The Queen`s Confession

by Виктория Холт

  I must set down the story of the Diamond Necklace, which gradually came to my knowledge while the tension was growing over that trial—and during it.

  As I learned it I lost my carelessness. I believe this was the first time I really began to understand the mood of Prance, that I first became aware of that crumbling pedestal which supported the Monarchy.

  The Prince de Rohan was at the very centre of the drama; he was the dupe, it seemed; but bow a man of his education and culture could have been so easily duped it is difficult to understand; perhaps it had something to do with the strange Cagliostro who was arrested with Rohan and who remains a vague and shadowy figure, the mystery man. Magician or charlatan? That is something I shall never know.

  Perhaps the most important figure in the whole unsavoury affair was the Comtesse de la Motte-Valois, that woman who, from afar, since this unfortunate affair occurred, has been writing her sensational lying and pornographic stories of my life—my enemy whom I have never met, to whom I have done no harm except to have ascended the throne of France. Hers was an unusual story. She claims descent from the royal Valois, that branch of the family of France which ruled before the Bourbons. She was the daughter of a certain Jacques Saint-Remy, who claimed descent from King Henri II. This appeared to be the truth, for Henri II had had an illegitimate son by a certain Nicole de Savigny, and this child, christened Henri after him, was legitimised by him and created Baron de Luz and de Valois.

  Jeanne suffered great poverty in her childhood, but she had heard that she was descended from the Valois and never forgot it. In the days when she was living on the proceeds of her great fraud she bore the arms of her family—Sargent a une fasce d’azur, char gee de trois fleurs de Us for—on her carriage, in her house, anywhere where she could put it.

  The child Jeanne was brought up in a state of abject poverty, and this, added to the knowledge that she was of royal blood, may well have been

  at the root of her hatred for me and her desire to gain, at any cost, the status which she believed belonged to her.

  No doubt when Henri de Saint-Remy, son of Henri II, lived in the chateau it had been a beautiful place, but during the years which followed, the Saint-Remys found it impossible to keep up their standard of living; the ditches about the chateau became filled with stagnant water; the roof had fallen in and the upper part was exposed to the weather. By the time Jeanne’s father was born, it was a ruin.

  He was a man of great physical strength but had not desire to regain his family’s fortunes if it meant work. He was only interested in drink and debauchery, and gradually sold little by little, all that remained of the chateau.

  He seduced one of the village girls named Jossel, and when their child was born, married her. She was a woman of loose morals, and as Jeanne’s father cared only for drink she soon began to dominate the household.

  Jeanne was one of three children; neither parent cared for them, and they were kept in a miserable hut, naked, for they had no clothes and they would have starved to death but for the efforts of the cure and some of the peasants who took pity on them.

  When I think of all this now, I can forgive her, because I know misery even greater than she must have endured as a child; but at that time it was difficult to understand. Now I see that she felt a need to take revenge on society; and I can even feel it in my heart to be sorry for this woman.

  How wretched the child must have been, but while she was naked and shivering with cold and hunger, she never lost sight of the fact that she was descended from the royal Valois.

  There came a time when the family decided to take to the road. There were four children, Jacques, Jeanne, Marguerite-Anne and Marie-Anne.

  Poor little Marie-Anne was a year and a half and could only totter, so they decided they could not take her with them; they wrapped her in swaddling clothes and hung her on the door of a farmhouse. Leaving her there they set out, and now began the real nightmare for the children. Their mother was a strong handsome peasant and she decided to make use of her attraction; their father was ailing, so she fumed him out and took up with a soldier as depraved and cruel as herself. The children were sent out to beg and if they did not return with money were severely beaten. Then came Jeanne’s stroke of luck.

