The Queen's Necklace (26 page)

A few months later they were followed by Réteaux de Villette. Réteaux had fled to Geneva, had been arrested there and then extradited. The situation regarding La Motte was rather more complicated. He had gone to England, but even in those days the English were punctilious about such matters. They would not send refugees back for any reason; moreover, the French government was not especially popular in London at the time.

Since there was so little hope that the English authorities would return him, the Paris police decided on abduction. Their efforts in this direction read like a true-life detective story—it seems there are eternal truths even for crime writers. La Motte was living in Edinburgh as the paying guest of the family of an elderly Italian language teacher called Benevent Dacosta. He reckoned that this arrangement would attract the least attention to himself, since people would take him for a member of the family. But Dacosta was not just a language teacher. He was also a man of business, and the French ambassador to London, the Comte d’Adhémar, persuaded him to hand La Motte over for ten thousand guineas. He felt rather bad about doing it, he wrote, but poverty dictated his actions.

The plan involved two police officers travelling to Newcastle, where they were to meet Dacosta and La Motte. Two more officers, one of them the wily Quidor, would be waiting for them in a port called South Shields. French ships regularly called in there for coal, so their boat would not attract any particular
notice. There, Dacosta was to betray La Motte. They would pour a soporific into his wine and carry him onto the boat while he was asleep—the classic formula.

The French police proceeded in a very circumspect and low-spirited sort of way. They knew that if the English collared them they would be hanged without mercy.

But the plan failed. First, because La Motte became suspicious and refused to go to South Shields. Secondly, because the agents were unable to find a suitable house in the port, and even if they had found one, Dacosta had insufficient money to pay the rent. Thirdly, and principally, because the Italian took fright. He feared that the scheme would fail and he would be hanged. Instead he revealed the whole plan to La Motte. La Motte, whose sunny disposition we have already observed, was not in the slightest bit angry, and helped his good friend spend the one thousand guineas he had had as an advance from the French.

Rohan, however, remained a prisoner in the Bastille. He could have had no complaint on grounds of comfort. The largest suite in the staff officers’ building was placed at his disposal. He took three footmen in with him, and was given a daily allowance of a hundred and twenty francs. (Should that be multiplied by ten?) He dined in princely style, and could receive any visitor he chose. He gave banquets for twenty people, with oysters and champagne. Because of the extraordinarily large number of his visitors the drawbridge was, most exceptionally, left down all day. Every afternoon he took his walk around the tower terrace, in his brown overcoat, with a large hat drawn down over his eyes, to the delight of the vast crowd of Parisians gathered below. In the city the only topic of conversation was the trial, and interest in it was just as strong abroad.

The King, following the rules, began by appointing Breteuil, as his Paris Minister, and Thiroux de Crosne, the Chief of Police, as examining judges. But Rohan rejected the first as a personal enemy, and the second as being of too low a social
rank to question him. Vergennes, the Interior Minister, and Castries, Minister for the Navy, were brought in. The Cardinal gave his evidence coolly, shrewdly, and in strict accordance with the truth.

Jeanne’s hearing was somewhat stormier. She sat on the
sellette
(the prisoner’s bench, or rather stool) day after day for months, directly facing each witness. If they attacked her defences in one place, she would plug the gap in the wink of an eye with some impromptu remark that introduced three or four random new points; above all, she made fine use of that perennial woman’s weapon, hysteria. This Rohan, who had called her to account, how much money did he have? She hurled it in his face that he had been her lover. To Baron Planta, who had brought separate charges against her, she replied that he was only saying what he did because he had attempted violence on her, and got the worst of it. Father Loth she accused of living a riotous life, especially for a monk, and of procuring women for La Motte. She gave lurid details of Nicole d’Oliva’s moral life. She screamed at Cagliostro that he called her his “lamb” and was always billing and cooing, raising his eyes to the heavens, pronouncing great sayings, calling on God to witness, and pouring out his Italian and so-called Arabic jargon. There was no stopping her. The moment she opened her mouth a filthy and obscene atmosphere poured out and clouded the entire hearing.

Jeanne’s methods of defence always bring to mind that fearful scene when a pack of dogs have driven a cat into a corner. Realising that it cannot run up the wall, it suddenly turns on its attackers, seems to become twice the size it was before, hisses and makes the terrifying sound of a time bomb about to explode. If we were to erect a statue symbolising courage, it would have to depict a cat in this situation.

Carlyle, however, questions Jeanne’s courage. “Had Dame de Lamotte a certain greatness of character; at least, a strength of transcendent daring, amounting to the bastard-heroic? Great, indubitably great, is her dramaturgic and histrionic talent;
but as for the rest, one must answer, with reluctance, No. Mrs Facing-both-ways is a ‘spark of vehement life’, but the farthest in the world from a brave woman … Her grand quality is to be reckoned negative: the ‘untameableness’ as of a fly; the ‘wax-cloth dress’ from which so much ran down like water.”

The housefly image is apt. But is the housefly not brave? We are not saying that Jeanne’s hysterical courage has any moral worth—but that she showed courage, indeed great courage, we would not venture to question. Carlyle himself says of her elsewhere: “O worthy … to have been Pope Joan thyself, in the old days;” and surely it took a devilish amount of courage for anyone to become a female Pope?

Louis XVI offered Rohan the choice of being tried either by himself, under royal jurisdiction, or by the Parlement. In a letter, co-signed by members of his family, which made clear how much they identified with him, Rohan chose to go before the Parlement. The letter was finely calculated, and indeed somewhat defiant:

This in fact meant: ‘If you accept the fact that I am innocent, I should be willing to submit myself to your sentence; but if not, the Parlement must decide between us.’

