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.