“When I questioned Bassenge in Basle in 1797,” Georgel writes, “he did not deny but in fact formally acknowledged that statements he made during the trial, like the evidence submitted by Boehmer, sounded very much as if dictated by Breteuil, and that, if the two of them had not actually followed his orders blindly, they had, at the very least, been forced to remain silent about matters he did not want them to mention. After that revelation, how can one possibly exonerate Her Majesty of a degree of culpable connivance — which sits very ill with her own standards and her social rank? The dishonourable actions of the woman La Motte, abusing the Queen’s name in order to carry out her monumental theft with greater audacity and impunity, ought to have outraged any royal person. How could anyone not be shocked by it? If the Queen had acted on her initial feelings of insulted honour, it would almost certainly have prompted the jewellers to tread more carefully. But even if we accept that she did want to take revenge on the Cardinal and be rid of him, the fact remains that what had already happened, and what she already knew, were more than enough to force him to resign his position at the Court and return to his diocese. No one would have been able to challenge the justice of her actions; the Grand Almoner would have been properly humiliated for his credulity; the house of Rohan would have been disgraced, with no grounds for complaint against her; there would have been no scandal, no Bastille and no criminal proceedings. And that is what Marie-Antoinette clearly might have done, had she followed her own line of thinking. But she listened instead to two men who persuaded her to act quite differently.” The two men Georgel refers to, the Abbé Vermond and Baron Breteuil, were the Cardinal’s sworn enemies.
Like Georgel, Mme Campan also went on to write her memoirs. She makes it clear that she does convict the Queen of a certain complicity, in that, when she received the jeweller’s letter and failed to understand a word of it, she gave it no further thought. But it also appears from Campan’s book that the Queen and her entourage were every bit as suspicious — without justification — of the Cardinal as his people were of her. Marie-Antoinette was convinced that Rohan had used her name in the forged letters to defraud Boehmer and Bassenge of the necklace, in order to repair his notorious financial position. Her phobia about Rohan was such that it even made her fear that he and his co-conspirators might have hidden the necklace in her bedroom with the intention of ‘finding’ it at a suitable moment and laying a false charge, the way people did in medieval legends. But however it was, if we knew nothing else about this episode, the Grand Almoner’s opinion of the Queen, and her opinion of him, constitutes the most frequently discussed topic in connection with the last days of the French monarchy.
From her prison Jeanne managed to send word to Nicole d’Oliva that she had been arrested on the basis of an evil slander, and that, because of the episode in the Bower of Venus, the same danger threatened her if she did not leave forthwith. The girl set off at once for Brussels with her current beau, Toussaint de Beausire. The Paris police quickly discovered her address and informed the French legation in that city. D’Oliva and her suitor were arrested and imprisoned. But their extradition was not a simple matter. Amongst the ancient privileges of the land of Brabant was one waiving the obligation to return refugees except in cases where they themselves requested it. So the police sent their wiliest operator, a man called Quidor, who quickly persuaded d’Oliva that it would be in her own interests to apply for extradition. Which is what happened; whereupon the French government, which revealed its economising tendency on the most surprising occasions, paid her full travel expenses, then locked them both up in the Bastille.
A few months later they were followed by Réteaux de Villette. Réteaux had fled to Geneva, had been arrested there and then extradited. The situation regarding La Motte was rather more complicated. He had gone to England, but even in those days the English were punctilious about such matters. They would not send refugees back for any reason; moreover, the French government was not especially popular in London at the time.
Since there was so little hope that the English authorities would return him, the Paris police decided on abduction. Their efforts in this direction read like a true-life detective story — it seems there are eternal truths even for crime writers. La Motte was living in Edinburgh as the paying guest of the family of an elderly Italian language teacher called Benevent Dacosta. He reckoned that this arrangement would attract the least attention to himself, since people would take him for a member of the family. But Dacosta was not just a language teacher. He was also a man of business, and the French ambassador to London, the Comte d’Adhémar, persuaded him to hand La Motte over for ten thousand guineas. He felt rather bad about doing it, he wrote, but poverty dictated his actions.
The plan involved two police officers travelling to Newcastle, where they were to meet Dacosta and La Motte. Two more officers, one of them the wily Quidor, would be waiting for them in a port called South Shields. French ships regularly called in there for coal, so their boat would not attract any particular notice. There, Dacosta was to betray La Motte. They would pour a soporific into his wine and carry him onto the boat while he was asleep — the classic formula.
The French police proceeded in a very circumspect and low-spirited sort of way. They knew that if the English collared them they would be hanged without mercy.
But the plan failed. First, because La Motte became suspicious and refused to go to South Shields. Secondly, because the agents were unable to find a suitable house in the port, and even if they had found one, Dacosta had insufficient money to pay the rent. Thirdly, and principally, because the Italian took fright. He feared that the scheme would fail and he would be hanged. Instead he revealed the whole plan to La Motte. La Motte, whose sunny disposition we have already observed, was not in the slightest bit angry, and helped his good friend spend the one thousand guineas he had had as an advance from the French.
Rohan, however, remained a prisoner in the Bastille. He could have had no complaint on grounds of comfort. The largest suite in the staff officers’ building was placed at his disposal. He took three footmen in with him, and was given a daily allowance of a hundred and twenty francs. (Should that be multiplied by ten?) He dined in princely style, and could receive any visitor he chose. He gave banquets for twenty people, with oysters and champagne. Because of the extraordinarily large number of his visitors the drawbridge was, most exceptionally, left down all day. Every afternoon he took his walk around the tower terrace, in his brown overcoat, with a large hat drawn down over his eyes, to the delight of the vast crowd of Parisians gathered below. In the city the only topic of conversation was the trial, and interest in it was just as strong abroad.
The King, following the rules, began by appointing Breteuil, as his Paris Minister, and Thiroux de Crosne, the Chief of Police, as examining judges. But Rohan rejected the first as a personal enemy, and the second as being of too low a social rank to question him. Vergennes, the Interior Minister, and Castries, Minister for the Navy, were brought in. The Cardinal gave his evidence coolly, shrewdly, and in strict accordance with the truth.