The Queen's Necklace E-Book

Antal Szerb

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 484

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A witty and erudite love letter to a bygone age, from one of Europe's last great humanists. In August 1785 Paris buzzed with scandal. It involved an eminent churchman, a notorious charlatan, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself. At its heart was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled and the web of fraud, folly and self-delusion it had inspired. In Szerb's last major work, a witty and often surprising account of events, the story is used as a standpoint from which to survey the entire age. Written in war-torn Hungary in the early 1940s, it constitutes a remarkable gesture of defiance against the brutal world in which the writer lived and died. Antal Szerb (1901-1945) was born in Budapest. Though of Jewish descent, he was baptised at an early age and remained a lifelong Catholic. He rapidly established himself as a formidable scholar, through studies of Ibsen and Blake and histories of English, Hungarian and world literature. He was a prolific essayist and reviewer, ranging across all the major European languages. Debarred by successive Jewish laws from working in a university, he was subjected to increasing persecution, and finally murdered in a forced labour camp in 1945. Pushkin Press publishes his novels The Pendragon Legend, Oliver VII and his masterpiece Journey by Moonlight, as well as the historical study The Queen's Necklace and Love in a Bottle and Other Stories.

Leseprobe

ANTAL SZERB

THE QUEEN’S NECKLACE

Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix

Contents

Title Page

PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR

Chapter One: The Necklace

Chapter Two: The Comtesse

Chapter Three: The Grand Seigneur

Chapter Four: The Magician

Chapter Five: The Bower of Venus

Chapter Six: Spirits in Glass Pitchers

Chapter Seven: The Queen

Chapter Eight: How it Happened

Intermezzo: Figaro and Count Haga

Chapter Nine: The Necklace Explodes

Chapter Ten: The Bastille, the Parlement and the King

The Verdict

Epilogue

TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

Also Available from Pushkin Press

About the Publisher

Copyright

THE QUEEN’S NECKLACE

PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR

The times we live in teach literary people like myself to look beyond our usual subjects and seek fresh inspiration in history.

Medieval and modern history is the history of nation states, and the first duty of the sons of those nations is to write about their own past. But there are two particular periods, the Italian Renaissance and the French Revolution, which are so universally important and seminal that they can be thought of as part of the common inheritance of the entire European race. The mood of our times has much more in common with the earthquake years in France than with the cosmic spring of Florence, and since the social class I personally belong to, the bourgeoisie, began life under the same fatal stars as the French Revolution, I am not perhaps entirely unqualified to write about it.

In fact the topic more or less chose me. It is one for which I seem to have been more or less unconsciously preparing for a great many years. More difficult was the question of genre. I could have written a scholarly study, a monograph. But the subject is a vast one, and has been so thoroughly worked over that I would have been obliged to focus on some rather minor aspect, and to deal with even the most minuscule of those would have required the sort of study I could have carried out only in those beloved haunts of my youth, the great libraries of Paris—now closed to me for the indeterminate future.

I might have written a novel, and, I must confess, that idea tempted me for some time. But I was as wary of tackling historical fiction as I would have been of setting a novel in a country I had never visited. A kind of respectful diffidence held me back from putting words they had never spoken into the mouths of once-living people, assigning feelings to them which I could not be sure were not my own, and taking them down paths they had never trod.

And so I arrived at a genre for which at the time I had no name: I have called it a ‘real history’, because it eschews every kind of novelistic embellishment and amplification, and because it treats a well-known episode (from the time of Louis XVI) which historical scholarship has explored in minute detail. The very nature of the event was such that it can be seen as symbolic of the whole period, because, like an ideal work of drama, it contains within itself everything that is both quintessential and representative in the multi-faceted mass of events. Furthermore it can be treated as a viewpoint from which perspectives open out into every aspect of the age, like gazing out from one of those fountains in the grounds of Versailles from which avenues radiate, like a star, in all directions; and I have made every effort to explore those avenues.

The raw material of my narrative, the story of the necklace trial, is taken by and large from Frantz Funck-Brentano’s L’affaire du collier—The Affair of the Necklace—an admirable treatise based on an exhaustive study of a vast treasury of documents. My purpose is not to shed any radically new light on the affair—Funck-Brentano’s work puts any thought of that out of the question. Rather, as I have already said, I use it as a vantage point from which to take a bearing on the approaching Revolution. For this reason I do not confine myself very strictly to the story of the necklace; rather I attempt to weave into my discourse every “significant minor detail”, following that unsurpassably great master Hippolyte Taine, to whom, once our youthful fascination with the history of ideas is over, we all return in our maturity. I explain the facts in as much depth as seems necessary, and as far as I understand them, but I do so in the chastening consciousness that, in the final analysis, all historical events defy explanation.

ANTAL SZERB 1942

Statement found among Antal Szerb’s posthumous papers, and published on the occasion of the first printing of The Queen’s Necklace.

Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to hear that some acquaintance has, to his immense surprise, read one of my books of literary history as if it were a novel. For that is exactly what I intended—to rescue the material from the layers of schoolroom dust and give it a living reality, thus moulding people’s tastes by making them want to read not just best-sellers but also the great works of so-called ‘literary history’. The literary historian must, first and foremost, be a propagandist, an advertising executive in the service of the eternal values. But naturally there are two sides to this. People in this country expect scholarly works to be unreadable; from which they are led, quite logically, to the erroneous conclusion that anything that is readable cannot therefore be scholarly. A great many critics have reproved the relaxed, often slightly mocking, tone of my books, insisting that I cannot possibly respect literature if I talk about it in such a cheerfully familiar way. To which I can only respond with a saying of Jules Renard: “You just don’t like ironical people. They make fun of their own deepest feelings. That is like saying: ‘this father cannot love his children because he plays with them’.”

