XXXIX. Aug. 1787–April, 1789. IN LONDON.—THE COUNTESS GIVES UP FORGERY AND TAKES TO CALUMNY.

“I remained a fortnight,” continues Madame de la Motte, “at the house of Mrs. McMahon, in the Haymarket, without venturing abroad to take the air, fearing lest I should be discovered. Every coffee-house in the neighbourhood of this place was filled with persons, many of whom were foreigners, eager to gratify their curiosity by seeing me. To prevent the inconvenience of being stared and pointed at, my friend, Mrs. McMahon, contrived to take me out about nine or ten o’clock in the evening.”

The countess tells us that she found her husband in great distress, waiting impatiently the moment when his unfeeling uncle and aunt, Monsieur and Madame de Suremont, would send over such property of his as remained in their hands. The count had not long to wait, it appears, for the De Suremonts arrived in London a few days after Madame de la Motte, when they delivered to him a “ring, which had formed the stud of the Necklace; a watch-chain which,” says the count, “I sold for fifty pounds sterling; and a box I had taken in exchange, and which I sold to Gray for sixty pounds. Restoring these three articles, they told me that they were all they had been able to preserve of our jewels. Having had full leisure to invent these falsities, and persuaded that I could not have been informed of their conduct and the depredations they had committed on my property, they spared no pains to convince me of the truth of what they said, which would indeed have appeared reasonable had my intelligence not been so well founded.

“Affecting to be satisfied with what they had delivered to me, I, the same day, procured a writ to be issued, hoping thereby to frighten them into a surrender of the remaining jewels; but they imagining, from the inquiries they had made, and the advice they had received, that I could not by any means molest them, pretended to show the utmost indignation at my conduct, and finally declared that they had nothing left belonging to me; that they had sold every article; and that, could they have foreseen the ingratitude I now evinced towards them, they would have given up all my jewels to the government.

“Judging from their resolute tone that something more than words was requisite to bring them to a sense of justice, I insisted no farther, but, urged by necessity, put the writ into the hands of a sheriff’s officer, who soon after, though much to my regret, arrested my uncle, a man of property, childless, enjoying the first offices in the place of his residence, and possessing the esteem of all its inhabitants, and whom I really respected. The case was otherwise with his beloved consort, a despicable woman, detested by all who knew her, who, I am certain, had prevailed upon her husband to be guilty of such a piece of meanness and injustice. The moment she saw him arrested she came to me, urging my acceptance of bills to the amount of my claims, still assuring me she had nothing of mine, and that she was going to part with some of her own property to purchase her husband’s release. Finding she could not make me accede to the terms she proposed, she ended by acknowledging everything, and departed to fetch what she had asserted upon oath had been surrendered to government.

“On her return she gave up two rings that had belonged to the Necklace, a pair of drop earrings (out of which she had taken four diamonds, which I only perceived after we parted), a hoop ring, a neck-button, a hair-ring, set round with stones, and another ring of small value. The day after this forced restitution my relations returned to their own home, where they have shared the remainder of the spoil; I have not heard of them since, excepting being informed, in a circumstantial manner, of all the havoc they have made in my house at Bar-sur-Aube, and of the contempt they have drawn upon themselves by their behaviour to me.”⁠[392]⁠

The count informs us that he sold the articles which he so fortunately recovered to Gray the jeweller, who, spite of the part he took in the Necklace trial, was still ready enough to buy any more diamonds that the De la Mottes had to sell. The amount which the count received for these trinkets—all that remained to them of the famous Necklace—was two thousand two hundred pounds, a mere per-centage on the sixty thousand pounds at which the matchless jewel was originally valued, but still a nice enough little sum of money for people in a “hard-up” condition. True, it would not go very far in supporting even an approach to that state to which the De la Mottes had accustomed themselves, and which the hard fare and dismal cells of the Salpêtrière had not entirely destroyed madame’s taste for. Unfortunately “some people having learned that the count’s relations had brought him nearly sixty thousand livres’ worth of diamonds, eager to share the spoil, swore false debts against him. I myself,” says madame, “saw him arrested five times for different sums. M. de la Motte’s attorney availed himself of this, and advised him, to use his own expression, to rid himself at once of these troublesome scoundrels by giving a gratuity of two hundred louis to one and one hundred and fifty louis to another, while eighty louis were given to an attorney who had never once appealed to the laws in favour of his unfortunate client, from whom he had frequently received different sums to extricate him from real or fictitious embarrassments.”

