Accomplices, the forger Villette, and the counterfeit queen D’Oliva.
Villette, on being banished from France, proceeded to gratify that
longing which he pretended he had to visit Italy where he seems to have
lived for some years, apparently not caring to profit by the opportunity
which the Revolution afforded him to return once more to the land of his
birth. He published at Venice, in the year 1790, as his contribution
to the lying literature of the Diamond Necklace affair, a small octavo
volume, of less than one hundred pages, under the title of “Mémoire
Historique des Intrigues de la Cour, et de se qui s’est passé entre la
Reine, le Comte d’Artois, le Cardinal de Rohan, Madame de Polignac,
Madame de la Motte, Cagliostro, etc.”[437] In this work he informs us
that he forged the queen’s signature under the eyes of the cardinal—a
prince who overawed him, and who had so many opportunities of benefiting
him—and of Madame de la Motte, a woman whom he adored; a pension of
six thousand livres a year being promised him for his compliance, one
thousand crowns of which he received, the following day, on account.
The words “_of France_,” were added, he says, by the cardinal’s express
directions. Villette pretends that Cagliostro, the cardinal, and Madame
de la Motte, were equally concerned in the plot; Cagliostro, whom at
the trial he emphatically declared to be innocent of all share in the
fraud, being the most guilty of all. The Necklace was obtained, he said,
with the sole view of selling it, so that the trio might replenish
their bankrupt exchequers, the cardinal having exhausted his resources
in supplying Cagliostro with funds to carry on his experiments for the
discovery of the philosopher’s stone, which experiments they hoped might
turn out successful by the time the Necklace had to be paid for. Villette
pronounces all the “Mémoires” put forth at the time of the trial to be
merely so many romances, fabricated for the sole purpose of concealing
the truth. Of the countess’s _liaisons_ he speaks in the most open
terms. “Abandoned,” he says, “by her husband, a depraved libertine and
gambler, she sought to captivate other men, and to render them slaves
to her charms.” What these charms were, Villette himself shall tell.
“Strong natural wit, a graceful figure, a white and transparent skin,
and eyes bright and piercing.” He says that he possessed the countess’s
entire confidence, and knew of all her intrigues, and particularly her
_liaisons_ with the cardinal; he then proceeds to say that she was
seduced in the first instance by the Marquis de Boulainvilliers, and that
she afterwards admitted the Bishop of Langres to her embraces, that the
Marquis d’Autichamp was her next lover, that she had a _liaison_ with the
Count d’Artois even, and reckoned the Count de Dolomieu and M. de Coigny
on the list of those she had ensnared. “I have described her,” concludes
Villette, “as she was—amiable, pretty, and over-complaisant; too good not
to have been a trifle weak, too passionate not to have been somewhat of a
libertine. This woman, whom I loved to adoration, and who had loaded me
with benefits, I dared to betray.”
The termination of the career of Rétaux de Villette would appear to have
been even a more sorry one than that of the woman he so adored, if the
statement is true that he died by the hands of the hangman, swung off on
the leads of the Castle of Saint Angelo, at Rome.[438]
The Demoiselle d’Oliva married her old lover Beausire, the same who
accompanied her to Brussels at the time of her flight. He was an offshoot
of nobility, and, as we have already stated, was formerly attached to
the household of the Count d’Artois. D’Oliva’s married life was but
brief, and anything but happy, for she died, it is reported, in 1789,
in the greatest misery.[439] Next year her husband became commandant
of the National guard of the Temple section, but finding his influence
rapidly declining, he retired to Choisy, near Paris, and managed to get
appointed procureur of the commune; finally he pursued the despicable
calling of _mouton_, or informer, and drew up the lists of proscription
in the Luxembourg prison, when it was choke-full of persons _suspects_.
Against the majority of these there was not a shadow of evidence, but as
evidence must be forthcoming in some form or other, the poor wretches
were accused of having plotted in prison. It was remarked that Beausire’s
old acquaintances who had had the ill-luck to win money of him at play
were certain to be on his list of victims, and it was said that he
spoke privately to the public accuser to have them guillotined.[440]
“This Plot in the Prison,” remarks Carlyle, “is now the stereotype
formula of Tinville; against whomsoever he knows no crime, this is a
ready-made crime. His judgment-bar has become unspeakable, a recognized
mockery, known only as the wicket one passes through towards death. His
indictments are drawn out in blank; you insert the names after. He has
his _moutons_, detestable traitor jackals, who report and bear witness,
that they themselves may be allowed to live—for a time.”[441]
Beausire was at the head of these _moutons_, was, in fact, the chief spy
of the detestable Boyenval, who gloated over the number of victims he was
instrumental in bringing to the guillotine. He said of Beausire, that he
made use of him, but that Fouquier Tinville did not like him, and that
he could have him guillotined whenever he pleased.[442] And it pleased
Boyenval at last to put this covert threat of his into execution, and
“D’Oliva’s husband was hurled in.”[443]
XLII.
