by Antal Szerb
Representatives of the Church also met and drew up a statement of protest, asking the King to allow Rohan to be tried under their jurisdiction, as the Parlement was not an appropriate body to arraign a prince of the Church. Even the Pope protested, though when he understood the more intimate details of the case he backed off. People sang this satirical song:
Mais le Pape, moins honnête
Pourrait dire a ce nigaud:
Prince, à qui n’a point de tête,
Il ne faut point de chapeau!
A man with no head has no need of a Cardinal’s hat!
But at the same time the rabble ‘knew’ that Marie-Antoinette certainly had the necklace and was simply denying the fact.
Mme Cagliostro, whose complete innocence became clear in the course of the trial, was duly freed. She was the first of Rohan’s entourage to leave the Bastille. It now became apparent for the first time just how far popular feeling had shifted towards Rohan and away from the Queen. Mme Cagliostro was enthusiastically fêted, was received in the highest places, and three hundred people signed the visitors’ book at her home on a single day.
Another sympathetic female prisoner in the Bastille also had a happy result: the comely Nicole d’Oliva gave birth to a healthy boy, who was christened Jean-Baptiste Toussaint, his natural father Toussaint de Beausire having had no hesitation in acknowledging him.
At last the Procureur Général, Joly de Fleury, completed his indictment. He read it out on 30th May. It invited the jury to agree that the documents signed ‘Marie-Antoinette de France’ were fraudulent; that the Comte de la Motte in absentia and Réteaux de Villette should be sentenced to the galleys for life; that the Comtesse de la Motte should be birched, branded with a hot iron and imprisoned for life in the Salpêtrière. Rohan was to be given eight days to confess before the Grand chambre that he had recklessly given credence to the meeting in the Venus Bower, and that he had contributed to the deception of the jewellers; and should therefore express his full repentance, and ask pardon of the King and Queen; in addition he should resign all his official positions, give alms to the poor, and keep away from the royal residence for the rest of his life.
De Fleury’s indictment acquitted the Cardinal of fraud, but found him guilty on the higher charge that he had insulted the Queen’s honour by the assumptions he had made. Considered objectively, this was entirely justified, and the punishment proposed not especially severe.
But those who were determined both to humiliate the Queen in every possible way and to undermine the King, did not think so. When Joly de Fleury had finished reading out his statement, M Séguier, the Avocat Général, who stood above Fleury in rank, rose to speak. He protested vehemently, demanding that the Cardinal be acquitted on all counts. His raised tones were hardly in keeping with the dignity of the occasion; it was like a foretaste of the embittered rantings soon to be heard in the courts of the Revolution.
“You, who already have one foot in the grave,” he roared, “want to heap the ashes of shame upon this man, and to bring that shame upon the Parlement itself.”
“Your anger, sir, is not surprising,” replied Fleury. “People like you, who are so deeply sunk in debauchery, have no choice but to take the Cardinal’s side.”
“It’s is true that I know a few ‘girls’,” retorted Séguier, “and in fact my coach does sometimes wait at their door. But that’s entirely my business. No one could say of me that I basely sold my opinions to those in power.”
His meaning was that Fleury was in the pay of the Court. The accusation shocked him so much that he couldn’t speak.
Such were the circumstances in which the hearing began. Réteaux did not deny that he had written the letters in question, but, he pleaded, he had done so with good intentions, since he and everyone knew that the Queen would never have signed herself ‘Marie-Antoinette de France’.
Jeanne responded to the judges’ questions with indomitable courage. Rohan and the Queen had certainly corresponded: she had personally seen some two hundred letters written between them. In hers, the Queen used the intimate ‘tu’ form with him, and most of them involved arranging rendez-vous. And they really had met.
This assertion deeply offended the judges, even those who were passionately against the Queen. They were aristocrats, and they felt that enough was enough. Jeanne curtseyed with a saucy, mocking smile, and left the room.
The Cardinal was next. He was very pale, utterly exhausted: a broken man. Observing that he could barely stand, the court gave him permission to sit, not on the bench for the accused but on a seat reserved for their own use. When his submission was over and he was about to leave, they gave him a standing ovation.