Such being the state of affairs means have to be found to replenish the almost empty exchequer. The count has recourse, no doubt, to the gaming-table, for all his life he has been an inveterate gambler. The countess, on whom her sentence has had this wholesome effect, it had cured her of her propensity for forgery and theft, bethinks herself that calumny, if the envenomed shaft be only skilfully aimed, might yield a golden prize. This contemplated slandering of the queen “was an arrow I still preserved,” says Madame de la Motte, “as the best in my quiver, resolving to threaten, but not to shoot till reduced to the very last extremity.”⁠[393] In pursuance of this resolution, rumours are wafted abroad—care being especially taken that they shall cross the Channel and penetrate to the royal apartments at Versailles—to the effect that the Countess de la Motte is engaged in writing her “Mémoires,”—the very titles of the chapters of which she had managed to get published in the English newspapers,—wherein she intends to give “an exact detail of the extraordinary events which contributed to raise her to the dignity of confidant and favourite of the Queen of France, with some further particulars relative to the mysterious transaction of the Diamond Necklace.”⁠[394]⁠

If Count de la Motte is to be believed, the Duchess de Polignac made at this period a second visit to England, again “to drink the Bath waters.” Our opinion, however, is that, either by accident or design, he has put forward the date of the visit (which it is quite certain the duchess made early in May, returning to France at the end of June)⁠[395] for upwards of a month; for Madame de la Motte, according to her own statement, did not arrive in England until the early part of August. Either the case is as we have suggested, or else the countess arrived in England more than a month earlier than she represents herself to have done. Supposing this to be the fact, the visit of the duchess now alluded to would be the same visit of which we have already spoken.⁠[396] The count in his autobiography states that, soon after his wife arrived in London, he received a message from the Duchess of Devonshire (the beautiful Georgiana), begging him to call upon her at Devonshire House. The count goes there, and on being introduced into the drawing-room is presented to the Duchess de Polignac and her sister the Countess Diane, who observe to him that, having come over to drink the Bath waters, and having heard that Madame de la Motte proposed publishing some memoirs, they thought they might perhaps be of service to her—in other words, might save her from fresh persecutions, and insure her the means of an honourable existence for the future.

On the count communicating all this to his wife, she immediately resolved, he says, to leave London with the least possible delay, for she feels certain that the intention is to kidnap her and take her back to the Salpêtrière, and threatens she will throw herself into the Thames if her husband will not leave London with her that very day. The count, knowing that she was quite capable of carrying out her threat, wrote to the Duchess of Devonshire, explaining his wife’s fears, and informing the duchess of her resolution. De la Motte, in answer to the Abbé Georgel’s assertion that Madame de Polignac bought the MS. of the “Mémoires,” affirms that at this time not a line of them was written, and never would have been written, had it not been for M. de Calonne (madame’s old friend and ex-controller-general), who called a few days afterwards and suggested that the “Mémoires” should be at once written, so as to profit by the offer of the queen. With this view he introduced to them a M. de la Tour, a writer in the Courrier de l’Europe to throw their rough notes into shape; and in consequence the countess at once set to work, and produced her celebrated “Mémoires Justificatifs.” Supposing this statement to be true, the chances are, that the Duchess de Polignac, in the settlement she made with the De la Mottes, provided for these memoirs never seeing the light. In one of those letters of court gossip, from which we have made frequent quotations, it is explicitly stated that Madame de Polignac was assured that “these writings would not appear.” The queen, who was no doubt gratified at the success which she believed had attended the Duchess’s negotiations, had all the apartments of the latter newly furnished at her own expense just before the duchess’s return from her mission, and went, accompanied by the king, to sup with her on the evening of her arrival.⁠[397] One can plainly see that the spirit which pervades this book of Madame de la Motte’s was prompted by an axiom of which she is herself the author, and which is to be found in the second volume of her “Life.” “No calumny,” says she, “is so certain to be believed as that which one woman propagates against another.”⁠[398] In the midst of the long string of infamous slanders in these so-called Justificatory Memoirs, with which the writer has sullied for all time the name of a noble-hearted, if somewhat erring woman, there occurs this passage: “If the Queen of France were not what she is, should I have been to her what a defenceless bird is in the hands of a froward child, who, after being amused with it for a few moments, strips it of its feathers one by one, and then throws it into the destructive talons of a devouring animal?” Most people, after reading these “Mémoires Justificatifs,” will be inclined to reverse the application of the above simile, and will look upon poor Marie-Antoinette as the defenceless bird, and seek for the devouring animal, with its destructive talons, in Jeanne de St. Remi de Valois.

