Marie Antoinette

AS the summer of 1784 broadened through May and June it led on the Queen to every grace of life, and at last, as it might have been imagined, to security. The season itself was fruitful and serene: the establishment of prestige abroad—so often a forerunner of evil to European nations—was now triumphantly achieved. There was now about the Court an air of solidity and permanence which the visit of foreign princes continued to confirm, and this air (thanks to Calonne’s largesse) seemed less poisoned by that financial ill-ease which had turned even the last victories of the American War into doubtful and anxious things.

Marie Antoinette had entered into that content and calm which often introduces middle age after a youth tormented by an inward insecurity. Her inheritance was sure. Her children had not yet betrayed the doom of their blood. The legend of her follies meant daily a little less, because daily it became more and more of a legend worn by time, dangerous only if its set formula should be filled with life and reality by some new scandal. The violence of her youth now seemed exorcised; her fulness of feature, which had shocked the taste of Louis XV.’s Court, accorded with these her later functions of authority. She was indeed in that full flower of womanhood which later so perturbed the memories of Burke and lent one famous passage of sincerity to his false political rhetoric.

As Marie Antoinette so entered at last into maturity, and, it would seem, into peace, the comedy which was to bring upon her every humiliation entered upon the Stage of this World. In the waters below her, Jeanne de La Motte de Valois, fishing for goldfish, struck and landed her Cardinal.

Gustavus of Sweden, Northerner and Flibbertigibert, the same that had slung diamond necklaces round the Du Barry’s little dog and the same that had despised the Dauphine, was at Court in the early days of that June, and saw the Queen now a woman; his affections were immediately moved. There was a touch of flirtation between them; on her side also a real friendship which for years continued in correspondence—for the softness of the North never failed to soothe and to relieve this Austrian woman caught in the hardness of French rules and the pressure of French vitality. He had come as the “Comte de Haga,” and she feasted him well. That new toy, a balloon, was sent up to amuse him—she had it called by her name—and he was shown all that Trianon could show by day or by night. She was the more gracious from the awkwardness of Louis, who came ill-dressed to meet Gustavus and who was slow with him. She gave him deference. She consented, at one great supper of hers, to stand with her women and supervise all, while he was seated. Only she would not dance with him; she said she danced no more....

Meanwhile accompanying the King of Sweden and ever at his side, Fersen was come again to Versailles.

Fersen was now a man. War had made him. Marie Antoinette could silently watch in him a very different carriage and a new alertness of the visage, but his eyes still bore the tender respect that she had known and remembered.

He was now for some years to come and go between Versailles and the world. He was a colonel of French Horse, and his place was made....

The King of Sweden went down well; the Court was full of him. The Queen surpassed herself in well-receiving him.

The month of June was filled with this sincere and pleasing gaiety; but all that June, far off, the La Motte was going and coming in her secret ways, talking to the Cardinal of letters to her “from the Queen,” assuring him that these letters gave proof of his growing favour. She did more and boldly; she affected to show him those royal letters!

There was a soldier of sorts, cynical, ramshackle, hard up, like all her gang, Rétaux de Villette by name; he it was who wrote these letters whenever the La Motte might ask him—so much a time. They must have amused him as he wrote them! He was at no pains to disguise his hand; he wrote straight out to his “dear heart,” the Countess de La Motte Valois, anything she asked him to write—especially praise of Rohan—and when he had written it (at so much a time) he would boldly sign “Marie Antoinette” with a flourish; and the La Motte would show the letter to Rohan, and Rohan (that is the amazing and simple truth) would believe them to be the Queen’s!

If the Cardinal had any doubts at all they were easily dispersed. Cagliostro, who enjoyed the Illumination of the Seventh House and had powers from the other world, most strongly reassured him—for a fee; the seen and unseen powers all combined to reassure the fatuous Rohan, and he was ready, as June ended, to believe not only that he was in favour with the Queen but in very peculiar favour indeed, and that all this show of avoidance and silence upon her part was a mask necessary to conceal a deeply-rooted tenderness. She might turn her head away when the Grand Almoner passed on his rare and pompous occasions of ecclesiastical office in the galleries of Versailles. She might refuse to speak to him a single word. She might, whenever she deigned to speak of him to others, speak with complete contempt and disgust. She might (as she had and did) successfully prevent the smallest honour or moneys coming to him. But, oh! he saw it all! It was but a mask to hide her great love—and, sooner or later, he would have his reward for such long and patient waiting!