Next should have been the turn of Nicole d’Oliva, but she had asked to be excused for a short while as she was suckling her child. The judges were men of sensibility, and readily gave her permission. Finally she did appear, and won everyone’s hearts. Her winsome innocence and charming disarray put them in mind of a popular painting by Greuze, The Broken Jug. Some had tears in their eyes. They did not trouble her for very long; everyone took her innocence for granted. Decidedly she was their favourite.
Then Cagliostro stepped up. He too was an instant success. Even the way he wore his hair, with locks dangling in little plaits down to his shoulders, gave them something to smile at. To the standard opening question about who he was and where he was from, he replied in his most metallic tones:
“I am a noble traveller.”
That put an end to any solemnity in the proceedings. There were no further questions, as he held forth about himself, happy in the knowledge that at last he had an audience. The sophisticated, acerbic judges found him a breath of fresh air, a kind of southern bumpkin, an especially amusing market-hall barker, or an organ-grinder with his monkey. At the end they even congratulated him, which Cagliostro naturally took as his due.
When the prisoners left the Palais that evening to return to the Bastille by coach, a huge crowd was waiting to cheer Rohan and Cagliostro. The Cardinal was less than comfortable with this reception, but Cagliostro was in his element, gesticulating, shouting and throwing his hat into the throng, where (he claimed) people fought for it in their thousands.
On 31st May, at six in the morning, the Parlement sat in judgment. Despite the early hour, there for all to behold stood those late sleepers and late risers, the assembled aristocracy of France. Since five am nineteen members of the Rohan family and the related house of Lotharingia (Lorraine), including Mme de Marsan, Mme de Brionne, the Duc Ferdinand de Rohan (the Archbishop of Cambrai), the Duc de Montbazon and others, had been standing at the gate of the Grand’chambre in full mourning garb. It was like that scene in the Spanish Romanzero when the sons of Count Lara process before the King after their father’s honour has been impugned. Everything about the scene was charged with a sense of ancient aristocratic feudal—and Spanish—grandeur. Mme de Brionne, the most formidable of the fairy godmothers, had already called on the leader of the Parlement at dawn and upbraided him furiously, as only these formidable old ladies can, hurling it in his face that he had sold himself to the Court. (“How proud people are of their own independence when they betray that of others for money!”) When the judges filed past, the nineteen Rohans and Lorraines met them with a profound and sombre silence. The judges, even those who were of noble birth, were all from families far younger than the two Illustrious Houses, and were deeply moved.
Jeanne de la Motte’s fate was the first to be decided. In flat, unvarying tones her crimes were read out. When the time came to determine the sentence, two Councillors, one of them Robert de St Vincent, a passionate opponent of the monarchy, called for execution. This was just a manoeuvre. Had the discussion really got on to the death penalty, the clerical members of the Parlement would have been obliged to withdraw. It was a way of ensuring that thirteen of them would stay out of the debate, since, with two exceptions, they would have taken a stand against Rohan as a disgrace to his religious order. And so the
two Councillors now demanded the ultimate penalty for Jeanne: “to be taken from this place and put to death”. The actual form her punishment would take, we shall see.
The Comte de la Motte was sentenced to the galleys for life. Réteaux got off extremely lightly, with lifelong banishment from the kingdom. D’Oliva and Cagliostro were acquitted, but on differing terms. D’Oliva was deemed hors de cour—dismissed from the court—while Cagliostro was acquitted on all counts. The first of these acquittals was less absolute than the second, having a certain implication of disgrace attached to it.
All these decisions had been handed down in a relatively routine manner. Now the real business began—deciding what to do about Rohan.
The discussion lasted seventeen hours, and the result was announced only at ten pm. Those who were sworn enemies of the Court, Fréteau de St Just and Robert de St Vincent, had made powerful speeches in Rohan’s defence. The outcome was that everyone voted for his acquittal, but they could not agree on the precise manner of it. Twenty-six speakers voted for outright acquittal, while twenty-two wanted simply to discharge him hors de cour. In the end there was a majority decision—Cardinal Rohan was completely cleared on all charges, with no shadow of infamy attaching to his name.
