rocks; the waterfall, and the trembling bridge thrown across the little
torrent; the lake, and, under the shade of the shrubs, the embarking and
landing-places, with the galley dotted all over with _fleurs-de-lis_; the
temple of love open to all the winds, with its statue, by Bouchardon,
of Cupid trying to trim for himself a bow out of the massive club of
Hercules; the groves that skirt the river’s bank; and, finally, at the
most remote part of the garden—the background, so to speak, of the
picture—the hamlet where Marie-Antoinette had the king disguised as a
miller, and the Count de Provence as a schoolmaster. Here are the little
houses of the village nestled together like members of one family.
The queen’s is the prettiest of them all, for it has vases filled
with flowers, and grape-vines in front of it. On the opposite side
of the lake, and near to the water’s edge, is the white marble dairy,
with its four goat’s-head fountains, and close beside it, and near
to a weeping-willow planted by the queen’s own hand, is the tower of
Marlborough, so called from the nursery song which the young dauphin’s
_bonne_ used to sing to him. Nothing is wanting to this pretty village
of the stage, neither the curé’s house nor that of the bailiff; nor
the mill, with its wheel which actually turns; neither the farmhouse,
with the stone troughs for the cattle, and the little barns to store
away the corn; nor the thatched roofs, the wooden balconies, the little
diamond-paned windows, and the flights of steps at the sides of the
cottages. Marie-Antoinette and Hubert Robert, the painter, had thought
of everything, even of painting rents in the stone work, cracks in the
plaster, with here and there beams and bricks jutting out of place, as
if time would not wither with sufficient rapidity this pleasantry of a
queen.[234]
Marie-Antoinette put aside all regal authority at the Trianon. Here she
was no longer queen, but merely the mistress of the establishment, which
was like an ordinary country-house, with its small retinue of servants
and all its unrestrained habits. When the queen entered the _salon_, the
ladies neither quitted the piano nor their embroidery-frames, nor the men
their games at billiards or backgammon. The king would come to Trianon
on foot, and unattended. The queen’s guests arrived at two o’clock to
dinner, and returned to Versailles at midnight. Marie-Antoinette’s
occupations and amusements were exclusively those of a country life.
Attired in a white muslin dress, a lace shawl, and a straw hat, she would
run about the gardens, or visit her farm, where she would take her guests
to drink her milk and eat her new-laid eggs; or she would conduct the
king to a summer-house, where he could read his book undisturbed until
she summoned him to a lunch on the grass; after which she would amuse
herself by watching the milking of her cows, or with fishing in the lake,
or, seated on a rustic seat, would occupy herself by winding up the
distaff of some young villager. Now and then she would give some grand
ball, to which all the courtiers from Versailles would be invited, when
dancing would go on under a large tent on the lawn in the day-time until
the sun set, and at night-time almost until it rose again.
All this must have been a great relief from Versailles and Marly and
the troop of intriguing courtiers that migrated backwards and forwards
according as royalty pitched its tent at one château or the other. There
was something too morally foul in the atmosphere of both these places.