Rohan well understood the nature of his choice. The Parlement was the King’s greatest enemy. By giving way to Marie-Antoinette’s womanish anger and insisting, in contrast to Rohan’s openness, on having him arrested in an atmosphere
of great scandal, Louis had committed his first major blunder. And now he made another, a hundred times greater and this time quite irreparable—he allowed those hostile to him to adjudicate the matter, so that, if they chose, they could pass judgement both on it and on the King.

Our Nordic friend Count Haga would certainly not have done that. Referring to the necklace trial, the Swedish King wrote to his confidant, Count C F Scheffer, as follows:

“I should have advised him, had I been asked, not to give such great éclat to this affair, which does not really concern the Queen, but which, if it does come to trial, might require a lot of uncomfortable explaining. We monarchs, though just as likely to be tripped up as the rest of humanity, have the advantage that we are not held to account for mistakes involving small amounts of money, and are generally trusted. But once we attempt to excuse ourselves, then we appear to acknowledge the possibility of blame on that side, something that would never occur to the common people of their own accord.” He felt that the necklace affair would damage the universal respect for the institution of the monarchy, and he was right.

Apart from the incompetence he showed, should we really blame the King for allowing the matter to pass into other hands and submitting it to the Parlement? It is possible to assume that he did this under the Queen’s influence. It is very interesting what Napoleon said in connection with this to a confidant on St Helena, where he had plenty of time to reflect.

“The Queen was innocent, and in order to give maximum publicity to her innocence, she wanted the Parlement to pass judgement on the case. The result was that everyone considered her guilty, and that undermined trust in the Royal Court.”

As is well known, the Paris Parlement of the day was neither a legislative body nor a house of representatives but the highest court of law. It was the Parlement not just of Paris but also of several other large provincial cities. Its members were paid for their services, like all judicial officers in the kingdom. Thus they
had for many centuries been drawn from the wealthy upper bourgeoisie. One of the most important developments in French society was that the power of the King became entrenched at a very early date, and in consequence the bourgeoisie did not evolve into an urban patriciate ambitious for self-government, as in Italy, Germany and Flanders. Instead, they served the King, and in that service made their way as lawyers and state officials.

The most high-ranking section of the upper bourgeoisie consisted of those who held the administration of justice in their hands. A great many of them had attained nobility, the collective term for them being the
noblesse de robe
—the
robe
here signifying the judge’s gown.

Some were extremely rich, with palaces in the cities and mansions in the countryside, and lived like the true nobility, who were distinguished from them by the term
noblesse d’épée
—nobility of the sword. Some even came to rival the blue-blood aristocrats in the matter of debt. Their incomes were generally very considerable. M d’Aligre, the leader of the Paris Parlement who presided over the necklace trial, was worth 700,000 livres a year. But while there were those who displayed all the vices of privilege, the greater part were extremely respectable, almost puritanically solemn and plain-living people, exhibiting the true bourgeois mentality: sobriety, integrity and unquestionable probity.

By the eighteenth century all the institutions of the monarchy were to some extent dated or obsolete, and everywhere riddled with corruption, the justice system not excluded. Those who wanted reforms naturally played that up. They complained that judges were often too young, inexperienced, ill-educated, and susceptible to undue influence. Legal costs were intolerably high, secretaries had to be paid vast sums to expedite the astonishingly slow procedures, as did the
huissiers
, to deliver sentences already pronounced. The criminal justice arrangements were outmoded, cruel and inhumane. France, like Italy, was coming
under the influence of the teachings of Beccaria, who urged radical changes to the system. He also demanded reform of the prisons. In 1782 the horrific For l’Évêque prison, whose inmates had to stand in water during years of high rainfall, was closed and the Hôtel de la Force built, where every prisoner had his own bed, and—to contemporary eyes—the whole place appeared astonishingly clean and comfortable.

The monarchy had tried on many occasions to reform the criminal system, but their intentions were always frustrated by the stubborn resistance of the Parlement. It was one of the most conservative bodies in all history. Every new law, and almost every other new development, was seen as an affront to its ancient rights and privileges. It is quite extraordinary the way it objected to everything: to the
petite poste
, by which private individuals delivered letters and packages; to the planting of potatoes, and even to the use of emetics. Above all, it opposed reform. In the eighteenth century, every right-thinking proposal for change made by a monarch foundered because of its opposition.

These abuses of power did nothing to harm its popularity. Neither the die-hard conservatives nor Voltaire, Diderot and the entire reformist camp of acerbic-minded philosophers ever attacked it. It never lost its popularity, because its members were eminent, belligerent and fearless, and were seen by the people as the representatives of the very idea of freedom.

Their ideal, since the start of the century, had been the British constitution, but by the time of Louis XVI their political theories had moved on. It was now accepted that every aspect of power, and all legal process, derived ultimately from the person of the King, but there was nonetheless a need for some sort of mediator between the monarch and his people to supervise the enactment of the laws he handed down: and that role fell to the Parlement.

In reality it had exercised this supervisory function for centuries, by virtue of the fact that its duty was to ‘register’
bills promulgated by the King—without such registration, bills could not become law. If the Parlement saw fit, it could block them. Naturally France was for this reason never an ‘absolute’ monarchy, since the King could not flatly impose his will against its members’ wishes. If the latter dragged their feet for too long and formally remonstrated with the King, he could call a
lit de justice
in his palace, at which he simply informed the relevant authorities that the bill was now in force. But this was very much a two-edged sword. It poisoned relations between the King and the Parlement, and with the passing of time the latter body became identified with protest, resisting everything, including the most welcome and necessary social reforms, since the very notion of ‘reform’ had come to be associated with ‘tyranny’.