by Juliet Grey
“I shall endeavor to look ignorant, madame,” said Rétaux, stooping his shoulders and affecting a vacant expression as he tried to slip a hand beneath her stays.
“Can you keep it up all night?” Jeanne asked him. Acknowledging the double entendre, the conspirators shared a laugh. “Have you finished the letters?”
“The ink is drying on the last of them,” he said, toying with her breast. “But we will need to have more sheets made up—which means I will need money; the gold embossing is dear.”
Jeanne kissed Rétaux full on the mouth. “I shall tap the keg again tonight,” she assured him. “Just make sure the correspondence looks authentic.”
The comte and comtesse and their illustrious guest supped on filet of sole and, having plied the cardinal with a postprandial goblet of fine brandy, Jeanne confided to the Grand Almoner that the queen had been willing to entertain the prospect of forgiving him, but that he would have to prove himself trustworthy. To that end, she showed him a sheaf of letters, all in Her Majesty’s hand, on the queen’s own notepaper rimmed in gold and embossed with the fleur-de-lis of France. “You will see, here, her latest note to me in which she asks me to request on her behalf that you aid a friend of hers who is in deep financial distress.” She handed the letter to the cardinal, and true enough, Marie Antoinette wished him to deliver sixty thousand livres to the comtesse de Lamotte-Valois, who would discreetly distribute it to Her Majesty’s unfortunate friend.
I cannot be seen to be involved in this endeavor, as I have already exhausted my allowance from the king. He can never know of this gift. And therefore, ma très chère comtesse, for the love we bear one another, I entrust you to ask the Grand Almoner, the prince de Rohan, to act as my banker and my emissary. If he can do this for me and keep his counsel when he next crosses paths with my husband, know that he shall have my gratitude.
It was signed by the queen herself. Or appeared to be. Neither the cardinal nor Rétaux de Villette had ever seen her signature.
Noticing the prince’s widened eyes, Jeanne took the ruse a step further. A woman who lives by her wits and her wiles learns that people will see what they wish to. “Her Majesty has assured me that once she is informed of your assistance in this most delicate matter, she will acknowledge it. Station yourself in the Oeil de Boeuf at the hour when she passes through the Hall of Mirrors with her entourage on her way to High Mass. The queen has instructed me to tell you that she will be looking for you. If you are there, she will nod to you as a sign of her approbation and approval.”
Her scheme worked like the movements of a Swiss clock, so well, in truth, that several weeks later the comtesse de Lamotte-Valois touched the cardinal for an additional fifty thousand livres on the same pretext. By then she had fully convinced the cleric of her intimacy with the queen, staging more than one opportunity for him to witness her departure from Her Majesty’s apartments, often escorted by a mysterious man—none other than the clever Rétaux de Villette in disguise. The prince de Rohan had no idea that Marie Antoinette was at le Petit Trianon at the time. And if he began to wonder how the comtesse had acquired her new wardrobe, a complement of jewels, a handsome equipage, and a panoply of sumptuous furnishings, she would reply with the sincerest countenance that she owed her recent acquisitions to the generosity of Sa Très Puissante Majesté.
To our sorrow, the dauphin was not developing into a strong child. By now he should have been a plump and sturdy-legged toddler, but Louis Joseph was small and frail, and as the years progressed it was clear that his spine was curved. The king and I nurtured constant fears for the boy’s health, but I took a measure of comfort in the knowledge that my sister Marianne, the abbess, suffered from a similar deformity; several years older than I, she still enjoyed good health. And because I was born with one shoulder higher than the other, every time I looked at my beautiful curly-haired dauphin I despaired of having passed him my bad blood.
So on June 7, when I sent Louis an urgent summons to curtail his hunting party and return to Versailles immediately, he feared the worst had befallen our heir. Relief was palpably etched in his broad face when he arrived at the palace, breathless and perspiring, to greet his sovereign brother, King Gustavus III of Sweden, who had arrived with his entourage during his Grand Tour, traveling incognito as the Count de Haga. Louis had so little time to change into his formal clothes that his flustered valet dressed him in one shoe with a red heel and a gold buckle and the other with a black heel and silver buckle.
