Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  A moment later the messenger was reintroduced to receive the casket from the hands of Madame de la Motte. Within five minutes the Cardinal was in his carriage again, driving happily back to Paris with his dreams of a queen’s gratitude and confidence.

  Two days later, meeting Bohmer at Versailles, the Cardinal suggested to him that he should offer his thanks to the Queen for having purchased the necklace.

  Bohmer sought an opportunity for this in vain. None offered. It was also in vain that he waited to hear that the Queen had worn the necklace. But he does not appear to have been anxious on that score. Moreover, the Queen’s abstention was credibly explained by Madame de la Motte to Laporte with the statement that Her Majesty did not wish to wear the necklace until it was paid for.

  With the same explanation she answered the Cardinal’s inquiries in the following July, when he returned from a three months’ sojourn in Strasbourg.

  And she took the opportunity to represent to him that one of the reasons why the Queen could not yet consider the necklace quite her own was that she found the price too high.

  “Indeed, she may be constrained to return it, after all, unless the Bohmers are prepared to be reasonable.”

  If His Eminence was a little dismayed by this, at least any nascent uneasiness was quieted. He consented to see the jewellers in the matter, and on July 10th — three weeks before the first instalment was due — he presented himself at the Grand Balcon to convey the Queen’s wishes to the Bohmers.

  Bohmer scarcely troubled to prevent disgust from showing on his keen, swarthy countenance. Had not his client been a queen and her intermediary a cardinal, he would, no doubt, have afforded it full expression.

  “The price agreed upon was already greatly below the value of the necklace,” he grumbled. “I should never have accepted it but for the difficulties under which we have been placed by the purchase of the stones — the money we owe and the interest we are forced to pay. A further reduction is impossible.”

  The handsome Cardinal was suave, courtly, regretful, but firm. Since that was the case, there would be no alternative but to return the necklace.

  Bohmer took fright. The annulment of the sale would bring him face to face with ruin. Reluctantly, feeling that he was being imposed upon, he reduced the price by two hundred thousand livres, and even consented to write the Queen the following letter, whose epistolary grace suggests the Cardinal’s dictation:

  MADAME, — We are happy to hazard the thought that our submission with zeal and respect to the last arrangement proposed constitutes a proof of our devotion and obedience to the orders of Your Majesty. And we have genuine satisfaction in thinking that the most beautiful set of diamonds in existence will serve to adorn the greatest and best of queens.

  Now it happened that Bohmer was about to deliver personally to the Queen some jewels with which the King was presenting her on the occasion of the baptism of his nephew. He availed himself of that opportunity, two days later, personally to hand his letter to Her Majesty. But chance brought the Comptroller-General into the room before she had opened it, and as a result the jeweller departed while the letter was still unread.

  Afterwards, in the presence of Madame de Campan, who relates the matter in her memoirs, the Queen opened the note, pored over it a while, and then, perhaps with vivid memories of Bohmer’s threat of suicide:

  “Listen to what that madman Bohmer writes to me,” she said, and read the lines aloud. “You guessed the riddles in the ‘Mercure’ this morning. I wonder could you guess me this one.”

  And, with a half-contemptuous shrug, she held the sheet in the flame of one of the tapers that stood alight on the table for the purpose of sealing letters.

  “That man exists for my torment,” she continued. “He has always some mad notion in his head, and must always be visiting it upon me. When next you see him, pray convince him how little I care for diamonds.”

  And there the matter was dismissed.

  Days passed, and then a week before the instalment of 350,000 livres was due, the Cardinal received a visit from Madame de la Motte on the Queen’s behalf.

  “Her Majesty,” madame announced, “seems embarrassed about the instalment. She does not wish to trouble you by writing about it. But I have thought of a way by which you could render yourself agreeable to her and, at the same time, set her mind at rest. Could you not raise a loan for the amount?”

  Had not the Cardinal himself dictated to Bohmer a letter which Bohmer himself had delivered to the Queen, he must inevitably have suspected by now that all was not as it should be. But, satisfied as he was by that circumstance, he addressed himself to the matter which Madame de la Motte proposed. But, although Rohan was extraordinarily wealthy, he had ever been correspondingly lavish.