And now I have written a book on a historical subject. Naturally my critics will now complain that I fail to respect history. And properly speaking, they are right. I don’t ‘respect’ it. Why should I? The past was in no way superior to the present, and what the present is like I have no need to tell you. So I may not ‘respect’ it, but on the other hand I do love it. Feelingly, deeply, passionately. The way I love Italy. And tea. And sleep. History is my home. Or rather, perhaps, my country of refuge. So I would say to my reader: if he absolutely insists that a writer should address him in the scholarly manner, from on high, in ex cathedra tones, then he should simply toss this book on the floor. My way is to speak as one human being to another, looking to find kindred spirits and good company.

The book tells the well-known story of Marie-Antoinette’s necklace, or rather, it describes events leading up the French Revolution. It differs from the usual historical biography, first, in that it is not a biography at all, and secondly, and more importantly, in that I do not content myself with narrating events. I also attempt to explain them, together with their antecedents and consequences, placing them in their intellectual and spiritual contexts. In doing so, I attempt, within the framework of my tale—a tale that is both remarkably eventful and yet true to life from beginning to end—to show French society in the age of Louis XVI, along with its literature, prevailing sensibility and notable personalities, and to bring all this together in a living tableau, rich in implication, which provides a picture of the way the French Revolution came about. In terms of form, the book is somewhat experimental, and I am naturally curious to see how it will be received by the public.

Chapter One

The Necklace

IN THE DECADES LEADING UP to the Great Revolution, two German jewellers lived in Paris: Charles August Boehmer—whose name the French mispronounced as “Bo-emer”—and Paul Bassenge, whose surname reveals his family’s Gallic origins. His forebears, Huguenot refugees, had lived in Leipzig until this particular Bassenge was born, in Paris, and went on to become a partner in the firm belonging to the ageing Boehmer. Boehmer was by then very well known. During the reign of Louis XV he had purchased for himself the title of Joaillier de la Couronne et de la Reine—Jeweller by appointment to the Crown and the Queen.

The two men, or at least Boehmer, who plays the larger role in the main events of our story, must have been rather exceptional. They were driven by a passionate dream of greatness, and in their own field they strove for fame and immortality. With quiet diligence, over long years, they acquired a collection of the finest diamonds available on the European market; but rather than mount them in accordance with current Parisian taste, or sell them off in order to make their fortunes and, as did all the rising bourgeoisie of the day, use the money to buy the sort of landed estates that would associate them with the nobility, they took a different path. They locked the diamonds away in their shop and then, when they had amassed a vast number, set about creating a masterwork. They constructed what at the time was the most expensive item of jewellery in the world. This record-breaking treasure, the fateful diamond necklace, is the subject of our tale.

Very few people—including those who feature in our narrative—ever saw the necklace, and later we shall learn why. It never hung from anyone’s neck, nor, like some sort of curse, did it bring down disaster on those who wore it. But, as with the Nibelungs’ treasure in the depths of the Rhine, the short period of time it spent on earth was enough to alter the course of destiny. Diligent research carried out recently among the firm’s papers has unearthed the original design, and it is perfectly clear what it was to be: not, we fear, very beautiful. It was to be so impossibly, so barbarically, huge, so like some ancient ‘treasure’ dug up from an age of nomadic wandering, that it was more likely to have provoked raw amazement than raptures of delight. It consisted of three chains of diamonds from which were suspended diamond medallions, the third and longest chain having several strands and ending in four diamond tassels.

The jewellers originally intended it for the Comtesse du Barry, or rather, they hoped that Louis XV would be persuaded to pay for it. But Louis died suddenly of smallpox, alone and forsaken, Du Barry went into exile at Louveciennes, and the great sic transit required Boehmer and Bassenge to look for a new gloria mundi. They offered it to the Spanish Court, but the people there took fright at the asking price.

It soon occurred to them that there was one person in the world whom fate had clearly singled out to own such a treasure—the young Queen of France, Marie-Antoinette. History tells us that the kings and queens of old were fond of jewellery, but among Marie-Antoinette’s circle this fondness amounted to an ungovernable passion. She did of course have other jewellery, as did other queens. From her home in Vienna, Marie-Antoinette had brought a vast quantity of diamonds in her trousseau; then her husband’s grandfather Louis XV showered her with diamonds and the pearls left by his late daughter-in-law, Marie-Josèphe of Saxony. Among these was a necklace of pearls the smallest of which was the size of an aveline (a ‘tubular hazelnut’, according to Sauvageot’s dictionary: perhaps some American variety?). It had once been worn by Anne of Austria, and bequeathed by her to the Queens of France. Since Anne of Austria was the wife of Louis XIII, this could well be the very jewel that graced another famous neck, familiar to us all from Alexander Dumas the Elder’s The Three Musketeers.

The Queen could hardly accuse either Louis XV or Louis XVI of meanness, but the jewellery she had received so far was still not enough to assuage her passion. Because her mother, the wise and saintly Maria Theresa, was forever scolding her in her letters and telling her that her finest jewel was her youth, she kept her purchases secret. But Boehmer knew her inclinations well. In 1774 he had sold her a pair of earrings containing six diamonds and costing 360,000 francs—also created originally with the Comtesse du Barry in mind. Boehmer had wanted 400,000 francs, but the Queen took out two of his diamonds and replaced them with a pair of her own to reduce the price, and paid off the balance in instalments.

So Boehmer could still hope that the Queen would one day purchase his record-breaking item. But in this he was doomed to disappointment. She showed herself almost willing … it was just that she found the price too high. Even for a queen, 160,000 livres was a considerable sum, especially when things were not going well for her. With France’s most popular war ever in mind, the one fought against Britain over American independence, she declared: “We have more need of a warship than of any such necklace”.

But the jewel remained. And, like an unwanted and badly-stored body of radioactive material, it continued to emanate a silent, unseen, and fatal influence.

Here we must pause for a minute, take a breath, and give a little thought to the wider economic background to Boehmer’s enterprise. Because—this is important—creating jewellery in this way really was an enterprise. He was working not to complete a commission, as his predecessors, the great jewellers and goldsmiths of earlier centuries, had done, and as they say Benvenuto Cellini had worked, but for ‘the market’. Boehmer created this piece not to supply an existing demand but to create one. Moreover, the market he was operating in was extremely high-risk in character, since the number of buyers he could count on were extremely few.