Paris received the verdict with widespread rejoicing. The Parlement’s popularity had increased yet again, and everywhere people drank to its health and the Cardinal’s. The fishwives, those proud representatives and symbols of the people, stood waiting for him in the courtyard with bunches of roses and jasmine, and clasped him to their bosoms with joy.
The next day he and Cagliostro left the prison. Later Cagliostro painted this moving picture of his return home:
“I left the Bastille towards eleven-thirty in the evening. The night was dark, and the quarter where I live was relatively abandoned. So, great was my surprise when I was suddenly greeted by some eight or ten thousand people. They had broken down the gate to my house. The courtyard, the staircase, the rooms—everywhere was packed. I took my wife in my arms. My heart could not endure the many feelings that contended for mastery within me. My knees were shaking. I fell unconscious to the floor. My wife shrieked and fainted. My friends gathered around me. They were trembling, not knowing whether this most beautiful moment of our lives was also its last, and the loud rejoicing turned into a grim silence. But I recovered myself. Tears poured from my eyes, and at last, as if in death, I clasped her to my bosom … but here I must leave off. Oh you privileged beings, on whom Heaven has bestowed the rare and melancholy gifts of ardent souls and sensitive hearts, only you could understand; only you could know what such an exquisite moment of happiness might mean after ten months of suffering!”
But let us intrude no further on the happy couple. We should rather consider how a somewhat more important, and much less happy couple, the King and Queen, received the news. The Queen’s sense of humiliation and grief was boundless. She had trusted that in the end the law would unequivocally condemn those who had brought scandal upon her, and the very opposite had happened. She could not understand how it was possible. She knew of no precedent for such a thing in all the annals of royalty. When her Habsburg relations had been on the Spanish throne, anyone who chanced simply to touch the Queen’s foot could expect the death sentence, but here someone could lay sacrilegious hands on her good name, her womanly honour … and the highest court in the land would find him not guilty. It was incomprehensible. She had no way of knowing that this incident no longer belonged in the annals of royalty but was the first hunting cry of the Revolution.
“So there you are,” writes Funck-Brentano: “The King entrusts the defence of the Queen’s honour to a court of law which is independent of him and is generally hostile to him. During the course of the trial the Finance Minister, the Minister of Justice and the King’s Librarian, Le Noir, all of them therefore in his confidence, are more or less openly manoeuvring to have Rohan acquitted. And no one is the least bit surprised. Is there any government today that would allow the freedom people enjoyed at that time?” This hypocritical sophistry, which insists that people were never so free as under the Ancien Régime, is the extraordinary conclusion, typical in its mauvaise foi, of French royalist writers. Funck-Brentano must surely have been just as aware as we are that what happened was not a sign of freedom but of impotence. Such events did not occur in the last days of the Ancien Régime because there was no tyranny, but because that tyranny had become weak. And an enfeebled tyranny is even more odious than a violent one. The situation cried out for the cleansing storm of 1789.
Louis XVI, incidentally, hastened to crown the two blunders he had made over the trial with a third. The one wise thing he could have done in the circumstances would have been to behave as if nothing had happened; a true king would never have admitted that his subjects had so upset him. Instead Louis gave free reign to his resentment, and set out to punish the pardoned Rohan as much as he could without risking a furore. The Grand Almoner was forced to resign his position and leave Paris within three days, to return to the Chaise-Dieu, the cloister where he had been a monk. Cagliostro was given eight days to leave Paris and three weeks to be out of France.
Naturally, the fairy godmothers could not acquiesce in this. Mme de Marsan called on the King and reminded him for the umpteenth time that she had nursed him as an infant and brought him up, and she implored him to send Rohan into exile somewhere else, as the climate at Chaise-Dieu would be so bad for his knees; and she threatened never to set foot in the Court again. But now that there was no need for it, Louis was obdurate. However this time he did not push the matter too far. He did eventually agree that Rohan could base himself at Marmoutiers, in the beautiful Loire valley.
