The Queen's Necklace (12 page)

—It doesn’t sound much better in the French!—

We can see how much stress Cagliostro placed on his philanthropy. It was far more important in winning people over than his mysticism. It is a truly noble age when the charlatan’s first concern is to reassure people that his heart is in the right place.

He immediately found favour through an announcement directed at Parisian taste—he had founded a Freemasonry lodge for women. Its Grand Mistress was Lorenza, and its membership included names of the highest rank: Brienne, Polignac, Brassas, the Comtesse de Choiseul, Mme Genlis and others. The Grand Master and Protector of the Egyptian Rite was the Duc de
Montmorency, its Grand Inspector the
fermier général
Laborde, and its treasurer the powerful financier Sainte-James. It can be said without qualification that Cagliostro had arrived.

It is not entirely clear what the women did in their lodges. According to Haven, it was no different from the men. Naturally, the non-initiated were convinced that wild orgies took place, with the ladies’ admirers appearing in the form of charitable genies, and that Lorenza taught them that pleasure was everything. What is certain is that they were given pretty little pyramids as presents, and the Seven Spirits, including Zobiachel, duly appeared before them.

But while all this was going on, Cagliostro did not lose sight of the one thing that mattered, his main business: Rohan. He took care to maintain a warm relationship with him, and Rohan almost certainly continued to lavish significant gifts on his guide to all things mystical.

Inevitably, Rohan also sought his advice in the matter of the Queen’s favour. Cagliostro had little enthusiasm for Jeanne, because he knew full well that she was fishing in the same pond, but he did not see her as a serious threat. It served his interests that she should keep Rohan’s hopes alive, since pessimists are not enamoured of prophets, and his prophesies regularly revealed that the Queen would soon be taking Rohan back into her favour.

La Motte had a little fifteen-year-old relation called Marie-Jeanne de la Tour. It became apparent that this young lady met all Cagliostro’s conditions for a perfect ‘dove’, or medium: an angelic innocence, a highly-strung nature and blue eyes; it was also important that she had been born under Capricorn. Her mother, struggling under the weight of temporary material concerns, and telling herself it would always be advisable to be in the Cardinal’s good books, was happy to put the girl at his and Cagliostro’s disposal.

Cagliostro received her in the laboratory at the Hôtel de Strasbourg.

“Young lady, it is true that you are innocent?” he asked her directly.

“Of course, sir.”

“We shall soon see. Offer up your soul to God, go and stand behind the screen, and concentrate on the thing you would most like to see. If you are innocent, it will appear to you, but if you are not, you will see nothing.”

Mlle de la Tour retired behind the screen, while Cagliostro and Rohan remained where they were. Cagliostro drew certain magical signs in the air, and said to the girl:

“Stamp your pretty little foot and tell me—did you see anything?”

“I saw nothing,” the girl replied, trusting in the truth.

“Then you are not innocent.”

The girl could not bear the suspicion, and quickly called out that she could now see what she wanted to see.

A surviving notebook contains a deposition made to the Court about a second visit.

Marie-Jeanne went with her mother to the Hôtel de Strasbourg, where she was met by the Cardinal and Cagliostro. They gave her a white apron, told her to say a few prayers, and stood her before a table on which a jug of clear water stood between two candles. Cagliostro waved his sword behind a screen and called on the assistance of the Great Kophta and the Archangels Raphael and Michael. Then he asked the girl:

“Tell me, young lady, did you see the Queen in the glass vessel?”

Marie-Jeanne had by now realised what would constitute a suitable response in the eyes of the magician.

“But of course,” she replied eagerly (“so that I could get away,” she later told the court).

“Young lady, do you see the angels and the little figures” (the so-called
petits bonhommes
) “who are trying to kiss you?”

“No,” she replied modestly.

“Make as if you were angry, and stamp your pretty little foot,” he said, “to summon the Great Kophta here instantly, and tell the angels to come and embrace you.”

“Oh yes, they’re here already,” the girl replied (“just to get away”), and she gave the
petits bonhommes
a kiss.

Whereupon Rohan fell to his knees and prayed. Then he asked Marie-Jeanne to tell no one about what had taken place.

Three days later the girl returned to the Cardinal’s palace. This time they gave her a long white shirt with a “great sun” in the middle and two blue ribbons forming a cross—a costume designed by Cagliostro himself. She was taken into Rohan’s bedroom, which was ablaze with candles. Once again there was a glass vessel on a table, filled with water and surrounded by stars,
petits bonhommes
and other symbols she had not seen before—Egyptian hieroglyphs representing Isis and the bull Apis. Cagliostro again brandished his sword, and asked:

“Young lady, do you not see a lady inside the jug, dressed in white?”

