by Juliet Grey
Having concluded unanimously that the approvals and signature of the queen on the contract of sale for the infamous diamond necklace were false, the forger Rétaux de Villette was to be henceforth banished from France, with all his worldly possessions forefeited to the king.
He had evaded the gallows. As the handsome Villette wept with relief, the galleries hummed with murmurs; was the sentence too lenient? But the spectators were quickly hushed by the guards so the next recommendation could be heard. Nicole Leguay, also known as Mademoiselle de Signy, also known as the baronne d’Oliva, absent sufficient evidence to convict her, was being acquitted with a reprimand from the court for her criminal impersonation of the monarch. The lovely demimondaine, whose face was as pale as her gown, fainted on the spot, resuscitated after a genuine baronne seated in the gallery lobbed her vinaigrette at the sellette.
Upon the recommendation of the court, the Count Cagliostro was completely exonerated of all charges against him, at which the galleries, populated by many of the mystic’s “patients,” erupted into cheers. But they were soon sobered by the reading of the sentence against Marc-Antoine Nicolas de Lamotte. Although he had not been extradited to France from his London mole hole, he was condemned to be flogged naked, scourged with rods, and branded with a hot iron on his right shoulder with the letters GAL, the identification required for His Majesty’s galley slaves. Not only was he to be chained to an oar for all eternity, but the entirety of his possessions were also forfeit to the Crown; the public was to be so notified by the affixing of a plaque proclaiming his punishment in the Place de Grève, the plaza where Paris’s public executions took place.
“Sacre Dieu, how terrible!” a young lady in the gallery commented to her father.
He chuckled. “A mere formality, ma petite. Let them try to find him! But hush—here come the bigger fish!”
The spectators grew silent as the judgment was pronounced upon Jeanne de Lamotte-Valois. In another unanimous recommendation, her sentence was much like the one handed down to her husband, except that, judged to be a thief, she was to be branded on both shoulders with the letter V, for voleuse, thence to be imprisoned for life in the women’s house of correction, the infamous Salpêtrière. Amid a considerable amount of murmurs and whispers, there was a general agreement in the gallery that, although it was shocking for a woman to be accorded so violent a punishment, the penalty was hardly a surprise.
Opinions, barely audible above Jeanne’s ear-shattering shrieks, were tossed about in the galleries like so many horseshoes.
“L’Autrichenne desecrates the memory of the Valois!”
“Clearly the queen doesn’t wish her to reveal everything she knows; remember yesterday when the comtesse said she would name someone powerful?”
“What a terrible price to pay for keeping Her Majesty’s secrets!”
It was several minutes before the crowd could be quieted, and the outcry only ceased with the reminder that the cardinal’s fate had yet to be pronounced.
The Grand Almoner was attired as if he was preparing to conduct High Mass. Courtly and distinguished, his hair threaded with silver at the temples, he wished to remind the temporal judges of his princely birthright and the clerical magistrates on the tribunal of his lofty ecclesiastical stature. The effect was both humble and intimidating as he stood before the bar, once again refusing to lower his body by accepting the sellette.
At last, Monsieur de Fleury intoned the final recommendation of the court. “The cardinal-prince de Rohan is to appear in this hall eight days hence to make a public statement of repentance for the crime of lèse-majesté—the wanton disrespect of his sovereigns—in arranging a midnight rendezvous in the Grove of Venus under the pretext of meeting the queen, and in continuing the deception that Her Majesty was a party to the purchase of the diamond necklace. He is to be stripped of all offices, exiled for life from all royal residences, and compelled to make a contribution of alms to the indigent people of France. And it is the verdict of this court that he remain imprisoned until the completion of this sentence.”
The prince de Rohan maintained his composure, permitting himself only the hint of a smile. His punishment had amounted to little more than a formal scolding, a slap on the ruby-ringed hand. He could manage without his offices, and perhaps in time, his family might persuade the king to overturn the sentence and return his sinecures and perquisites. But—he exhaled, the musty air of the Grand Chambre seeming now as fresh as a new-mown meadow—he was alive and would remain unscarred. No flogging, branding, or permanent incarceration! He scarcely heard the clamor of the crowd in the galleries, the hearty congratulations of his smug relations, who had correctly predicted that the clerical justices of the Paris Parlement, which traditionally tussled with the kings of France, would never destroy one of their own by voting to condemn him to indentured servitude, exile, or death. Many of the secular magistrates, too, chafed at the omnipotence of the Crown and might have declared that the moon was red, purely because the king had declared it to be blue.
