Read Ebook: Maria Antoinette Makers of History by Abbott John S C John Stevens Cabot

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In a few days Madame Campan met Boehmer, and, in reply to her interrogatories, he informed her that the sultan at Constantinople had purchased it for the favorite sultana. The queen was highly gratified with the good fortune of the jeweler, and yet thought it very strange how the grand seignior should have purchased his diamonds at Paris. Matters continued in this state for some time, until the baptism of the Duke d'Angoul?me, Maria Antoinette's infant son. The king made his idolized boy a baptismal present of a diamond epaulette and buckles, which he purchased of Boehmer, and directed him to deliver to the queen. As the jeweler presented them, he slipped into the queen's hand a letter, in the form of a petition, containing the following expression:

"I am happy to see your majesty in the possession of the finest diamonds in Europe; and I entreat your majesty not to forget me."

The queen read this strange note aloud, again and again exclaiming, "What does the man mean? He must be insane!" She quietly lighted the note at a wax taper which was standing near her, and burned it, remarking that it was not worth keeping. Afterward, as she reflected more upon the enigmatical nature of the communication, she deeply regretted that she had not preserved the note. She pondered the matter deeply and anxiously, and at last said to Madame Campan,

"The next time you see that man, I wish that you would tell him that I have lost all taste for diamonds; that I never shall buy another as long as I live; and that, if I had any money to spare, I should expend it in purchasing lands to enlarge the grounds at St. Cloud."

A few days after this, Boehmer called upon Madame Campan at her country house, extremely uneasy at not having received any answer from the queen, and anxiously inquired if Madame Campan had no commission to him from her majesty. Madame Campan faithfully repeated to him all that the queen had requested her to say.

"But," rejoined Boehmer, "the answer to the letter I presented to her! To whom must I apply for that?"

"To no one," was the reply; "her majesty burned your memorial, without even comprehending its meaning."

"Ah, madame!" exclaimed the man, trembling with agitation, "that is impossible; the queen knows that she has money to pay me."

"Money, M. Boehmer!" replied the lady, "your last accounts against the queen were discharged long ago."

"And are you not in the secret?" he rejoined. "The queen owes me three hundred thousand dollars, and I am ruined by her neglect to pay me."

"Three hundred thousand dollars!" exclaimed Madame Campan, in amazement; "man, you have lost your senses! For what does she owe you that enormous sum?"

"For the necklace, madame," replied the jeweler, now pale and trembling with the apprehension that he had been deceived.

"The necklace again!" said Madame Campan. "How long is the queen to be teased about that necklace? Did not you yourself tell me that you had sold it at Constantinople?"

"The queen," added Boehmer, "requested me to make that reply to all who inquired upon the subject, for she was not willing to have it known that she had made the purchase. She, however, had determined to have the necklace, and sent the Cardinal de Rohan to me to take it in her name."

"You are utterly deceived, Boehmer," Madame Campan replied; "the queen knows nothing about your necklace. She never speaks even to the Cardinal de Rohan, and there is no man at court more strongly disliked by her."

"You may depend upon it, madame, that you are deceived yourself," rejoined the jeweler. "She must hold private interviews with the cardinal, for she gave to the cardinal six thousand dollars, which he paid me on account, and which he assured me he saw her take from the little porcelain secretary next the fire-place in her boudoir."

"Did the cardinal himself assure you of this?" inquired Madame Campan.

"Yes, madame," was the reply.

"What a detestable plot! There is not one word of truth in it; and you have been miserably deceived."

"Go immediately to Versailles, and lay the whole matter before the king. But you have been extremely culpable, as crown jeweler, in acting in a matter of such great importance without direct orders from the king or queen, or their accredited minister."

"I have not acted," the unhappy man replied, "without direct orders. I have now in my possession all the promissory notes, signed by the queen herself; and I have been obliged to show those notes to several bankers, my creditors, to induce them to extend the time of my payments."