  Moreover, to complicate matters, there had been the bankruptcy of his nephew, the Prince de Guimenee, whose debts had amounted to some three million livres. Characteristically, and for the sake of the family honour, Rohan had taken the whole of this burden upon his own shoulders. Hence his resources were in a crippled condition, and it was beyond his power to advance so considerable a sum at such short notice. Nor did he succeed in obtaining a loan within the little time at his disposal.

  His anxieties on this score were increased by a letter from the Queen which Madame de la Motte brought him on July 30th, in which Her Majesty wrote that the first instalment could not be paid until October 1st; but that on that date a payment of seven hundred thousand livres — half of the revised price — would unfailingly be made. Together with this letter, Madame de la Motte handed him thirty thousand livres, interest on the instalment due, with which to pacify the jewellers.

  But the jewellers were not so easily to be pacified. Bohmer, at the end of his patience, definitely refused to grant the postponement or to receive the thirty thousand livres other than as on account of the instalment due.

  The Cardinal departed in vexation. Something must be done at once, or his secret relations with the Queen would be disclosed, thus precipitating a catastrophe and a scandal. He summoned Madame de la Motte, flung her into a panic with his news and sent her away to see what she could do. What she actually did would have surprised him. Realizing that a crisis had been reached calling for bold measures, she sent for Bassenge, the milder of the two partners. He came to the Rue Neuve Saint-Gilles, protesting that he was being abused.

  “Abused?” quoth she, taking him up on the word. “Abused, do you say?” She laughed sharply. “Say duped, my friend; for that is what has happened to you. You are the victim of a swindle.”

  Bassenge turned white; his prominent eyes bulged in his rather pasty face.

  “What are you saying, madame?” His voice was husky.

  “The Queen’s signature on the note in the Cardinal’s possession is a forgery.”

  “A forgery! The Queen’s signature? Oh, mon Dieu!” He stared at her, and his knees began to tremble. “How do you know, madame?”

  “I have seen it,” she answered.

  “But — but—”

  His nerveless limbs succumbing under him, he sank without ceremony to a chair that was opportunely near him. With the same lack of ceremony, mechanically, in a dazed manner, he mopped the sweat that stood in beads on his brow, then raised his wig and mopped his head.

  “There is no need to waste emotion,” said she composedly. “The Cardinal de Rohan is very rich. You must look to him. He will pay you.”

  “Will he?”

  Hope and doubt were blended in the question.

  “What else?” she asked. “Can you conceive that he will permit such a scandal to burst about his name and the name of the Queen?”

  Bassenge saw light. The rights and wrongs of the case, and who might be the guilty parties, were matters of very secondary importance. What mattered was that the firm should recover the 1,600,000 livres for which the necklace had been sold; and Bassenge was quick to attach full value to the words of Madame de la Motte.

  Unfortunately for every
body concerned, including the jewellers themselves, Bohmer’s mind was less supple. Panic-stricken by Bassenge’s report, he was all for the direct method. There was no persuading him to proceed cautiously, and to begin by visiting the Cardinal. He tore away to Versailles at once, intent upon seeing the Queen. But the Queen, as we know, had had enough of Bohmer. He had to content himself with pouring his mixture of intercessions and demands into the ears of Madame de Campan.

  “You have been swindled, Bohmer,” said the Queen’s lady promptly. “Her Majesty never received the necklace.”

  Bohmer would not be convinced. Disbelieving, and goaded to fury, he returned to Bassenge.

  Bassenge, however, though perturbed, retained his calm. The Cardinal, he insisted, was their security, and it was impossible to doubt that the Cardinal would fulfil his obligations at all costs, rather than be overwhelmed by a scandal.

  And this, no doubt, is what would have happened but for that hasty visit of Bohmer’s to Versailles. It ruined everything. As a result of it, Bohmer was summoned to wait instantly upon the Queen in the mater of some paste buckles.