“Oh, but of course,” Marie-Jeanne dutifully replied.

“Tell me, young lady—but think about this carefully, because much depends on what you say next: does that lady dressed in white bear a resemblance to the Queen?”

“Oh yes, very much so.”

Rohan raised his head and glanced at the girl, his eyes clouded with happiness.

“Tell me, young lady,” the magician went on: “do you not also see a rather older
bonhomme
, also dressed in white, walking in a garden and embracing the Queen?”

“Oh yes, very much,” she wisely returned (“just to get away”).

“Well then, would you please ask once again for the aid of the Great Kophta, the Archangel Gabriel, and perhaps also Zobiachel.”

The girl put her hands together and mumbled something.

“Now pay attention, young lady, and gather up all the strength of your innocent little soul. Do you not see His Eminence the Cardinal, on his knees, with a tobacco box in one hand and a little platter in the other?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” she replied. “Now I see it, oh yes: My Lord Cardinal kneeling and holding a tobacco box in one hand and a little platter in the other.”

In his excitement Rohan exclaimed: “Incredible! Extraordinary!”

His face, Mlle de la Tour tells us in her deposition, was radiant with happiness and satisfaction. He fell on his knees sobbing, and raised his hands to the heavens.

Poor Rohan! His gestures—throwing himself to the ground, falling on his knees—must have come from his profoundest being, the intense devotion that was the deepest yearning of his heart. Such was his fate, that in all his life he never met anyone who could lead him to where he could fall to his knees with a tranquil heart, before the one true Absolute.

M
ARIE-
A
NTOINETTE
, the chief victim of the necklace trial, has probably been more written about than any other woman in world history. Only Mary Stuart—that other Queen Maria to end up on the scaffold—can rival her. The revolutionary years poured out a venomous stream of slander about her; then, with the restoration of the monarchy in the early nineteenth century, she was turned into a sainted royal martyr. More recent writers, in their quest for objectivity, have looked for an answer somewhere between the two. To us it seems she was neither a demon nor a martyr but a woman neither better nor worse than any other woman placed on the throne by fate. Since the portraits by the brothers Goncourt and Stefan Zweig are readily available, and practically everyone has read the latter, there is no need for us to show Marie-Antoinette in
premier plan
, like the other actors in our story. It will be enough to summarise the facts very briefly and then turn the spotlight solely on those areas that are critically important for the historical argument. What we do need to explain is why Rohan should have believed the things he did about her. To answer that we must examine her prodigality, her war on Court etiquette, her friendships with other women and the erotic legend that grew up around her.

Marie-Antoinette was born on 2nd November 1755, the day of the great earthquake in Lisbon. Her mother was Maria Theresa, her father the genial Lotharingian Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. As a young girl she learnt to dance extremely well, to play music and to recite. Taught by the resident poet at the Viennese court, Metastasio, she memorised the libretti of
the great operas in Italian. It was an excellent upbringing—for a future diva. In later years she developed an implacable hostility towards any kind of intellectual occupation or difficult reading matter, no matter how much her wise mother urged her in her letters to study seriously. But one can hardly blame her for that. There is no doubt that she was intelligent and witty, perhaps excessively so. When receiving a delegation she would respond with a formal little speech she had earlier composed with great care. This habit infuriated the female members of the royal household, who thought it quite inappropriate for a princess to speak at such length to ordinary people, rather than simply mumble a few incomprehensible words of greeting.

Her fate was decided by the Duc de Choiseul, Louis XV’s Foreign Minister. To enable France to turn her full might on England and Prussia, he broke a long tradition of French policy and made an alliance with Austria, her rival of many centuries. The alliance was sealed and underwritten by the marriage of Princess Marie-Antoinette to Louis XV’s grandson, the future Louis XVI.

Marie-Antoinette’s face and figure have been immortalised in countless contemporary pictures and writings. Mme Vigée-Lebrun alone painted her twenty times.

She was certainly beautiful. A tall, queenly figure, with fine arms and bosom, a full head of ash-blonde hair and a most attractive face—admittedly rather a babyish face, by no means the sort that people nowadays find piquant or very interesting. But the fact is that the women of any particular period do all seem to resemble one other, the way men’s handwriting always does. In the eighteenth century women had baby faces, mainly because of their rounded chins. History of course reminds us that these baby-faced duchesses and princesses were cleverer, more passionate and, if necessary, often more vicious than those who came either before or after them. It is only the women of one’s own period that one can judge by their looks—and even then the results are completely unpredictable.

