XXX. 1786. Feb.–March. THE TRIAL: THE CONFRONTATIONS OF THE ACCUSED WITH EACH OTHER AND WITH THE WITNESSES.

The examinations having at length terminated, the confrontations of the accused with each other, and with the principal witnesses, now commenced. At the time these were going on, the accused, in accordance with custom, were deprived of the assistance of their counsel, who were not permitted to hold any intercourse whatever with them. Madame de la Motte and the cardinal were first confronted with each other. The countess describes being ushered into the hall of the Bastille, and the cardinal making his appearance shortly afterwards. The oaths having been administered, the opponents surveyed each other attentively; though, says Madame, the cardinal, “pretending to amuse himself with his pencil, which he twirled about in his fingers, affected not to regard me,” and the duello of words at once began. And it was a mere duello of words, for the real points of the affair seem hardly to have been touched upon. At the outset the countess evidently thought she was getting much the best of the contest, for she observes in her “Life,” that in her replies to the cardinal’s interrogatories her expressions “were so strongly pointed, so pertinent and forcible, that every one present gave smiles of approbation.”⁠[262] When questioned as to whence she derived the means for such an unwonted display of opulence as she was known to have exhibited, she pointed to the cardinal, and gave the judges distinctly to understand that the relations subsisting between them were those of lover and mistress, and not benefactor and supplicant as had been commonly supposed; hence the motive for the liberal gifts which she had received at the hands of the Prince de Rohan.⁠[263]⁠

As the contest went on, the cardinal, according to Madame’s version, got some further awkward thrusts which touched him to the quick, and made him “look uneasy, and turn suddenly pale, and complain of a violent headache,” which stayed the proceedings for a time. When these were resumed, the countess thought it necessary to object to what she styles some impropriety on the part of the cardinal—he put some pertinent question which it was not convenient for her to answer—whereupon a three hours’ altercation ensued, during which the plethoric cardinal grew “red as fire,” while madame, less excited “came off,” she tells us, “with flying colours,” the judges bestowing upon her “smiles of encouragement.” Thus ended the first day’s confrontation.

The day following, the cardinal entered the hall quite chapfallen; “instead of his former fierce and haughty demeanour, his eyes appeared to ask pardon, and his countenance was sweet and engaging.”⁠[264] His “mildness” gave the countess “fresh spirits, and increased her hopes,” but a scene of wrangling began immediately—each accused the other of having had the Necklace, and of knowing what had become of it. “At this moment,” remarks the countess, “I was not mistress of my temper, and loaded them all with reproaches,” which brought down upon her a severe reproof from the judges, which did not, she confesses, “in the least tend to abate her violence.”⁠[265] The second day’s proceedings terminated, therefore, in a greater tempest than the first had done.

If we believe what Madame de la Motte says, the cardinal, as the confrontations progressed, grew quite sentimental. Weak and foolish to the extreme point of folly we know the grand almoner to have been, still, now that the film was removed from his eyes, we can hardly credit that he acted the old dotard’s part as the countess would have us believe. “He blew me over kisses,” she says, “and when he discovered my eyes turned aside upon any other object, he played with his pencil to attract my notice.” At another time, “he clasped his hands eagerly together, and lifting up his eyes to heaven, ‘Ah!’ exclaimed he, ‘how unhappy we are!’ He even shed tears.”⁠[266]⁠

On a subsequent occasion the countess pretends that when they were by themselves at one end of the hall the cardinal approached her, took her by the hand, and led her to the fireplace, and that while they were there standing in an attitude of the most friendly regard, engaged in earnest conversation, she suddenly rang the bell, which brought in De Launay, governor of the Bastille, and two of his officers, who surprised them in the attitude above described. “The lieutenant, De Losme,” she observes, “could scarce pardon me to see me holding discourse with my executioner, ‘a person,’ said he, with indignation, ‘that endeavours to prove you a thief;’” and who did, indeed, in due course, not only prove her to be a thief, but procured her a felon’s punishment.

Although, according to her own account, these confrontations opened so triumphantly for her, the countess at their close had lost much of that confidence which her overweening vanity had led her to feel, and tried hard to prolong the proceedings by urging that application should be made to the king for permission for her to send a letter to her husband, “to engage him to come in person to confront and disprove this preconcerted system of lying accusations which pretends that he has gone off with a part of the necklace.” As if the count could not have come forward, and done all this of his own accord, as he might possibly have been tempted to do had he not entertained a wholesome fear of the scourge and the branding-iron, and of being chained to the oar as a galley slave for the rest of his life.

Judging from the countess’s report of these confrontations, they would seem to have been merely a series of wordy wranglings; it is, however, quite certain that in the course of them many facts damaging to her in the last degree were brought to light. Her wretched poverty, up to the very moment when she touched the first fifty thousand livres of the cardinal’s money, was proved beyond a doubt, as well as the comparative affluence which she displayed immediately afterwards. And the same with respect to the almost Oriental style of luxury in which the De la Mottes commenced to live immediately after the count had returned from England with the proceeds arising from the sale of the diamonds to the jeweller Gray.