Most of the evenings not given up to dancing were spent at play, which
some letters of court gossip of the time characteristically describe as
being “murderous.” The Count d’Artois, after losing two million francs,
was exiled by the king to Fontainebleau. On one occasion a certain M. de
Chalabre lost as much as 42,000 louis at a sitting, and being without
sufficient ready cash to discharge the whole of his obligations, had to
hand over debts due to him from the Countesses de Provence and d’Artois,
for fifty thousand and twenty-five thousand crowns respectively. The
queen, who was a winner of 7000 louis of poor Chalabre’s money, sent
the next day, we are told, for Mdlle. Bertin, her milliner, and paid
her account. Among the persons of rank and position admitted to these
assembles there seem to have been both sharpers and pickpockets, for on
one occasion a rouleau of fifty counterfeit louis was placed on a card
by M. du Luc d’Andilly, an ex-mousquetaire, and son of Count du Luc of
Picardy. On the cheat being discovered, the king ordered the culprit to
be degraded from his nobility and declared incapable of serving him in
future. At another time, Count Arthur Dillon, one of the queen’s intimate
friends, had his pocket picked of his purse filled with bank notes. It
was suggested that everybody in the _salon_—some forty in number—should
be searched, but nothing was done, and the count never saw his purse
again.[235]
Private theatricals were at this time in great favour with the queen,
whose Trianon _troupe_ comprised the Count d’Artois, who is said to have
danced passably well on the tight rope, but only acted in a manner that
was just bearable,[236] M. de Vaudreuil, M. d’Adhémar, the Duke and
Duchess de Guiche, the Countess Diane de Polignac, and M. de Crussol:
occasionally the Baron de Besenval, the Countess de Polastron, and Counts
Esterhazy and de Coigny had parts assigned them. The Count de Provence
and his wife considered these diversions beneath their rank, and the
king, moreover, disapproved of them. Out of politeness to the queen,
he was now and then present at the representations, when he habitually
hissed the actors. On one occasion, when the “Devin du Village” was being
played, and the queen was singing an air with more than her accustomed
taste, all at once a whistle was heard from the back of one of the
boxes. Marie-Antoinette soon perceived that it was from the king himself
that this interruption proceeded. Advancing to the footlights, she
bowed profoundly, and said, with a smile: “Sir, if you are dissatisfied
with the performers you can leave, and your money will be returned to
you.”[237] She then resumed her song, which she was permitted to finish
without further interruption. Beaumarchais’ comedy of the “Barbier
de Seville,” for which, Madame Campan tells us, Marie-Antoinette was
studying her part at the time she made the disclosure to her of the
conversation she had had with Böhmer respecting the Necklace, was the
last piece performed by this aristocratic _troupe_. It was played on the
19th of August, 1785, the very day on which the Countess de la Motte was
lodged in the Bastille.
XXVII.
1785.
CALUMNIES AGAINST THE QUEEN.—HER ANIMOSITY AGAINST THE CARDINAL DE ROHAN.
From the day she became queen, to the very hour of her death, and
even after the grave had closed over her headless corse, the unhappy
Marie-Antoinette was fated to be the victim of calumny. Her youthful
levity was magnified into natural vice. Her most innocent amusements were
made the objects of dark suspicion. Her friendships were so many criminal
attachments. From Marly to Versailles, and from Versailles to Marly,
slander pursued her. It penetrated the groves of Trianon, and insinuated
that secret orgies, rivalling those of the “Parc aux cerfs,” were carried
on in this now favourite retreat. Indecent pamphlets referring to her,
written by hireling scribes, were circulated all over France. Libels
against her were even forged in the police bureau. Scandalous songs were
thrown at the king’s feet, in the “Œil-de-Bœuf.” Scandalous libels were
placed under his dinner-napkin. Courtiers repeated the last foul epigram,
the last lying report against the queen, in the royal antechambers,
whispered it and chuckled over it even in the queen’s presence; carried
it from Versailles or Marly, post haste to Paris, to the different
hostile _salons_, to the green-rooms of the theatre and the opera, and
to the _cafés_, thence to be disseminated all over the capital, even to
the _halles_; carried it to their country châteaux, and laughed over it
at their dinner-tables, whence it spread among their tenantry and the
inhabitants of the adjacent towns:
“And they who told it added something new,
And they who heard it made enlargement too,
In ev’ry ear it spread, on every tongue it grew.”
Fancy what a perfect fund of scandal this affair of the Necklace,
enveloped as it was at first in such an impenetrable mystery, provided
for these despicable minds! What an arsenal for defamation and calumny
it furnished to the avowed enemies of Marie-Antoinette! The Orléans
faction professed to look upon it as a state crime, pretending to believe
that the real culprit was the queen, who had secured the Necklace
through the medium of the cardinal, he having been her dupe in the first
instance, and afterwards her victim. They gave out, through their herd of
itinerant agents—men without characters, without homes, without bread,
without settled occupations, fitted only for scandalous adventures, and
living only by dishonourable expedients—that it was Marie-Antoinette
herself, “_la louve Autrichienne_,” as they styled her, who had met the
grand almoner in the park of Versailles at midnight; that it was she
who had heard his exculpation, and had listened to his new promises of
fealty, which had been sealed by embraces and the gift of a rose; and
further, that she had subsequently granted him several secret interviews
at the Little Trianon. On this false basis they raised their broad
superstructure of defamation, and pursued the queen with every species
of malignant slander in pasquinades, epigrams, and songs,[238] “unfit
for print or pen, the brutality of which nothing can exceed; but which,
nevertheless, found believers—increase of believers, in the public
exasperation—and did the queen, say all her historians, incalculable
damage,”[239] until finally the hideous fabrications culminated in the
epithet of Messalina, hurled at her by the furies of the _halles_ on her
way to the guillotine.