But they knew that the sovereign was powerless to override a trial verdict. It was not the same as exercising his right to hold a lit de justice if the Parlement refused to ratify one of his reforms or edicts. This time, the magistrates had the last word.
The galleries erupted into a clamor, a cacophony of voices, both exultant and disbelieving. Had Justice been served this day? Peut-être? Non? Oui, absoluement!
“Vive le cardinal!” they cried, from one man to a chorus of hundreds, who would have leapt from the balconies if they could and hoisted the victorious, if now visibly exhausted and relieved, prince de Rohan on their shoulders.
The dreadful news was broken to me by Madame Campan. I could not curtail my weeping, so I beckoned her to sit beside me, although such proximity to the sovereign was far above her place. I tore at my hair like a madwoman; I clutched at my skirts until the gray-blue satin bore the impressions of my angry fingernails. “If the queen cannot get justice, what does that bode for a woman such as yourself, for your reputation and your fortune?”
Henriette rose and crossed the room as Louis entered, his eyes both sympathetic and sorrowful. “I don’t know what to say, ma chère.” He sighed heavily, taking my hand in his. He looked as defeated as I. “The Parlement refused to see the cardinal as anything but a man of the church.”
“And not the corrupted, over-perfumed swindler that he is!” I interrupted.
The king nodded. “I should like to give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that he will find a way to pay the jewelers. They are honest men and their business should not be made to suffer because the prince was a credulous fool.”
I felt sick, from my head to my stomach to my heart. “I feel as though I shall never dance, nor ever smile again,” I murmured through my salty tears.
But I did rouse myself; perhaps it was my Hapsburg blood that taught me never to admit defeat. A few days after the verdicts were rendered, I journeyed to Paris to attend the Opéra with my ladies—except for the princesse de Lamballe, for the sympathetic soul had angered me by visiting the comtesse de Lamotte-Valois in her prison cell. Perhaps she sought to learn why the comtesse had so vociferously endeavored to destroy me, and still persisted in maintaining that we shared an intimate bond. Or perhaps Marie Thérèse believed she must have been touched in the head and was in need of prayers.
As my carriage halted outside the Palais Royal, I was peppered with insults as if I were being pelted with stale bread. My fellow Frenchwomen dared to openly insult my virtue, my honor, and the paternity of my children. Boos and hisses from both sexes greeted my entrance inside the Opéra. More frightening still was that in addition to the familiar epithets they had ascribed to me—“Autrichienne,” “manipulative harlot”—came a new appellation, even more wounding for its untruth.
“Et voilà Madame Deficit,” a woman exclaimed as I entered my opera box, escorted by the capital’s chief of police, who had come to ensure my safety—a terrifying thought in itself
. The woman garnered a laugh and so she repeated the insult. And soon, like a wave crashing upon the shore, a tide of voices, snickers, and murmurs chorused “Madame Deficit.”
I turned to the chief of police and tried to mask my fear. “I don’t understand, Monsieur de Crosne. What do they want of me? What harm have I done them?”
He shook his head. “You should not have come to Paris tonight,” he whispered to me. “And,” he added tactfully, “if I were you, I should stay away from the capital for some time.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Punished
SUMMER 1786
How had I become the guilty party?
The court painter, Madame Vigée-Lebrun, paid a respectful call to state, with the greatest delicacy, that she felt compelled to withdraw a portrait of me on display at the Academie, for fear it would be destroyed.