The other surprising element in this is his notion of achieving some sort of record—a dream of greatness. Greatness had for many centuries been the prerogative of the two branches of the First Estate, the Church and the Nobility. A knight might think of astounding the world by some unparalleled act of courage; a holy man might hope to rouse the sleeping conscience of his fellow men by some unprecedented and horrifying form of self-denial. In more recent centuries, a thinker or scholar might have aspired to some work that would dwarf all previous efforts in his field. But the bourgeois, the merchant, the mere manufacturer? Even if he did amass a fortune, he would never have done so with the intention of achieving some sort of record, since there would always be those who had even more than he did. But nor was Boehmer simply trying to create a masterpiece, like his predecessors working in the ancient guilds. He wanted to set a new standard not in terms of his craft but as a entrepreneur—to create an item of jewellery not more beautiful but simply more expensive than any other. In his own way, he was a pioneer. And he suffered the pioneer’s usual fate.

We know of course that capitalism existed long before Boehmer, but his behaviour was an early example of the peculiar Anglo-American version of it that came to the fore in the second half of the nineteenth century. In his day, it must have been rare indeed.

This also makes him an excellent illustration of the idea that the Ancien Régime, the age of Louis XV and XVI, is not divided by some vast chasm from what came after the Revolution. Tocqueville, the great political thinker of the last century, tells us that, “In 1789 the French made the most thoroughgoing attempt of any people to ensure that their history would be divided into two distinct parts, with a deep gulf dividing what had been from what was to be.” But their more critical and objective successors could no longer take that claim at face value. Tocqueville saw, and for fifty years scholars have been very largely in agreement with him, that the Revolution did not create something new out of nothing. Rather, it was the sudden, almost miraculous ripening of everything that had been sprouting and budding for quite some time, and which would perhaps have come to fruition, only more slowly, had the Revolution never happened.

Which is what makes Boehmer’s enterprise so remarkable. It shows that the ur-capitalist mentality, with its drive for growth at any price, and its quest for unprecedented wealth, was already in place by the eighteenth century, creating upheaval and overturning whole worlds just as much then as it did later. It was not, as opponents of the Revolution insist, simply the result of institutions brought into being by that event.

There are other implications too. It is unlikely to have occurred to a jeweller to create a product of absolutely unprecedented size in a climate of national economic gloom. Such an ambition bears witness to the financial self-confidence of an entire generation, or indeed the whole country. It confirms that the Ancien Régime was witness to a strong economic upsurge. Tocqueville was the first to suggest as much, but it was only at the start of the twentieth century that two non-French scholars, the Russian Ardasev and the German Adalbert Wahl, working independently of each other, confirmed his insight using statistically-based scholarly methods.

The boom had already begun under Louis XV, was briefly halted by the Seven Years War, then gathered pace again under Louis XVI. The number of iron mines and furnaces grew. Previously France had bought the iron needed for its manufactures from England and Germany; now it produced its own, in the steelworks of Alsace, Lorraine, Nantes and above all Amboise. There were huge advances in the textile industry, especially in wool-weaving, while Sèvres porcelain, Gobelin tapestries, St Gobain glass, Baccarat crystal and faience ware from Rouen and Nevers supplied the world. The Machine had begun its triumphal progress. Marseilles became one of the world’s leading ports. Following the Peace Treaties of Versailles, a trade agreement was made with Britain in 1786 which proved favourable to France’s agriculture but rather less so to her commerce and manufacturing. Nonetheless, the country remained the second richest in the world after England. (In the aftermath of the Revolution, it was not until 1835 that trade returned to its level of 1787.) Perhaps we might also mention, as another sign of this accelerating heartbeat, that the stock market had grown to such proportions during the reign of Louis XVI that in 1783 Mirabeau felt obliged to deliver his thundering proclamation against it.

When Louis XVI ascended to the throne, symptoms of wealth were evident on every side. They found exactly the sort of expression you would expect from his reign. The towering coiffures worn by the ladies gave symbolic representation to the general feeling: at the coronation of Louis XVI their heads were as heavily laden as the wheat fields in the countryside.

And the deranged economic situation in the kingdom, the credit deficit that sparked off the Revolution? Well, yes. But that financial crisis involved the Royal Treasury, not the country at large, and certainly not the people. It was a matter of the King’s—that is, the State Treasury’s, expenditure exceeding its income. The position could have been helped in one of two ways: either by reducing outgoings or increasing revenues. The private tragedy of the monarchy, it could be said, was that given the situation they were in at the time they could not, for purely internal reasons, hope to achieve either. But the relative affluence or poverty of the country as a whole was not the issue.

The general upswing under Louis XVI can be observed not just in the economic arena but also in foreign politics. After the pointless and in some ways disreputable military campaigns of his two predecessors, France, guided by the gentle King and his outstanding Foreign Minister Vergennes, now pursued a sensible policy of peace. Louis resisted the military adventures into which his restless ally Joseph II (Marie-Antoinette’s brother, whom we know as our own ‘hatted king’) tried repeatedly to draw him. He involved himself in only one war, against England, over American independence. That war was reasonably painless, with minimal loss of French blood, and long periods of fluctuating fortunes during which the English would occupy French colonies and the French would occupy English ones, until at last, in 1781, the combined American and French armies achieved their decisive victory at Yorktown. In 1782 Lafayette, the French hero of the American war, returned home to be crowned with laurel in the Opera House. On 3rd September 1783 the Versailles Peace Treaty was signed (and what a fateful second such treaty was to follow it!). The French were not much pleased by its conciliatory terms, but were nonetheless delighted that they had erased the blot inflicted on their gloire during the Seven Years War.

