“No!” said the lady; “What message should she give?”
“An answer to my note,” said the jeweler.
Madame remembered a note which the Queen had received from Boehmer a little while before, along with some ornaments sent by his hands to her as a present from the King. It congratulated her on having the finest diamonds in Europe, and hoped she would remember him. The Queen could make nothing of it, and destroyed it. Madame Campan therefore replied,
“There is no answer, the Queen burned the note. She does not even understand what you meant by writing that note.”
This statement very quickly elicited from the now startled German a story which astounded the lady. He said the Queen owed him the first instalment of the money for the diamond necklace; that she had bought it after all; that the story about the Sultana was a lie told by her directions to hide the fact; since the Queen meant to pay by instalments, and did not wish the purchase known. And Boehmer said, she had employed the Cardinal de Rohan to buy the necklace for her, and it had been delivered to him for her, and by him to her.
Now the Queen, as Madame Campan knew very well, had always strongly disliked this Cardinal; he had even been kept from attending at Court in consequence, and she had not so much as spoken to him for years. And so Madame Campan told Boehmer, and further she told him he had been imposed upon.
“No,” said the man of sparklers decisively, “It is you who are deceived. She is decidedly friendly to the cardinal. I have myself the documents with her own signature authorizing the transaction, for I have had to let the bankers see them in order to get a little time on my own payments.”
Here was a monstrous mystification for the lady of honor, who told Boehmer to instantly go and see his official superior, the chief of the king’s household. She herself being very soon afterwards summoned to the Queen’s presence, the affair came up, and she told the Queen all she knew about it. Marie Antoinette was profoundly distressed by the evident existence of a great scandal and swindle, with which she was plainly to be mixed up through the forged signatures to the documents which Boehmer had been relying on.
Now for the Cardinal.
Louis de Rohan, a scion of the great house of Rohan, one of the proudest of France, was descended of the blood royal of Brittany; was a handsome, proud, dissolute, foolish, credulous, unprincipled noble, now almost fifty years old, a thorough rake, of large revenues, but deeply in debt. He was Peer of France, Archbishop of Strasburg, Grand Almoner of France, Commander of the Order of the Holy Ghost, Commendator of the benefice of St. Wast d’Arras, said to be the most wealthy in Europe, and a Cardinal. He had been ambassador at Vienna a little after Marie Antoinette was married to the Dauphin, and while there had taken advantage of his official station to do a tremendous quantity of smuggling. He had also further and most deeply offended the Empress Maria Theresa, by outrageous debaucheries, by gross irreligion, and above all by a rather flat but in effect stingingly satirical description of her conduct about the partition of Poland. This she never forgave him, neither did her daughter Marie Antoinette; and accordingly, when he presented himself at Paris soon after she became Queen, he received a curt repulse, and an intimation that he had better go to—Strasburg.