1786–1793.
DUPE AND VICTIM.
What became of the Dupe—Cardinal Prince Bishop Louis-René-Édouard de
Rohan? Finding the bleak air of the Auvergne mountains sorely trying
to his constitution, broken as it was by excesses and long confinement
in the Bastille, the cardinal asked and obtained permission of the
king to choose another place of residence. Either he or the Baron de
Breteuil fixed upon the Abbey of St. Bénoît, on the Loire, near Orléans,
but the lady superior of this establishment, alarmed at the prospect
of the cardinal and his large retinue of servants coming there and
eating them out of house and home, besides being very backward in his
payments, protested that she was unable to afford the cardinal the
necessary accommodation.[444] Eventually he was taken in at the Abbey
of Marmontier, near Tours, where, we are told, he was ever lamenting
the mad hopes in which he had permitted himself to indulge with regard
to the queen, and the blind confidence he had reposed in Madame de la
Motte.[445] Growing tired after a time of his new home, the cardinal
made various efforts to obtain permission to return to his diocese, and
even sent medical certificates to his old enemy, the Baron de Breteuil,
setting forth that the air of his native Alsace was absolutely necessary
to the restoration of his health. The king at last gave an unwilling
consent, and for a time the cardinal lived in something like his old
accustomed luxurious state at pleasant Saverne. On the approach of the
Revolution he was nominated, by the influence of the popular party—who
thought that his desire to be revenged upon the court would secure him
to their side—a deputy of the clergy of Alsace. Being still under
sentence of exile he did not dare accept the nomination, and a certain
Abbé Louis was elected in his place. The abbé dying, the cardinal was
again chosen, and the National Assembly having cancelled his sentence of
exile, after some delay he came to Paris and took his seat, amidst loud
shouts of applause—much, however, against the wish of his illustrious
relatives, who, one and all, hated the Revolution as a certain individual
is said to hate holy water. For a time the cardinal, with the view of
self-preservation, went with the revolutionary current, and even took
the civic oath; but when his co-reformers began to meddle with the
property of the clergy, decreeing the sale of their lands and superfluous
edifices, he cut himself adrift from them, and retired once more to his
loved Saverne, to dream, however, no more mad dreams of love and ambition
while pacing up and down his once-favourite “Promenade de la Rose.”
Any mere wordy formula the cardinal was willing enough to swallow, but he
could not tolerate sacrilegious hands being laid upon church property,
and particularly church property that he was interested in. “Messieurs
of the clergy,” said a wag of the time, “it is your turn to be shaved;
if you wriggle too much you will be certain to get cut;” and cut the
cardinal, and with him the unfortunate crown jewellers, certainly did
get, for the latter’s security on the rich revenues of the Abbey of St.
Waast, of which the nation had taken possession, was now only so much
waste paper, and bankruptcy was the result. Shortly after the grand
national oath-taking ceremony in the Champ de Mars, the cardinal was
summoned by the Assembly to resume his functions as deputy within fifteen
days, but instead of doing so, he wrote a letter, stating that as it was
impossible for him to give his adhesion to the new civil constitution of
the clergy, he placed his seat at the Assembly’s disposal. The cardinal
was now looked upon as one “_suspect_,” and had ere long to retire to
Ettenheim, a dependency of his Strasbourg bishopric, lying beyond the
French frontier on the opposite bank of the Rhine. Here, in his capacity
of prince of the German empire, he caused levies of troops to be made to
swell the army under the command of his relative, the Prince de Condé,
whom he aided in every possible way. These proceedings of his greatly
exasperated the revolutionary party; he was constantly being denounced
in the National Assembly, and on one occasion Victor de Broglie brought
forward a proposition to indict him before the national high court; but
the Assembly, knowing the cardinal to be beyond its reach, sensibly
enough refused to entertain the proposal, although it was renewed again
and again. It contented itself, on first hearing of the cardinal’s
flight, with instructing the municipality of Strasbourg to seize and make
an inventory of his effects, of which they were to retain custody until
further orders.[446] “Deprived of his vast revenues,” says the cardinal’s
biographer, “he lived a modest and frugal life, intent only on securing
the happiness of his diocese, now reduced to a small patch of territory
on the right bank of the Rhine.”[447] This life of virtuous restraint
which the old spendthrift and debauchee, stripped of his fat benefices,
was compelled to lead in his declining years, was perhaps as severe a
punishment as could have been meted out to him. He died on the 16th of
February, 1803, having attained an age only a little more than a year
short of the allotted three score years and ten.