The verdict in l’affaire du collier had removed the crystal stoppers from the genies’ bottles, loosing a noxious cloud of perfidy perpetuated by caricaturists and pamphleteers not only in France, but from as far away as England and the Low Countries. The king and I were convinced they had been financed by his cousin the new duc d’Orléans, the duc de Chartres having assumed the title upon his father’s death the previous year; however, Louis’s brother Monsieur was also never above my suspicions. It seemed as though every day there was a new entry in the publishers’ stalls along the Seine, although the usual assertions were made: such titles as A List of All the Persons With Whom the Queen Has Had Debauched Relations (the lengthy roster included Mesdames de Polignac and Lamballe, as well as the comte d’Artois, “et toutes les tribades de Paris”); and The Royal Bordello: Followed by a Secret Interview between the Queen and Cardinal de Rohan—a disgusting farce, the setting being “The Queen’s Apartments in Versailles.”
I could not comprehend such unmitigated hatred; nonetheless, I vowed to change people’s minds. “I shall conquer the malicious by trebling the good I have always tried to do,” I told Louis.
The king feared for my health, not merely for the sake of the child I carried. Axel was equally solicitous, feeding me like a nursemaid when he came to visit me at Trianon, and insisting I take the medicine Monsieur Lassone had prescribed for my sleeplessness and loss of appetite. Mademoiselle Bertin had told me about a Parisian chemist, Sulpice Debauve, who would distill the remedies into chocolate coins flavored with orange flower water, almond milk, strong coffee, or vanilla in order to render the vile-tasting concoctions more palatable. Rose became responsible for acquiring these “Pistoles de Marie Antoinette,” as I was still advised to keep my distance from the capital.
I had thought that once the trial was over, the kingdom would regain its sanity so that Louis and Monsieur Calonne, the Contrôleur-Général, could return their focus to the financial health of the country.
Instead, the trial itself, followed by the spurious verdict that all but exonerated the cardinal-prince, and transformed the scheming comtesse de Lamotte-Valois into the innocent pawn of a debauched court, seemed to have given our subjects carte blanche to attack the monarchy. Had we brought this upon ourselves, I asked Louis, by aiding the American colonies a decade earlier? We had sent Frenchmen across the ocean to fight for another’s democratic precepts, and they had come home with the seeds of liberty in their pockets. But cannons and swords alone did not win the day. The initial weapons of revolution and rebirth were words and ideas, powerful enough to bring a nation as great as Britain to its knees. Ever since, the winds of rebellion remained in the air, and conditions in France had put nearly everyone on edge. After the verdict was rendered in the affair of the necklace, I imagined that I heard a slow, steady drumbeat wherever I went.
The world had been turned upside down
By sunrise on the morning of June 21, a massive sea of humanity had gathered in the Cour de Mai to witness the punishment of Jeanne de Lamotte-Valois. I heard she was cheered as though she were a martyr, while curses were rained upon my head, not only by the accused, but by the throngs who viewed her sentence. Soon after her scourging and branding, she was carried off to the Salpêtrière, where the Mother Superior of the prison was so shocked by the violence done to her body that she nearly wept for sympathy.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Reversals
I was brought to bed before my time, giving birth on July 9 to a tiny daughter several weeks early. We named her Sophie Hélène Béatrix, to honor the king’s late aunt, who had gone to heaven in 1782, yet another child named for the Bourbons. Young Marie Thérèse, Madame Royale, was the only Hapsburg namesake. But from the start, Sophie was frail; her lungs were weak and it broke my heart to watch my precious infant struggle for breath.
It took several months before I recovered fully from her delivery. My hair had once again fallen out in clumps and Monsieur Léonard determined that the popular fashion for halos of teased and frizzled tresses surmounting a waterfall of curls—styles bearing ludicrous names such as Porcupine, Pomegranate, and Philadelphia (the last being yet another tribute to Mr. Franklin)—would be difficult to create with my scant amount of locks. Powder was falling out of favor as well, and worry over the fragile health of ma petite Sophie and the dauphin, as well as heartsickness over the insulting denouement of l’affaire du collier, had resulted in the mingling of natural threads of silver with my strands of reddish blond.
Mademoiselle Bertin tried to raise my spirits during one of our twice-weekly tête-à-têtes with an armload of fabric swatches and sketches. Always an advertisement for the latest fashions, she was dressed most à la mode, disgusted to be wearing flat leather shoes (though with her height, she did not need a court heel to make her appear more imposing), and skirts that, while full, lacked the underpinnings of panniers.
