XXVII. 1785. CALUMNIES AGAINST THE QUEEN.—HER ANIMOSITY AGAINST THE CARDINAL DE ROHAN.
Reading edition
From the day she became queen, to the very hour of her death, and even after the grave had closed over her headless corse, the unhappy Marie-Antoinette was fated to be the victim of calumny. Her youthful levity was magnified into natural vice. Her most innocent amusements were made the objects of dark suspicion. Her friendships were so many criminal attachments. From Marly to Versailles, and from Versailles to Marly, slander pursued her. It penetrated the groves of Trianon, and insinuated that secret orgies, rivalling those of the “Parc aux cerfs,” were carried on in this now favourite retreat. Indecent pamphlets referring to her, written by hireling scribes, were circulated all over France. Libels against her were even forged in the police bureau. Scandalous songs were thrown at the king’s feet, in the “Œil-de-Bœuf.” Scandalous libels were placed under his dinner-napkin. Courtiers repeated the last foul epigram, the last lying report against the queen, in the royal antechambers, whispered it and chuckled over it even in the queen’s presence; carried it from Versailles or Marly, post haste to Paris, to the different hostile salons, to the green-rooms of the theatre and the opera, and to the cafés, thence to be disseminated all over the capital, even to the halles; carried it to their country châteaux, and laughed over it at their dinner-tables, whence it spread among their tenantry and the inhabitants of the adjacent towns:
“And they who told it added something new, And they who heard it made enlargement too, In ev’ry ear it spread, on every tongue it grew.”
Fancy what a perfect fund of scandal this affair of the Necklace, enveloped as it was at first in such an impenetrable mystery, provided for these despicable minds! What an arsenal for defamation and calumny it furnished to the avowed enemies of Marie-Antoinette! The Orléans faction professed to look upon it as a state crime, pretending to believe that the real culprit was the queen, who had secured the Necklace through the medium of the cardinal, he having been her dupe in the first instance, and afterwards her victim. They gave out, through their herd of itinerant agents—men without characters, without homes, without bread, without settled occupations, fitted only for scandalous adventures, and living only by dishonourable expedients—that it was Marie-Antoinette herself, “la louve Autrichienne,” as they styled her, who had met the grand almoner in the park of Versailles at midnight; that it was she who had heard his exculpation, and had listened to his new promises of fealty, which had been sealed by embraces and the gift of a rose; and further, that she had subsequently granted him several secret interviews at the Little Trianon. On this false basis they raised their broad superstructure of defamation, and pursued the queen with every species of malignant slander in pasquinades, epigrams, and songs,[238] “unfit for print or pen, the brutality of which nothing can exceed; but which, nevertheless, found believers—increase of believers, in the public exasperation—and did the queen, say all her historians, incalculable damage,”[239] until finally the hideous fabrications culminated in the epithet of Messalina, hurled at her by the furies of the halles on her way to the guillotine.
To this body of antagonists must be added those retailers of gossip and small talk who, in a country like France, where most men are mixed up in intrigues, (and no reputation is too sacred for the inuendo, the smart sally, and the bon-mot,) delight and revel in scandals enveloped in some degree of mystery. There was certainly no lack of mystery in the affair of the Necklace, and these quick-witted individuals, thinking only of the entangled web offered them to unravel, displayed their ingenuity in suggesting clue after clue, regardless as to whether this or that clever explanation which they put forward compromised the queen or no, for the old loyal feeling of the nation was by this time utterly dead.
The lower classes of society in France had for some time past been brought to believe, and not without reason, that kings and queens were their natural enemies; that they despised, if they did not hate, their poorer subjects, whom they only valued as so much food for powder, or for what they could furnish to the exchequer through the hard extortion of the tax-gatherer. Marie-Antoinette was deservedly blamed for her thoughtless acquisition of the château of St. Cloud, at an outlay of six million francs, at this particular period when several bad harvests had imposed new hardships on the people; when provisions were frightfully scarce, prices correspondingly high, and tillage employment, save as “statute labour,” hardly to be had. The peasants in certain parts had even been reduced to live “on meal, husks, and boiled grass.” In the towns, the distress, if not so great, was still considerable, and large numbers of men were out of work. Crowds of idlers, as a matter of course, filled the cafés and cabarets—men with fermenting minds, and only too ready to believe any new calumny against the objects of their disaffection, and to lend their busy tongues to circulate the foulest slanders through the land. Upon the quick fancies of these thoughtless men, who never paused to examine what they heard, the enemies of Marie-Antoinette, who went about inflaming the discontented, encouraging the angry, and imposing on the thoughtless and the credulous, made a lasting and fatal impression.