Instead, however, of following Madame Campan's judicious advice, Boehmer, half delirious with solicitude, went directly to the cardinal, and informed him of all that had transpired. The cardinal appeared very much embarrassed, asked a few questions, and said but little. He, however, wrote in his diary the following memorandum:

"On this day, August 3, Boehmer went to Madame Campan's country-house, and she told him that the queen had never had his necklace, and that he had been cheated."

Boehmer was almost frantic with terror, for the loss of the necklace was his utter and irremediable ruin. Finding no relief in his interview with the cardinal, he hastened to Little Trianon, and sent a message to the queen that Madame Campan wished him to see her immediately. The queen, who knew nothing of the occurrences we have just related, exclaimed, "That man is surely mad. I have nothing to say to him, and I will not see him." Madame Campan, however, immediately called upon the queen, for she was very much alarmed by what she had heard, and related to her the whole occurrence. The queen was exceedingly amazed and perplexed, and feared that it was some deep-laid plot to involve her in difficulties. She questioned Madame Campan very minutely in reference to every particular of the interview, and insisted upon her repeating the conversation over and over again. They then went immediately to the king, and narrated to him the whole affair. He, aware of the many efforts which had been made to traduce the character of Maria Antoinette, and to expose her to public contumely, was at once convinced that it was a treacherous plot of the cardinal in revenge for his neglect at court.

The king instantly sent a command for the cardinal to meet him and the queen in the king's closet. He was, apparently, anticipating the summons, for he, without delay, appeared before them in all the pomp of his pontifical robes, but was nevertheless so embarrassed that he could with difficulty articulate a sentence.

"You have purchased diamonds of Boehmer?" inquired the king.

"Yes, sire," was the trembling reply.

"What have you done with them?" the king added.

"I thought," said the cardinal, "that they had been delivered to the queen."

"Who commissioned you to make this purchase?"

"The Countess Lamotte," was the reply. "She handed me a letter from the queen requesting me to obtain the necklace for her. I truly thought that I was obeying her majesty's wishes, and doing her a favor, by taking this business upon myself."

The cardinal was in the most violent agitation, and, apparently hardly knowing what he said, replied, "I see plainly that I have been duped. I will pay for the necklace myself. I suspected no trick in the affair, and am extremely sorry that I have had any thing to do with it."

He then took a letter from his pocket directed to the Countess Lamotte, and signed with the queen's name, requesting her to secure the purchase of the necklace. The king and queen looked at the letter, and instantly pronounced it a forgery. The king then took from his own pocket a letter addressed to the jeweler Boehmer, and, handing it to de Rohan, said,

"Are you the author of that letter?"

The cardinal turned pale, and, leaning upon his hand, appeared as though he would fall to the floor.

"I have no wish, cardinal," the king kindly replied, "to find you guilty. Explain to me this enigma. Account for all those maneuvers with Boehmer. Where did you obtain these securities and these promissory notes, signed in the queen's name, which have been given to Boehmer?"

The cardinal, trembling in every nerve, faintly replied, "Sire, I am too much agitated now to answer your majesty. Give me a little time to collect my thoughts."

The Countess Lamotte was also arrested, and held in close confinement to await her trial. She had just commenced living in a style of extraordinary splendor, and had vast sums at her disposal, acquired no one knew how. It is difficult to imagine the excitement which this story produced all over Europe. It was represented that the queen was found engaged in a swindling transaction with a profligate woman to cheat the crown jeweler out of gems of inestimable value, and that, being detected, she was employing all the influence of the crown to shield her own reputation by consigning the innocent cardinal to infamy. The enemies of the queen, sustained by the ecclesiastics generally, rallied around the cardinal. The king and queen, feeling that his acquittal would be the virtual condemnation of Maria Antoinette, and firmly convinced of his guilt, exerted their utmost influence, in self-defense, to bring him to punishment. Rumors and counter rumors floated through Versailles, Paris, and all the courts of the Continent. The tale was rehearsed in saloon and caf? with every conceivable addition and exaggeration, and the queen hardly knew which way to turn from the invectives which were so mercilessly showered upon her. Her lofty spirit, conscious of rectitude, sustained her in public, and there she nerved herself to appear with firmness and equanimity. But in the retirement of her boudoir she was unable to repel the most melancholy imaginings, and often wept with almost the anguish of a bursting heart. The sunshine of her life had now disappeared. Each succeeding day grew darker and darker with enveloping glooms.