  Her cry when she stood by the roadside begging was:

  Give alms to a poor orphan sprung from the blood of the Valois. ” This naturally provoked jeers now and then, but it did attract some attention, and one day the Marchioness de Boulainvilliers passing in her carriage heard what the child said, was curious, and stopped to question her. She was immediately struck by the child’s beauty and proud bearing; she believed the story of royal descent and decided to help. She took Jeanne and her little sister Marguerite-Anne and sent them to school, where very soon Marguerite-Anne caught smallpox and died. Meanwhile Jeanne’s father had died in great poverty in the hotel-Dieu in Paris; her mother’s paramour left her and she returned with Jacques to Bar sur Arbe, her native town, where she took up a Bfe of prostitution. Jacques ran away to sea and joined a ship at Toulon, where with the help of Madame de Boulainvilliers he made a good career in the Navy and actually died at the time the affair of the necklace came to light.

  Jeanne had left her nightmare childhood behind her; and it is not surprising that she made up her mind that never would she fall into such dire misery again.

  Madame de Boulainvilliers was good to her, and when she was old enough to leave school placed her with a dress maker in the Faubourg Saint-Gennain; but Jeanne was too proud to remain there. In her autobiography, which she produced after the trial and which of course everyone was eager to read, she said she became ‘a washerwoman, a water-carrier, a cook, an ironer, a needle-woman, everything except a happy and respected girl. “

  That was what Jeanne craved for above everything to win the respect which she considered due to her rank.

  Madame de Boulainvilliers was a kindly woman; she realised that Jeanne could never settle down, and understood the reason, so she took her into her home and there Jeanne lived for a while as a member of the household. Madame de Boulainvilliers did not forget little Marie-Anne, who had had the good fortune to be taken in by the goodhearted farmer when he had discovered her hanging on his door; the good lady sent for her, and since she had grown into a well-mannered girl decided that she should go with her sister Jeanne to a finishing-school for young ladies. Now Jeanne was not only a beautiful young woman of twenty-one, she was an educated one, but remembering she had sprung from the Valois, she wanted to be treated as a royal personage.

  When Jeanne was twenty-four she was sdll restless and dissatisfied, and she then met a soldier some two years older than herself. This was Mark-Antoine-Nicolas de la Motte, an officer in the gendarmerie. They became lovers and it was necessary for them to marry hastily. Twins were born a month after the wedding, but in a few days they were dead.

  Jeanne was the leading spirit in this union, it appeared, and de la Motte soon learned that he must do as he was told. One of the first things he was obliged to do was to assume the title of Comte. He obeyed his wife, and her haughty manners, her habit of reminding everyone that she was descended from the Valois, soon made everyone accept the title as a natural one. They became known as the Comte and Comtesse de la Motte Valois

  Jeanne and her husband, in need of money, for how could a descendant of the royal house of Valois be expected to live on the pay of an officer of the gendarmerie, immediately began to make plans. An opportunity arose when Madame de Boulainvilliers visited Strasbourg as a guest in the chateau of Saveme, the magnificent home of the Cardinal de Rohan. Jeanne remembered that the Cardinal was notoriously fond of women, and she was undoubtedly attractive. With her air of haughty refinement, her lovely chestnut hair and blue eyes under black eyebrows, her colouring was startling.

  She decided to use the Cardinal, but at this stage she was not sure how. The wildest of plans would occur to her later when a series of strange events fell into their places setting the stage an
d making possible this plot which would otherwise have seemed too incredible for reality.

  I have already written much of the Cardinal de Rohan. I shall never be able to get that man out of my mind, and even now when I have become resigned to my fate and my understanding of others has grown I still feel a great revulsion every time I hear his name or allow his image to cloud my thoughts.

  I suppose he was handsome in his way, for he was known as La Belle Eminence. Sometimes I think he was an extremely foolish man—indeed he must have been, for who but a simpleton would have allowed himself to be used as he was?

  I can recall his face clearly; there is something childlike about it—round and like a doll’s, unwrinkled and highly coloured; the only ageing feature was his white hair, which grew far back from his forehead, and even this merely accentuated the ruddy roundness of his face. He was very tall and carried himself with grace and great dignity; and in his Cardinal’s robes he was a figure of magnificence.

