Rohan bore his own ordeal with quiet, sombre dignity. When his case came before the Parlement and he ceased to be the prisoner of the King, he lost the right to maintain a great household and receive visitors. Only his doctors were allowed to see him (he was suffering from inflamed kidneys), and it was they who took his letters, written in invisible ink, to his lawyer. He became increasingly exhausted, and began to lose heart. He was deeply anxious about his friends and allies, Planta and Cagliostro. He even required his lawyer to take an oath that he would always address Cagliostro as Comte, as it pained him so much when people did not. But deep in his heart lay the real concern, which troubled him even more strongly than his own fate and that of his friends — his grief for the Queen. “Write and tell me,” he begged his lawyer, “whether it is true that she is still so upset.”
It was customary at the time for lawyers involved in cases of unusual public interest to print and circulate their memoirs, or rather their own accounts of what happened. The first to do this had been Beaumarchais himself. Now the public were waiting in a fever of excitement for ‘memoirs’ of the necklace trial, which of course duly appeared, with huge success. The version put out by Jeanne’s lawyer Doillot saw ten thousand copies instantly snapped up from his home address, and another five thousand distributed through booksellers. This Doillot was an elderly gentleman who had not been in practice very long. Jeanne had completely turned the old fellow’s head. He believed everything she told him, and faithfully recorded her fantastic tales in his memoir. Which of course only served to make it even more of a success.
Cagliostro’s lawyer, the young M Thilorier, was very aware that this was his great chance to make a name for himself. The basic text was written for him, in Italian, by the magus himself, and he then worked it up, with considerable literary flair, to suit the taste of the time. Grimm and other experts declared that had it been a novel, they would have considered it wonderfully interesting and skilfully wrought. In this work can be found the more fanciful stories about Cagliostro’s youth already quoted. As for the actual legal issues, Thilorier was in a very easy situation, as Cagliostro was able to prove his alibi, having arrived in Paris, from some way away, the day after Rohan first talked to the jewellers.
Nicole d’Oliva’s lawyer, the equally youthful Maître Blondel, produced a lyrical little masterpiece, a gem of sensibilité, and the age lapped it up. It tapped the same vein of sentimentality we find in Manon Lescaut and the later La dame aux camélias. People were shocked by Nicole’s innocence, for who could be more innocent than an innocent courtesan?
Blondel’s work ran to twenty thousand copies. Scarcely less popular were the minor personages, Planta, Réteaux, Mme Cagliostro and others who had been more or less incidentally caught up in the case. But the greatest expectations of all were aroused by the memoirs of the Cardinal’s lawyer, Mâitre Target. Target was an Academician, and the pride of the legal profession. Finally, on 16th May, the long-awaited work appeared. It proved a huge disappointment to the public. Target wrote with wonderful scholarly, indeed Ciceronian, eloquence, but he described nothing but the truth, with not a jot of poetry or fantasy in it.
Alongside the memoirs came the flood of pamphlets. Their authors, whose livelihoods depended on the popular hunger for sensation, naturally had no wish to miss out on the boom. Everyone had some new detail to add. They were able to reveal that Rohan and d’Oliva had spent the night together after the scene in the Bower, Rohan in the belief that he held the Queen in his arms. They reported that La Motte was now in Turkey, where he had been circumcised and made a Pasha. The more gruesome and shameless the pamphlet, the more certain it was of success. In this burgeoning tide of filth, Cagliostro became immensely popular. But as for the Queen …
Of these pamphlets Carlyle writes:
“The mind stops in dismay: curiosity breaks of it, whether this vortex of deception should ever close while delirium becomes general and the human tongue incomprehensible jargon, like the squalling of jays and magpies.”
Images and caricatures of the dramatis personae poured into circulation. The publishers were not overly scrupulous. The face of St Vincent’s wife (he was the President of the Parlement) was circulated over Jeanne’s name, while the Duc de Montbazon stood in for La Motte.
How could the government possibly tolerate all this? Was there no censorship yet in the world? Well, of course there was, and extremely strict provisions regulated the presses. But those provisions were every bit as toothless and impotent as every other function of the Ancien Régime. Any pamphleteer caught in the act would have his work burnt and would be severely punished, but such people were never caught, nor were their distributors. The police had good reason not to arrest them, since it was rumoured that the very worst of these productions was the work of no less a person than the Finance Minister, Calonne, while other pamphleteers enjoyed the protection of the Duc d’Orléans and operated under his direction.
We have already related one colourful tale involving the tracking down of pamphlets by Beaumarchais. Perhaps even more instructive is the tale of police inspector Goupil. Shortly after Louis XVI took the throne, Goupil announced that he had discovered a secret press near Yverdun that was about to print something that was deeply scurrilous about the King, and even more so about the Queen. He had managed to procure one or two examples, but to secure the rest he would need a great deal of money. He was given thirty thousand louis, and shortly afterwards produced both the manuscript and all the copies that had been run off. For these he was given another thousand louis. But at this point another policeman, prompted by envy, revealed that the author of the pamphlet was none other than Goupil himself. Ten years earlier, he had been a prisoner in the Bicêtre, and his wife had been in the Salpêtrière. On her release she had managed to delude Rohan into believing that she could act as a mediator on his behalf with the Queen. (Was that such a very widespread fashion among the women of this period?)
These pamphleteers were repulsive little nobodies, and their productions give pleasure now only to bibliographers and collectors, but their importance was considerable. They played a far greater role in bringing about the Revolution than the truly great writers. It was they who served public opinion, both feeding and directing it. At the time there was no daily press in the modern understanding of the term. In the turbulent years before 1789 one had to look elsewhere for material to supply the ever-chattering and gossip-hungry people of Paris. Hence the pamphlets. They existed in immense variety. There were the ‘little books’ (libelle, source of the modern English ‘libel’), and there were handbills and leaflets carrying pictures and verses. The eighteenth century was extremely fond of the verse form (even for textbooks), so naturally slander too could be versified. There are many such poems written about Marie-Antoinette, each more appalling than the last.
But all the while the shadow of the Bastille hung over the pamphleteer. Any day the little scene might take place which Mercier euphemistically calls the ‘delivery of the exempt’, with the police officer sidling up beside you and fluting softly in your ear:
“There must surely be some mistake, Monsieur, but I am instructed, Monsieur, to order your detention, Monsieur. In the name of the King, Monsieur.”