Marie Antoinette

by Hilaire Belloc

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.