Lamotte-Valois was mysteriously enabled to escape from the Salpétrière by night and to seek refuge in England, it was universally believed in Paris that the Queen had effected this jail-delivery of her ‘friend’ through gratitude to the Valois for having, in court, magnanimously kept a still tongue concerning Marie Antoinette’s participation in the necklace affair.
In reality Madame de Lamotte’s escape had been planned and effected by King Louis’s affectionate relatives to enable them to stab the Queen in the back. It was not merely done in order to give colour to the rumours about an understanding between Marie Antoinette and the adventuress. There was a bolder and more effective game than that to play. Once safely across the Channel, the Valois could adopt the part of accuser, could have the most abominable calumnies printed, and could also, since innumerable persons in France and elsewhere were greedy for ‘revelations’, earn extensive and ill-gotten gains. On the very day of her arrival, a London printer offered her large sums. In vain did the French court, which had at length recognised the sinister import of calumny, try to avert the poisoned arrows, sending Madame de Polignac, the Queen’s favourite, to buy Madame de Lamotte’s silence at the price of two hundred thousand livres; for this talented and unscrupulous cheat played double as before, accepting the hush-money, and then going to press, once, twice, thrice and yet again, with her memoirs, penned and repenned in perpetually new and more fabulous forms.
These memoirs contained all that could gratify a scandal-loving public’s lust for sensation. The trial before the Parliament of Paris was described as a sham-fight, the poor Comtesse de Lamotte-Valois having been sacrificed in the basest possible way. She declared, of course, that the Queen had ordered the necklace and had received it from Rohan, and that she herself, innocent of offending, had confessed to the alleged crime from friendship for Marie Antoinette and in order to refurbish the latter’s tarnished honour. As to the way in which she had first entered into friendly relations with the Queen, this was accounted for by the unabashed liar in the manner that would best please irreconcilable enemies. There had been a lesbian intimacy between the pair!
It mattered nothing that most of these falsehoods were obviously absurd to every unprejudiced eye. For instance, Madame de Lamotte declared that Marie Antoinette, when still an archduchess of the House of Habsburg, had had a liaison with Cardinal de Rohan, then ambassador in Vienna. All persons of goodwill could reckon up on their fingers and thus satisfy themselves that Marie Antoinette was living as Dauphiness in Versailles long before de Rohan had become French ambassador to Austria. But persons of goodwill had become rare, so far as Marie Antoinette was concerned. The public at large read with delight the dozens of musk-scented letters from the Queen to Rohan, as published by the Valois in her memoirs, and appetite for stories about the Queen’s sexual perversions grew by what it fed on.
One foul lampoon followed another, each outdoing the last in lasciviousness. Ere long there was published a “List of All the Persons with Whom the Queen Has Had Debauched Relations”. This contains no fewer than four-and-thirty names of persons of both sexes—dukes, actors, lackeys, the King’s brother and his groom of the bedchamber, Madame de Polignac, Madame de Lamballe and “toutes les tribades de Paris”—all the tribes of Paris—including a number of street-walkers who had been whipped out of the town.
But this list of four-and-thirty persons by no means exhausts the tale of Marie Antoinette’s reputed lovers, those ascribed to her by the artificially stimulated opinion of the drawing room and the gutter. When once the erotic fantasy of a whole city, of a whole nation, has become inflamed about a woman, be she empress or film-star, queen or opera-singer, her supposed excesses and perversions grow like an avalanche—for the crowd, with simulated indignation, participates in an orgasm of fancied lust. Another libel, La vie scandaleuse de Marie Antoinette, speaks of a vigorous pandour who, before she left the Austrian imperial court, was wont to appease the almost unappeasable “fureurs utérines”—uterine furies—(the graceful title of a third pamphlet) of the thirteen-year-old girl. In Bordel Royal, a fourth dainty title, there was an account of the Queen’s “mignons et mignonnes”—darlings—enriched by numerous pornographic copperplates, showing Marie Antoinette in “poses plastiques”—plastic poses—with various partners.
Louder and louder rose the chorus of hatred; ever more detestable grew the lies, which were believed because people wanted to believe them. Within two or three years after the necklace affair, Marie Antoinette’s reputation had been damaged beyond recall. She was regarded as the most lascivious, the most depraved, the most crafty, the most tyrannical woman in France; whereas Madame de Lamotte, a condemned and branded felon, was looked upon as guiltless and virtuous. Directly the Revolution began, the political clubs wanted to take the refugee under their protection, so that the diamond-necklace affair might be retried—but this time before the Revolutionary Tribunal, with Madame de Lamotte-Valois as accuser and Marie Antoinette in the dock. It was only the sudden death of the adventuress (who, in a paroxysm of delirium of persecution, flung herself out of a window in the year 1791) which prevented this remarkably successful cheat from being brought back in triumph to Paris, and from being received with honour by a decree that she had “done good service to the Republic”. Had it not been for this trick played by Fate, the world would have witnessed an even more grotesque comedy of justice than the necklace trial before the Parliament of Paris, for the Valois would have been a loudly acclaimed spectator at the execution of the Queen she had so grossly defamed.