When the MS. of these “Mémoires” was completed, it was sent to M. de Calonne, who, according to the count, altered it to suit his own purposes. Madame says that the ex-minister even added indecent expressions against the queen—his aim being to get recalled to France and to secure the restoration of the blue ribbon of which he had been deprived. With this object in view, armed with the De la Motte libel, the ex-minister writes to Versailles, offering terms. The queen, however, rejects his proposal with disdain. Calonne now desires to have the MS. printed without delay, and for this purpose orders type and presses to be sent to the house where the De la Mottes reside, so that the work may be done in all secrecy.

During its progress, the ex-controller-general seems to have carried on an intrigue of another kind with the countess, and one which was, moreover, so notorious as to be openly referred to in the scandalous publications of the time.⁠[399] He used to twit her about the branding she had received, and on one occasion, when the countess was boasting in a large assembly of the capital hand she held at picquet, he spitefully observed she had better be careful, or she would certainly be marked.⁠[400] Some little misunderstanding which occurred between the pair made them thenceforth at daggers-drawn with each other.

Just about this time, a new ambassador from the French court arrives in England—the Marquis de la Luzerne, brother of the Bishop of Langres, the countess’s early patron, and reputed lover. He has heard of Calonne’s proceedings, and loses no time in sending an envoy to the De la Mottes, to point out to them that Calonne will be certain to play them false, and to make arrangements for an interview. Calonne gets scent of what is going on, and tries to carry off the MS., but does not succeed. The interview with the ambassador takes place; Count de la Motte shows M. de Luzerne the MS., with Calonne’s corrections and interlineations, and it is arranged that the ambassador shall make a definitive proposition so soon as he has received instructions from Paris. Calonne hears of this interview, goes to the De la Mottes, and demands the restitution of the MS.; threatening all the terrors of the law if they do not comply. The count remains firm, and madame, by the aid of an English naval officer, who subsequently translated her “Mémoires” into English, shows up the ex-French minister of finance in a pamphlet, which she styles, “A Scourge for Calonne,” and which goes off like wildfire, copies fetching as much as six louis each in Paris on its first appearance.⁠[401] The Marquis de la Luzerne, having received his instructions, communicates them to the count. He is commissioned to make an offer of ten thousand livres a year, with fifty thousand livres down, to enable the De la Mottes to discharge their more pressing debts. The countess, according to her husband’s account, is opposed to accepting this very liberal offer, talks very big about her position before the world, clearing her character, &c.; the count, however, thinking that the solid pudding is to be preferred to all this, over-persuades his wife, and they give their acquiescence. The money is to be speedily forthcoming; but, unfortunately, one of those proverbial slips between the cup and the lip now chances. Cardinal-Archbishop Loménie de Brienne is dismissed from his office of prime minister, and M. Necker is summoned to occupy his place, and M. Necker will have nothing whatever to do with a De la Motte negotiation in any shape or form. Such is the count’s version of this affair of the “Mémoires,” but, like everything else from the De la Motte mint, it must be received with suspicion.⁠[402]⁠

When or how the MS. of these “Mémoires,” of Madame de la Motte’s was sold to the French court, we have no means of ascertaining; but that it was sold, and that after the sale the “Mémoires” were published in breach of good faith, is a moral certainty. In all probability the Duchess de Polignac negotiated the purchase, which was likely enough carried out through the medium of the French ambassador, the statement about M. Necker being a falsehood concocted to conceal the fact of any sale of the MS. taking place. Madame Campan asserts, in the most solemn manner, that she herself had seen, “in the queen’s hands, a manuscript of the infamous memoirs of the woman Lamotte, which had been brought to her from London, and which were corrected by the very hand of M. de Calonne in all those places where a total ignorance of the usages of the court had made this wretch commit the most palpable errors.”⁠[403]⁠