But it was above all in the world of ideas that this all-embracing upsurge could be felt. In 1780, Tocqueville tells us, the French lost the feeling that their country was in decline, and it is precisely at this moment that we see the emergence of the belief in human perfectibility, the notion that in time both man and the world could become ever better and better—in short, the idea of Progress. The signs were everywhere: flying boats soaring into the skies—Montgolfier with his hot-air balloon and Charles suspended beneath one filled with hydrogen; some, like Pilâtre de Rozier, plunging into La Manche and drowning; others, like Blanchard, flying over it and planting the French flag on the English side. New machines were being invented, new medicines discovered. Under Buffon’s canny eye the immense age of the planet was coming to light. Since the excavations at Pompeii the glories of the ancient world had come to enjoy a new renaissance, and people were starting to have a true understanding both of how it felt to be alive in those days, and of the classical cult of beauty: magnus ab integro saeculorum nascitur ordo—A whole new order is being born out of the fullness of time.

No, in no way could it be said that this was an age of decadence, the morbidly-beautiful autumn of an old and dying regime. Historical periods cannot be likened to decades: each carries the seeds of the next. Everyone knows Talleyrand’s famous observation: “No one who has not lived under the Ancien Régime can know the full sweetness of life.” Familiarity with that sweetness was of course confined to those of privileged birth, and they were rather few in number. Even so, for everyone else the France of Louis XVI can hardly have been hell, though at the height of its raging turmoil they came close enough to it.

At the end of the eighteenth century France was ‘in training’. Spengler uses this sporting term for those nations capable of shaping both their own history and that of the wider world. France was in training, limbering up for the great Rationalist miracle that no one saw coming—the Revolution. The purpose of this history is to explore the secret workings of that process of unconscious preparation.

Chapter Two

The Comtesse

HAVING NOW INTRODUCED OUR SUBJECT, that is, our subject with a capital ‘S’—the fateful Nibelung Treasure—we should now, as in the old films, present the actors centre stage. These portraits, and the histories behind them, will claim a fair amount of space, but that is only natural insofar as our tragedy—or comedy—is one of character, as our school textbooks conceive of the form: if we placed such and such a person in a given situation on stage, each would be bound to behave in such and such a way, their fates following from their characters. By simply stating what sort of people we are dealing with we shall have told you half our story.

Our heroine, or rather, one of our heroines, the Comtesse de la Motte, began her career at a rather humble level. When she first appears on our stage, she is eight years old and a beggar. Prior to that, she had tended geese, but reluctantly.

The Marquise de Boulainvilliers, accompanied by her husband, was on her way by coach to their estate at Passy, which at that time was not a suburb of Paris but a separate little village, some way from the capital, where Parisians took their holidays. The carriage was going very slowly. A little girl, holding an even smaller child in her arms, ran towards the coach and began to beg, in the following remarkable terms:

“In God’s sacred name I implore you, spare a few coppers for two little orphans who carry the royal blood of Valois.”

Something about her appearance, it seems, lent a mysterious emphasis to her words. Despite her husband’s protests, the Marquise halted the chaise. The little girl had already launched into her strange tale. Her Ladyship heard her out, and declared that if what she was saying could be proved, she would give her a home and be a second mother to her.

She duly pursued the matter, making enquiries among the local people, especially the parish priest to whose flock the little mendicants belonged. In the entire story of the necklace, says Stefan Zweig, the strangest thing is that even its least credible details turn out to be rooted in fact. The priest confirmed, with incontrovertible evidence, that the little girl’s story was true. The royal blood of Valois did indeed run in their veins.

They were descended in a direct line on their father’s side from Henri II (the son of François I, The Great) who ruled from 1547 to 1559. Their great-great-grandfather, Henri de Saint-Rémy, was the offspring of Henri’s liaison with Nicole de Savigny; Henri acknowledged his son and declared him legitimate. In terms of blood, they stood perhaps even closer to the throne of St Louis than the ruling Bourbons. Their coat of arms consisted of two bundles of sticks on a field argent, beneath three lilies, the illustrious lilies of Valois. “The little beggar-girl was familiar with the crest, and indeed it was the only thing, in her terrible abandonment, that she did know,” declares Funck-Brentano. “And when she spoke in such astonishing detail about it, or about her ancestor the royal bastard born to Nicole de Savigny, her little body, bowed as it was with oppression, became erect, proud and defiant.”

And with good reason. The blood of Valois in one’s veins—what a fatal inheritance, and what a cursed Nibelung treasure! Perhaps the most fundamental and interesting scholarly debate of our century is whether a person’s character and fate are determined before or after birth: by inheritance or environment; by ‘genes’ or behaviourism; by those mysterious little bodies which are passed on from one’s ancestors to one’s descendants, or by the ‘conditioned reflexes’ acquired in childhood, instinctive modes of behaviour, which repeat themselves in response to certain conditions.

Probably both camps are right, or rather, neither is. Inheritance must play some role in shaping human character, as must habits learnt in childhood, and besides the question of personality is highly complicated, and too complex to explain with reference to either of those factors alone or even as the product of the two working together. So perhaps we should not give excessive credence to the notion that the little beggar girl Jeanne inherited much of her nature from the Valois kings. With so many intermarriages down the generations, a proportion of somewhat less-than-aristocratic blood would also have flowed in her veins. A perfectly sufficient explanation of the way her character was shaped lies, as we have seen, in her childhood and her social situation when she became aware of the fact that she was a descendant of the house of Valois: her ancestry did indeed exercise a decisive influence on her fate, not through the mysterious workings of heredity but simply through her consciousness of it.

Nonetheless we might allow ourselves to play with the idea for a moment. They say miraculous throwbacks do occur …

The house of Valois ruled France from 1328 to 1589, throughout the Hundred Years War, the Renaissance and the centuries of barbarism. It was on their account that Joan of Arc was burnt at Rouen; it was they who forged a unified kingdom from a France hitherto divided into feudal estates; their proud armies fought in the Italy of Leonardo and Michelangelo; and it was they who ordered the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. They included lunatics like Charles VI, bloody tyrants like Louis XI, and fiery-spirited Bohemian grandees like François I. They were a great and appalling family, famous hunters, with history resounding in every step they took. So why not see in this proud Jeanne, with her kittenish ferocity, her wildcat defiance and needle-sharp teeth, a spirit harking back to its forebears? Or again, in the story that is about to unfold (essentially a war between two women) why not see it moreover as two ancestral enemies still at each others’ throats—two families which, as the ‘neighbouring houses’ of Habsburg and Valois, shaped all Europe, and whose mutual hatred was passed on to later generations?