The cardinal and his “familiar” do not appear to have met again on this
side of the grave. Cagliostro, as we have seen, had to make a rapid
retreat to England, and here he remained for about a couple of years.
Then he went to Switzerland, to Savoy, and finally to several of the
chief cities of Italy. On December 27th, 1789, when the proceedings of
the revolutionary party in France were exciting the utmost alarm in the
minds of members of the sacred college, Cagliostro had the ill-luck to
get arrested, denounced, it is said, by his wife as chief of a society
of Illuminati. He was confined in the Castle of St. Angelo, and after
fifteen months detention, was found guilty of practising freemasonry, and
sentenced to death, which sentence was commuted to perpetual imprisonment
in the Castle of St. Leo, where he is believed to have died in 1795. His
wife was condemned to a life of religious seclusion in the Convent of
Ste. Apolline.[448]
And what became of the Victim?—the Austrian she-wolf!—the Austrian
tigress!—the Iscariot of France! Messalina, Brunehaut, Frédégonde, and
Médicis! as she was indifferently called by her relentless persecutors? A
more powerful pen than our own shall record her cruel fate:—
“On Monday, the 14th of October, 1793, a cause is pending in the Palais
de Justice, in the new Revolutionary Court, such as these old stone walls
never witnessed—the trial of Marie-Antoinette. The once brightest of
queens, now tarnished, defaced, forsaken, stands here before Fouquier
Tinville’s judgment-bar, answering for her life. The indictment was
delivered her last night.[449] To such changes of human fortune what
words are adequate? Silence alone is adequate.
“There are few printed things one meets with of such tragic, almost
ghastly, significance as those bald pages of the _Bulletin du Tribunal
Révolutionnaire_, which bear title ‘Trial of the Widow Capet.’... The
very witnesses summoned are like ghosts: exculpatory, inculpatory, they
themselves are all hovering over death and doom; they are known, in our
imaginations, as the prey of the guillotine. Tall, _ci-devant_ Count
d’Estaing, anxious to show himself patriot, cannot escape; nor Bailly,
who, when asked if he knows the accused, answers, with a reverent
inclination towards her, ‘Ah, yes! I know madame.’ Ex-patriots are here
sharply dealt with, as Procureur Manuel; ex-ministers shorn of their
splendour. We have cold aristocratic impassivity, faithful to itself even
in Tartarus; rabid stupidity of patriot corporals—patriot washerwomen—who
have much to say of plots, treasons, August tenth, old insurrection of
women,—for all now has become a crime in her who has _lost_.
“Marie-Antoinette, in this her utter abandonment and hour of extreme
need, is not wanting to herself, the imperial woman. Her look, they
say, as that hideous indictment was reading, continued calm; ‘she was
sometimes observed moving her fingers as when one plays on the piano.’
You discern, not without interest, across that dim revolutionary bulletin
itself, how she bears herself queen-like. Her answers are prompt, clear,
often of laconic brevity; resolution, which has grown contemptuous
without ceasing to be dignified, veils itself in calm words. ‘You
persist, then, in denial?’ ‘My plan is not denial: it is the truth I have
said, and I persist in that.’ Scandalous Hébert has borne his testimony
as to many things—as to one thing concerning Marie-Antoinette and her
little son, wherewith human speech had better not further be soiled. She
has answered Hébert; a juryman begs to observe that she has not answered
as to _this_. ‘I have not answered,’ she exclaims with noble emotion,
‘because nature refuses to answer such a charge brought against a mother.
I appeal to all the mothers that are here.’ Robespierre, when he heard
of it, broke out into something almost like swearing at the brutish
blockheadism of this Hébert,[450] on whose foul head his foul lie has
recoiled. At four o’clock on Wednesday morning, after two days and two
nights of interrogating, jury-charging, and other darkening of counsel,
the result comes out: sentence of Death! ‘Have you anything to say?’ The
Accused shook her head, without speech. Night’s candles are burning out;
and with her, too, time is finishing, and it will be Eternity and Day.
This Hall of Tinville’s is dark, ill-lighted, except where she stands.
Silently she withdraws from it, to die.
“Two processions, or royal progresses, three-and-twenty years apart, have
often struck us with a strange feeling of contrast. The first is of a
beautiful arch-duchess and dauphiness, quitting her mother’s city, at the
age of fifteen, towards hopes such as no other Daughter of Eve then had.