He in his turn wrote—constantly. To the letters the La Motte showed him—dainty scented notes on little dainty sheets of gilded blue (but written, alas! by such rough hands)—he would answer, with imploring, respectful, adoring lines, handed to the La Motte, that she might give them to her great and high friend. Now he could understand why Cagliostro had promised him in oracular enigmas that “glory would come to him from a correspondence,” and that “full power with the Government” was immediately awaiting him. He was ready to assume it.

July was empty enough for the Queen. Her guest was gone; there was little doing at Versailles. Her amusements, especially her theatre, she had deliberately given up, determined to let the legend against her die. She waited through the dull month a little worried. Her brother the Emperor was still fussing about his diplomatic quarrel, the opening of the Scheldt, and the rest of it; she was anxious for him and for peace. Henry of Prussia would soon be visiting Versailles, there intriguing (as she dreaded) against her Austrian House. But, on the whole, the month of July 1784 was a dull month for her. It was not dull for the La Mottes.

The male La Motte in early July sauntered, on those fine sunny days, in the Palais Royal. He was looking for something; he was looking for a face and a figure not too unlike those of the Queen of France. It was not a difficult thing to find; the type was common enough, and in the first days of his search he found it. The woman was a woman of the town, young, with a swelled heart, as it were, and no brains; she was timid, she was ready to swallow anything offered her. He followed her with gallantry, and found that her professional name was d’Oliva; her true name the more humble one of Le Quay. For a week or so this new lover of hers went on like any other, he appeared and reappeared most naturally; but when the week was over and he had grown most familiar to her—and perhaps with his birth and high accent most revered—La Motte confided to her great and flattering news. There was a great Lady at Court who sought her aid in a matter of vast importance, and that great Lady spoke perhaps for a Lady greater still. The grandeur of the position was left to brew, and on the 22nd of July, when it was already dusk, the great Lady (who was the female La Motte) swept into the poor girl’s humble lodgings—a vision of the Court and the high world; she told the wide-eyed hussy things that seemed too lofty for human ears. The Queen had need of her.

For herself, said the La Motte, she was the Queen’s one great, near friend (she showed a letter—one of the famous letters), and if the d’Oliva would do as she was begged to do, the gratitude of the Queen would far excel in effect the paltry 400 pounds that she, La Motte, would give. Come, would she help the Queen?

Oh yes! the d’Oliva would help the Queen! She would come next day to Versailles!

Why, then, all was well.... And that very night, posthaste, the interview over, Madame de La Motte galloped off to Versailles to take a room with her maid.

For the Queen the dreary month was ending—there was no trouble upon her horizon. She had written again to Sweden; she asked for, and obtained, the reversion of the See of Albi for a friend of the King of Sweden’s. There was no other news.

History does not show perhaps one situation more wonderfully unlike the common half-happenings, complexities and reactions of real life, nor one more wonderfully fulfilling the violent and exact, simple, and pre-arranged ironies of drama, than the contrast of that night: the Queen in the palace, ignorant of any ill save the old and dwindling tales against her, listless after a summer month of idleness and of restraint—and coming right up at her, down the Paris road, the woman who was to destroy her altogether.

The La Motte and her maid got in to Versailles very late. They took rooms at the Belle Image. Next day La Motte and Rétaux, the soldier, came, bringing the poor girl d’Oliva with them; and after a short walk in the town, during which she was left in the hotel with that “great Lady,” before whom she trembled, they told the d’Oliva that they had seen the Queen and that all was well. They waited till the morrow. On the evening of that morrow, the 24th of July, Madame de La Motte warned the d’Oliva that the time was come. She dressed her all in white, magnificently; she gave her a letter and a rose, and said: “To-night we go into the Park together, and there you will see for a moment a great Lord. Give him this letter and that rose, and say these words: ‘You know my meaning!’ You will have no more to do.” It was about eleven, a dark night and no moon, when the two women went together into the vast gardens of the palace.