In the doubtful Lamballe Memoirs this Princess is represented as giving a most circumstantial account of her having become the purchaser of a printed copy of Madame de la Motte’s “Mémoires Justificatifs” corrected by the hand of M. de Calonne, and of the existence of which she was first made acquainted by a letter addressed to her by Sheridan. This occurred immediately subsequent to a visit paid by her to England where she went on two occasions—once during July 1787,⁠[404] and a second time in June 1791.⁠[405] On the receipt of the work in question she delivered it, she says, to the queen, who at once brought it beneath the notice of Louis XVI. in proof of Calonne’s villainy. Had the princess’s narrative stopped here we might have felt disposed to put faith in it, but, unfortunately for its claims to be regarded as authentic, it goes on to say that the king forthwith indignantly ordered Calonne to resign his portfolio, and that the minister begged permission to return it to the king with his own hands. On this request being granted, the book was produced, and a scene ensued which ended in the king leaving the room, and Calonne falling upon his knees before Marie-Antoinette and imploring her to pardon him.⁠[406] Now as Calonne was dismissed from office, and exiled from Paris in April 1787, three months before the Princess de Lamballe’s first visit to England, and more than four years before her second, and was never called upon to serve the king afterwards, and as moreover Madame de la Motte’s first libel, her “Mémoires Justificatifs,” was not printed until 1789, it is quite certain that there is not a particle of truth in the above narrative, which induces us to believe that the so-called “Mémoires relatifs à la Famille Royale de France” claiming to be based on a private journal of the Princess de Lamballe’s, are, like many other pretended Memoirs of the time, nothing more than a clumsy forgery.

Madame de la Motte herself indirectly admits that it was the desire of pecuniary gain rather than any particular anxiety to “clear her character before the world,” which induced the publication of her “Justificatory Memoir.” “My husband,” says she, “standing on the very brink of ruin”—they had received since they had been in England two thousand two hundred pounds for their diamonds, and at least as much more we should suppose for the MS. of the “Mémoires,” so that if this statement is true, they must have dissipated between four and five thousand pounds in the course of a couple of years—“was necessitated to have recourse to printing my ‘justification’ as the only means of satisfying the craving demands of his creditors, whom he was obliged to avoid, as they made every effort to arrest him; while I, with misery like a vulture gnawing at my heart, and poverty chasing even at my very heels, detesting that burden of life which it is yet my duty to support, and, God forgive me! cursing the hour of my birth, remained defenceless—unable to protect myself from insult, or to ward off the blows which malice aimed at my reputation.

“M. de la Motte printed five thousand ‘Mémoires’ in French and three thousand in English, confident, from the advice he had received, that the queen would not suffer them to be published, though I constantly represented to him the absurdity of this belief.... How could he hope the government would make terms with us, when they knew that the original MS. of the ‘Mémoires’ was in the possession of M. de Calonne, who could make it public whenever he thought proper?⁠[407] It never accorded with my sentiments,” continues the countess, “to enter into any pecuniary negotiations with the government; the only thing I had at heart was the vindication of my honour; and, had I been left to my own discretion, neither sceptres nor crowns should have purchased my silence.”

This was a safe enough reservation, as neither sceptres nor crowns were likely to be offered even to a descendant of the house of Valois; but we question whether madame could have withstood the temptation of a certain number of billets of the bank of France, had these been tendered to her, for times were hard with the De la Mottes, and it was necessary above all things to “put money in the purse.” At any rate, she would have promised to keep silence, would have taken the money, and then have broken her word.

It must be remembered that all the time this bargaining is going forward for the sale and purchase of these wretched libels, Paris—nay, France itself—is in a state of ferment, what with the meeting of its states-general, the quarrels of its first and third orders, the braving of the royal authority, the dismissal of Necker; with troops constantly under arms, riots out of which bloodshed arises in the streets, the tocsin sounding from all steeples, attacks upon the prisons, the states-general in permanent session, to be followed ere long by the storming and capture of the Bastille—in other words, a Revolution!