  The Queen received the jeweller in private, and her greeting proved that the paste buckles were a mere pretext. She demanded to know the meaning of his words to Madame de Campan.

  Bohmer could not rid himself of the notion that he was being trifled with. Had he not written and himself delivered to the Queen a letter in which he thanked her for purchasing the necklace, and had not that letter remained unanswered — a silent admission that the necklace was in her hands? In his exasperation he became insolent.

  “The meaning, madame? The meaning is that I require payment for my necklace, that the patience of my creditors is exhausted, and that unless you order the money to be paid, I am a ruined man!”

  Marie Antoinette considered him in cold, imperious anger.

  “Are you daring to suggest that your necklace is in my possession?”

  Bohmer was white to the lips, his hands worked nervously.

  “Does Your Majesty deny it?”

  “You are insolent!” she exclaimed. “You will be good enough to answer questions, not to ask them. Answer me, then. Do you suggest that I have your necklace?”

  But a desperate man is not easily intimidated.

  “No, madame; I affirm it! It was the Countess of Valois who—”

  “Who is the Countess of Valois?”

  That sudden question, sharply uttered, was a sword of doubt through the heart of Bohmer’s confidence. He stared wide-eyed a moment at the indignant lady before him, then collected himself, and made as plain a tale as he could of the circumstances under which he had parted with the necklace Madame de la Motte’s intervention, the mediation of the Cardinal de Rohan with Her Majesty’s signed approval of the terms, and the delivery of the necklace to His Eminence for transmission to the Queen.

  Marie Antoinette listened in increasing horror and anger. A flush crept into her pale cheeks.

  “You will prepare and send me a written statement of what you have just told me,” she said. “You have leave to go.”

  That interview took place on August 9th. The 15th was the Feast of the Assumption, and also the name-day of the Queen, therefore a gala day at Court, bringing a concourse of nobility to Versailles. Mass was to be celebrated in the royal chapel at ten o’clock, and the celebrant, as by custom established for the occasion, was the Grand Almoner of France, the Cardinal de Rohan.

  But at ten o’clock a meeting was being held in the King’s cabinet, composed of the King and Queen, the Baron de Breteuil, and the Keeper of the Seals, Miromesnil. They were met, as they believed, to decide upon a course of action in the matter of a diamond necklace. In reality, these puppets in the hands of destiny were helping to decide the fate of the French monarchy.

  The King, fat, heavy, and phlegmatic, sat in a gilded chair by an ormolu-encrusted writing-table. His bovine eyes were troubled. Two wrinkles of vexation puckered the flesh above his great nose. Beside, and slightly behind him, stood the Queen, white and imperious, whilst facing them stood Monsieur de Breteuil, reading aloud the statement which Bohmer had drawn up.

  When he had done, there was a moment’s utter silence. Then the King spoke, his voice almost plaintive.

  “What is to be done, then? But what is to be done?”

  It was the Queen who answered him, harshly and angrily.

  “When the Roman purple and a princely title are but masks to cover a swindler, there is only one thing to be done. This swindler must be exposed and punished.”

  “But,” the King faltered, “we have not heard the Cardinal.”

  “Can you think that Bohmer, that any man, would dare to lie upon such a matter?”

  “But consider, madame, the Cardinal’s rank and family,” calmly interposed the prudent Miromesnil; “consider the stir, the scandal that must ensue if this matter is made public.”

  But the obedient daughter of Marie Therese, hating Rohan at her mother’s bidding and for her mother’s sake, was impatient of any such wise considerations.

  “What shall the scandal signify to us?” she demanded. The King looked at Breteuil.

  “And you, Baron? What is your view?”

  Breteuil, Rohan’s mortal enemy, raised his shoulders and flipped the document.

  “In the face of this, Sire, it seems to me that the only course is to arrest the Cardinal.”

  “You believe, then—” began the King, and checked, leaving the sentence unfinished.

  But Breteuil had understood.