As you stand in the centre of the great façade of Versailles and look westward down a mile of formal lawn and water, there lie to your left in the palace what were the Queen’s rooms, and to your left in the gardens a large grove called “the Queen’s Grove,” in which are the trees that can be seen nearest to her windows or to be reached most quickly from what were her private doors.

Near and within this grove, by an appointment which the La Motte had sworn him to observe, paced and repaced the Cardinal. The La Motte had told him he would see the Queen.

In an enormous cloak of dark mysterious blue that covered his purple to the heels, in a broad soft hat that flapped down and hid his face, this fool of magnitude paced the gardens of Versailles and waited for the delicious hour. Behind him as he paced followed respectfully a man of his—one Planta, a sort of insignificant noble. The hour came. The_La Motte found the Cardinal. She led him along a path among the high trees—and there for a moment, near a hornbeam hedge that grew there, he saw dimly a woman in white, showing tall and vague in the darkness. This figure held forward to him in some confusion a rose, and said very low, “You know my meaning!” Rohan seized the hem of the white dress and kissed it passionately, but before another word could pass a man came forward at speed and whispered as in an agony: “Madame! D’Artois is near—Madame!” The La Motte said “Quick!...” The thing in white slipped back into the shadow of a bush, the Cardinal was hurried away—but his life had reached its summit! He had heard dear words from the lips of the Queen!...

Marie Antoinette was asleep perhaps, or perhaps chatting, muffled, with Polignac’s wife, or perhaps, more likely, by her children’s nursery beds, watching their repose and questioning their nurse in the wing of the great palace hard by. A hundred yards away, in the darkness of the grove outside, that scene had passed which set the train of her destiny alight; and the explosion caused by it ruined all that creviced society of Versailles and cast it down, casting down with it the Queen.

There existed at that time necklace. Fantastic stories have been told of its value; of those sovereigns to whom it was offered, and who, with a sigh, had been compelled to refuse it. It may very likely have been offered to Marie Antoinette (with her old passion for jewels) some years before, in ’79, after the birth of her first child. It may be that the King would have given her the expensive thing—£64,000 was the price of it—it may be he had never seen it. At any rate, all the world knew that the unrivalled necklace existed, and had for some years existed as the property of two Court jewellers who worked in partnership, Boehmer and Bassange, and that they could not find a purchaser. The reader should remember this necklace, for though it will not be before him till six months after this July of ’84, yet, but for the scene in the “Queen’s Grove,” Rohan would never have handled it, and had Rohan never handled it, there would not have arisen that enormous scandal that came so opportune to new rumours and new angers, and in the end dragged down the Queen.

With August came Prince Henry of Prussia and all the bother of him. The Emperor was pressing the Dutch more and more. France was half inclined to prevent that pressure, in spite of the Austrian Alliance. France was determined, at any rate, to prevent Austria, allied or not, from strengthening herself upon the North and East. England, to keep the Scheldt shut, was more than half inclined to prevent that pressure, in spite of Holland’s attitude during the American War. Prussia stood by to gain—and part of Prussia’s chance was the opportunity of feeling and influencing Louis XVI.’s Cabinet.

Prince Henry came, as Frederick’s brother, to feel and to influence; to see how much could be done by way of separating Vienna from Versailles. It was a strain on the Queen. What could she know of these intrigues and counter-intrigues? She saw things, now as ever, few and plain; she saw a Prussian attempt to separate her House and the House into which she had married. Therefore Prince Henry’s visit was a difficulty to her. She solved it as one might expect of her character, by avoiding him. She wrote to the King of Sweden a little too familiarly, and assured him that she had hardly seen the visitor: she “was at Trianon continually, with intimates only.” Paris thought much of him (for Prussia was then, as now, efficient); she was very properly fatigued, but, improperly, she did not conquer her fatigue. During all his stay he saw her perhaps not half-a-dozen times, though he (as might be expected of his character or of any of his descendants, ancestors, or collaterals) stayed on and on and on.... He stayed steadily on in France till November!—and before November enough had happened!

The little Dauphin was really ill. His mother was anxious. St. Cloud was bought for him, in some vague hope that the “air” was better there—as though the “air” of one suburb more than another could cure the rickets of the Bourbons.

Next, it was known that the Queen was again with child. She wrote of it (familiarly enough) to the King of Sweden.