To this body of antagonists must be added those retailers of gossip and
small talk who, in a country like France, where most men are mixed up in
intrigues, (and no reputation is too sacred for the inuendo, the smart
sally, and the _bon-mot_,) delight and revel in scandals enveloped in
some degree of mystery. There was certainly no lack of mystery in the
affair of the Necklace, and these quick-witted individuals, thinking only
of the entangled web offered them to unravel, displayed their ingenuity
in suggesting clue after clue, regardless as to whether this or that
clever explanation which they put forward compromised the queen or no,
for the old loyal feeling of the nation was by this time utterly dead.
The lower classes of society in France had for some time past been
brought to believe, and not without reason, that kings and queens were
their natural enemies; that they despised, if they did not hate, their
poorer subjects, whom they only valued as so much food for powder, or
for what they could furnish to the exchequer through the hard extortion
of the tax-gatherer. Marie-Antoinette was deservedly blamed for her
thoughtless acquisition of the château of St. Cloud, at an outlay of six
million francs, at this particular period when several bad harvests had
imposed new hardships on the people; when provisions were frightfully
scarce, prices correspondingly high, and tillage employment, save as
“statute labour,” hardly to be had. The peasants in certain parts had
even been reduced to live “on meal, husks, and boiled grass.” In the
towns, the distress, if not so great, was still considerable, and large
numbers of men were out of work. Crowds of idlers, as a matter of
course, filled the cafés and cabarets—men with fermenting minds, and
only too ready to believe any new calumny against the objects of their
disaffection, and to lend their busy tongues to circulate the foulest
slanders through the land. Upon the quick fancies of these thoughtless
men, who never paused to examine what they heard, the enemies of
Marie-Antoinette, who went about inflaming the discontented, encouraging
the angry, and imposing on the thoughtless and the credulous, made a
lasting and fatal impression.
Whilst the numerous enemies of the queen were thus at work turning the
Necklace scandal to the best account, the Baron de Breteuil, whose hatred
of the cardinal knew no bounds, was straining every nerve to convert it
into an instrument for the effectual ruin of his enemy. The Abbé Georgel
assures us that this animosity went so far as to induce the minister to
promise Böhmer—who, according to some accounts, had in the first instance
been arrested in conjunction with Saint-James and others on suspicion
of being privy to the abuse of the queen’s name[240]—full payment for
the Necklace if he would aggravate his evidence against the cardinal. De
Breteuil also sent emissaries to the Bastille, to communicate with Madame
de la Motte, offering to save her if she would furnish sufficient proof
to inculpate his old enemy.
Beugnot, at this period a rising young barrister of four-and-twenty,
understood to be an intimate acquaintance of the De la Mottes, and known
to have been the person last in company with the countess previous to her
arrest, fully expected to be sent to join her in the Bastille. The Baron
de Breteuil, however, far from ordering Beugnot’s arrest, instructed
M. de Crosne,—recently appointed lieutenant of police in place of M.
Lenoir, promoted to the presidency of the administration of finances—to
send privately for the young barrister, when, playing on his vanity, he
recommended him to take the countess’s brief, as the trial was certain
to attract the eyes of all men, and could hardly fail to push forward a
young advocate in his career. But Beugnot, who knew his proposed client
too well, declined to avail himself of the opportunity. “The next day,”
observes he, “I received a new message from M. de Crosne, which involved
another visit on my part. The lieutenant of police gave me an opened
letter of Madame de la Motte’s, who, not understanding the difficulties
which I felt in charging myself with her defence, begged me to come
and see her. M. de Crosne backed up her request with some pressing
solicitations of his own; then judging from my obstinate refusal, or
possibly from something that Madame de la Motte had said to him, that I
thought there was danger attached to the post proposed to me, he sought
to reassure me on this point, and urged me to see the Baron de Breteuil.
