The Queen's Necklace

by Antal Szerb

  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 explanati
on 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.