The Saint-Rémy family had lived for generations on their estate at Fontette, near Bar-sur-Aube, in the north-eastern part of France. They lived as becomes the sons of princes when not actually on the throne: they farmed and hunted, did the odd bit of poaching, and from time to time discreetly exercised the royal craft of coining. They certainly had need of the last, but, it seems, did not put it to very much use. Jeanne’s father, Jacques de Saint-Rémy, Baron de Luz and de Valois, was thoroughly impoverished. He no longer lived in the manor—its roof had fallen in and it was visibly crumbling—but in the farmhouse. He mixed with the peasantry, and married his village sweetheart, who became Jeanne’s mother. The woman finally bankrupted him, and when he fell ill she threw him out. He ended his miserable life in the Hôtel Dieu hospital in Paris. She then took up with a soldier; and now the fate of little Jeanne, who had been born in 1756, really took a turn for the worse. She was sent out to beg, and her foster father vented on her all the rage he felt against his own unbearable existence.

It was at this point that, in 1763, the Marquise de Boulainvilliers took little Jeanne into her home, together with her baby sister, who died of smallpox shortly afterwards. Jeanne was raised in a girl’s boarding school up to the age of fourteen, after which her patroness placed her with a Parisian dressmaker.

During the years when rococo was in fashion, such establishments ranked among the most celebrated places in Europe, just as they are in our day, perhaps even more so. One of the most striking features of Paris at the time was the number of dressmakers’ workshops and couturiers. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, to whom we shall frequently refer, compiled a wonderful inventory of the city in 1781, thus inaugurating that delightful genre, which has become popular only in our time, of books about cities. In his study he devotes a lengthy chapter to the seamstresses:

“They sit in their shops, side by side in rows, in full view of the street windows. They sew pompons, little accessories, the elegant insignia that fashion summons into being and then promptly replaces. You are free to stare in at them, and they are equally free to stare back at you.

“Chained to their workbenches, needle in hand, the girls are forever glancing out into the street. No passer-by can avoid their eye. There is an army of men queuing up to bestow their admiring stares, and a fierce struggle is waged for the place nearest the window.

“The girls are thrilled by the looks directed at then, and each imagines that every man is in love with her. The large number of passers-by simply adds to the variety, increases the glamour and inspires further curiosity. This is what makes their professional bondage tolerable, the combined pleasures of seeing and being seen. But one has to arrange things so that the prettiest girl is always seated nearest the window.

“Every morning they set forth in large numbers, with their baskets of pompons, to call on great ladies at their dressing tables. Their task is to adorn the brows of their rivals in beauty; they must keep their secret sexual jealousies to themselves and behave in a professional manner while titivating the good looks of those who treat them with contemptuous indifference. Sometimes the shop girl is so very pretty that the proud brow of her wealthy patroness pales to insignificance beside her. The beau is instantly unfaithful; his eyes are on the watch only for the fresh little mouth and ruddy face in the corner of the mirror … but she of course has neither footmen nor family.

“Quite a few of these girls will make it in one bound into an English carriage. A month ago she was a mere shop girl; now when she arrives with her wares her head is held high, her face a picture of triumph, while her former supervisor and ‘dear, dear colleagues’ turn green with envy.

“There are some establishments where the tone is strict and the girls are all very respectful, but even the proprietress finds this astonishing, and recounts the fact to everyone as if it were some sort of universal miracle. It is as if she has a wager that one day she will be able to say, ‘There is in Paris one fashion house where every girl is a virgin, and it’s all due to my strength of character and vigilance.’”

In a word, we can surmise that Jeanne learnt a great deal more in the shop than she would have at the girls’ boarding school where she resided until the age of fourteen.

She learnt a lot, but she was not happy. She had the sort of nature that is never satisfied. There was a burning, mordant restlessness in her, and she could never settle to anything. Such was her nature she would probably have been dissatisfied whatever her circumstances—but how fiercely that inborn dissatisfaction was exacerbated by consciousness of her royal origins! From time to time the Marquise would take her back so that she could keep an eye on her, but in the great house Jeanne felt reduced to the level of a servant, and her sense of painful humiliation simply grew. She remained duly respectful towards her patroness until her Valois ancestry was formally recognised in 1776 and the King granted her a civil-list pension of 800 livres. Then she summoned her one surviving younger sister, Marie-Anne, and together they entered the convent at Longchamps, where only the daughters of the aristocracy were admitted as pupils.

Jeanne was twenty-one, and her restlessness was steadily increasing. No matter what happened, she could not erase the memory of her childhood: she would always be the Valois heir who had begged in the dust of the highway; the déclassée: an enemy of the entire social order.

“My indomitable pride I was given by nature,” she wrote, “and Mme de Boulainvilliers’s charity simply exacerbated it. Oh God, why was I born of Valois blood? Fatal name, you exposed my soul to savage pride! You are the cause of these tears; it is because of you that I am so unhappy.”

This sort of person always possesses a certain insinuating eloquence: especially when they are parading their sorrows.

She did not remain long in the convent. She felt not the slightest calling to become a nun, and one fine day she and her sister made their escape. The word went round Bar-sur-Aube that two duchesses had come to recover their ancestral lands and had taken rooms at the very cheapest hotel. A Mme Surmont, wife of the Master of the Law Court and the lynchpin of local society, decided it was her duty to take them—two young ladies in distress, no doubt pursued by mysterious enemies—into her home. Since both were clad in the meanest of attire, she immediately lent each of them one of her own dresses, much to the amusement of the young people present, since the good lady was extremely large. By the next day they had been completely retailored to make a perfect fit. The Master’s wife was somewhat taken aback, but she slowly became used to the fact that Jeanne was now mistress of the house. The two girls came for a week and stayed for a year. That year, the lady said later, was the most painful of her entire life.