The countess in her confrontation with Laporte—who had first mentioned the Necklace to her, and had introduced her to the crown jewellers—tried to wheedle him by such a shallow manœuvre as thus addressing him: “I believe you to be an honest man, Monsieur Laporte. Forget for a moment that you have made any deposition, and distinctly answer my questions.” Laporte, however, stuck to his text, and nothing favourable to the countess could be extracted from him.⁠[267] When she and the Baron de Planta, the cardinal’s equerry, are brought face to face, he declines to swear black to be white, and persists in saying that he had himself carried to her the two several sums of fifty thousand livres and one hundred thousand livres, for which she had applied to the cardinal in the queen’s name. “I swear in the presence of justice, and on my honour and my head,” exclaimed the indignant baron, “that I myself gave you these amounts from the Cardinal de Rohan to be remitted to the queen;”⁠[268] whereupon madame pronounces him to be mad, and in proof of her assertion recounts, with evident unction, the particulars of an attempted indelicate assault upon her by the baron in the month of October, 1784.⁠[269] Regnier, the goldsmith and jeweller who supplied the De la Mottes with a service of plate, &c., and received diamonds in discharge of his account, having given his version of his transactions with the count and countess, the latter, following her usual system of denial, contradicts Regnier point blank, whereupon he exhibits the entries in his books made at the time. She then admits everything, and asks herself, with seeming astonishment, how it was possible in less than a year for her to have so far lost her memory.⁠[270]⁠

The countess, when confronted with Father Loth, loaded him with a shower of reproaches. “You bad man,” exclaimed she, “it is you who have led my husband astray; you have introduced him to disreputable women. You have persuaded him to live on bad terms with me. You have robbed me.”⁠[271] Grenier, the goldsmith and money-lender, had deposed that Madame de la Motte had ordered of him two superb robes of Lyons silk, saying she intended making a present of them to the queen; in reply to which he had told her point blank that it was not likely she would dare to take the liberty of making presents to her majesty. Whereupon the countess remarked, that there was no such ceremony as he supposed between relations! She had, moreover, told him that she had reinstated the cardinal in the queen’s good graces, and that her majesty dared refuse her nothing, and had also shown him a letter which she said had been written to her by the queen, but which she would not allow him to read.⁠[272] When brought face to face with Grenier, she exclaimed, “He has been in the Bastille for fifteen days, and when he comes out his first act is to depose against me out of revenge, because I once had him put outside my house, and because it was in relation to me that he was imprisoned.”⁠[273]⁠

With regard to her confrontations with the Demoiselle d’Oliva, the countess complains that questions were put to the latter in such a form that she had only to answer yes or no. “I did not let this escape me,” she remarks, “but desired Dupuis de Marcé, one of the reporters of the case, appointed by the parliament, to suffer her to speak, and not to be her mouthpiece. He turned red, was stung with rage, and getting up like a demoniac, put an end to the sitting.”⁠[274] When it was resumed, and that portion of D’Oliva’s declaration was read which spoke of the letters, purporting to have been written by the queen, which the countess had shown her, Madame de la Motte cannot conceal her agitation. She makes signs to D’Oliva, winks her eyes at her, and finding that she takes no notice, keeps repeating the action. When charged with this, she replies in a furious tone of voice, “I make signs to you? Yes, I make you a sign that you are a monster for having said such a thing.” She then proceeds to charge D’Oliva with having behaved immodestly when on a visit to her at Charonne, says she was guilty of positive indecencies, that she was only a common courtezan, who had been for some time her husband’s mistress, and who had usurped a title to which she had no claim. She next enlarged upon D’Oliva’s affairs generally, and spoke of her pecuniary embarrassments, and of the real and supposed disappointments she had experienced, with “audacity, arrogance, and fury;” for all of which she was duly taken to task by D’Oliva’s counsel in a new edition of his client’s “Mémoire.” “Proud and vile woman,” the memorial proceeds to say, “who caressed me when I could serve you, who disdained me when I exposed you, who hate me when I confound you, descend, descend from the supreme height of your genealogical tree, from whence you brave the law, impose upon its administrators, and insult by turns your unfortunate co-accused.”⁠[275]⁠