More than this, war was apparent. The Emperor’s smouldering quarrel with the Dutch had broken into flame; upon the 4th of October 1784 an Imperial ship had sailed up the Scheldt to see if the Dutch would oppose an entry. The Dutch did oppose it; they shot at the Imperial ship and took it, and every ruler in Europe put his hand to the hilt of his sword.

So far Marie Antoinette had done little at Versailles but be worried by all this complex quarrel; a fortnight before the incident she had told her brother that “really she was not so important at Versailles”; she hoped it was a thing to shirk. Now that the guns had begun, she was in a panic and made a call upon her old and natural violence. She effected little: Vergennes and the tradition of French diplomacy were too much for such tantrums, but the superficial aspect of her action was striking. It was known that she continually saw the King, that she made scenes, that she stormed. It was known that she was “Austrian” in all this—if it was not understood by the people that she had failed. On the contrary, when in the upshot a compromise was arranged, she appeared once more in that most odious light—a woman sending French tribute to Vienna.

For when the Emperor consented to the closing of the Scheldt (it was not till February of the next year that he gave way), the French Cabinet, which had firmly supported Holland, was gradually influenced to guarantee the indemnity which the dignity of the Imperial Crown demanded: it was close on ten million florins.^[7] The Dutch refused so large a sum. The Queen wrote, cajoled, insisted in favour of her brother, her House and Austria. The French Foreign Office, true to its tradition of taking material interests seriously, stood firm and backed Holland steadily. At last the French agreed to take over and to pay as sponsors for Holland one-half the sum demanded of the Dutch Government, if thereby they might avoid war in Europe.

The payment was due to the Queen’s vigour or interference, and meanwhile there had arisen one of those large and sudden affairs which give everything around them a new meaning, which emphasise every coincident evil, and draw together into their atmosphere every ill-will and every calumny. Just before Marie Antoinette appeared before the populace as one who was sending millions of French treasure to her foreign brother came the explosion—in the interval of all this diplomacy and negotiation—of what is called in history “The Affair of the Diamond Necklace.” The truth with regard to that famous business is as follows:—

When the Cardinal de Rohan left the Park that midnight of July after the rapture of a word from the ridiculous d’Oliva, he was fallen wholly in the hands of the La Motte. She it was, as he thought, who had done this great thing for him. She had given him the Queen; and he was now entirely sure of his right to act for Marie Antoinette and to serve her. The La Motte began by begging money of him for the Queen’s pet charities. She obtained it: first, two or three thousand pounds at the end of August. Rétaux wrote the letter: “It was for people whom she wanted to help.” Rétaux signed it with his “Marie Antoinette”: and Rohan paid. A few pounds of it went to the unhappy woman whom La Motte had used, the rest to creditors or show. Much at the time when the Scheldt business was at its height, just as Prince Henry was leaving and all were talking of the Queen, in the autumn of 1784 a new letter came (again from Rétaux’ hand) asking for four thousand. There was the signature “Marie Antoinette,” there the beloved terms, and Rohan blindly paid: his man took the money to the La Motte, “to give the Queen.” The Cardinal was sure of his way now; he was a master; the Queen was under obligations to him. The money was spent in a very lavish display by the male and the female La Motte. They travelled with grandeur; they visited in a patronising manner the earlier home of their poverty; they lived high. With the end of the year 1784 more money was needed—and here enters into history that diamond necklace which had so long been waiting its cue to come upon the stage.

The name of La Motte was now current—in the mouth alone and among the populace, not at Court—for one who could do much. Bassange heard, from a friend, of the La Mottes: of Madame de La Motte. He sent the friend to see whether his white elephant of a necklace could be moved towards that quarter. Madame de La Motte said wisely that she must see the jewels, a day or two after Christmas. She saw them; for three weeks they were kept on the hook. Upon the 21st of January 1785, a date that has appeared before and will appear again in this history, she sent and told them that the Queen would buy, but (in her usual manner) a “great lord” would be the intermediary; and on the 24th, by the time it was full daylight, the great lord came in the winter morning to do that little thing which led to so much at last. It was the Cardinal de Rohan who came, handled the jewels, bargained, promised four payments (at six-monthly intervals) of £16,000 each, the first for the 1st of August (the date should be noted), and demanded delivery on the 1st of February. The jewellers brought the gems on that day to his great palace in the Marais, and he then told them frankly that the buyer behind him was the Queen.