I was overjoyed to see Axel again, although our reunion took place in the presence of dozens of courtiers. He had brought me a gift—a magnificent Swedish elkhound with blue eyes and a thick gray and white coat. The dog, whom I named Odin, after the king of the Norse gods, was not a surprise; the count and I had corresponded about it during his travels. But Gustavus had been so demanding and so jealous of Axel’s time that he had to feign illness just so he would have the time to write me a letter.
“I encountered some difficulty with the breeder,” Axel confided when we were able to steal a private moment. “I informed him that the dog was for a woman named Joséphine, but when it took such a long time to acquire him, I was compelled to state that in truth, he was a gift for the Queen of France.” I knew, however, that Joséphine was Axel’s secret name for me, and that every time he wrote, he would chronicle a letter to “Joséphine” in his journal.
Odin, a large hunting hound—quite the contrast to my bevy of lap dogs—would now assume pride of place in my affections, as my precious pug Mops, the companion of my girlhood, having grown blind and incontinent, had gone to his final reward a few years earlier.
On the twenty-first of June we fêted our foreign guests with a supper party at le Petit Trianon. First I treated them to a command performance of Piccini’s opera Le Dormeur Éveillé in my intimate little theater, after which the meal was served, course by course, in the park’s romantic pavilions, affording our guests the opportunity to fully admire the grounds. Everyone had been asked to wear only white, creating a spectral fantasy as we roamed the estate, each of us resembling a fallen star. My gardens had been transformed into a wonderland; fairy lights were suspended from the trees; torches and pots of colored fire illuminated the grottoes and the lake. Garlanded wherries ferried our invitees across the shimmering water to the colonnaded Temple d’Amour, where they could indulge themselves in strawberries and champagne.
“We are in France only until the twentieth of July,” Axel told me. He was wearing the scent I had commissioned for him. “But I promise to see you as often as I may.” His eyes glittered in the torchlight. “Even to look at you; to hear your melodic voice as you accompany yourself on the clavichord or harp; to know that you are singing Dido for me”—he touched his hand to his breast—“brings me unalloyed joy.” He nodded his head in the direction of his sovereign. “But Gustavus is overfond of diversions, and, like a doting nursemaid, it is my duty to see that he stays out of trouble.”
I touched my fan to my lips. “Devoted and always so correct; no one could wish for a more stalwart or trustworthy companion than you, Count von Fersen. I can’t say I do not envy the King of Sweden.”
He took my hand and bowed, touching his mouth to my fingers. Raising his eyes to meet mine, he murmured, “I will come to you as often as I can.”
Throughout the month of July, except for my evening walks on the parterres in the sultry summer air, where I was always accompanied by my ladies, I contrived to be found alone as much as possible. In Axel’s presence I was dancing on the edge of a precipice, with the music growing faster the closer my body was to his. And yet I could not step back, although every day I asked myself why it was so impossible. Was it pure desire that drew me to Count von Fersen? Was Louis’s clumsiness in the boudoir and his indifference to physical passion to blame? Did Axel’s noble mien and loyal character transform me into a disloyal wife?
JULY
Rétaux de Villette spent the first days of July scouring the shadowed promenades of the Palais Royal
for a certain trollop who, according to Jeanne, bore a striking resemblance to the queen. Mademoiselle Nicole Leguay, in her early twenties, could not believe her good fortune when she was told she would be dining in the home of a real comtesse.
Gawking at the velvet drapery and thick carpets, the bronze and onyx sculptures resting on tabletops of exquisitely veined marble in the town home on the rue Neuve Saint-Gilles, the prostitute had never seen such opulence. She was greeted by the comtesse de Lamotte-Valois herself, dripping with rubies that complemented her gown of rose moiré.
After plying her visitor with brandy, Jeanne brusquely informed her, “I am an intimate of the queen and I have chosen you to render a great service to the kingdom.”
“Moi?” Mademoiselle Leguay’s hand flew to her breast.
“Toi.” The comtesse smiled benevolently. “But first I think you should have an aristocratic title.” She paused for a moment, thinking. “From now on, you will be a baronne. Baronne Nicole d’Oliva.” The newly minted Mademoiselle d’Oliva’s services would be required the following night. “What will be expected of me?” she anxiously asked her new benefactress. “Will this grand seigneur expect me to embrace him? And if so, am I to permit him to do so?”