Much to the king’s annoyance, the dandyish comte d’Artois had begun to favor the masculine version of these simple, and (to my taste, somewhat dowdy) clothes—unadorned frock coats, and round hats that made him resemble a country cleric.
“This shade is all the vogue,” said Rose, unfurling a bolt of greenish-brown satin. “We call it ‘goose droppings.’ And this,” she added, displaying a length of black-and-white-striped silk, “is an homage to the zebra in His Majesty’s royal menagerie. Stripes are au courant nowadays, no matter the colors. You will find them in men’s breeches, vests, and coats, ladies’ skirts and underskirts, full gowns—I have a lovely petal-pink stripe that would suit you exquisitely—and if you prefer a darker, more matronly look, I will show you a green and gold silk taffeta that would emphasize your coloring.”
I shook my head sorrowfully. “They call me Madame Deficit now. My accounts have recently been shown to me. And my greatest expenses, apart from renovating and redecorating the royal châteaux, have been the purchases I have made for my wardrobe. In one year alone, I spent almost eight thousand livres for your creations, and who knows how much I paid to the court dressmaker, Madame Éloffe. My riding habits alone have cost me thirty-one thousand francs.” Rose began to protest, but I raised my hand to quiet her. I knew she would insist that her own talent was worth the price, but I was, regrettably, forced to make economies.
“I am no more responsible for France’s financial ills than for the sun and the moon, but every breath I take is assiduously chronicled and there are numberless people just waiting for yet another exhalation that they can add to their catalogue of my misdeeds. Why, even the comte de Mercy has chided me for playing games with my children in my petits appartements when he comes to discuss important business. He says such behavior feeds the false impression that I am a frivolous and superficial woman. I have already laid aside my original plan for the renovation of Saint-Cloud—I had thought to enlarge the Egyptian scheme at Fontainebleau—for the Crown cannot afford it.”
My eyes misted over with tears. “For the past dozen years I have relied upon you—and we have made quite a good pair. And I am certain you profited immensely every time I wore one of your lavish creations,” I added with a chuckle, “for every woman in Franc
e desired the same ensemble. But, through no fault of mine, I was judged a monster for ‘forcing’ my countrywomen to follow these modes.”
I laid my gloved hand across Rose’s arm. “But now, et je le regrette beaucoup, ma très chère amie, I must, with the heaviest of hearts, give you your congé.”
Mademoiselle Bertin’s eyes and mouth widened. “I do not believe it!” she declared. “C’est impossible—that you should dismiss me. After everything I have done for you!”
“You have always been handsomely paid, Mademoiselle. And, I would hazard, you are one of our rare creditors to have your invoices discharged in a timely manner. Even so, you are forever refusing my dame d’atours’s requests to itemize your bills, so how do we know that you have not grossly inflated them, assuming the Crown can pay?” I caught my breath, not wishing to sound cross. “Please, Rose. Please do not make this parting any more difficult than it already is.”
She folded her arms, and drew herself up, seeming to grow another half foot in height. “Je le regrette, Majesté,” she said evenly, betraying no hint of emotion. I, on the other hand, was in tears.
“J’en suis désolée,” I murmured. “Rose, I am so sorry.”
Mademoiselle Bertin dropped into a court curtsy, far grander than the circumstances of our meeting required. Then she rose with effortless grace and backed out of the room, eyes not lowered, but fixed on something above my head, determined not to swallow her pride.
Despondency seemed to lurk all about us. It permeated the draperies and tapestries and seeped into our souls. The new year of 1787 opened inauspiciously, with the death in January of the king’s ablest minister, the Foreign Secretary, comte de Vergennes.
“I am come unmoored by it,” Louis confided in me as we sat alone in his library. Openly sobbing, he gave a frustrated push to his great globe, sending it spinning. “A vessel without a rudder.” My brother Joseph had entered an alliance with Catherine the Great and was preparing to go on the defensive against the Turks. Across the Atlantic, in Massachusetts, an armed uprising led by a disgruntled veteran of the American Revolution named Daniel Shays led to the widespread fear that the infant nation’s democratic impulse had spiraled out of control. Privately, Louis and I wondered what the impact of their fledgling democratic ideals would have on Continental Europe, now that they had been revealed to be less than Utopian. Perhaps the nation could not survive after all without a king.