But for beauty the raw material, the body, is not enough. It depends on what you do with it. Marie-Antoinette’s contemporaries could never praise her smile, her facial expression or her deportment highly enough. Mme Vigée-Lebrun, the painter, said of her afterwards that she had the most elegant walk in the whole of France. That was written after the Queen’s death, and may be too generous. We should bear in mind that women were never more versed in the art of deportment than they were then. It was a difficult art and a highly important one, which young ladies studied with great care over many years. Another expert, Count Tilly, who had been one of her pages, disapproved of her eyes and protruding Habsburg lower lip, and thought that her posture could have been more elegant, but even he thought her carriage marvellous. “She had two kinds of walk,” he said: “one very decided, rather brisk and extremely aristocratic, and one that was altogether more sinuous, a kind of rocking movement, though that term should not be taken to imply disrespect. No one could curtsey with more grace than she. She could greet ten people with a single dip, while her glance gave proper due to each in turn … in a word, if I am not deceived, a man would instinctively want to lead her to a throne, the way he would offer another woman a chair.”

(That curtsey! What would Proust have given to see it!)

Yes, she must have been very beautiful. Perhaps we should be less delighted for her than ashamed of ourselves. Ashamed of our own plebeian century.

These details are offered by way of introduction. We must now move directly on to the subject of the Queen’s extravagance.

We have already mentioned that she lived and died for jewellery, and spent vast sums acquiring it. Another of her expensive passions was cards. At the Château de Marly she gambled constantly, always for substantial sums, following royal tradition. The card games here were a form of public ritual, like
mealtimes. Any member of the nobility or gentry could attend provided he was properly dressed, and he would be free to play against the nobility seated at the table. The vast octagonal salon was lined with balconies, where the women, who were not admitted to the area below, were seated. The passion for card games in this period was generally ruinous. Both male and female members of the aristocracy who, as we have seen, were often in longstanding financial difficulties despite their vast incomes, would seek to remedy their situation through the gaming table. The stakes were fantastic. The Marquis de Chalabre (the godfather of the card game Kalaber?) lost 840,000 livres at a single sitting, and the next day won almost two million. He later became the banker of the royal casino. At Fontainebleau one epic game of Faro lasted an unbroken thirty-six hours. The King’s younger brother the Comte d’Artois was said in 1783 to have lost 14,600,000 over seven years. Nor were these princes above the occasional bit of trickery, and it became necessary to introduce various regulatory measures.

So it is not surprising then, that Marie-Antoinette also played and lost. On one occasion the King paid out 100,000 livres she had forfeited in a single sitting. He was not happy doing it, because he was himself very economical by nature: in fact he was the only Bourbon to be that way. It did him little good. In 1777 Marie’s Antoinette’s gambling debts amounted to 487,272 livres.

Naturally she also spent unbelievable sums on clothes; probably more than any other queen in history. Her ambition was to be respected and admired not as the Queen but as the prettiest and most elegant woman in France. The pleasure of being a pretty and elegant woman in France has never come cheap—and we can imagine what it meant then, when all her dresses were made from expensive fabrics. According to the eternally well-disposed Mme Campan, the word was that the Queen had bankrupted every woman in the land by the fashions, and the constant changes in fashion, that she dictated.

She was also fond of building—that greatest of royal passions. The King bought St Cloud for her and then made her a gift of Le Petit Trianon, both of which she remodelled to her own taste. Her taste was of course of the very finest, avoiding anything that might be deemed extravagant. The people naturally were convinced that her financial extravagance was unbounded, and when representatives of the Estates General (regional lawyers and state officials) visited Le Petit Trianon in 1789, they came expecting to find the rooms piled high with diamonds, and the twisting columns of sapphires and rubies with which ‘everyone knew’ the ‘Austrian woman’ had adorned the grottoes in which she conducted her debaucheries.

But in her own way Marie-Antoinette was thrifty. It was her desire to save money that precipitated the whole necklace affair. We have seen that the King was perfectly happy to buy the fatal jewels for her, but she refused. Had she accepted, she would have been spared the whole painful story of the rest of her life. But her economising zeal was always somehow inappropriate and misplaced. One New Year’s Eve, the day on which French children are given presents, she had the latest fashionable toys brought from Paris, and showed them to her children.

“You see,” she said, “these are the toys you didn’t get, because we prefer to give money to the poor, who are freezing and have no winter coats.”

Opinions differ as to whether Marie-Antoinette’s extravagance did put as significant a strain on the state coffers as was believed at the time, and whether she really did deserve the name of Mme Deficit. Probably she did not. The sum total of her various extravagances is dwarfed by the running expenditure of the state, especially in relation to the American war. In 1781 the costs incurred by the King, Queen and Royal Princess, together with the King’s sister, his aunts and their ‘household’, amounted to 27,317,000 livres, and they also paid out pensions to the value of twenty-eight million; while treasury expenditure amounted to 283,162,000 livres. So the outgoings
of the royal household amounted to just one tenth of the whole. The war alone, including naval and other outgoings, absorbed around a hundred and thirteen million livres.

