Antal Szerb - The Queen's Necklace

“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, suddenly 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.

The instant Marie-Antoinette met Jeanne she took her to her heart and gave her ten thousand livres, as friendship is strengthened by such little gifts. Out of pure kindness Jeanne mediated between them on Rohan’s behalf, but he had another, far more powerful, patron, the Emperor Joseph II, who thought it in the Austrian interest to demand that his friend Rohan should be made Prime Minister of France. (Here she neatly worked in the greatest of all the accusations levelled at Marie-Antoinette, that she served the interests of a foreign power.) Marie-Antoinette did not really like Rohan, but she blindly obeyed her brother and so made her peace with him, and their passion flared up again. The expression is of course colourful rather than precise, since both were merely feigning, Marie-Antoinette for political reasons (the Austrian cause) and Rohan from ambition. Rohan was at the time both morally and physically a broken man, who needed to take Cagliostro’s magic pills with him to the assignations; and on the way — oh masterstroke of the parlour maid’s imagination! — he would call in on his young mistress at Passy to “get his head up …”

Then she comes to the letters. She had not kept all two hundred of them, only some thirty or so — copies — supposedly made at the time. They are indeed love letters, but not very entertaining. Here, all the same, is a brief example — a graphic illustration of just what the French were capable of believing about their royalty:

16th August 1784

Yesterday someone made a rather nosy and suspicious remark, and that has prevented my coming to T… [Trianon] today, but it will not make me deprive myself of the sight of my darling slave. The minister (the King) is going at eleven to hunt at R … [Rambouillet] ; he may be home later, but more probably only in the morning; I hope to compensate myself for his absence by taking revenge for the boredom I have endured these past two days …

… Since you will play the leading role in my plan, it is essential that there should be perfect understanding between us à propos this subject, as there was last Friday on the s … [sofa]. You will smile at the comparison, but since it is appropriate, and since I want to give you proof that it is this evening while we are talking about serious things, you must dress as a messenger, with a parcel in your hand, and walk up and down between the columns of the chapel at eleven; I will send the Comtesse who will lead you up a hidden staircase to a room where you will find the object of your heart’s desire.

The time has come for us to say a few words about Marie-Antoinette’s dire and ever-increasing unpopularity, that shift in sentiment which played such a significant part in the outbreak of the Revolution.

When she arrived in Paris with her new husband in 1773 she was given a rapturous reception by the people. As she stood on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, that fine old cavalier Maréchal Brissac said to her:

“ Voila, Madame —two thousand admirers stand before you.”

And it was no exaggeration. The French passionately admired the beautiful little princess who had brought a touch of youth to the ageing Bourbon Court. She sensed this, and was happy in the knowledge of it. At around this time she wrote to her mother:

“As we withdrew, we waved to the people and they were so delighted. How happy is our situation when we can win the friendship of an entire people so cheaply!” This did not mean that she would not have been prepared to pay a great deal for it.

But as the years passed and the impatiently-awaited Dauphin failed to appear, her popularity began to wane. When a son was born to the Duc d’Artois, the fishwives pouring into Versailles demanded to know why she was not following the example. But when the Dauphin did finally arrive, the enthusiasm was not what it would once have been, at the start of the reign. Without ever noticing it, Marie-Antoinette had lost the people’s love.

By degrees she came to be held responsible for everything the public disliked. Even the King’s refusal to be vaccinated was laid at her door. People knew that the Queen was all-powerful — so she must have been to blame for whatever happened or failed to happen. But seen from this distance, Marie-Antoinette was not all-powerful. Her greatest wish in the field of politics, that Choiseul should be recalled from exile, was never fulfilled. Instead, despite her every protest, Calonne was made Contrôleur Général (Finance Minister), and it was as a result of his profligacy, his ineffective and doomed financial policies, that people turned against Marie-Antoinette and ridiculed her as Madame Déficit .