I declined. ‘I could say nothing to the minister,’ I remarked, ‘which I
had not already said to him, neither would the former obtain from me what
I had refused to the lieutenant of police.’ M. de Crosne insisted still
more strongly, and gave me to understand that more condescension on my
part to the views of the authorities would be neither prejudicial to my
professional advancement nor to my fortune; his favourite refrain always
being—‘See the Baron de Breteuil.’ I gave M. de Crosne to understand that
I should not have that honour, since I did not see to what it could lead,
and I left him, after obtaining permission to address to him a letter in
reply to the one he had delivered to me.
“When recalling this scene, I can scarcely doubt the nature of the
political interest which the Baron de Breteuil took in Madame de la
Motte. He knew from one of his confidential emissaries, with whom I
had been conversing, that I treated the stealing of the Necklace as
comparatively a pitiful incident; but that I regarded the scene in the
park almost in the light of a capital crime. This was apparently in
precise accordance with his own views, and made him anxious that Madame
de la Motte’s counsel should share to the fullest extent in his opinions.
In replying to the countess’s letter, I grounded my refusal on my want
of talent and experience for so grave a business, and I added, that it
would be useless for her to insist further, as my refusal being dictated
to me by my conscience, nothing she could urge would induce me to revoke
it.”[241]
On her side, Marie-Antoinette, deeply and very naturally incensed
against the Prince de Rohan, and, truth to tell, quite as eager for his
destruction as the minister Breteuil, refused likewise to look elsewhere
for a culprit. Both she and the king believed the grand almoner to be
guilty of the peculation of the Necklace, and of an impertinent abuse
of the queen’s name. They knew he had contracted enormous debts; they
knew, too, that he had been charged with tampering with the funds of
a rich hospital, the Quinze-Vingts, of which he was treasurer, and
that he had hitherto led a most dissolute life. Was he not, therefore,
precisely the man who would be likely to perpetrate such a crime? Already
branded in public opinion for an alleged malversation of a million of
francs in the matter of the Hospital of the Quinze-Vingts, his office
of grand almoner, and his dignity as a prince of the Church, could not
raise him above suspicion. The aversion first excited in the queen’s
mind by the cardinal’s private letter against her mother, and his
injurious representations respecting herself at the court of Vienna,
was increased to positive hatred by the description of the scene in
the park of Versailles, by the frequent association of her own name
with his in people’s mouths, as well as by the offensive commentaries
provoked by that association. This burning abhorrence, continually fed
by fresh reports similar in character to the foregoing, so blinded
Marie-Antoinette to the strict rules and rigid formalities of justice,
that in her first moments of passion she is said to have demanded the
cardinal’s life of the king, and the king, moreover, is believed to have
promised her that he should not escape the scaffold.
XXVIII.
1785. SEPT.–OCT.
PREPARATIONS FOR THE TRIAL.—CAPTURE OF THE COUNTERFEIT QUEEN.
The Cardinal de Rohan, who in the first instance was looked upon as the
grand criminal in the Necklace affair, was no sooner in safe keeping
than the somewhat difficult question arose what should be done with
him. It is true that the queen, in her first moments of anger, urged on
by her adviser, the Abbé Vermond, and the cardinal’s enemy, the Baron
de Breteuil, was for doing swift execution upon the grand almoner; but
fortunately for the latter there were certain tedious forms of law to be
gone through before a prince of the holy Roman Church could be consigned
to the scaffold. Irresolute Louis XVI. had, of course, no opinion of his
own upon the subject, and it is quite certain that much indecision on the
subject prevailed among his chief advisers. Phlegmatic M. de Vergennes,
though no friend of the queen, seems to have thought it best to hush the
matter up, and let the scandal die out if it would, and he well-nigh
convinced the king that this would be the proper course to pursue. While
the affair was under discussion, Louis XVI. wrote to M. de Vergennes as
follows:
“I thank you, sir, for your new interview with M. de Breteuil. I have
weighed your reasons; come to-morrow before mass, and I will hear you
upon this subject once more. It is necessary that a decision should be
arrived at, so as to end with this intrigue of a needy man, who has so
scandalously compromised the queen, and who, in order to clear himself,
has no other recourse than to allege his connection with an adventuress
of the worst kind. He dishonours his ecclesiastical character. Being a
cardinal, he is none the less a subject of my crown.”[242]
This interview seems to have resulted in a proposal to the cardinal,
offering him the option of throwing himself upon the clemency of the
king, or of being arraigned before the parliament, not doubting that he
would be only too ready to accept the first of these two alternatives.
