PORTRAIT BUST OF THE DUKE OF NORMANDY, THE SECOND DAUPHIN,
SOMETIMES CALLED LOUIS XVII, WHO DIED IN THE TEMPLE
THIS BUST WAS BROKEN IN THE FALL OF THE PALACE,
AND HAS RECENTLY BEEN RECOVERED AND RESTORED TO VERSAILLES
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.