“Undoubtedly,” Jeanne replied.
“But … what if he should desire still more?”
The comtesse laughed. “I hardly think that probable,” she assured the young woman. “You are merely to come with us to Versailles tomorrow evening, where, at a certain spot, you will encounter a great man; when he approaches you, near enough to be heard when you whisper, you will hand him this note and speak the words I tell you to utter.” She showed Mademoiselle d’Oliva a folded missive, sealed in red wax with a crest bearing two initials, and told her to return the next afternoon, when she would be attired for her grand role.
While the demimondaine was ensconced in a lavish hotel room for the night, courtesy of the comte and comtesse de Lamotte-Valois, the couple entertained the cardinal, summoning him from the Hôtel de Rohan on the right bank of the Seine.
“I have tremendously exciting news for you,” Jeanne told him, removing the crystal stopper from the decanter of brandy and pouring a generous goblet for her illustrious guest. “Your patience and generosity these past several months have finally paid off. The queen herself will meet you tomorrow night below the terraces of Versailles in the bosquet they call the Grove of Venus. A white handkerchief lying at the base of a hedge will mark the place.”
The prince de Rohan was well aware that Marie Antoinette’s nocturnal strolls along the parterres had for years been the stuff of considerable gossip. And when Jeanne informed the cardinal that the queen remained anxious to ensure his discretion, he, too heady with excitement and ambition, did not question why they were to meet outdoors at midnight on a moonless night.
He saw himself as the hero of a grand adventure, he said to the comtesse, and at that moment would have clasped her to his bosom and smothered her with kisses, had not her husband, puffing away at his clay pipe, been present.
Jeanne smiled and sighed prettily, pursing her lips in a petulant moue at the sight of the cardinal’s moist gaze and trembling hands, and pretended to be quite put out that her husband (not to mention Monsieur de Villette), would not quit the room so that she could properly fling herself into the cardinal’s arms in a triumphant embrace. A “grand adventure” was indeed about to be staged, not unlike one that had made quite a sensation that season in Paris, when Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais had penned a romantic comedy that skewered the nobility of France. The king had banned all further performances of Le Mariage de Figaro, but after a public outcry, led by the very aristocrats whose class was being mocked, the production was reinstated.
Being the sort of woman who liked to be seen at first nights, the comtesse de Lamotte-Valois was extremely familiar with the scene in which the Countess Almaviva disguises herself as her maid Suzanne in order to catch her own husband in the act of arranging a moonlit assignation in the palace gardens with the maidservant. But the cardinal, for all his worldliness, was too blinded by his own ambitions and his desperate need to be reconciled to the queen to notice the similarities between the stock comedy of Beaumarchais and the plot that Jeanne had contrived.
The following afternoon, the faux baronne d’Oliva was attired by her trio of benefactors in a filmy white dress with a wide blue sash that mimicked the queen’s infamous gaulles. A flowing cape of white silk completed the ensemble. Nicole’s blond hair, lightly powdered to disguise the fact that it was more ash than strawberry, was dressed in fat sausage curls that cascaded from a teased and frizzled coiffure. The comtesse tied a large straw bonnet under her chin; her face was obscured by a thérèse, a heavy veil of white lace that was attached to the brim.
Just before dusk, Mademoiselle d’Oliva, with the secret letter in the pocket of her cloak and a pink rose clasped in her hands, was bundled into a coach beside the comte de Lamotte-Valois and the mysterious man whom she had first encountered while sipping chocolate and eyeing prospective patrons outside a café adjacent to the Palais Royal. The carriage clattered out of the rue Neuve Saint-Gilles and into the night.
The coach was left outside the gates and the trio entered the palace grounds, skirting the shadows like so many mice along a baseboard. Just below the Great Terrace and the Hundred Steps was a maze constructed of overlapping charmilles, trellises of greenery fanning out every three feet. Less familiar with the gardens than he pretended, Nicolas, guiding Mademoiselle d’Oliva toward the destination appointed for the rendezvous, nearly became lost within the maze of trellises.
