XXVIII. 1785. Sept.–Oct. PREPARATIONS FOR THE TRIAL.—CAPTURE OF THE COUNTERFEIT QUEEN.

The Cardinal de Rohan, who in the first instance was looked upon as the grand criminal in the Necklace affair, was no sooner in safe keeping than the somewhat difficult question arose what should be done with him. It is true that the queen, in her first moments of anger, urged on by her adviser, the Abbé Vermond, and the cardinal’s enemy, the Baron de Breteuil, was for doing swift execution upon the grand almoner; but fortunately for the latter there were certain tedious forms of law to be gone through before a prince of the holy Roman Church could be consigned to the scaffold. Irresolute Louis XVI. had, of course, no opinion of his own upon the subject, and it is quite certain that much indecision on the subject prevailed among his chief advisers. Phlegmatic M. de Vergennes, though no friend of the queen, seems to have thought it best to hush the matter up, and let the scandal die out if it would, and he well-nigh convinced the king that this would be the proper course to pursue. While the affair was under discussion, Louis XVI. wrote to M. de Vergennes as follows:

“I thank you, sir, for your new interview with M. de Breteuil. I have weighed your reasons; come to-morrow before mass, and I will hear you upon this subject once more. It is necessary that a decision should be arrived at, so as to end with this intrigue of a needy man, who has so scandalously compromised the queen, and who, in order to clear himself, has no other recourse than to allege his connection with an adventuress of the worst kind. He dishonours his ecclesiastical character. Being a cardinal, he is none the less a subject of my crown.”⁠[242]⁠

This interview seems to have resulted in a proposal to the cardinal, offering him the option of throwing himself upon the clemency of the king, or of being arraigned before the parliament, not doubting that he would be only too ready to accept the first of these two alternatives. The cardinal, however, decided upon consulting his friends and advocates; and among the latter were two of the ablest members of the Paris bar, the one, M. Target, robust of brain and body, pompous in speech, learned as intense study could render him, versed in the treasures of literature, fiery, impetuous, an athlete redoubtable to all,⁠[243] who, as member of the National Assembly, subsequently busied himself a good deal in framing the constitution, and was in after years applied to to undertake the defence of Louis XVI. himself—a duty which he declined on the plea that he was getting old; the other, M. Tronchet, who, though ten years older than Target, did undertake to defend the king, although he knew he was engaging in a hopeless cause—Tronchet, whose natural phlegm disposed him to listen with attention, and whom a healthy judgment directed aright even in the most difficult matters.⁠[244] The cardinal’s friends were all of them in favour of the parliament; while his advocates were divided in opinion. Nevertheless, by the parliament he decided he would be judged, and made known his election to the king in the following terms:

“Sire,—I respectfully thank your majesty for the alternative you have been pleased to offer me. I have no hesitation in preferring the parliament, as affording me the surest way of unmasking the intrigue of which I am the victim, and of proving my innocence before the world.”⁠[245]⁠

On receiving this reply, and exactly three weeks after the cardinal’s arrest, the king issued his royal letters patent, addressed to the Parliament of Paris, formally apprising it of the great fraud that had been committed in the queen’s name, and of the arrest of the supposed authors of it, and requiring the parliament to investigate and judge the affair. The cardinal having selected the parliament as the tribunal before which he desired to be arraigned, now protested, in his character of bishop and prince of the holy Roman Church, in a somewhat mild way, against the competency of the judges he had himself chosen, and humbly besought the parliament that he might be tried by an ecclesiastical tribunal, composed of his peers or brethren in the episcopacy, in accordance with the recognised rights and privileges of the Catholic Church. This request being refused, the cardinal had no option but to accept the tribunal named by the king. On the pope hearing of this, he summoned a consistory, which unanimously declared that the Cardinal de Rohan had acted contrary to his dignity as a member of the sacred college in recognizing the authority of the parliament, and at once directed his ecclesiastical suspension for a period of six months, at the end of which time, in the event of his persisting in his course, he was to be struck off the list of cardinals.⁠[246] In this dilemma, the Abbé Lemoine was despatched to Rome by the cardinal’s friends, and succeeded in proving to the pope that the Prince de Rohan had made the protests which his dignity required, though without avail, and that he only accepted a secular tribunal because he was compelled to subscribe to the will of the king. The interdict was thereupon removed, and the cardinal reinstated in all his functions.

While these formalities were being discussed, and the affair still partook of the character of a political contest between the adherents and friends of the house of Rohan united with the enemies of Marie-Antoinette on the one hand, and the court and government and partizans of the crown on the other;—while people were eagerly devouring the statements circulated on behalf of the accused, and were now blaming, now seeking to exculpate the cardinal, and were either attacking or sympathising with Madame de la Motte, and ridiculing Cagliostro,—an individual whom no one was particularly regarding, was silently, but none the less earnestly, labouring to overthrow the cold calculations of political animosity, and dissolve all those dreams of private vengeance of which the Prince de Rohan was the object. This was the Abbé Georgel, the cardinal’s vicar-general, who had taken upon himself the task of disentangling the threads of this complicated affair. With the sanction of the grand almoner, he went first of all to the jewellers, and arranged with them that they should receive payment for the Necklace in full, with all interest then due or that might hereafter accrue, and he gave them as security an assignment under the cardinal’s hand, of the revenues of the Abbey of St. Waast, to the amount of three hundred thousand livres per annum. Thus this able man of business, by a single wrench, so to speak, drew out the most envenomed shaft, converting the jewellers from enemies, if not into friends, at any rate into very harmless antagonists. The cardinal’s other creditors, whose claims amounted to nearly two millions of livres, on hearing of this assignment, became clamorous, and had also to be successfully arranged with.⁠[247]⁠