The trial of the cardinal continued, with various interruptions, for more than a year. Very powerful parties were formed for and against him. All France was agitated by the protracted contest. The cardinal appeared before his judges in mourning robes, but with all the pageantry of the most imposing ecclesiastical costume. He was conducted into court with much ceremony, and treated with the greatest deference. In the trying moment in which he first appeared before his judges, his courage seemed utterly to fail him. Pale and trembling with emotion, his knees bent under him, and he had to cling to a support to prevent himself from falling to the floor. Five or six voices immediately addressed him in tones of sympathy, and the president said, "His eminence the cardinal is at liberty to sit down, if he wishes it." The distinguished prisoner immediately took his seat with the members of the court. Having soon recovered in some degree his composure, he arose, and for half an hour addressed his judges, with much feeling and dignity, repeating his protestations of entire innocence in the whole affair.

At the close of this protracted trial, the cardinal was fully acquitted of all guilt by a majority of three voices. The king and queen were extremely chagrined at this result. During the trial, many insulting insinuations were thrown out against the queen which could not easily be repelled. A friend who called upon her immediately after the decision, found her in her closet weeping bitterly. "Come," said Maria, "come and weep for your queen, insulted and sacrificed by cabal and injustice." The king came in at the same moment, and said, "You find the queen much afflicted; she has great reason to be so. They were determined through out this affair to see only an ecclesiastical prince, a Prince de Rohan, while he is, in fact, a needy fellow, and all this was but a scheme to put money into his pockets. It is not necessary to be an Alexander to cut this Gordian knot." The cardinal subsequently emigrated to Germany, where he lived in comparative obscurity till 1803, when he died.

The Countess Lamotte was brought to trial, but with a painfully different result. Dressed in the richest and most costly robes, the dissolute beauty appeared before her judges, and astonished them all by her imperturbable self-possession, her talents, and her cool effrontery. It was clearly proved that she had received the necklace; that she had sold here and there the diamonds of which it was composed, and had thus come into possession of large sums of money. She told all kinds of stories, contradicting herself in a thousand ways, accusing now one and again another as an accomplice, and unblushingly declaring that she had no intention to tell the truth, for that neither she nor the cardinal had uttered one single word before the court which had not been false. She was found guilty, and the following horrible sentence was pronounced against her: that she should be whipped upon the bare back in the court-yard of the prison; that the letter V should be burned into the flesh on each shoulder with a hot iron; and that she should be imprisoned for life. The king and queen were as much displeased with the terrible barbarity of the punishment of the countess as they were chagrined at the acquittal of the cardinal. As the countess was a descendant of the royal family, they felt that the ignominious character of the punishment was intended as a stigma upon them.

As the countess was sitting one morning in the spacious room provided for her in the prison, in a loose robe, conversing gayly with some friends, and surrounded by all the appliances of wealth, an attendant appeared to conduct her into the presence of the judges. Totally unprepared for the awful doom impending over her, she rose with careless alacrity and entered the court. The terrible sentence was pronounced. Immediately terror, rage, and despair seized upon her, and a scene of horror ensued which no pen can describe. Before the sentence was finished, she threw herself upon the floor, and uttered the most piercing shrieks and screams. The tumult of agitation into which she was thrown, dreadful as it was, relaxed not the stern rigor of the law. The executioner immediately seized her, and dragged her, shrieking and struggling in a delirium of phrensy, into the court-yard of the prison. As her eye fell upon the instruments of her ignominious and brutal punishment, she seized upon one of her executioners with her teeth, and tore a mouthful of flesh from his arm. She was thrown upon the ground, her garments, with relentless violence, were stripped from her back, and the lash mercilessly cut its way into her quivering nerves, while her awful screams pierced the damp, chill air of the morning. The hot irons were brought, and simmered upon her recoiling flesh. The unhappy creature was then carried, mangled and bleeding, and half dead with torture, and terror, and madness, to the prison hospital. After nine months of imprisonment she was permitted to escape. She fled to England, and was found one morning dead upon the pavements of London, having been thrown from a third story window in a midnight carousal.

