As Marie Antoinette continued to be “short of cash,” Rohan, who was himself heavily in debt and had misappropriated into the bargain the funds of various institutions of which he was the trustee, was obliged to borrow the money the Queen was supposed to be in need of from the Jews. His Eminence, however, at length became restive under these incessant demands for money. He even began to suspect that the Queen might be playing him false, and in spite of all the Countess’s explanations demanded some visible proof of the interest she professed to manifest in him.
It was at this juncture, when it seemed as if the game was up, that Lamotte, walking in the garden of the Palais Royal, met by accident an unfortunate female whose face bore a perfect resemblance to that of the Queen.[29] To such an intrigante as the Countess, this resemblance was sufficient material out of which to forge a fresh chain for the Cardinal. On August 11, 1784, between ten and eleven at night, “the unfortunate female”—Mlle. Leguay, Baroness d’Oliva or whatever she called herself—having been carefully trained and paid to represent Marie Antoinette, gave the Cardinal, “disguised as a mousquetaire,” a meeting in the park of Versailles, a meeting which the Countess de Lamotte was careful to interrupt ere it began, giving his Eminence barely time to kiss the hand of the supposed Queen, who as she was hurried away flung the kneeling prelate a rose as a token of her affection and esteem.
To Rohan that fleeting vision of the Queen of France served as the proof he had demanded. Henceforth the dream of his diseased fancy enveloped him as in a veil. Obsessed by a single idea, he became the blind instrument of the consummate enchantress by whom he was bewitched. After his romantic rendezvous in the park of Versailles, he advanced confidently and triumphantly to the abyss into which he was destined to plunge, without looking to the right or to the left, and seeing nothing but his vision of the Queen as she had dropped the rose at his feet.
So complete was his thraldom, that later in the depth of his abasement, when he lay in the terrible solitude of the Bastille, charged with swindling a jeweller of a necklace, it was with difficulty that Rohan could bring himself to believe, not that he had been basely betrayed by the Queen, but duped by Madame de Lamotte. “I was completely blinded by the immense desire I had to regain the favour of the Queen,” he said at his trial, in reply to the observations of the judges how a man so cultivated, so intelligent, and even so able, as he unquestionably was—his embassy in Vienna had been a brilliant success—should have become the plaything of the Countess de Lamotte.
“His incredible credulity,” says the Duc de Lévis, “was really the knot of the whole affair.” However, it is not so incredible as it seems. The very fact of his intelligence partially explains it. As Suzanne says to Figaro in the Barber of Seville, “intellectual men are fools,” particularly when there is a woman in the case, and Madame de Lamotte was clever and fascinating enough to have turned the head of the Devil himself.
As a result of this strategy the Countess managed to mulct the Cardinal of 150,000 livres. The figure that she cut on this money confirmed the rumours of her intimacy with the Queen, a circumstance she did not fail to turn to account. By paying those whom she owed she obtained from them and others still greater credit, whereby the foundations of the vast structure of deceit in which she lived were still further strengthened and extended. She had no longer to ask for credit, it was offered to her, and people even came to implore her to use her boasted influence at Court in their behalf. Some silk merchants of Lyons, who desired the patronage of the Queen, sent her a case of superb stuffs valued at 10,000 livres.
It was in this way that she became acquainted with Böhmer, the maker of the famous necklace.
Except the Cardinal, it would be impossible to imagine a more ridiculous monomaniac than this Saxon Jew. For over ten years he had locked up his whole fortune in a “matchless jewel” for which he was unable to find a purchaser. Marie Antoinette, in particular, had been pestered to buy it, till her patience being exhausted she ordered Böhmer never to mention it to her again.[30] He obeyed her, but none the less continued to hope she would change her mind. In the course of ten years this hope became a fixed idea, which he sought to realize by hook or crook. Thus hearing that Madame de Lamotte had great influence with the Queen, Böhmer came, like the silk merchants of Lyons and others, to purchase it if possible.
It did not take the wily Countess long to gauge the credulity of her visitor, or to make up her mind that it was worth her while to exploit it. Needless to say, a woman clever enough to persuade the Grand Almoner of France that a fille de joie of the Palais Royal from whom he had received a rose in the park of Versailles was Marie Antoinette, would have no difficulty in getting possession of Böhmer’s necklace.
The Cardinal, who had been marking time, so to speak, at Saverne ever since his adventure, was hastily summoned to Paris to perform a service for her Majesty concerning which she enjoined the strictest secrecy. When Rohan, who had travelled post in a blizzard, discovered what the service was he was staggered. No wonder. The Queen, he was informed, wished him to be her security for the purchase of the necklace, for which she had agreed to pay 1,600,000 livres (£64,000) in four instalments of equal amounts at intervals of six months. Madame de Lamotte, however, succeeded in persuading him to affix his signature to the necessary documents—and in due course Böhmer’s “matchless jewel” was in her possession.