It was here that Jeanne met Marc-Antoine-Nicolas de la Motte. He was a young nobleman, an officer with the gendarme regiment stationed at nearby Lunéville, where his father, a Knight of the Order of St Louis, had also once served. The local aristocracy in Bar were keen on amateur dramatics, as was the whole world at that time. La Motte was considered a great theatrical talent, and there can be no doubt that Jeanne really was one. They were often in the same play. “They recited and rehearsed together,” comments Funck-Brentano, in his benevolent elderly manner, “to the point where it became urgently necessary to marry.” They were united on 6th June 1780.

The Master’s wife finally took the opportunity to throw Jeanne out, and after a period of wandering the young couple settled in Lunéville. Twins were born, but they died soon after, and it seems that, for reasons of economy, Jeanne returned for a while to the convent. Otherwise the couple lived on credit and from La Motte’s shady dealings. At around this time he began to call himself Comte.

There is nothing particularly to be said about this gentleman, and no need to describe him in detail. He was one of those suave and thoroughly loathsome characters, those shameless and craven pimps that everyone who goes to France has met by the thousand—a type long established in that country, it seems. He hated work, loved women, was extremely ugly, but thought himself so extraordinarily handsome that every so often some woman or other actually believed him.

In September 1781 the young couple learnt that Jeanne’s patroness the Marquise de Boulainvilliers was staying at Saverne Castle as the guest of Cardinal Rohan. The mysterious inner voice that directed all Jeanne’s talents spoke again—they packed up and removed to Saverne.

Jeanne was now twenty-five. Her hair was naturally curled and chestnut brown, her eyes blue and expressive, her mouth equally so, if a little on the large side. Her smile was enchanting. As Beugnot, speaking from experience, put it, it “spoke to the heart”. Her bosom was considered by contemporaries to be rather underdeveloped. Her main attractions, it seems, were her voice and her conversation. “Nature gave her the dangerous gift of eloquence,” said one of the leading actors in the necklace trial, who added: “—eminently suitable for discussing those matters of civil law and ethics of whose existence Mme de la Motte, in all her innocence and eternal naturalness, had not the slightest suspicion.”

Chapter Three

The Grand Seigneur

THE GREAT HISTORIANS OF ANTIQUITY, in particular Livy, would always introduce their account of some major event by detailing the signs and auguries that foretold it. This was partly a religious requirement, since they did after all believe in these things, but it was also, it seems, a device to elevate the tone of the writing. The enlightened modern reader is unlikely to subscribe to any such superstition—we naturally do not ourselves—but everything is after all interconnected, and since the ancients were wise men notwithstanding we might just mention one or two such omens.

Goethe, who spent the most titanic years of his youth in Strasbourg, was there when the fourteen-year-old Marie-Antoinette arrived on her way to Paris. Strasbourg, an island on the Rhine, the then border between France and the Holy Roman Empire, was neutral territory, and here the Dauphine (wife of the Dauphin, the heir to the French throne and the equivalent of the Prince of Wales) was presented to the French. Her marriage had taken place in the Church of the Augustine Friars in Vienna, by proxy, her brother Prince Ferdinand standing in for the absent bridegroom.

On the island they had built a grand pavilion. A few days before the official reception Goethe bribed the custodians and went along with some friends to see the rooms and admire the Gobelin tapestries. Most of the company were delighted, especially with some hangings inspired by Raphael cartoons. But the work dominating the main room filled Goethe with unspeakable horror. It depicted a mythological scene, the story of Jason, Medea and Creusa. “To the left of the throne,” Goethe writes in Dichtung und Wahrheit, “the young bride is seen writhing in the extremity of an agonising death. To the right, Jason stands shuddering, his foot planted on the prostrate bodies of his murdered children, while the Fury (Medea) ascends to the skies in her dragon-drawn carriage …

“‘What on earth,’ I cried out, entirely forgetting there were others present. ‘What utter thoughtlessness is this? How could anyone set this most appalling of all examples of a wedding before the eyes of a young queen, the moment she sets foot in the country? Did none of those French builders, decorators and upholsterers understand that images carry meanings; that they influence our minds and feelings, that they leave profound impressions and arouse ominous presentiments? Not one of them, it seems.’” Goethe’s companions reassured him that no one but he would think of such things.

“The young lady was beautiful, aristocratic, as radiant as she was imposing. I have retained a vivid memory of her face ever since,” he continues, in the courtly manner of his later years. “Everyone had a good view of her in her glass coach, sharing little confidences with her female attendants, as if making a joke about the huge procession streaming ahead of her.” Perhaps even then she gave the impression that she found people amusing.

Goethe goes on to mention that this first ill omen was quickly followed by an even more horrific one. When the Dauphine arrived at Versailles a firework display was arranged in her honour in Paris. Fire broke out, the streets were blocked, and the crowd was prevented from escaping. People were crushed underfoot, leaving thirty-three dead and hundreds more injured.

However he fails to mention the third omen, the strangest of all. The day after she passed through the door of Strasbourg Cathedral, the Bishop appointed his coadjutor, who then celebrated the mass. This was Prince Louis de Rohan, who would later cause her more distress than anyone else in the world.

Even in those aristocratic centuries, the Rohans ranked among the most aristocratic families of France. They enjoyed the status of foreign princes, coming, together with the Ducs de Lorraine, immediately after the royal family. Their proud motto was: Roi ne puis, prince ne desire, Rohan suis—‘I can never be king, I have no desire to be a prince: I am a Rohan.’ One Rohan duchess, Chamfort relates, when asked when she was expecting a family event, replied: “I flatter myself I shall have the honour within a fortnight.” The honour, that is, of bringing a Rohan into the world.

Characteristically, not a single member of this family was ever a statesman or general, or sufficiently distinguished in any other field to justify such overweening pride. In this they were very much as one thinks of the grandees of the Ancien Régime: they “did nothing but be born—and given a choice they would not have taken the trouble to do that”, as Figaro remarks.