Then there is the separate issue of whether Marie-Antoinette was especially prodigal. She lived, as the Queen of France, at the very apex of the glitter and pomp so typical of the age. The French people had put up with the free spending of her predecessors without a murmur; she was made to atone for the sins of the centuries. Or perhaps not for their sins, but simply because the times had changed, and the hour had come for the great reckoning.

But for present purposes appearance is much more important than the reality. The common belief was that Marie-Antoinette squandered gold without a moment’s thought, and was in permanently dire financial straits. Rohan ‘knew’ that too, and he believed it—all the more so, because it applied equally to him.

The second great question concerns etiquette. Rohan ‘knew’ that Marie-Antoinette spurned the ancient protocol of the French court, and lived according to the dictates of her inclinations and caprice. What was the truth in all this?

The life of a court anywhere and in any period is governed by strict conventions. The function of etiquette is to externalise and indirectly express the ‘charismatic’, specially chosen and divinely ordained nature of royalty, and to instil a sense of religious awe in its subjects. It creates a sense of distance between the ruler and his people, making the king and his entourage seem to them as sacred and unshakeable as the eternal stars that pursue their courses with unvarying regularity. The greater the sense of distance desired by the monarchy, the stricter the protocol. The greatest of all was to be found among the ancient god-kings of the East and the rigid formality associated with them, that lived on in Byzantium. In the West,
the most unbending protocol of all was that of the Habsburg court of Spain, reflecting the enormous scale of the empire in its heyday and the eternal preoccupation with heaven and hell that characterised the Catholic world view. It enabled the Spanish to channel their immense personal self-respect into the veneration of the persons of the King and Queen as sacred objects. On one occasion the Queen fell from her horse, her foot caught in the stirrup, and the steed dragged her along with him. A nobleman rushed to her aid, freed her, then leapt onto the horse and galloped away out of the country, knowing that the death penalty awaited him for having dared touch her foot.

Louis XIV seems to have had the Spanish example partly in mind when he created the much gentler, more aesthetic, but no less unbending protocol of his own court. But, besides creating a sense of distance, he had other, more practical ends in view. He wanted the aristocrats whom he invited or summoned to Court to have something to do, and something to think about. Everything he personally did was to be made a precedent. In all comparable situations, exactly the same procedures had to be gone through. The majority of his courtiers, it seems, approached the resulting elaborate ceremonial with deadly seriousness. An example is that marvellously talented and inexpressibly dull writer the Duc de Saint-Simon, who meticulously recorded every one of those customs in his monumental tomes, so that posterity would know precisely how to behave.

And Louis XIV had another reason, possibly unconscious. We have mentioned that the unspoken aim of Western culture was to reduce the whole of life to a closed system, like a work of art. The punctilious, undeviating repetition of words and actions imposed by court customs can be seen as analogous to the nightly repetition of dialogue in a play, or movements in a ballet. Etiquette served much the same purpose.

This closed world-system, the triumph of art over the raw material of life, proved no less successful in creating that sense of traditional distance than the Spanish model had done, with
its rigid formal attire for men and the great hooped skirts of the ladies (and how uncomfortable their wearers must have been!). But in her early years Marie-Antoinette felt no need for such ‘historic’ distance. For her these things weren’t historic, they were everyday—boring, outdated rubbish.

The capacity of Versailles protocol to produce some strange situations is shown by the famous story of the Queen’s shift, as recorded by Mme Campan.

As
Prémière Femme de Chambre
it was her task to hand the Queen her slip. However, if a lady of higher rank happened to be in the room, the honour passed to her. Once, in winter—and the Palace could never have been properly heated—Mme Campan was about to pass the garment to the Queen when in stepped the
Dame d’Honneur
, the person next in rank above her. Seeing the situation, the lady quickly asked Mme de Campan to take off her gloves and lend them to her, as she could not give the Queen her shift without them. But while the gloves were being removed there was a knock at the door, and in stepped the Duchesse d’Orléans. To preserve protocol, the
Dame d’Honneur
followed the rules and returned the gloves to Mme Campan, who curtsied and offered the shift to the Duchesse, whereupon there was yet another knock on the door and in walked the King’s sister-in-law, the Comtesse de Provence. The Duchesse returned the dress to Mme Campan, who made a fresh curtsey and offered it to the Comtesse, who apologised and quickly handed it to the Queen, who was by now shivering with cold.