“There you are!” he whispered when he spotted another man, who was wearing a voluminous dark cape and a tricorn pulled down over his brow. He was in the company of the comtesse de Lamotte-Valois, who made a discreet fluttering motion with her hand and nodded her head. The prey was in the trap. She approached Mademoiselle d’Oliva and, leading her into a leafy arbor, cautioned her, “Remember, the queen and her maidservant will be watching and listening from behind that hedge. To please her, you will perform this service. You will hand the letter and the rose to the lord who will come to meet you, and as you do so, you will speak only these five words: You know what this means.”
She lifted the veil and kissed the girl’s cheek. “Wait here. He will arrive presently. Bonne chance, ma chère.”
As Nicolas and Rétaux retreated into the darkness, the comtesse de Lamotte-Valois briefly abandoned Mademoiselle d’Oliva and set out through the maze to locate the cloaked and masked cardinal. He was to have waited within the hedges of the Bosquet de la Reine at the spot where she had discreetly dropped the white handkerchief prior to his arrival. She was late for their rendezvous and the anxiety was palpable on his face as he at last recognized her from the voluminous black moiré domino she had promised to wear.
The prince de Rohan clasped her gloved hands in his bare ones. Even through the kidskin she could feel the dampness of his palms. His face was perspiring profusely and she handed him the handkerchief that had lain by the hedge, suggesting that he might wish to make himself more presentable for the queen.
“I apologize for my tardiness,” the comtesse said breathlessly, taking the cardinal’s arm to guide him through the maze. “I have just come from the queen. She is quite incommoded that Madame and the comtesse d’Artois insist on taking the air with her tonight. They never accompany her, and this has made her quite suspicious. Nevertheless, she insists upon keeping her appointment with you, but it will have to be much briefer, for now she must devise a means of escaping her belles-soeurs and they will grow wary if she is absent for too long.”
Building the suspense, Jeanne waited a few more minutes, then disappeared into the maze as she told the cardinal, “I think I hear her footsteps! I dare not intrude upon such a private moment, and I am certain that Her Majesty would prefer her words to be for your ears only.” A nightingale sang. Or did it? Was it a cue? After the final note a woman app
eared, veiled and cloaked, but her overgarment was draped so that it allowed the cardinal a view of a gauzy chemise à la Reine, the very style of gown the queen most favored. The woman approached and wordlessly extended the rose to the cardinal.
“Majesté, from this moment on, I shall call this the ‘rose of happiness.’ ” He pressed the long-stemmed blossom to his heart and reverently sank to one knee.
“You know what this means,” said the woman, finding her tongue at last.
“Oh, yes, Your Majesty,” the Grand Almoner breathed. “It means that my hope has been restored. Tonight you have made possible the pinnacle of my joy. To know that all is forgiven. And you must know that from this moment on, I am your willing slave.” Prostrating himself at her feet, he dared to press his lips to the toe of her silken slipper.
Jeanne decided it was best to end the charade before it exploded.
The nightingale sang again. There was a crunching of gravel and from a distant hedge, the sound of voices. From the opposite direction, she emerged with a “Hsst—we must leave quickly! The comte d’Artois is approaching with one of his equerries. Hurry, we must make haste! Take cover in the darkness.” She shooed the cardinal out of the grove; once she was convinced he had fled, she clasped Mademoiselle d’Oliva by the arm and ushered her toward the charmilles, where they rejoined her confederates and left the grove undetected. Only when they clambered into the coach did the courtesan, still a bit flustered by the night’s activities, realize that the letter she was supposed to have given to the great gentleman remained in her pocket.
The scheme had worked beyond Jeanne’s wildest plans. The cardinal had fairly eaten out of her hand. And from now on, she was convinced, he would never doubt a single word she said.
TWENTY-TWO
The Slave’s Collar
September 1, 1784
My dearest brother,
I cannot help but take umbrage at your words. To accuse me of being the “dupe of the French Council of State” is not only inaccurate, it is unwarranted. I had not expected you to credit what half the gossips of France seem to suppose; namely, that I have my husband coiled about my little finger and that I have a tremendous amount of influence, not only on Louis, but on the governance of the realm.
