Finally the longed-for moment arrived. The Queen’s message read: “Be in the park at Versailles, tomorrow night, in the Bosquet de Vénus.” ‘Tomorrow’ would be 11th August 1784.
In the Bosquet de Vénus: Venus’ Bower … How much promise lay in that name!
The following evening Rohan was in the park. He wore a large black cloak, as agreed, and a broad-brimmed hat pulled down low over his eyes and, thus attired, wandered along the deserted pathways. From time to time he encountered amorous couples out late; sometimes he was startled by the sudden calling of birds. If the romantic drama had then been in existence, we might have thought of him as one of its heroes. But it wasn’t. Rohan was a precursor.
He walked until late. The night was very dark. He finally withdrew beside a broad flight of steps. This was the Bower of Venus, so called because there were plans to set up a statue to the goddess there. It was never erected, and the bower was later named the Bosquet de la Reine, in memory of this particular night.
Inside the bower it was particularly dark. Not a single light shone in the windows of the vast palace. The eternal fountains were silent, the trees tossed and whispered to one another, and the statues of classical gods were a ghostly white presence among the bushes.
Footsteps were heard. Three people were approaching: two women and a man. The man Rohan recognised as the Comte de la Motte. One of the women was Jeanne de Valois. The other woman …
The Comte and Comtesse stopped outside, and the woman stepped hesitantly into the bower. Now he recognised her: it was the face … or rather, he seemed to discern the contours … the way she walked … the dress he knew very welclass="underline" it was the full Gallic cloak recently painted by Mme Vigée-Lebrun in the portrait now hanging in the Salon. Rohan made a deep bow and kissed the hem of her dress. It was not an empty gesture: it was the only way he could express what he was feeling.
The lady murmured something in a low voice; extremely low. But Rohan understood, or thought that he understood, the words:
“You may hope. Let us forget the past.” And a rose fell from her hand.
“Monseigneur, down on thy knees,” Carlyle shouts at this point to Rohan, from the distance of half-a-century. “Never can red breeches be better wasted.” Rohan knelt.
Then a shadow loomed.
“Quick, quick, you must be off!” it hissed, with theatrical huskiness. “Madame and the Comtesse d’Artois are coming.”
La Motte stepped into the bower and plucked the Queen away, while Jeanne took the Cardinal by the arm and led him off. Rohan pulled his hat even further down over his eyes. A sweet delirium filled his soul. It did not occur to him to wonder what the King’s sister and sister-in-law might be doing in the darkness of the park.
We can inform our gentle readers that the husky theatrical tones were those of Réteaux de Villette, Jeanne’s confidant (no doubt in the fullest sense of the word) and the one who had written the Queen’s letters, at her dictation, in his exquisite, feminine hand. Later he admitted that there had been an element of inclination—seductiveness — in the letters, but he then withdrew the remark and would only concede that the their tone had been agréable.
But who was ‘the Queen’?
La Motte would often stroll in the garden of the Palais Royal, the residence of the Duc d’Orléans. It was during this period that the building attained the form and outline we see today, but while it was being built the garden remained open to the public. It was here that all sorts of lesser nobility, people like La Motte himself, would take the air — cardsharpers, rumour-mongers, gigolos, the whole aristocratic underworld, whose prince was the palace’s owner, Philippe-Égalité. Of course they were not the only people moving about. “There is nowhere like it in the round world,” writes Mercier. “You can visit London, Amsterdam, Madrid and Vienna, and see nothing that resembles it. A prisoner could live there and never get bored: it would be years before he even thought about freedom. They call it the capital of Paris. Here you can find everything: a young man of twenty with an income of 50,000 livres might enter this fairy garden and never be able to leave.”
Here, under the trees, came all those children of the age whose passion was for free and open talk about the deepest questions of the time — religion, politics, the future of the monarchy, and the great changes impending. This is where public opinion was born. This is where the Revolution was born.
All Europe has at some time or another had much to thank the Palais Royal for. You too, gentle reader, will at some point take a stroll there, or we hope you will. When you do, take a good look at the statue of Camille Desmoulins. He seems to have leapt up into his chair just this instant; his huge head of hair flies in the wind, like the hair of a madman. The very air around him trembles with the excitement of youth — the youth of all mankind.
The Palais Royal was in effect a coffee house. People sat, either beneath the arcades or outside, in the kiosks dotted about the garden, sipping those cunning potions you can still buy in St Mark’s Square in Venice, which they so closely resembled. Inside was the Exchange, where the life of commerce pulsed and raged before it was given a palatial building of its own. In the eighteenth century the speculator was still part of a colourful democracy, rubbing shoulders with the gigolo, the oral reporter (that is, gossip columnist) and the streetwalker. It was all very Bohemian, not yet lent a corpulent dignity by wealth. And there were foreigners here too. Foreigners usually end up in the Bohemian district, as a consequence of their own lack of social position. (The English were making trips to Paris for a bit of immorality even then.) In August 1785 five theatres were playing in the Palais Royaclass="underline" the Ombres Chinoises, the Pygmées Françaises, the Vrais Fantoccini Italiens, Les Variétés Amusantes and Mme de Beaujolais’s Petits Comédiens.
Beneath the arcades stood a cheerful assembly of jewellers’ shops and boutiques selling women’s things, in front of which paraded les filles, as the French euphemistically termed those young ladies whose careers guaranteed that filles—maidens — was the one thing they were not. At the time of our story the Palais Royal was the most famous place not just in Paris but in the whole world, for such maidenly gatherings.
Among the regulars was a young woman called Marie-Nicole Leguay. By day she was a worker in one of the fashion shops where Jeanne had begun her career. In her free time she walked the Palais Royal, and it was there that La Motte first came across her.
He must have been instantly struck by her single interesting feature — her remarkable resemblance to Marie-Antoinette. On this every contemporary source agrees. The portrait still in Funck-Brentano’s collection reveals the same round, listless face, the slightly protruding lower lip, the soft features, the tall, fine head of hair. La Motte stood before her as before the Angel of the Lord.
He instantly propositioned her.
Next, he accompanied her to her home, where what passed between them took the same course as it would between many thousands of similar acquaintances made at the Palais Royal that evening. But at first La Motte preserved a deep silence about his real intentions. Some time later he invited the girl back to his house, where the Comtesse received her with a conspicuous display of friendliness. Soon, she even gave her a more suitable name so that she could deal on equal terms in the fashionable quarter. She became the Baronne d’Oliva — the letters deriving from ‘Valois’, further evidence of Jeanne’s strange obsession.