Such was the story of the Diamond Necklace. Though no one can now doubt that Maria Antoinette was perfectly innocent in the whole affair, it, at the time, furnished her enemies with weapons against her, which they used with fatal efficiency. It was then represented that the Countess Lamotte was an accomplice of the queen in the fraudulent acquisition of the necklace, and that the Cardinal de Rohan was their deluded but innocent victim. The horrible punishment of Madame Lamotte, who boasted that royal blood circulated in her veins, was understood to be in contempt of royalty, and as the expression of venomous feeling toward the queen. Both Maria Antoinette and Louis felt it as such, and were equally aggrieved by the acquittal of the cardinal and the barbarous punishment of the countess.

Whether the cardinal was a victim or an accomplice is a question which never has been, and now never can be, decided. The mystery in which the affair is involved must remain a mystery until the secrets of all hearts are revealed at the great day of judgment. If he was the guilty instigator, and the poor countess but his tool and victim, how much has he yet to be accountable for in the just retributions of eternity! There were three suppositions adopted by the community in the attempt to solve the mystery of this transaction:

THE MOB AT VERSAILLES.

A gathering storm.--Condition of the French people.--Forces assembled at Versailles.--The populace rise upon the troops.--Terror and confusion.--Attack on the Bastile.--The Bastile taken.--Awful tumult.--Energy of the queen.--Resolution of the king.--The king visits Paris.--Strange cavalcade.--Painful suspense of the queen.--Return of the king.--The banquet at Versailles.--Enthusiastic loyalty.--News of the banquet.--Famine in Paris.--The mob marches to Versailles.--Heroic reply of the queen.--Violence of the mob.--The queen retires to rest.--Peril of the queen.--Her narrow escape.--The mob in the palace.--Heroic conduct of the queen.--The queen appears on the balcony.--Her composure.--The queen applauded.--The royal family taken to Paris.--An army of vagabonds.--The royal family grossly insulted.--The royal family in the Tuileries.--The queen's self-sacrificing spirit.--Rioting and violence.--The dauphin's question.--The king's explanation to his son.--Flight of the nobility.--Inflammatory placards.--The Duke of Orleans.--The Duke of Orlean's plans frustrated.--Rumors of an invasion.--The leaders of the populace.--The queen urged to attend the theater.--Dignified reply of the queen.--Her unpopularity increases.--The queen's vigorous action.--Ultimate cause of the popular fury.--Transgressors visited in their children.

The year 1789 opened upon France lowering with darkness and portentous storms. The events to which we have alluded in the preceding chapters, and various others of a similar nature, conspired to foment troubles between the French monarch and his subjects, which were steadily and irresistibly increasing. The great mass of the people, ignorant, degraded, and maddened by centuries of oppression, were rising, with delirious energy, to batter down a corrupt church and a despotic throne, and to overwhelm the guilty and the innocent alike in indiscriminate ruin. The storm had been gathering for ages, but those who had been mainly instrumental in raising it were now slumbering in their graves. Mobs began to sweep the streets of Paris, phrensied with rum and rage, and all law was set at defiance. The king, mild in temperament, and with no force of character, was extremely averse to any measures of violence. The queen, far more energetic, with the spirit of her heroic mother, would have quelled these insurrections with the strong arm of military power.

The king at last was compelled, in order to protect the royal family from insult, to encamp his army around his palaces; and long trains of artillery and of cavalry incessantly traversed the streets of Versailles, to prop the tottering monarchy. As Maria Antoinette, from the windows, looked down upon these formidable bands, and saw the crowd of generals and colonels who filled the saloons of the palace, her fainting courage was revived. The sight of these soldiers, called to quell the insurgent people, roused the Parisians to the intensest fury. "To arms! to arms! the king's troops are coming to massacre us," resounded through the streets of Paris in the gloom of night, in tones which caused the heart of every peaceful citizen to quake with terror. The infuriated populace hurled themselves upon the few troops who were in Paris. Many of the soldiers of the king threw down their arms and fraternized with the people. Others were withdrawn, by order of Louis, to add to the forces which were surrounding his person at Versailles. Paris was thus left at the mercy of the mob. The arsenals were ransacked, the powder magazines were broken open, pikes were forged, and in a day, as it were, all Paris was in arms. Thousands of the noble and the wealthy fled in consternation from these scenes of ever-accumulating peril, and bands of ferocious men and women, from all the abodes of infamy, with the aspect and the energy of demons, ravaged the streets.