And now we come to the final scene, in which Jeanne de Valois de la Motte undergoes her appropriate punishment. When she learnt that the Cardinal had been acquitted, Jeanne had one of her usual fits and began to rage. A soul filled with malicious fury finds its own misfortunes much easier to live with than the good fortune of others. She could not bear the fact that the Cardinal, who had always been so good and so chivalrous to her, should have escaped from the danger that she had brought on his head.
On 21st June 1786, she was woken by her warders at five in the morning. Thinking it must be something to do with another court hearing, she refused to get up. Finally, after much delay, she decided she would and went out into the courtyard. There she was seized by four powerful executioners assisted by two footmen, and bundled along to the foot of the stairs. She kicked out and bit, and the usual deluge of never-ending curses poured from her mouth. She was forced to her knees and made to listen while the sentence was read out. When she heard that she was to be birched, she shrieked:
“You will shed the royal blood of the Valois!”
Her screams filled the whole palace.
“How can you bear to let these people shed the blood of your kings?”
Even at this early hour, the commotion drew an audience of some two or three hundred people. They watched while her clothes were ripped from her as she fought with her hands, her feet and her teeth, and was beaten over the shoulders with a birch.
Then she tore herself free and flung herself about on the stone floor in a hysterical fit. She pulled up her skirt and thrust herself forward obscenely, to express her defiant, diabolical feelings about the world. At that moment everything else fell away from her—that pose was the most sincere gesture she ever made.
The executioner managed to brand her with only one of the Vs (for voleuse, ‘thief’). When he tried to apply the second, as she thrashed about in agony, the scorching iron slipped onto her breast. She leapt up and bit the shoulder of one of the executioners through his clothing, drawing blood. Then she collapsed.
Later she was moved to the Salpêtrière hospital, which also served as a prison. There she was made to wear prison uniform, and the gold ring was removed from her ear. A doctor offered her twelve livres for it. Jeanne, who up to that point been sunk in taciturn silence, sudde
nly came to herself:
“What? Twelve livres? The gold alone is worth more than that!”
She was not going to be cheated.
Shortly afterwards the second part of the sentence was carried out. At Bar-sur-Aube all the La Motte possessions, both fixed and personal, were sold off on behalf of the Treasury.
In its days of greatness the French monarchy would surely have found a way of removing Jeanne from the land of the living without the publicity attached to locking her up in the Salpêtrière. No true governing power could have tolerated the restless, malcontent nature of such a creature. In this too, the Ancien Régime was simply weak.
And so it happened that, in time, and with the help of a kindly nun, Jeanne quietly and effortlessly slipped out of prison. The nun is said to have shouted this pleasantly ambiguous piece of advice after her:
“Adieu, Madame, prenez garde de vous faire remarquer.”—Farewell, Madame, and try not to draw attention to yourself.
She went to London, where her husband was waiting for her. And there she lived, perhaps on money left over from the sale of the diamonds, or perhaps secretly helped by the King’s enemies—possibly the Duc d’Orleans himself; but above all, she lived by her writing. Neither she nor Réteaux de Villette allowed the popular sympathy for her cause to go untapped, and both of them poured out a stream of pamphlets and memoirs.
Jeanne’s literary imagination, unlike the practical imagination revealed in her intrigues and machinations, was not of the first rank. Her literary fantasies are those of a hysterical parlour maid who concocts interminable fictions to the discredit of her employers. It seems that the Valois blood did not predominate after all; she too belonged rather to the house of Figaro.
The most notable of these masterworks appeared in London in 1788, entitled: Mémoirs justificatifs de la Comtesse de la Motte, écrits par elle-même. According to this testimony, the affair between Rohan and Marie-Antoinette began back in Vienna. Their relationship finally ended when the Princess left him for a German officer, whereupon Rohan, wounded in his manly pride, committed various indiscretions and brought her wrath down upon himself. He hoped he might win her heart again when she came to Paris, but now the Comte d’Artois had come between them.