The odd thing is that the details of their origin survived at all, against a background of wandering populations and prolific mythmaking. They claimed descent from the rulers of Brittany—their ancestor Guéthénoc, youngest son of the Duc de Bretagne, became the Vicomte de Porhoët in 1021. The family had used the name Rohan ever since 1100. Even so, Brittany remained a small, half-savage domain in the back of beyond until Anna, the last little ‘clog-wearing Duchess’, married Charles VIII of France, taking the entire peninsula with her as dowry. This marks the entry of the Rohans into France.

The Protestant branch of the family, the Rohan-Gies, produced some stubborn and brave men of conscience during the wars of religion, but the line died out in 1540. In the eighteenth century two major branches remained, the Rohan-Guéménées and the Rohan-Soubises. The latter’s best-known son was the Maréchal de Soubise, a courtier who was made a general through the influence of Mme de Pompadour, despite his complete lack of talent. It was he who, together with an Austrian duke, achieved the remarkable feat of leading an army of 60,000 to defeat against 20,000 soldiers of Frederick the Great at Rossbach, the decisive battle of the Seven Years War.

The other branch, Rohan-Guéménée, is noted chiefly for the fact that despite annual revenues of astronomical proportions, its representatives went bankrupt in 1781, in debt to the tune of thirty-three million livres, taking countless lesser folk down with them, simple Breton sailors who had put their money with them in the expectation of life annuities. The Guéménées, finding what was left of their fortune insufficient to maintain their lifestyle, were forced to give up their courtly status and pretensions. Their bankruptcy contributed significantly to the general loss of respect for the aristocracy.

The Strasbourg bishopric was part of the family inheritance, so to speak. Half-a-century before the grand entry of Marie-Antoinette, another Rohan had received a foreign princess at the cathedral door. This was Maria Leszczynska, who became the unhappy wife of Louis XV.

Duc Louis de Rohan was born in 1734. In 1760 he was appointed coadjutor to his uncle the Bishop of Strasbourg, and simultaneously made Bishop of Canopus in Egypt in partibus infidelium—the honorary prelate of a diocese that had been in the hands of pagans for well over a thousand years. The top echelons of the Church had always included persons of the highest social rank, but by the seventeenth century the aristocratic families associated with the French Court had appropriated the sees of bishops and archbishops exclusively for themselves. Not only was Rohan’s uncle a bishop, his cousin Ferdinand de Rohan was Archbishop of Cambrai, and the ducal La Rochefoucauld family alone filled three episcopal sees: Rouen, Beauvais and Saintes. The Court aristocracy, like the princes of the Church, made few adjustments to their personal lives or outward manner of living—one of the reasons why the French Church was so weak in the eighteenth century. The gulf between its upper ranks and the poorly-endowed lower clergy was every bit as great as that between the aristocracy and the nation at large. At a critical moment in the early days of the Revolution representatives of the lower ranks of the clergy aligned themselves with the citizenry, an act that had decisive consequences.

Louis de Rohan was not just a dignitary of the church. Since 1761 he had also been a member of the Académie Française, counting among the ‘Immortals’. Of its thirty-eight members in 1789 (two places were vacant) there were seven nobles and five senior churchmen—an aristocratic age indeed. Earlier, under Louis XIV, France’s bishops and academicians had been almost entirely of bourgeois origin. The final years of the Ancien Régime were by far the most aristocrat-dominated.

What sort of man was this Duc Louis de Rohan? According to his contemporaries he was extremely refined and well-mannered, a witty companion, and a fine speaker—by no means a disgrace to the Academy. He was both chivalrous and genuinely good-hearted, and his followers noted countless touching acts of charity carried out behind the scenes: a true son of the times, a man of feeling, as indeed was his royal master, Louis XVI.

But these facts tell us almost nothing, and the surviving portraits of the man add little more. They show the refined but somewhat expressionless features of the frail, rather spoilt, offspring of elderly parents: the face of a man almost impossible to describe. The sort of man of whom you might say: had he not been born a prince he would be indistinguishable from anyone else. But that judgement would be superficial. Rohan was a true-born prince—his Rohan qualities were as integral to his being as any inherited predisposition to disease of the organs. They determined his character and his fate as surely as tuberculosis or neurasthenia.

If we wish to understand him, our point of departure must be not his personal traits but his social position.

Rohan was a grand seigneur, in the heyday of his type—a time when to be one implied not merely differentness but a way of life based on aristocratic rule, at a time when the whole of Europe, so to speak, existed to sustain the lofty status of his class.

Western culture was essentially aristocratic. From its birth at the end of the eleventh century down to the French Revolution its aim had been for a small number of the chosen to attain the dream of the beautiful life; a life as pure, ordered and wonderful as a work of art from the hand of a genius, and no less independent of the mundane world and the vicissitudes of fortune. Such a culture finds its most complete expression in the royal court, the idealised life-that-transcends-life. This ideal was served by chivalry, ceremony and protocol, and its underlying aims by art and poetry.

But this is all rather general. The precise nature of Rohan’s status and condition as a grand seigneur can be better demonstrated by some biographical and statistical facts.

There was a general feeling in Marie-Antoinette’s France that he would not long remain a mere coadjutor. His two extremely influential aunts, Mme de Guéménée and Mme de Marsan, Royal Governess to the young princes (the term ‘governess’ not to be understood in the modern sense), supported by Mme du Barry and the government minister the Duc d’Aiguillon (who owed his position to her favour), persuaded the ageing Louis XV to send him as ambassador to Vienna. Since France and Austria were at the time allies, loyal if mutually suspicious, the roles of French envoy to Vienna and of his Austrian counterpart to Versailles were the most important diplomatic postings in Europe. The Austrian representative, Comte Mercy-Argenteau, was among the most eminent people in Paris. His influence was that of a minister. He was counsellor to the young Marie-Antoinette and his mistress was the most celebrated beauty of the opera. And what he was in Paris, Rohan aspired to become in Vienna, a city second only to the French capital in its savoir-vivre, its sense of life as a work of art.