When the morning of the 14th of March, 1789, dawned upon the city, a scene of terror and confusion was witnessed which baffles all description. In the heart of Paris there was a prison of terrible celebrity, in whose dark dungeons many victims of oppression and crime had perished. The Bastile, in its gloomy strength of rock and iron, was the great instrument of terror with which the kings of France had, for centuries, held all restless spirits in subjection. Now, the whole population of Paris seemed to be rolling like an inundation toward this apparently impregnable fortress, resolved to batter down its execrated walls. "To the Bastile! to the Bastile!" was the cry which resounded along the banks of the Seine, and through every street of the insurgent metropolis; and men, women, and boys poured on and poured on, an interminable host, choking every avenue with the agitated mass, armed with guns, knives, swords, pikes--dragging artillery bestrode by amazons, and filling the air with the clamor of Pandemonium. A conflict, fierce, short, bloody, ensued, and the exasperated multitude, many of them bleeding and maddened by wounds, clambered over the walls and rushed through the shattered gateways, and, with yells of triumph, became masters of the Bastile. The heads of its defenders were stuck upon poles upon the battlements, and the mob, intoxicated with the discovery of their resistless power, were beginning to inquire in what scenes of violence they should next engage. At midnight, couriers arrived at Versailles, informing the king and queen of the terrible insurrections triumphant in the capital, and that the royal troops every where, instead of being enthusiastic for the defense of the king, manifested the strongest disposition to fraternize with the populace. The tumult in Paris that night was awful. The rumor had entered every ear that the king was coming with forty thousand troops to take dreadful vengeance in the indiscriminate massacre of the populace. It was a night of sleeplessness and terror--the carnival of all the monsters of crime who thronged that depraved metropolis. The streets were filled with intoxication and blasphemy. No dwelling was secure from pillage. The streets were barricaded; pavements torn up, and the roofs of houses loaded with the stones.

All the energies of the queen were aroused for a vigorous and heroic resistance. She strove to inspire the king with firmness and courage. He, however, thought only of concessions. He wished to win back the love of his people by favors. He declared openly that never should one drop of blood be shed at his command; and, with the heroism of endurance, which he abundantly possessed, and to prove that he had been grossly calumniated, he left Versailles in his carriage to go unprotected to Paris, into the midst of the infuriated populace. Just as he was entering his carriage on this dangerous expedition, he received intelligence that a plot was formed to assassinate him on the way. This, however, did not in the slightest degree shake his resolution. The agony of the queen was irrepressible as she bade him adieu, never expecting to see him again.

The National Assembly, consisting of nearly twelve hundred persons, was then in session at Versailles, the great majority of them sympathizing with the populace, and yet were alarmed in view of the lawless violence which their own acts had awakened, and which was every where desolating the land. As, on the morning of the 17th of July, the king entered his carriage with a slender retinue, and with no military protection, to expose himself to the dangers of his tumultuous capital, this whole body formed in procession on foot and followed him. A countless throng of artisans and peasants flocked from all the streets of Versailles, and poured in from the surrounding country, armed with scythes and bludgeons, and joined the strange cavalcade. Every moment the multitude increased, and the road, both before and behind the king, was so clogged with the accumulating mass, that seven hours passed before the king arrived at the gates of the city. During all this time he was exposed to every conceivable insult. As Louis was conducted to the Hotel de Ville, a hundred thousand armed men lined the way, and he passed along under the arch of their sabers crossed over his head. The cup of degradation he was compelled to drain to its dregs.

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