  He held the Bishopric of Strasbourg, which was the richest in France;

  he was a Prince of the Empire, Landgrave of Alsace, Abbe of the Grand Abbey of Saint-Vaast and Chaise-Dieu, Provisor of Sorbonne, Grand Almoner of France, Superior-General of the Royal Hospital of the QuuueVingts, and Commander of the order of the Holy Ghost And this was the man who had been arrested at Versailles like a common felon—as his family said.

  At the time he made the acquaintance of Jeanne de la Motte-Valois the Cardinal was under the spell of Cagliostro.

  I do not know the truth about Cagliostro. Who does? Some laugh at him.

  Others say that he was in possession of some of the great secrets of the universe. The fact remains that while he was close to the Cardinal, the Cardinal accepted ridiculous falsehoods as truth.

  There were so many stories about the magician. I have heard descriptions of him from my servants who waited in the streets to catch a glimpse of him. His coat was of blue silk, his shoes were fastened by buckles made of diamonds; even his stockings were studded with gold; he glittered as he walked, for diamonds and rubies covered his hands; his flowered waistcoat was set with gems which sparkled so fiercely that they dazzled the eyes of all who beheld them.

  When he was arrested, shortly after the Cardinal, I heard many stories of his strangeness. The one which most impressed me was that of how he stopped in the square of Strasbourg before a crucifix and declared in a loud voice which could be heard by all those around—and there was always a crowd following him: “How could an artist who had never seen him have made such a perfect likeness?”

  “Your lordship knew Christ?” asked a hushed voice close by.

  “We are on terms of friendship,” was the answer.

  “How many times we strolled together on the shady shore of Lake Tiberias. His voice was of great sweetness, but he would not listen to me. He loved to walk on the shore, where he picked up a band of fishermen. This and his preaching brought him to a bad end.” Then to his servant he added:

  “Do you remember that day when they crucified Christ in Jerusalem?”

  Then came the astonishing climax to the story: “No, my lord,” replied the servant in the hushed tones of reverence with which the great man was addressed, ‘your lordship forgets I have only been in your service for the last fifteen hundred years. “

  He was a small fat man with the appearance of being in his forties; he had large bright animated eyes, and a strong voice. He was undoubtedly fascinating, for often those who went to him to jeer at him and expose him as a fraud became his most earnest admirers.

  Of course there were those who said he talked gibberish which people thought was brilliant wit and wisdom because they could not understand it. He had a formula for certain questions and when he was asked who he was would reply, “I am he who is!” and would add: “I am he who is not!” which was so baffling’ that most people who heard became very deferential and pretended they were the wise ones who could understand the meaning of his imagery.

  There were countless sinister murmurs about him. He was a Freemason and wished to set up Egyptian Free masonry in France; he was in the pay of secret societies and his motives were more devious than the duping of a foolish Cardinal. He had discovered the philosopher’s stone and could transmute base metals into gold and make precious stones. Stories of the cures he had effected on his journeys were told everywhere. He could look at a man who was crippled and make him walk.

  He would not give his attention to all sufferers, however, and he reserved the right to treat those whom he favoured.

  There was a Comtesse de Cagliostro a young woman of charm and beauty who was said to be ‘not of this world. ” No one knew where she came from any more than they knew her husband’s origins. She was ‘an angel in human form who had been sent to soften the days of the Man of Marvels.” Cagliostro was a faithful husband who never gave one amorous glance in any other woman’s direction. All he was interested in was his own doctrine.

  In spite of the wild life he had led, there was about the Cardinal a touch of innocence; he was a lecher, but a roman tic one; superstitious in the extreme, he was very much attracted by the occult. Moreover he delighted in splendour; be admired fine clothes, and above all magnificent jewellery; and Cagliostro was a magician who, by his great wisdom, could bring sparkling jewels from his crucible. Such an achievement could not fail to impress the Cardinal, and in a very short time he had invited Cagliostro to Saveme, where the two became great friends.

