XIV. 1784. July–Nov. A GOLDEN HARVEST.—HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF.—BARONESS D’OLIVA IS GIVEN THE COLD SHOULDER.

The evening following that on which the cardinal was so cleverly duped, young Beugnot happening to find himself in the neighbourhood of the Rue Neuve-Saint-Gilles, looked in at the countess’s hôtel on the chance of finding her at home. At this period it was no longer a spacious appartement that she rented, but the entire house; and yet, with the view of deceiving the cardinal, on whose bounty she was now in a large measure dependent, whenever he called upon her she used invariably to receive him in some mean apartment on one of the upper floors.⁠[99] “I was told,” says Beugnot, “that the master and mistress were absent, and that only Mademoiselle Colson was within. This made me the more inclined to stay. Mademoiselle Colson was a relation of Madame de la Motte’s, whom madame had qualified for and raised to the rank of dame de compagnie. She was wanting neither in wit nor malice, and whenever I met her we always made a point of laughing together at the foolishness and extravagance of the heads of the house. They used to tell her nothing; nevertheless she managed to find out everything. ‘I think,’ she remarked to me on this occasion, ‘that their royal highnesses are occupied with some grand project. They pass their time in secret counsels, to which the first secretary (Villette) is alone admitted. His reverence the second secretary (Father Loth) is consequently reduced to listening at the door: he makes three journeys a day to the Rue Vieille-du-Temple (to the Palais-Cardinal), without guessing a single word of the messages they confide to him. The monk is inconsolable at this, since he is as curious as an old devotee.’

“We passed two hours in thus slandering our neighbours and in making guesses and prophesying. When I wished to leave, Mademoiselle Colson pointed to the clock: it was midnight, and there was no chance of finding a voiture on the stand. Since I had remained so long, the only thing to do now, she said, was to await the return of Madame de la Motte, who would send me home in her carriage. I consented. Between twelve and one o’clock we heard the sound of a vehicle entering the court, and saw alight from it Monsieur and Madame de la Motte, Villette, and a woman from twenty-five to thirty years of age—a blonde, very pretty, and of a remarkably fine figure. The two women were dressed with elegance, but simplicity; the men wore dress-coats, and had the air of having just returned from a country party. They began by joking me on my tête-à-tête with Mademoiselle Colson, and spoke of the regret we must both have felt at having been so soon disturbed. They talked any amount of nonsense together, laughed, hummed, and seemed as if they could not keep their legs still. The stranger shared the common mirth, but she restrained herself within due bounds, and displayed a certain timidity. They seated themselves at table, the merriment continued, it increased, and finally became noisy. Mademoiselle Colson and I wore dull and astonished looks, such as one is forced to put on in the presence of very gay people when one is ignorant of what they are laughing at. Meanwhile the party indulging in this excess of hilarity seemed inconvenienced by our presence, as it prevented them from speaking openly of the subject of their mirth. M. de la Motte consulted Villette as to whether there would be any risk in speaking. Villette replied that ‘he did not admit the truth of the adage that one is betrayed only by one’s own people; in fact, anybody and everybody were ready to betray you, and discretion——’ Here Madame de la Motte, by whose side the first secretary was sitting at table, suddenly put her hand on his mouth, and said in an imperative tone: ‘Hold your tongue; M. Beugnot is too upright a man for your confidence.’ I give her own words without changing a syllable. The compliment would have been a flattering one if the countess had not been ordinarily in the habit of using the words ‘upright man’ and ‘fool’ as though they were synonymous.

“Madame de la Motte, following her usual practice whenever I was present, turned the conversation upon Bar-sur-Aube and on my family, and inquired when I contemplated returning thither. Every one was wishing the supper to come to an end. I asked Madame de la Motte to lend me her horses to take me home. She raised only a slight difficulty: it was necessary that she should send home the stranger, and eventually decided that the one living farthest off should set down the other on the way. I objected to this arrangement, and asked permission of the lady to escort her to whatever quarter she lived in, expressing my regret at the same time that however distant this might be, it would still be too near. This woman’s countenance had at the first glance caused me that kind of uneasiness which one feels when one is conscious of having seen a person before, but cannot remember when or where. I addressed several questions to her on our way, but was unable to draw anything out of her; either Madame de la Motte, who had spoken to her in private before her departure, had recommended her to be discreet with me, or, what seemed more probable, she had naturally more inclination for holding her tongue than for talking. I set down my silent companion in the Rue de Cléry. The uneasiness which I felt in her presence was, I afterwards called to mind, due to her striking resemblance to the queen. The lady proved to be no other than Mademoiselle d’Oliva, and the mirth of my companions was occasioned by the complete success of the knavish trick which they had played off only the night before in the park of Versailles upon the Cardinal de Rohan.”⁠[100]⁠

This meeting, at which the cardinal was so cleverly fooled, took place, be it remembered, either at the end of July—the countess fixes it on the 28th—or at the commencement of August. His eminence the cardinal was so much elated with his good fortune, in having thus recovered, as he hoped, the favour of the queen, and felt so well assured that he was now in a fair way of becoming prime minister, the great object of his ambition, that the Countess de la Motte resolved at once to reap the first-fruits of his fond hallucination. So great was her decision of character, so thorough her assurance, so precise and prompt her mode of action, that before many days had elapsed she had applied for, by means of a billet bordered with vignettes bleues, penned of course by the forger Villette—and obtained the moderate sum of 50,000 livres, in the queen’s name, assuring her dupe that the queen required the loan for certain charitable purposes.⁠[101] Ere another three months had gone by, by the aid of another forged billet purporting to have been penned by the queen, madame succeeded in obtaining 100,000 livres more. Both these amounts she received at the hands of the cardinal’s equerry, the Baron de Planta. Thus the Prince de Rohan, who in the month of July had been duped by an interview with a counterfeit queen, had been swindled, ere the year had gone by, out of no less a sum than 150,000 livres, or £6,000 sterling.

