“Young lady, do you not see a lady inside the jug, dressed in white?”
“Oh, but of course,” Marie-Jeanne dutifully replied.
“Tell me, young lady — but think about this carefully, because much depends on what you say next: does that lady dressed in white bear a resemblance to the Queen?”
“Oh yes, very much so.”
Rohan raised his head and glanced at the girl, his eyes clouded with happiness.
“Tell me, young lady,” the magician went on: “do you not also see a rather older bonhomme, also dressed in white, walking in a garden and embracing the Queen?”
“Oh yes, very much,” she wisely returned (“just to get away”).
“Well then, would you please ask once again for the aid of the Great Kophta, the Archangel Gabriel, and perhaps also Zobiachel.”
The girl put her hands together and mumbled something.
“Now pay attention, young lady, and gather up all the strength of your innocent little soul. Do you not see His Eminence the Cardinal, on his knees, with a tobacco box in one hand and a little platter in the other?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” she replied. “Now I see it, oh yes: My Lord Cardinal kneeling and holding a tobacco box in one hand and a little platter in the other.”
In his excitement Rohan exclaimed: “Incredible! Extraordinary!”
His face, Mlle de la Tour tells us in her deposition, was radiant with happiness and satisfaction. He fell on his knees sobbing, and raised his hands to the heavens.
Poor Rohan! His gestures — throwing himself to the ground, falling on his knees — must have come from his profoundest being, the intense devotion that was the deepest yearning of his heart. Such was his fate, that in all his life he never met anyone who could lead him to where he could fall to his knees with a tranquil heart, before the one true Absolute.
Chapter Seven. The Queen
MARIE-ANTOINETTE, the chief victim of the necklace trial, has probably been more written about than any other woman in world history. Only Mary Stuart — that other Queen Maria to end up on the scaffold — can rival her. The revolutionary years poured out a venomous stream of slander about her; then, with the restoration of the monarchy in the early nineteenth century, she was turned into a sainted royal martyr. More recent writers, in their quest for objectivity, have looked for an answer somewhere between the two. To us it seems she was neither a demon nor a martyr but a woman neither better nor worse than any other woman placed on the throne by fate. Since the portraits by the brothers Goncourt and Stefan Zweig are readily available, and practically everyone has read the latter, there is no need for us to show Marie-Antoinette in premier plan, like the other actors in our story. It will be enough to summarise the facts very briefly and then turn the spotlight solely on those areas that are critically important for the historical argument. What we do need to explain is why Rohan should have believed the things he did about her. To answer that we must examine her prodigality, her war on Court etiquette, her friendships with other women and the erotic legend that grew up around her.
Marie-Antoinette was born on 2nd November 1755, the day of the great earthquake in Lisbon. Her mother was Maria Theresa, her father the genial Lotharingian Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. As a young girl she learnt to dance extremely well, to play music and to recite. Taught by the resident poet at the Viennese court, Metastasio, she memorised the libretti of the great operas in Italian. It was an excellent upbringing — for a future diva. In later years she developed an implacable hostility towards any kind of intellectual occupation or difficult reading matter, no matter how much her wise mother urged her in her letters to study seriously. But one can hardly blame her for that. There is no doubt that she was intelligent and witty, perhaps excessively so. When receiving a delegation she would respond with a formal little speech she had earlier composed with great care. This habit infuriated the female members of the royal household, who thought it quite inappropriate for a princess to speak at such length to ordinary people, rather than simply mumble a few incomprehensible words of greeting.
Her fate was decided by the Duc de Choiseul, Louis XV’s Foreign Minister. To enable France to turn her full might on England and Prussia, he broke a long tradition of French policy and made an alliance with Austria, her rival of many centuries. The alliance was sealed and underwritten by the marriage of Princess Marie-Antoinette to Louis XV’s grandson, the future Louis XVI.
Marie-Antoinette’s face and figure have been immortalised in countless contemporary pictures and writings. Mme Vigée-Lebrun alone painted her twenty times.
She was certainly beautiful. A tall, queenly figure, with fine arms and bosom, a full head of ash-blonde hair and a most attractive face — admittedly rather a babyish face, by no means the sort that people nowadays find piquant or very interesting. But the fact is that the women of any particular period do all seem to resemble one other, the way men’s handwriting always does. In the eighteenth century women had baby faces, mainly because of their rounded chins. History of course reminds us that these baby-faced duchesses and princesses were cleverer, more passionate and, if necessary, often more vicious than those who came either before or after them. It is only the women of one’s own period that one can judge by their looks — and even then the results are completely unpredictable.
But for beauty the raw material, the body, is not enough. It depends on what you do with it. Marie-Antoinette’s contemporaries could never praise her smile, her facial expression or her deportment highly enough. Mme Vigée-Lebrun, the painter, said of her afterwards that she had the most elegant walk in the whole of France. That was written after the Queen’s death, and may be too generous. We should bear in mind that women were never more versed in the art of deportment than they were then. It was a difficult art and a highly important one, which young ladies studied with great care over many years. Another expert, Count Tilly, who had been one of her pages, disapproved of her eyes and protruding Habsburg lower lip, and thought that her posture could have been more elegant, but even he thought her carriage marvellous. “She had two kinds of walk,” he said: “one very decided, rather brisk and extremely aristocratic, and one that was altogether more sinuous, a kind of rocking movement, though that term should not be taken to imply disrespect. No one could curtsey with more grace than she. She could greet ten people with a single dip, while her glance gave proper due to each in turn … in a word, if I am not deceived, a man would instinctively want to lead her to a throne, the way he would offer another woman a chair.”
(That curtsey! What would Proust have given to see it!)
Yes, she must have been very beautiful. Perhaps we should be less delighted for her than ashamed of ourselves. Ashamed of our own plebeian century.
These details are offered by way of introduction. We must now move directly on to the subject of the Queen’s extravagance.
We have already mentioned that she lived and died for jewellery, and spent vast sums acquiring it. Another of her expensive passions was cards. At the Château de Marly she gambled constantly, always for substantial sums, following royal tradition. The card games here were a form of public ritual, like mealtimes. Any member of the nobility or gentry could attend provided he was properly dressed, and he would be free to play against the nobility seated at the table. The vast octagonal salon was lined with balconies, where the women, who were not admitted to the area below, were seated. The passion for card games in this period was generally ruinous. Both male and female members of the aristocracy who, as we have seen, were often in longstanding financial difficulties despite their vast incomes, would seek to remedy their situation through the gaming table. The stakes were fantastic. The Marquis de Chalabre (the godfather of the card game Kalaber?) lost 840,000 livres at a single sitting, and the next day won almost two million. He later became the banker of the royal casino. At Fontainebleau one epic game of Faro lasted an unbroken thirty-six hours. The King’s younger brother the Comte d’Artois was said in 1783 to have lost 14,600,000 over seven years. Nor were these princes above the occasional bit of trickery, and it became necessary to introduce various regulatory measures.