  The Cardinal wore an enormous jewel the size of an egg, which he declared he had seen Cagliostro pluck fro tn the crucible. How the Cardinal was duped, whether the Cardinal was duped, remains a secret, but it was a fact that Cagliostro lived in great splendour with his Comtesse in the palace of Saveme and that the Cardinal could scarcely bear him out of his sight.

  And then in the private apartments of the Cardinal’s palace these two men began to talk of me. I had become an obsession with the Cardinal.

  I had stubbornly refused to receive him at Court; I had remembered my mother’s warnings about him; I had tried to prevent his being Grand Almoner; he knew that I disliked him, and he wanted my favour with the desperation of a man who has only had to take what he desires all his life and suddenly finds something denied him.

  There was. something even more sinister which had crept into the Cardinal’s mind. He wanted to be my lover. The thought of this took possession of his mind. He began to think of little else. Did he talk of me to Cagliostro? Did he ask what chances he had of success with me? If he had calked with me instead of the magician I could have told him that never . never never should I have looked at him with favour even if I had been the kind of woman who forgets her marriage vows.

  Why did Cagliostro lend himself to this mad scheme? Did he know what was going on? Could it be true that he had gifts like Mesmer’s and could make people act as he wished at certain times? And did he wish me to be caught up in this gigantic scandal because his masters of some of the secret lodges of the world were eager to see the end of the Monarchy in France?

  At the rime it seemed that this was merely the story of a gullible man, a scheming woman and a man of mystery. I was involved the central figure in the plot, the character who never makes an actual appearance during the whole of the play but without whom there would be no play.

  Jeanne de la Motte-Valois speedily became the Cardinal’s mistress; that was an inevitable sequel. She also became Cagliostro’s friend.

  Did she suspect he was a charlatan? Did he know that she was a scheming woman? Whichever way one turns in this incredible story there is mystery.

  Jeanne would soon have discovered the Cardinal’s obsession with me.

  Then the Comtesse saw a way of improving her status with the Cardinal; it may have been then that it all began.

  She had become friendly with a comrade of her husband’s, Retaux de Ville’tte, a handsome man of about thirty, with blue eyes and a fresh complexion although his hair was already beginning to turn grey. He was an
adept at writing verses, imitating well-known actors and actresses, and he could write in various styles, even delicately as a woman. This young man became the lover of the Comtesse—perhaps she was genuinely fond of him, or perhaps because the plot was already beginning to form in her mind and she wished to bind him to her.

  Jeanne hinted to the Cardinal that I had shown some favour to her.

  This did not seem impossible for my friendships were the source of a great deal of gossip and it was known that it was women with charming looks such as the Princesse de Lamballe and Gabrielle de Polignac who attracted me. Jeanne was extremely attractive; she was also a member of the House of Valois; it was not therefore an impossibility that I should have noticed her and favoured her. So far the story progressed reasonably enough.

  Jeanne must have been overwhelmed with joy by her success, for the Cardinal showed clearly that he believed her and confided in her his great desire to be received by me.

  It might be, she told him, that she could put in a word for him with the Queen. But Jeanne knew that vague promises would not satisfy him; this was where Retaux de Villette could be useful; he could write in a light feminine hand, and if he signed his letters with my name, why should not the Cardinal believe that they had been written by me? They were addressed to my dear friend Madame la Comtesse de la Motte-Valois and in them were many expressions of friendship.

  How could he have believed that I had written such letters to this woman? Yet it seemed that he did. It has been suggested that Cagliostro was in the plot with the de la Mottes to delude the Cardinal, and that the sorcerer mesmerised him into accepting the letters as written by me. I should have said this was ridiculous but for the fact that they had that absurd signature “Marie Antoinette de France.” Surely if he had his wits about him the Cardinal must have realised they were false by that alone.

  I have seen some of these letters which were said to have been written by me. I shudder to look at them; and even now, with most of the facts in mind, I am still mystified.