The abbé directed his attention to the state prosecution, in order to see whether it could not be diverted from the cardinal, the actual victim of the fraud, to the countess and her confederates, the perpetrators of it. Night and day, with the pertinacity of the true Jesuit, did the Abbé Georgel pursue his plan; now visiting the Bastille and interrogating the cardinal next examining his friends, his visitors, and his domestics, and then again the different individuals to whom these referred him, and taking notes of every scrap of information he obtained. For many weeks his industry seemed to yield him no result, for as yet he was without anything like a positive clue. At length, from hints given him by the Abbé de Juncker, he tracked out Father Loth, one of the countess’s minor instruments, and so far privy to, if not an actual accomplice in, her misdeeds as to judge it prudent on his part to keep entirely in the background until the Necklace inquiry was brought to a close.⁠[248] For a long time he was a most unwilling witness, but eventually the Abbé Georgel skilfully extracted from him all that he knew, and learned for the first time the names of Mademoiselle d’Oliva and of Rétaux de Villette, and the rôles they had been engaged to play. The announcement of this discovery demolished in a moment the subtle political intrigue, the object of which had been to send the Cardinal de Rohan to the scaffold.

Encouraged by this stroke of good fortune, the abbé proceeded to track the fugitives, for Mademoiselle d’Oliva, and Rétaux de Villette, had both turned their backs upon Paris soon after the countess’s arrest. Through the good offices of the Count de Vergennes, who prevailed on the king to consent to a demand being made in his name, for the surrender of the “jolie demoiselle” of the Palais Royal she was arrested at Brussels on the 16th of October in the middle of the night by the sub-lieutenant of police, three civic officers, a greffier, and some half-dozen of the town guard—rather a formidable force to take an unprotected female of four-and-twenty into custody. It is supposed to have been owing to the exertions of Marie-Antoinette’s sister, the Duchess of Saxe-Teschen, then gouvernante of the Austrian Netherlands, that the Demoiselle d’Oliva and her lover, a certain M. de Beausire, formerly attached to the household of the Count d’Artois, were routed out. In a letter of the queen’s, written to her sister, she says, “Your government, I am certain, will second me in searching for the woman who played the part in the garden scene, and who has taken refuge with you.”⁠[249] D’Oliva was at once brought to Paris, and lodged in the Bastille. She, however, knew nothing beyond what related to the nocturnal scene in the park of Versailles, when she had been tricked out to play the part of queen.

Yet what Mademoiselle d’Oliva did know she told with frankness and with an air of perfect truth. A memorial, ostensibly on her behalf, was brought out by the indefatigable abbé, containing the announcement of the important fact, now proved beyond a doubt, that it was the humble individual now in custody, and not the Queen of France, who took part in the famous interview which had given rise to so much scandal. The story was so clear, the incident so fully explained, that the malice of ten thousand tongues was in a moment deprived of its nutriment, and the great figure of Marie-Antoinette was suddenly withdrawn from the scene—too late, alas! for her subsequent reputation,—while the innocence of the cardinal was everywhere beginning to be felt.

Before D’Oliva’s memorial made its appearance, however, and indeed, before the counterfeit queen’s capture, Madame de la Motte had been engaged in furnishing her counsel with the materials for a memorial on her own behalf, which was made public early in November, when, in all probability, she had not heard of D’Oliva’s arrest. This formed number one of that series of lying “Mémoires” issued by the countess, which, in their endeavour to explain away certain new evidence that had come to light, contradicted former statements made by her, contradicted each other, and at times contradicted themselves. The countess avers that so great was the excitement on the occasion of the issue of her first memorial, that M. Doillot, her advocate, was obliged to have a guard at his house during the distribution of the copies, six thousand of which were sold in the course of a day or two.⁠[250]⁠

The countess, who had been in the Bastille for several months, feeling by no means dissatisfied with the turn her case was apparently taking, and contenting herself with denying all knowledge of the Necklace, experienced a certain degree of disquiet on learning of the arrest of Mademoiselle d’Oliva; still, her fertile brain was soon at work to concoct some kind of explanation of the circumstances to which this new witness might be expected to depose. Besides, if it came to the worst, could she not fall back upon her system of general denial? and was not D’Oliva a person of notoriously bad character, whose word would weigh as nothing against that of a descendant of the house of Valois? It must have been about this time that she would have also heard from her counsel of the rumours afloat respecting the depositions which Carbonnières, intendant of the cardinal’s household, had procured in England from the jewellers Gray and Jefferys, and have seen how necessary it was that the more complete story which she would now be constrained to tell should fit in all its parts with this new and unexpected evidence. It was more than ever requisite that she should be wakeful, since she had heard, like the rest of the world, that the prosecution would be a contest between the queen and the Baron de Breteuil on the one hand, and the Prince de Rohan and his powerful partisans on the other; and there are strong reasons for believing that the home secretary and other enemies of the cardinal had insinuated to her, through various channels, that if she could only produce good evidence against the grand almoner, no other victim would be required. If we can believe her own statement, that “mercenary hireling,” as she calls him, Commissary Chénon, “made use of every argument to exasperate me against the cardinal,” and wound up by saying, “He indeed may lay all manner of things to your charge, but make yourself easy, we shall take care to saddle him with everything.”