They saw a signature, “Marie Antoinette de France”; they saw a part at least of a letter, to the effect that she the Queen was not accustomed to accommodation and therefore begged him to negotiate. They were satisfied, left the necklace, and were gone. That night the Cardinal gave it to Madame de La Motte at Versailles, or rather, hiding himself in an alcove, saw it given to a man who acted the part of the Queen’s messenger and who was, of course, Rétaux.

All this, I say, passed on the 1st of February 1785.

Next day, Candlemas—just two years after Madame de La Motte had made her desperate effort to approach the Queen with a petition—Rohan and the jeweller, one as Grand Almoner in the high religious function of the day, the other as a man in the crowd, each watched the royal party go by and noted the Queen; each missed the jewel that surely she should be wearing on the morrow of its purchase, and each saw that it was not yet worn. Each for different reasons wondered, but each for different reasons was silent, and each determined, for different reasons, to wait. Meanwhile the necklace was in the custody of the male La Motte ready for its journey to London, the refuge of the oppressed.

Lent passed. On Easter Sunday the Queen’s third child—he who became the Dauphin of the Imprisonment—was born. If, thought Rohan, the Queen had purposely waited before putting on the necklace, in order to avoid a coincidence of date between his visit to the jewellers and her first wearing of the gem, surely a long enough space would have passed by the time of the Relevailles, the ceremonial churching in Notre Dame which followed the birth of every member of the Blood Royal. The Relevailles approached. It was more than eight months since the Cardinal had been given that rose at midnight, and he began to grow anxious. The necklace haunted him.... Far off in London the male La Motte was selling, stone by stone, the better part of it; the rest Rétaux was carefully disposing of in Paris itself.

It was on May 24 that the Queen proceeded to Paris for the ceremony of the Relevailles. All the antique grandeur was there and the crowds, but over all of it and over the crowds a new and dreadful element of popular silence. The guns saluted her through a silent air. In the streets of the University the very wheels of her carriage could be heard, so hushed was the crowd. The rich in the opera that evening cheered her, but going in and coming out through popular thousands she heard no cheers. She supped in the Temple with Artois, whose appanage the liberties of the Temple were, and she could see through the night in his garden, as she had seen so often before in his feasts and his receptions, the dimmer and more huge from the blaze of light near by, that ominous great Tower which, it is said, she had always dreaded and dreaded more acutely now with an access of superstitious fear. “Oh! Artois, pull it down!”

The Grand Almoner was present at this high function; he watched her and marvelled that the necklace should still be hidden away.

The next morning she could be certain how Paris had changed. There was throughout its air a mixture of indifference and of dislike that poisoned her society with it. Paris now thought of her fixedly as the living extravagance of the Court. St. Cloud was at their gates to reproach her, with its title of the “Queen’s Palace,” its printed “Queen’s” orders on the gate. The Deficit was there to reproach her. Her very economies, the lessened festivities, the abandoned journeys of the Court, her rarer and more rare appearances in the capital, the lack of noise in Trianon, were, in the public mouth, a consequence of past excesses. The judgment was false, but it stood firm.

Her undue influence over the King and the councils of the King was another legend, less false than that of gross extravagance. There was no proof, but a crowd has more judgment than an isolated man, and the crowd divined what we now know. They had divined it in this critical year which saw France balancing on the verge of war with Austria, and which, before its close, saw the payment of the Dutch indemnity by the French to the Queen’s brother at Vienna. All her action for twelve months was wholly Austrian in their eyes, and they were wholly right. It was in such a popular atmosphere, so sullen and so prepared, full for a year past of “Figaro’s” ironic laughter against a régime already hurrying to its end, that the explosion of that summer was to come; for the 1st of August was near, and with it the time for the first instalment upon the necklace.

In June the Count de La Motte was back from London paying part of the money he had received for the diamonds to a Paris banker—one Perregaux.