Whilst the numerous enemies of the queen were thus at work turning the Necklace scandal to the best account, the Baron de Breteuil, whose hatred of the cardinal knew no bounds, was straining every nerve to convert it into an instrument for the effectual ruin of his enemy. The Abbé Georgel assures us that this animosity went so far as to induce the minister to promise Böhmer—who, according to some accounts, had in the first instance been arrested in conjunction with Saint-James and others on suspicion of being privy to the abuse of the queen’s name[240]—full payment for the Necklace if he would aggravate his evidence against the cardinal. De Breteuil also sent emissaries to the Bastille, to communicate with Madame de la Motte, offering to save her if she would furnish sufficient proof to inculpate his old enemy.
Beugnot, at this period a rising young barrister of four-and-twenty, understood to be an intimate acquaintance of the De la Mottes, and known to have been the person last in company with the countess previous to her arrest, fully expected to be sent to join her in the Bastille. The Baron de Breteuil, however, far from ordering Beugnot’s arrest, instructed M. de Crosne,—recently appointed lieutenant of police in place of M. Lenoir, promoted to the presidency of the administration of finances—to send privately for the young barrister, when, playing on his vanity, he recommended him to take the countess’s brief, as the trial was certain to attract the eyes of all men, and could hardly fail to push forward a young advocate in his career. But Beugnot, who knew his proposed client too well, declined to avail himself of the opportunity. “The next day,” observes he, “I received a new message from M. de Crosne, which involved another visit on my part. The lieutenant of police gave me an opened letter of Madame de la Motte’s, who, not understanding the difficulties which I felt in charging myself with her defence, begged me to come and see her. M. de Crosne backed up her request with some pressing solicitations of his own; then judging from my obstinate refusal, or possibly from something that Madame de la Motte had said to him, that I thought there was danger attached to the post proposed to me, he sought to reassure me on this point, and urged me to see the Baron de Breteuil. I declined. ‘I could say nothing to the minister,’ I remarked, ‘which I had not already said to him, neither would the former obtain from me what I had refused to the lieutenant of police.’ M. de Crosne insisted still more strongly, and gave me to understand that more condescension on my part to the views of the authorities would be neither prejudicial to my professional advancement nor to my fortune; his favourite refrain always being—‘See the Baron de Breteuil.’ I gave M. de Crosne to understand that I should not have that honour, since I did not see to what it could lead, and I left him, after obtaining permission to address to him a letter in reply to the one he had delivered to me.
“When recalling this scene, I can scarcely doubt the nature of the political interest which the Baron de Breteuil took in Madame de la Motte. He knew from one of his confidential emissaries, with whom I had been conversing, that I treated the stealing of the Necklace as comparatively a pitiful incident; but that I regarded the scene in the park almost in the light of a capital crime. This was apparently in precise accordance with his own views, and made him anxious that Madame de la Motte’s counsel should share to the fullest extent in his opinions. In replying to the countess’s letter, I grounded my refusal on my want of talent and experience for so grave a business, and I added, that it would be useless for her to insist further, as my refusal being dictated to me by my conscience, nothing she could urge would induce me to revoke it.”[241]
On her side, Marie-Antoinette, deeply and very naturally incensed against the Prince de Rohan, and, truth to tell, quite as eager for his destruction as the minister Breteuil, refused likewise to look elsewhere for a culprit. Both she and the king believed the grand almoner to be guilty of the peculation of the Necklace, and of an impertinent abuse of the queen’s name. They knew he had contracted enormous debts; they knew, too, that he had been charged with tampering with the funds of a rich hospital, the Quinze-Vingts, of which he was treasurer, and that he had hitherto led a most dissolute life. Was he not, therefore, precisely the man who would be likely to perpetrate such a crime? Already branded in public opinion for an alleged malversation of a million of francs in the matter of the Hospital of the Quinze-Vingts, his office of grand almoner, and his dignity as a prince of the Church, could not raise him above suspicion. The aversion first excited in the queen’s mind by the cardinal’s private letter against her mother, and his injurious representations respecting herself at the court of Vienna, was increased to positive hatred by the description of the scene in the park of Versailles, by the frequent association of her own name with his in people’s mouths, as well as by the offensive commentaries provoked by that association. This burning abhorrence, continually fed by fresh reports similar in character to the foregoing, so blinded Marie-Antoinette to the strict rules and rigid formalities of justice, that in her first moments of passion she is said to have demanded the cardinal’s life of the king, and the king, moreover, is believed to have promised her that he should not escape the scaffold.