The cardinal, however, decided upon consulting his friends and advocates;
and among the latter were two of the ablest members of the Paris bar, the
one, M. Target, robust of brain and body, pompous in speech, learned as
intense study could render him, versed in the treasures of literature,
fiery, impetuous, an athlete redoubtable to all,[243] who, as member of
the National Assembly, subsequently busied himself a good deal in framing
the constitution, and was in after years applied to to undertake the
defence of Louis XVI. himself—a duty which he declined on the plea that
he was getting old; the other, M. Tronchet, who, though ten years older
than Target, did undertake to defend the king, although he knew he was
engaging in a hopeless cause—Tronchet, whose natural phlegm disposed him
to listen with attention, and whom a healthy judgment directed aright
even in the most difficult matters.[244] The cardinal’s friends were all
of them in favour of the parliament; while his advocates were divided in
opinion. Nevertheless, by the parliament he decided he would be judged,
and made known his election to the king in the following terms:
“Sire,—I respectfully thank your majesty for the alternative you have
been pleased to offer me. I have no hesitation in preferring the
parliament, as affording me the surest way of unmasking the intrigue of
which I am the victim, and of proving my innocence before the world.”[245]
On receiving this reply, and exactly three weeks after the cardinal’s
arrest, the king issued his royal letters patent, addressed to the
Parliament of Paris, formally apprising it of the great fraud that had
been committed in the queen’s name, and of the arrest of the supposed
authors of it, and requiring the parliament to investigate and judge
the affair. The cardinal having selected the parliament as the tribunal
before which he desired to be arraigned, now protested, in his character
of bishop and prince of the holy Roman Church, in a somewhat mild way,
against the competency of the judges he had himself chosen, and humbly
besought the parliament that he might be tried by an ecclesiastical
tribunal, composed of his peers or brethren in the episcopacy, in
accordance with the recognised rights and privileges of the Catholic
Church. This request being refused, the cardinal had no option but to
accept the tribunal named by the king. On the pope hearing of this, he
summoned a consistory, which unanimously declared that the Cardinal de
Rohan had acted contrary to his dignity as a member of the sacred college
in recognizing the authority of the parliament, and at once directed his
ecclesiastical suspension for a period of six months, at the end of which
time, in the event of his persisting in his course, he was to be struck
off the list of cardinals.[246] In this dilemma, the Abbé Lemoine was
despatched to Rome by the cardinal’s friends, and succeeded in proving to
the pope that the Prince de Rohan had made the protests which his dignity
required, though without avail, and that he only accepted a secular
tribunal because he was compelled to subscribe to the will of the king.
The interdict was thereupon removed, and the cardinal reinstated in all
his functions.
While these formalities were being discussed, and the affair still
partook of the character of a political contest between the adherents and
friends of the house of Rohan united with the enemies of Marie-Antoinette
on the one hand, and the court and government and partizans of the
crown on the other;—while people were eagerly devouring the statements
circulated on behalf of the accused, and were now blaming, now seeking to
exculpate the cardinal, and were either attacking or sympathising with
Madame de la Motte, and ridiculing Cagliostro,—an individual whom no one
was particularly regarding, was silently, but none the less earnestly,
labouring to overthrow the cold calculations of political animosity,
and dissolve all those dreams of private vengeance of which the Prince
de Rohan was the object. This was the Abbé Georgel, the cardinal’s
vicar-general, who had taken upon himself the task of disentangling
the threads of this complicated affair. With the sanction of the grand
almoner, he went first of all to the jewellers, and arranged with them
that they should receive payment for the Necklace in full, with all
interest then due or that might hereafter accrue, and he gave them as
security an assignment under the cardinal’s hand, of the revenues of the
Abbey of St. Waast, to the amount of three hundred thousand livres per
annum. Thus this able man of business, by a single wrench, so to speak,
drew out the most envenomed shaft, converting the jewellers from enemies,
if not into friends, at any rate into very harmless antagonists. The
cardinal’s other creditors, whose claims amounted to nearly two millions
of livres, on hearing of this assignment, became clamorous, and had also
to be successfully arranged with.[247]