This is all the more extraordinary, and only proves the intensity of the infatuation under which the old dotard must have been labouring, for no very long time previously there had been much talk within the purlieus of the court of a daring act of swindling, perpetrated by means of a scandalous misuse of the queen’s name, which ought to have put him on his guard. It seems that one Béranger, a fermier-général had been induced to advance a sum of 200,000 livres, to a certain Madame Cahouet de Villers, a lady said to be in attendance on the queen, for the use as he believed of her royal mistress. When first the lady applied to him, M. Béranger observed that he should be proud to furnish the sum required, provided her majesty would condescend to say one word to him—only one little word. But the lady only laughed at his unreasonable demand. If the queen, she said, chose to apply in so open a manner, of course the contents of every strong box in the kingdom would be at her disposal. Then where would be the merit of lending so small a sum on such security?

Poor Béranger was ashamed of himself for having been so unreasonable, and consented to lend the money if the queen would only show him by a look, or even by a nod, that she desired it. This compact was agreed upon.

A few days afterwards, therefore, when the queen with her train of ladies had to pass along the famous Galérie des Glaces at Versailles on some occasion of pleasure, the cautious fermier-général posted himself in a quiet corner where he could be seen, and by-and-by Marie-Antoinette swept by full of “nods and becks and wreathed smiles,”—cunningly provoked by some smart observations made by Madame Cahouet de Villers, and which the delighted financier applied entirely to himself. A few hours afterwards the two hundred thousand francs were handed to the lady in question. The duped fermier-général, who, when the affair came to be commonly known, was toasted as a gallant financier at all parties and in all societies for a month or two afterwards, ultimately put the affair into the hands of the police, and my lady was arrested and sent to Sainte-Pélagie, whilst her husband was brought to ruin through having to reimburse the fermier-général the amount of which he had been defrauded.

The above transpired in 1777. Five years later another imposture of a somewhat similar character was brought to light, but owing to its having been comparatively harmless in its results, it did not make any particular noise. A female boasted that she was honoured with the confidence of the queen, and exhibited letters—sealed with a seal belonging to Marie-Antoinette which had been stolen off a table in the apartment of the Duchess de Polignac—inviting her to Trianon. She gave out that she could influence the favour of the Princess de Lamballe, and pretended that she had been the means of disarming the resentment of the Princess de Guéménée (the Cardinal de Rohan’s niece) and Madame de Chimay against Madame de Roquefeuille. Here we have the same falsehoods, the same sort of dupes, the same farce, and, what is strangest of all, the same name; for the impostor of 1782 was also named De la Motte!—Marie-Josephe-Françoise Waldburg-Frohberg, wife of Stanislas-Henri-Pierre de la Motte, formerly administrator and inspector of the royal college of La Flèche.⁠[102] Thus does history, even in its most insignificant byways, repeat itself.

For some time after the incident of the midnight interview, Mademoiselle Leguay Designy was a constant visitor at the De la Mottes’ both at Paris and Versailles, and subsequently at their country house at Charonne; for immediately the countess had gathered the first-fruits of her successful fraud a petite maison de campagne was added to their other establishments. The demoiselle of the Palais Royal was presented to the somewhat mixed company she met on these occasions under the title of the Baroness d’Oliva, which the countess had herself conferred upon her, deriving, it is supposed, “Oliva” from “Olisva,” an anagram of “Valois.” We learn from her that at the De la Motte table, which was served, by-the-way, by footmen in elegant liveries, there were to be seen officers of rank, such as the Baron de Villeroy, chevaliers of St.-Louis and of Malta, retired notaries and their wives, a relative of madame’s, one Valois, a bootmaker, Rétaux de Villette, the countess’s secretary, and Father Loth, her homme d’affaires,—altogether a tolerably free-and-easy sort of society, we have no manner of doubt.

On one occasion the Baroness d’Oliva accompanied the Countess de la Motte, the Baron de Villeroy, and Rétaux de Villette to the Théâtre Français to see Beaumarchais’ comedy, “The Marriage of Figaro,” then running its hundred nights; but as time wore on, the countess became less pressing in her invitations, and the intercourse between the two ladies grew gradually less intimate, until some time in the ensuing November, when the Countess de la Motte and the Baroness d’Oliva were no longer on visiting terms. With regard to the 15,000 livres which the counterfeit queen was to have received for her single night’s performance, and on the strength of which brilliant engagement she had contracted debts which were a source of great future embarrassment to her, this is what she says to the countess in her “Mémoire:”—

“Some days after your return from Versailles, you and your husband came at midnight in a voiture de place to the Rue de Jour, and gave me four hundred livres on account.

“On another day you came to me in the evening in your carriage, having only your footman with you, and gave me seven golden louis.

“Another day you drove up to my door in your carriage and sent your footman to inquire for me. I came down and saw Father Loth and the Baron de Villeroy with you in the carriage. I asked you for four hundred livres, which I wanted to pay to Gentil, my upholsterer. Some days afterwards, Father Loth called for me, and we went together to Gentil and paid him the money.

“On another occasion your friend Villette brought me three hundred livres from you.

“Another day I sent my servant to you, according to previous arrangement, when you paid her three thousand francs in notes of one thousand francs each.”⁠[103]⁠

Thus it will be seen that she was only paid 4,268 of the 15,000 livres promised to her, and that by bit-by-bit instalments. Schemers and sharpers, if they had gold mines at their disposal, would never pay in any other way.