‘On the morrow,’ says Weber, an eye-witness, ‘the Dauphiness left Vienna.
The whole city crowded out, at first with a sorrow which was silent. She
appeared: you saw her sunk back into her carriage, her face bathed in
tears; hiding her eyes now with her handkerchief, now with her hands;
several times putting out her head to see yet again this Palace of her
Father’s, whither she was to return no more. She motioned her regret, her
gratitude to the good Nation which was crowding here to bid her farewell.
Then arose not only tears, but piercing cries, on all sides. Men and
women alike abandoned themselves to such expression of their sorrow.
It was an audible sound of wail in the streets and avenues of Vienna.
The last courier that followed her disappeared, and the crowd melted
away.’[451]
“The young imperial maiden of fifteen has now become a worn, discrowned
widow of thirty-eight, gray before her time. This is the last
procession: ‘Few minutes after the trial ended, the drums were beating
to arms in all sections. At sunrise the armed force was on foot, cannons
getting placed at the extremities of the bridges, in the squares,
crossways, all along from the Palais de Justice to the Place de la
Révolution. By ten o’clock numerous patrols were circulating in the
streets; thirty thousand foot and horse drawn up under arms. At eleven
Marie-Antoinette was brought out. She had on an undress of _piqué blanc_.
She was led to the place of execution in the same manner as an ordinary
criminal, bound on a cart, accompanied by a constitutional priest in
lay dress, escorted by numerous detachments of infantry and cavalry.
These and the double row of troops all along her road she appeared to
regard with indifference. On her countenance there was visible neither
abashment nor pride. To the cries of _Vive la République_ and _Down with
Tyranny_, which attended her all the way, she seemed to pay no heed. She
spoke little to her confessor. The tricolour streamers on the house-tops
occupied her attention in the streets du Roule and Saint-Honoré; she
also noticed the inscriptions on the house fronts. On reaching the
Place de la Révolution, her looks turned towards the _Jardin National_,
whilom Tuileries; her face at that moment gave signs of lively emotion.
She mounted the scaffold with courage enough. At a quarter past twelve
her head fell; the executioner showed it to the people amid universal,
long-continued cries of _Vive la République_.’”[452]
And this was the fate reserved for her of whom Burke had said that he
thought “ten thousand swords would have leapt from their scabbards to
avenge even a look that threatened her with insult;”—who, on her first
entry into Paris, was welcomed by a wild sea of human beings, that
surged along her line of route and filled the vast space of the Place du
Carrousel;—the fair young dauphiness, to whom, as she looked forth from
the gallery of the Tuileries upon the swaying mass beneath, the old Duke
de Brissac gallantly said, “Madame, you have under your eyes two hundred
thousand lovers;”—the young queen who, when called upon to share her
husband’s throne, with mixed feelings of gratitude and pride wrote thus
respecting her adopted country to her mother:
“Though God caused me to be born in the rank I now occupy, I cannot but
admire the order of His providence which has selected me, the last of
your children, for the finest realm in Europe. I feel more than ever how
much I owe to the tenderness of my august mother, who took so much pains
and care to procure for me this great establishment.”[453]
“Beautiful Highborn that wert so foully hurled low!... Oh! is there a
man’s heart that thinks, without pity, of those long months and years of
slow wasting ignominy: of thy Birth, soft-cradled in Imperial Schönbrunn,
the winds of heaven not to visit thy face too roughly, thy foot to light
on softness, thy eye on splendour; and then of thy Death, or hundred
Deaths, to which the Guillotine and Fouquier Tinville’s judgment-bar was
but the merciful end? Look _there_, O man born of woman! The bloom of
that fair face is wasted; the hair is grey with care; the brightness of
those eyes is quenched, their lids hang drooping; the face is stony pale,
as of one living in death. Mean weeds, which her own hand has mended,
attire the Queen of the World. The death-hurdle, where thou sittest pale,
motionless, which only curses environ, has to stop; a people, drunk with
vengeance, will drink it again in full draught, looking at thee there!
Far as the eye reaches, a multitudinous sea of maniac heads; the air
deaf with their triumph-yell! The Living-dead must shudder with yet one
other pang; her startled blood yet again suffuses with the hue of agony
that pale face, which she hides with her hands. There is no heart to say,
God pity thee! O think not of these; think of HIM whom thou worshippest,
the Crucified,—who, also treading the wine-press _alone_, fronted sorrow
still deeper; and triumphed over it, and made it holy; and built of it a
‘Sanctuary of Sorrow,’ for thee and all the wretched! Thy path of thorns
is nigh ended. One long last look at the Tuileries, where thy step was
once so light—where thy children shall not dwell. The head is on the
block: the axe rushes—dumb lies the World. That wild-yelling World, and
all its madness, is behind thee!