Now for some more personal information. Rohan took with him to Vienna (omitting, for the sake of brevity, a truly astonishing quantity of material goods): fifty stallions, and accompanying personnel; six cadets from the most aristocratic families of Alsace and Brittany; their instructor in the handling of weapons, and their Latin tutor; two noblemen in his own service, ‘pour les honneurs de la chambre’, one of them a knight of Malta, the other a captain of horse; six valets, a maître d’hôtel, a head of household, two liveried attendants, four couriers (their costumes costing 4,000 livres each), to ‘glitter in the sunlight, as in a fairy tale’; twelve footmen; two ‘Swiss guards’, the leaner of them to command the inner door, the other, who was extremely plump, to man the gate; six musicians, to play during meals; a steward, a treasurer, four embassy officials of high social rank; the Jesuit Abbé Georgel as secretary to the legation, and four under-secretaries to assist him. All these persons were fitted out in fairy-tale splendour, and of course maintained and salaried by Rohan himself.

They arrived in Vienna, and soon filled the imperial city with awe. Everyone talked about them, the women in tones of rapture. It was hardly surprising. Rohan arranged vast hunts. His masked balls were spectacular. At Baden he lavishly entertained almost the whole of Lower Austria. Between a hundred and a hundred-and-fifty nobles attended his banquets, which, dispensing with the usual diplomatic practice, were served not at a single long table but at several smaller ones so that everyone might feel at ease. Dinner was followed by cards, a musical concert, dancing and flirting in the miraculous rooms of the Lichtenstein Palace and its garden, which was of course illuminated—just as it would have been at Versailles.

That was one side of the coin. The other was that Rohan had no money—neither he, nor either of the two branches of his family. He is reported to have had royal permission to raise one million livres against his estates, but that did not last very long. He was unable to pay his people regularly, and they in response abused their extra-territorial diplomatic immunity and devoted their time, very successfully, to smuggling. They did this with such typically French openness that Maria Theresa, though reluctant to offend the Court at Versailles, withdrew the privilege of immunity from the entire legation. That at any rate is the story according to Mme Campan, Marie-Antoinette’s Première Femme de Chambre (hardly ‘chambermaid’: she was as much a chambermaid as the Duchesse de Marsan was a governess). Her famous Memoirs, written around 1820, are our single most important source, as they are for everyone who writes about Marie-Antoinette and her times. However Mme Campan was writing specifically to rescue the memory of her mistress, and her portrait of Rohan is accordingly painted in the darkest of hues.

The crucial fact that Rohan had no money remains indisputable, as will be made clear in the story of the necklace. But how could he possibly not have money? His income from the bishopric at Strasbourg and his various abbotships alone brought him 60,000 livres per annum, on paper: in reality, more like 400,000 livres. The value of the livre at that time Funck-Brentano puts at about ten francs; that is, pre-war francs, worth a third of a Hungarian pengő in peacetime.

While we are considering Rohan as a typical representative of his social class, it might be interesting to add a few further details about his income, to compare him with others of his rank. They are taken from Funck-Brentano’s L’ancien régime—

“M de Sartine, Chief of Police, was given 200,000 livres (that is two million francs) to pay off a portion of his debts. The Keeper of the Seal Lamoignon received a small gift of 200,000 livres—modest indeed, when his successor Miromesnil accepted 600,000 livres (six million francs) towards ‘furnishing his house’. The Duc d’Aiguillon was awarded 500,000 (five million francs) in compensation when he left the ministry in 1774. The widow of the Maréchal de Muy, the Minister for War, had an annual pension of 30,000 livres, and when the Comte de St Germain gave up his position of Secretary of State for War he took an annual pension of 40,000 livres and 155,000 in compensation. (Multiply all these last figures by ten!)

“Marie-Antoinette once gave the Duc de Polignac 1,200,000 livres, and the Duc de Salm 500,000. Calonne, during his years in charge of the Treasury, paid out fifty-six million livres to the older of the King’s two brothers, the Duc de Provence, and twenty-five million to the younger, the Comte d’Artois. C’est à hurler!” (‘It makes one want to cry aloud!’—not my words, but those of the elderly Funck-Brentano, that most conservative-minded of men.) At any one time the Duc de Condé had twelve million livres to hand, and an annual income of 600,000 (six million francs).

These facts also appear in Taine’s L’Ancien Régime, unsurprisingly perhaps, since he appears to be Funck-Brentano’s source. Both writers provide a mass of other similar examples.

You have to cry out, or rather, the facts themselves cry out to Heaven. What was this? What strange madness had seized the hearts of the French kings, that they should hand out such legendary sums (very rarely asking for anything in return) simply as a reward for the possession of noble ancestry? It was of course not madness, but an inescapable consequence of the historical situation. In the Middle Ages France, like other European states, had been controlled by the feudal aristocracy. For some centuries its kings had been struggling to centralise power, that is to say, to prise it from the grip of the great barons and arrogate it to themselves. As is well known, this goal was finally achieved by Louis XIV when, in no sense boastfully, he remarked, ‘L’état c’est moi’. The rural feudal nobility had been transformed into one based at the Court. The barons could no longer reside on their estates but were required to remain near the King, who kept an eagle eye on any absences and punished them by the withdrawal of his favour. From this point on the people were plundered not by the barons but by the King’s intendants and the fermiers généraux, and the money now went to the royal coffers. That was why it had become necessary to bail out the nobility: with annuities, gifts, offices at Court commanding unheard-of salaries, and positions in the church and army. Later, perhaps, the need for all this fell away: all autonomous power had been leached out of the barons and they were no longer capable of mounting any sort of rebellion against the King (but nor could they provide him with support, one major reason why the Revolution triumphed so swiftly). By then, simple necessity dictated that they remain loyal to him. But by the time of Louis XVI, this once rational and necessary system of ‘reimbursement’ had come to seem a straightforward abuse, a pointless and unjustified luxury that quite rightly drew censure from the workers and provoked revolutionary anger in the people.