As for Cagliostro, on whom and on whose wife the countess had tried her utmost to shift a portion of her own guilt—out of revenge, we suppose, for the count having been the first to suggest to the cardinal that she had tricked him in the Necklace business—he is “this oracle who bewitched the cardinal’s understanding,” a low alchemist, a false prophet and profaner of the true religion, a mountebank and a vagabond. To which Cagliostro pertinently replied, “Not always a false prophet, for had the Prince de Rohan taken my advice he would have seen through the artifices of the countess, and neither of us been where we are. To her numerous calumnies I will content myself with making a laconic reply, the same that was made by Pascal under parallel circumstances—a reply which politeness forbids me to make in the vulgar tongue, but which madame’s counsel will translate for her, Mentiris impudentissime.”⁠[276] The countess, not knowing the meaning of the phrase, imagined, correctly enough, that it was something exceedingly offensive, and to use her own language, “put an end to the scene by throwing a candlestick at the quack’s head! Cagliostro, enraged and foaming at the mouth, said to me, ‘He will come, thy Villette! he will come! it is he that will speak!’”⁠[277]⁠

Referring to her confrontation with Madame Dubarry, the countess observes, “I cannot withstand the temptation of saying a few words concerning the part assigned to the ‘queen dowager,’ the immaculate Dubarry of monastic memory. She stated that I had been at her house to solicit her protection, and that I had left with her a memorial, signed ‘Marie-Antoinette de France.’ The fact is, I only went to her house out of curiosity in a good coach and four. Upon her signifying to me that she thought the branch of Valois had been extinct, I gave her a memorial of my genealogy, signed ‘Marie-Antoine d’Hozier de Sérigny, Judge of the Nobility of France.’ When confronted with me she assumed an air of haughtiness and insolence, but I hastened to make her sensible of the distance between her birth and mine.”⁠[278] This wrangling between such a pair of demireps must have been highly amusing to all who chanced to be witnesses of it.

The cardinal, alluding to the confrontations in one of his memorials, says that Madame de la Motte generally either cried or went into convulsions at them, and that with her, audacity, gaiety, and tears succeeded each other by turns, according as she found herself capable of sustaining a part, or felt herself forced to succumb to feelings of remorse and fear.⁠[279]⁠

During Lent of 1786, while the public excitement with reference to the Necklace trial was at its height, the Abbé Georgel, grand-vicar to the cardinal, whose office of grand almoner gave him spiritual jurisdiction over the royal chapel at Versailles, the Hospital of the Quinze-Vingts, and the Assumption, caused to be printed and posted on the doors of the churches and sacristies dependent on the grand almonry, a charge, wherein he quoted the words of St. Paul to his disciple Timothy, exhorting him to blush neither for his captivity nor for his bonds. Copies of this charge were even posted in the royal chapel itself.

The zeal of the Abbé Georgel here carried him a little too far. The king and queen were deeply irritated, and the Baron de Breteuil sent for the offender and spoke sharply to him on the subject. Instead of expressing regret, the faithful grand-vicar, intoxicated with the success he had already met with in thwarting the enemies of the cardinal, his master, ventured to brave the minister of justice, replying to his remonstrances with firmness, and insisting on his right to exercise the powers which the cardinal had delegated to him. The minister, taken aback at so much assurance on the part of a mere abbé, required Georgel to furnish him with an explanation in writing. This the grand-vicar did in the following terms:

“I had the honour to observe to you, sir, that monseigneur the cardinal not being under the bonds of a legal decree, enjoyed, even where he was, his rights as citizen, bishop, and grand almoner in all their fulness; that a detention which had not been pronounced by law did not take away from a prisoner the right to exercise his civil and ecclesiastical functions; that such an interdiction could be the consequence only of a decree of banishment or imprisonment; that the grand-vicars of monseigneur the Cardinal de Rohan, furnished with his powers, were legally authorized to exercise in his name and under his orders their respective functions; and that our legal code was precise on the application of these principles.

“You then tell me, sir, to send you all these details in writing. I obey the minister of the king, and shall await with the profoundest respect the orders of his majesty respecting the conduct which I ought to show in my quality of grand-vicar.”⁠[280]⁠

This was another false step on the abbé’s part, for the minister retaliated by a lettre-de-cachet, and the only order the grand-vicar received from his majesty was a command, dated March 10, 1786, to depart from Paris within four-and-twenty hours for Mortagne in Brittany. Thus at a most critical point in the proceedings instituted against him was the cardinal suddenly deprived of the services of his able and energetic grand-vicar.

On the 26th of March, owing to the exertions of Counsellor D’Epréménil, who pressed her case on the attention of the parliament, the Countess de Cagliostro succeeded in regaining her liberty after upwards of seven months’ confinement in the Bastille; and about this time the women of Paris, who were great partisans of the cardinal’s during the entire period of his imprisonment, took to wearing in their toilettes a combination of scarlet and straw-colour ribbons, jocularly entitled “cardinal on the straw”—meaning the cardinal in prison. Grand dames of fashion, too, at the Easter promenade of Longchamp, came out in straw bonnets with scarlet crowns, and trimmed with scarlet ribbon, which Mademoiselle Bertin, the queen’s milliner—at this moment out of favour at court—had introduced under the name of chapeaux au Cardinal.⁠[281]⁠