The cardinal could scarcely stand; he leaned against the table. “Sir,” he stammered, “I am too much overcome to be able to reply.” “Walk into this room, cardinal,” rejoined the king kindly; “write what you have to say to me.” The written explanations of M. de Rohan were no clearer than his words; an officer of the body-guard took him off to the Bastille; he had, just time to order his grand-vicar to burn all his papers.

The correspondence as well as the life of M. de Rohan was not worthy of a prince of the church: the vices and the credulity of the cardinal had given him over, bound hand and foot, to an intriguing woman as adroit as she was daring. Descended from a bastard of Henry II.‘s, brought up by charity and married to a ruined nobleman, Madame de la Motte Valois had bewitched, duped, and robbed Cardinal Rohan. Accustomed to an insensate prodigality, asserting everywhere that a man of gallantry could not live on twelve hundred thousand livres a year, he had considered it very natural that the queen should have a fancy for possessing a diamond necklace worth sixteen hundred thousand livres. The jewellers had, in fact, offered this jewelry to Marie Antoinette; it was during the American war. “That is the price of two frigates,” the king had said. “We want ships and not diamonds,” said the queen, and dismissed her jeweller. A few months afterwards he told anybody who would listen that he had sold the famous collar in Constantinople for the favorite sultana. “This was a real pleasure to the queen,” says Madame Campan; “she, however, expressed some astonishment that a necklace made for the adornment of Frenchwomen should be worn in the seraglio, and, thereupon, she talked to me a long while about the total change which took place in the tastes and desires of women in the period between twenty and thirty years of age. She told me that when she was ten years younger she loved diamonds madly, but that she had no longer any taste for anything but private society, the country, the work and the attentions required by the education of her children. From that moment until the fatal crisis there was nothing more said about the necklace.”

The crisis would naturally come from the want of money felt by the jewellers. Madame de la Motte had paid them some instalments on account of the stones, which her husband had sold in England: they grew impatient and applied to the queen. For a long while she did not understand their applications: when the complaints of the purveyors at last made her apprehend an intrigue, she sent for Abbe de Vermond and Baron de Breteuil, minister of the king’s household both detested the cardinal, both fanned the queen’s wrath; she decided at last to tell the king everything. “I saw the queen after the departure of the baron and the abbe,” says Madame Campan; “she made me tremble at her indignation.” The cardinal renounced the privileges of his rank and condition; he boldly accepted the jurisdiction of the Parliament.

The trial revealed a gross intrigue, a disgraceful comedy, a prince of the church and a merchant equally befooled by a shameless woman, with the aid of the adventurer Cagliostro, and the name, the favors, and even the personality of the queen impudently dragged in. The public feeling was at its height, constantly over-excited by the rumors circulated during the sessions of the court. Opinion was hostile to the queen. “It was for her and by her orders that the necklace was bought,” people said. The houses of Conde and Rohan were not afraid to take sides with the cardinal: these illustrious personages were to be seen, dressed in mourning, waiting for the magistrates on their way, in order to canvass them on their relative’s behalf. On the 31st of May, 1786, the court condemned Madame de la Motte to be whipped, branded, and imprisoned; they purely and simply acquitted Cardinal Rohan. In its long and continual tussle with the crown, the Parliament had at last found the day of its revenge: political passions and the vagaries of public opinion had blinded the magistrates.

“As soon as I knew the cardinal’s sentence, I went to the queen,” says Madame Campan. “She heard my voice in the room leading to her closet; she called to me. I found her very sad. She said to me in a broken voice: ‘Condole with me; the intriguer who wanted to ruin me, or procure money by using my name and forging my signature, has just been fully acquitted. But,’ she added vehemently, ‘as a Frenchwoman, accept my condolence. A people is very unfortunate to have for its supreme tribunal a lot of men who consult nothing but their passions, and of whom some are capable of bribery and others of an audacity which they have always displayed towards authority, and of which they have just given a striking example against those who are clothed therewith.’ The king entered at this moment. ‘You find the queen in great affliction,’ he said to me: ‘she has great reason to be. But what then! They would not see in this business anything save a prince of the church and the prince of Rohan, whereas it is only the case of a man in want of money and a mere dodge for raising the wind, wherein the cardinal has been swindled in his turn. Nothing can be easier to understand, and it needs no Alexander to cut this Gordian knot.’”

Guilty in the king’s eyes, a dupe according to the judgment of history, Cardinal Rohan was exiled to his abbey of Chaise-Dieu, less to be pitied than the unhappy queen abruptly wrenched from the sweet dreams of a romantic friendship and confidence, as well as from the nascent joys of maternal happiness, to find herself henceforth confronting a deluded people and an ever increasing hostility which was destined to unjustly persecute her even to the block.

M. de Calonne had taken little part in the excitement which the trial of Cardinal Rohan caused in court and city he was absorbed by the incessantly recurring difficulties presented by the condition of the treasury; speculation had extended to all classes of society; loans succeeded loans, everywhere there were formed financial companies, without any resources to speak of, speculating on credit. Parliament began to be alarmed, and enregistered no more credits save with repugnance. Just as he was setting out on a trip to Normandy, which afforded him one of the last happy days of his life and as it were a dying flicker of his past popularity, the king scratched out on the registers of the Parliament the restrictions introduced by the court into the new loan of eighty millions presented by M. de Calonne. “I wish it to be known that I am satisfied with my comptroller-general,” said Louis XVI. with that easy confidence which he did not always place wisely. When he returned from Cherbourg, at the end of June, 1786, M. de Calonne had at last arrived at the extremity of his financial expedients. He set his views and his ideas higher. Speculation was succeeded by policy.

“Sir,” said the note handed to the king by the comptroller-general, “I will not go back to the fearful position in which the finances were when your Majesty deigned to intrust them to me. It is impossible to recall without a shudder that there was at that time neither money nor credit, that the pressing debts were immense, the revenues exhausted in anticipation, the resources annihilated, the public securities valueless, the coinage impoverished and without circulation, the discount-fund bankrupt, the general tax-exchequer (ferme general) on the point of failing to meet its bills, and the royal treasury reduced to two bags of 1200 livres. I am far from claiming credit for the success of the operations which, owing to the continuous support given by your Majesty, promptly established abundance of coin, punctuality in the payments, public confidence proved by the rise in all securities and by the highest degree of credit, abroad as well as at home: what I must forcibly call your Majesty’s attention to is the importance of the present moment, the terrible embarrassment concealed beneath the appearance of the happiest tranquillity, the necessity of soon taking some measure for deciding the lot of the state. It must be confessed, Sir, that France at this moment is only kept up by a species of artifice; if the illusion which stands for reality were destroyed, if the confidence at present inseparable from the working staff were to fail, what would become of us with a deficit of a hundred millions every year? Without a doubt no time must be lost in filling up a void so enormous; and that can be done only by great measures. The plan I have formed appears to me the one that can solve so difficult a problem. Solely occupied with this great object, which demands enormous labor, and for the accomplishment of which I would willingly sacrifice my existence, I only beg your Majesty to accord to me, until I have carried it out, so much support and appearance of favor as I need to give me strength to attain it. It will perhaps be an affair of six months or a year at most. After that your Majesty may do as you please with me; I shall have followed the promptings of the heartiest zeal for your service, I shall be able to say,—

‘Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domino.’”