  “I know that the Cardinal must be pressed for money,” he said. “Ever prodigal in his expenditure, he is further saddled with the debts of the Prince de Guimenee.”

  “And you can believe,” the King cried, “that a Prince of the House of Rohan, however pressed for money, could — Oh, it is unimaginable!”

  “Yet has he not stolen my name?” the Queen cut in. “Is he not proven a common, stupid forger?”

  “We have not heard him,” the King reminded her gently.

  “And His Eminence might be able to explain,” ventured Miromesnil. “It were certainly prudent to give him the opportunity.”

  Slowly the King nodded his great, powdered head. “Go and find him. Bring him at once!” he bade Breteuil; and Breteuil bowed and departed.

  Very soon he returned, and he held the door whilst the handsome Cardinal, little dreaming what lay before him, serene and calm, a commanding figure in his cassock of scarlet watered silk, rustled forward into the royal presence, and so came face to face with the Queen for the first time since that romantic night a year ago in the Grove of Venus.

  Abruptly the King launched his thunderbolt.

  “Cousin,” he asked, “what purchase is this of a diamond necklace that you are said to have made in the Queen’s name?”

  King and Cardinal looked into each other’s eyes, the King’s narrowing, the Cardinal’s dilating, the King leaning forward in his chair, elbows on the table, the Cardinal standing tense and suddenly rigid.

  Slowly the colour ebbed from Rohan’s face, leaving it deathly pale. His eyes sought the Queen, and found her contemptuous glance, her curling lip. Then at last his handsome head sank a little forward.

  “Sire,” he said unsteadily, “I see that I have been duped. But I have duped nobody.”

  “You have no reason to be troubled, then. You need but to explain.”

  Explain! That was precisely what he could not do. Besides, what was the nature of the explanation demanded of him? Whilst he stood stricken there, it was the Queen who solved this question.

  “If, indeed, you have been duped,” she said scornfully, her colour high, her eyes like points of steel, “you have been self-duped. But even then it is beyond belief that self-deception could have urged you to the lengths of passing yourself off as my intermediary — you, who should know yourself to be the last man in France I should employ, you to whom I have not spoken once in eight years.” Tears of anger glistened in her eyes; her voice sh
rilled up. “And yet, since you have not denied it, since you put forward this pitiful plea that you have been duped, we must believe the unbelievable.”

  Thus at a blow she shattered the fond hopes he had been cherishing ever since the night of gems — of gems, forsooth! — in the Grove of Venus; thus she laid his ambition in ruins about him, and left the man himself half stunned.

  Observing his disorder, the ponderous but kindly monarch rose.

  “Come, my cousin,” he said more gently, “collect yourself. Sit down here and write what you may have to say in answer.”

  And with that he passed into the library beyond, accompanied by the Queen and the two Ministers.

  Alone, Rohan staggered forward and sank nervelessly into the chair. He took up a pen, pondered a moment, and began to write. But he did not yet see clear. He could not yet grasp the extent to which he had been deceived, could not yet believe that those treasured notes from Marie Antoinette were forgeries, that it was not the Queen who had met him in the Grove of Venus and given him the rose whose faded petals kept those letters company in a portfolio of red morocco. But at least it was clear to him that, for the sake of honour — the Queen’s honour — he must assume it so; and in that assumption he now penned his statement.

  When it was completed, himself he bore it to the King in the library.

  Louis read it with frowning brows; then passed it to the Queen.

  “Have you the necklace now?” he asked Rohan.

  “Sir, I left it in the hands of this woman Valois.”

  “Where is this woman?”

  “I do not know, Sire.”

  “And the letter of authority bearing the Queen’s signature, which the jewellers say you presented to them — where is that?”

  “I have it, Sire. I will place it before you. It is only now that I realize that it is a forgery.”

  “Only now!” exclaimed the Queen in scorn.

  “Her Majesty’s name has been compromised,” said the King sternly. “It must be cleared. As King and as husband my duty is clear. Your Eminence must submit to arrest.”

  Rohan fell back a step in stupefaction. For disgrace and dismissal he was prepared, but not for this.