In July—on the mid-Tuesday of the month—Boehmer in his capacity of Court Jeweller brought to Versailles certain jewels. He brought with him also a letter which he gave to the Queen at mid-day as she came out of Mass; he gave her the letter with mystery and with profound respect, and was gone. The Queen read that note; it was incomprehensible to her. It assured her of her jewellers’ unalterable devotion; it begged her to believe that Boehmer and Bassange were willing to accept her “latest proposals,” and it ended with their satisfaction that “the finest set of diamonds in the world should adorn the greatest and the best of its Queens.” Whether Marie Antoinette had even heard of the necklace in the past we cannot tell, though probably, like all the rest of the world, she had. Whether she had or not, the note was equally mysterious to her. The Comptroller of the Household, the Baron de Breteuil, was told of the little bother; he sent for Boehmer, asked him what on earth the note meant, but he only received mysterious replies leading nowhere.

If it be asked by the reader why, seeing a complication of some sort before her, Marie Antoinette did not at once order an investigation to be pursued by the police, the answer is simple enough to any one acquainted with her character: the annoyance bored her. Her instinct was simply to avoid it. She may (some say so) have spared herself trouble upon some theory that the jeweller was mad: anyhow, she spared herself trouble.

If it be asked how the complication ever arose, why that enigmatical letter was written, and why, once written and delivered, Boehmer should have hesitated and equivocated meaninglessly in his answers to Breteuil, the answer is simple when one hears what had just passed in that lower world of duped Cardinal and intriguing, most impudent of adventurers, rapscallions and spiritualists.

Madame de La Motte had been driving Rétaux of late to write more frequently than ever his “Marie Antoinette” letters to the Cardinal. The poor soldier was not a woman, he was not even a writer of fiction, and he had been kept hard at it to force the note of love so often and in such various ways; until at last, one letter had been ordered of him saying, as the date of the first instalment approached, that “really the price was too high.” Couldn’t the Cardinal, for her sake, get some £8000 off the price? If he could, the Queen would pay on the 1st of August, not the £16,000 then due, but a full £28,000. The Cardinal read and obeyed. The jewellers were agreeable. Hence Boehmer’s note of July 12th, and hence (since he was convinced that the Queen, by the very method of her purchase, desired secrecy above all things) his evasive replies to De Breteuil.

Thus, in that world beneath of which she knew nothing, things were coming to an issue against Marie Antoinette: one last event did all. Upon the Saturday before the payment was due, the Cardinal (acting upon a further letter) gave Boehmer something over £1000 and said to him that it was free money—over and above the fixed price—to console him for the unwelcome news that the first instalment could not be met quite punctually. Come, the Queen would certainly pay on the 1st of October; it was but two months to wait. He had seen it in a note of the Queen’s which the Countess de La Motte had just shown him.

It is probable that even the Cardinal had become suspicious now—he says as much himself—but his pride and his fear of exposure held him. As for the jeweller, the interview of that Saturday broke his back; he was distracted. On the Tuesday (or the Wednesday) the climax of the comedy was reached. The Countess de La Motte met the two partners Boehmer and Bassange together, and told them boldly that the signature “Marie Antoinette de France” was a forgery—so there! In the stupefaction that followed she added the quiet advice that for their money they must bleed the Cardinal—“He had plenty”—and so left them.

Then followed that general scurry which is the note of embroglios as they flare up towards their end. Bassange runs here, Boehmer runs there; the one to Rohan in his Episcopal Palace, the other to those who can help him with the Queen—notably to Madame Campan, who has left an exaggerated and distorted account of the interview. To Bassange the Cardinal (anything to gain time in the hurly-burly) swears the signature is true; to Boehmer Madame Campan, with her solid, upper-servant face, announces the redundant truth that he seems to have been let in. As for the La Motte, she flies to Rohan, and he (anything to keep things dark and to protect a witness to his incalculable stupidity of a coxcomb) consents to hide her; he gives her asylum in his great house.

Next Boehmer goes to Versailles—at once—and implores the Queen to see him. The Queen has really had her fill of this kind of thing; she refuses. But next week she consents, and the revelations begin.