“Beautiful Highborn that wert so foully hurled low!... _Thy_ fault in
the French Revolution, was that thou wert the Symbol of the Sin and
Misery of a thousand years; that with Saint Bartholomews, and Jacqueries,
with Gabelles, and Dragonades, and Parcs-aux-cerfs, the heart of mankind
was filled full, and foamed over in all-involving madness. To no
Napoleon, to no Cromwell wert thou wedded; such sit not in the highest
rank, of themselves; are raised on high by the shaking and confounding of
all the ranks! As poor peasants, how happy, worthy had ye two been! But
by evil destiny ye were made a King and a Queen of; and so both once more
are become an astonishment and a by-word to all times.”[454]
XLIII.
1792–1831.
“NESTOR DE LA MOTTE.”—ILL GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPERS.—GREEN OLD AGE.
Count de la Motte survived all the actors in the Necklace drama, and
lived to see France once more in the throes of a Revolution and the
Bourbons again dethroned—lived in fact, to the commencement of our own
era, and heard of, if he did not see, steam-vessels daily crossing the
Channel, and railways carrying passengers upwards of twenty miles an hour.
We left the count pursuing his second appeal with reference to the
Necklace case. He had not long to wait for a decision, for we find that
on July 27, 1792, the first tribunal gave judgment “on the appeal lodged
by Marc-Nicolas la Motte from the judgment given against him on the 5th
of April last by the third tribunal established at the Palais de Justice”
in the following terms:—
“Whereas the complaint remitted by the procureur-général to the former
Parliament of Paris on September 7, 1785, is only signed at the end
and not on each sheet, which is contrary to law, the present appeal is
annulled, together with the judgment given by the former Parliament of
Paris on December 5, 1785.
“Nevertheless, having regard to the gravity of the offence, it is ordered
that the said La Motte shall remain in custody, and that the documents
in the suit shall be hereunto annexed to serve as a record of the
proceedings, and that the same shall be brought before the director of
the jury to decide upon as he may be advised.”[455]
The count pretends that in the first instance the judgment said nothing
whatever about his remaining in custody, and that it was only on the
Jacobin public accuser (?) rising and stating that as no notice had been
taken during the proceedings of the letters patent issued by the king, he
opposed the count’s being set at liberty, that the unpleasant addendum
was made. According to the count, the king at once offered to withdraw
the letters patent, but was overruled by the minister. In a few days it
was too late; Louis XVI. was dethroned and a prisoner at the Temple, his
own keeper of the seals, Duport du Tertre, sealing with the great seal
the order for his arrest.
About this time poor M. de Laporte is also arrested and sent to join the
count in the Conciergerie, and in a week or two, after a swift trial
before the newly constituted tribunal of August 17th, the harmless old
man is sent to the guillotine. Swiftly as the new tribunal does its work
with the _suspects_, and swiftly as the newly invented guillotine seconds
it, still it is not sharp enough for revolutionary patriotism, with
Verdun fallen and the Duke of Brunswick in full march upon the capital.
By Marat and Billaud, and Sergent and Panis and some few others, the
hideous September massacres are planned, and De la Motte is horrified
at learning that his name, with the fatal red cross against it, stands
second on the list of proscribed prisoners in the Conciergerie. The count
pretends that he and a party of fellow-prisoners secretly arm themselves
and decide upon making a desperate resistance, though where they got
their weapons from is by no means clear. According to his version, he is
provided with a dagger and a couple of pistols, and takes up his post at
the grating at the end of the corridor, where he remains on the watch,
and from whence, not only did he see the prisoners tried, but slaughtered
as well. Throughout the night nothing is heard but the unlocking of
doors and drawing of bolts, followed by shouts, shrieks, and groans;
and an hour or so before daybreak comes the sound of heavy footsteps,
of loud voices demanding the keys, and sharp blows against the door at
the entrance to the corridor leading to their cells. All at once the
count hears his own name shouted out, and thinks the time has now come
to battle for his life. A few more blows and the door gives way, and a
band of strangers rushes in—friends, however, and not enemies, who caress
the count, clasp him to their breasts, and carry him off triumphantly in
their arms. The outside of the prison gained, they entertain him at a
neighbouring café, and then summoning a vehicle, three of his liberators
accompany him to the Rue de Choiseul, where they insist upon his going
and at once making his demand upon the “domain” for the entire value of
his effects seized at Bar-sur-Aube in virtue of the sentence passed upon
him by the Parliament of Paris.