It was at such a moment, with such storms about her, in the full and growing unpopularity of her Austrian influence in the affair of the Dutch indemnity, in the full and growing renascence of the legend of her extravagance, that Marie Antoinette had determined not only to play once more in her theatre at Trianon—the chief reproach of the past, a legend with the populace for unqueenly exposure, for lack of dignity, for expense—not only to break her wise resolve, which had been kept for more than a year, that her plays should cease, but actually to play another piece by that same Beaumarchais whose wit was the spear-head of the attack upon the old régime. The decision came neither of cynicism nor of folly upon her part; it came of tragic ignorance.

It was while she was rehearsing her part of “Rosine” that she was persuaded—probably by Madame Campan herself—to send for Boehmer and to hear his tale. He came upon the 9th of August, Tuesday, by the Queen’s command, to Trianon. At first he simply asked for the money he believed his due. When he saw that Marie Antoinette neither understood why it should be paid, nor for what, nor by whom, he told the whole story as he had heard it. He was sent off to write down coherently and at length in a clear memorandum the details of this amazing thing, and when he had gone the Queen raved.

Each consequence and aspect of the abomination, as each successively appeared to her, struck her with separate and aggravated blows. Her name linked with a libertine whom, of all libertines, she most loathed—a man who was the object of her dead mother’s especial contempt! The half-truths that would come in; her love of jewellery—now long conquered, but now widely remembered! Her secret debts—now long paid, but already a fixed idea in the public mind! At the best that such a man had thought it conceivable that she should be such a woman; at the worst that the world might believe it!

Upon Friday the report of Boehmer came in. She mastered it that day and the next, and on Sunday the 14th, the eve of the Assumption, she begged her husband to spend all the day with her at Trianon. He willingly came. They together—but surely at her initiative—determined on a public trial. Mercy would have done what we do now in England when there is danger of public scandal and the weakening of government; he would have paid the La Motte woman something to be off. Vergennes was strongly in favour of silence—as strongly as Downing Street would be to-day—for he was of the trained diplomatic kind. The King’s honour, the Queen’s intense and burning indignation against calumny persuaded them to risk publicity.

The course taken was, I repeat, not a course easy for my modern readers to understand; we take it for granted in the modern world, and especially in England, that a matter of this sort, involving, as it were, all the social fabric, is best snuffed out. Thus the French Foreign Office were willing to destroy the Pannizardi telegram, and rather give a traitor the advantage of concealing damning evidence against himself than to risk a rupture with Italy. Thus the English Home Office allows criminals of a certain standing to go free rather than endanger social influences whose secrecy is thought necessary to the State; nor do we allow any to know what sums or how large are paid for public honours, nor always to what objects secret subscriptions of questionable origin—in Egypt, for instance—are devoted. Louis XVI. and his wife at this critical moment decided otherwise and upon another theory of morals. They decided to clear by public trial the honour of the Crown. That decision, more than any other act, cost them their thrones. It has preserved the truth for history.

The Feast of the Assumption has for centuries attracted the French by its peculiar sanctity. Even during that phase of infidelity, which, before the Revolution, covered all their intellect and still clings to the bulk of their lower middle classes, the French maintained it. Even to-day, when a fierce anti-Christian masonry has moulded groups of artisans and intellectuals into ardent champions against the Faith, the Assumption is universally observed. In the Court of Versailles, though now but a ceremony, it was the noblest ceremony of the year.

It was warm noon upon that 15th of August. The Court in all its colours stood ranked outside the Chapel Royal. The Grand Almoner, the Cardinal de Rohan, taller than the prelates and the priests around him, stood ready in procession to enter and to celebrate the Pontifical High Mass as soon as the King and Queen might appear; but the King and Queen and a Minister or two in attendance were waiting behind closed doors in Louis’ private room. The procession still halted: the Court was already impatient: the doors still stood closed. They opened; a servant came out and told the Cardinal that the King wished to see him a moment. The servant and he went in together, and the doors shut behind the purple of Rohan’s robes and the lace upon his wrists and shoulders.

The Court outside grew weary of waiting. A quarter of an hour, twenty minutes passed; it was near the half-hour when those doors opened again and the Head of the King’s Household, the Baron de Breteuil, appeared with the Cardinal at his side. A lieutenant of the Guard happened to be by. Breteuil summoned him and said aloud: “The King orders you not to leave the Cardinal as you take him to his palace: you are answerable for his person.”

So Rohan was arrested, and there is no record who sang Mass that day.