Part 155

"There is no doubt that the French administrative body, at the time when Louis XVI. began to reign, was corrupt and self-seeking. In the management of the finances and of the army, illegitimate profits were made. But this was not the worst evil from which the public service was suffering. France was in fact governed by what in modern times is called 'a ring.' The members of such an organization pretend to serve the sovereign, or the public, and in some measure actually do so; but their rewards are determined by intrigue and favor, and are entirely disproportionate to their services. They generally prefer jobbery to direct stealing, and will spend a million of the state's money in a needless undertaking, in order to divert a few thousands into their own pockets. They hold together against all the world, while trying to circumvent each other. Such a ring in old France was the court. By such a ring will every country be governed, where the sovereign who possesses the political power is weak in moral character or careless of the public interest; whether that sovereign be a monarch, a chamber, or the mass of the people. Louis XVI., king of France and of Navarre, was more dull than stupid, and weaker in will than in intellect. ... He was ... thoroughly conscientious, and had a high sense of the responsibility of his great calling. He was not indolent, although heavy, and his courage, which was sorely tested, was never broken. With these virtues he might have made a good king, had he possessed firmness of will enough to support a good minister, or to adhere to a good policy. But such strength had not been given him. Totally incapable of standing by himself, he leant successively, or simultaneously, on his aunt, his wife, his ministers, his courtiers, as ready to change his policy as his adviser. Yet it was part of his weakness to be unwilling to believe himself under the guidance of any particular person; he set a high value on his own authority, and was inordinately jealous of it. No one, therefore, could acquire a permanent influence. Thus a well-meaning man became the worst of sovereigns. ... Louis XV. had been led by his mistresses; Louis XVI. was turned about by the last person who happened to speak to him. The courtiers, in their turn, were swayed by their feelings, or their interests. They formed parties and combinations, and intrigued for or against each other. They made bargains, they gave and took bribes. In all these intrigues, bribes, and bargains, the court ladies had a great share. They were as corrupt as the men, and as frivolous. It is probable that in no government did women ever exercise so great an influence. The factions into which the court was divided tended to group themselves round certain rich and influential families. Such were the Noailles, an ambitious and powerful house, with which Lafayette was connected by marriage; the Broglies, one of whom had held the thread of the secret diplomacy which Louis XV. had carried on behind the backs of his acknowledged ministers; the Polignacs, new people, creatures of Queen Marie Antoinette; the Rohans, through the influence of whose great name an unworthy member of the family was to rise to high dignity in the church and the state, and then to cast a deep shadow on the darkening popularity of that ill-starred princess. Such families as these formed an upper class among nobles. ... It is not easy, in looking at the French government in the eighteenth century, to decide where the working administration ended, and where the useless court that answered no real purpose began. ... There was the department of hunting and that of buildings, a separate one for royal journeys, one for the guard, another for police, yet another for ceremonies. There were five hundred officers 'of the mouth,' table-bearers distinct from chair-bearers. There were tradesmen, from apothecaries and armorers at one end of the list to saddle-makers, tailors and violinists at the other. ... The military and civil households of the king and of the royal family are said to have consisted of about fifteen thousand souls, and to have cost forty-five million francs per annum. The holders of many of the places served but three months apiece out of every year, so that four officers and four salaries were required, instead of one. With such a system as this we cannot wonder that the men who administered the French government were generally incapable and self-seeking. Most of them were politicians rather than administrators, and cared more for their places than for their country. Of the few conscientious and patriotic men who obtained power, the greater number lost it very speedily."

_E. J. Lowell, The Eve of the French Revolution, chapter 2._

ALSO IN: _F. Rocquain, The Revolutionary Spirit preceding the French Revolution, chapters 9-11._

_Mme. de Stael, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, chapters 3-10 (volume 1)._

_J. Necker, On the French Revolution, part. 1, section 1 (volume 1)._

_Condorcet, Life of Turgot, chapters 5-6._

_L. Say, Turgot, chapters 5-7._

_C. D. Yonge, Life of Marie Antoinette, chapters 8-21._

{1254}

FRANCE: A. D. 1778 (February). Treaty with the United States of America.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1776-1778, and 1778 (FEBRUARY).

FRANCE: A. D. 1780 (July). Fresh aid to the United States of America.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1780 (July).

FRANCE: A. D. 1782. Disastrous naval defeat by Rodney. Unsuccessful siege of Gibraltar.

See ENGLAND: A. D. 1780-1782.

FRANCE: A. D. 1782. The negotiation of Peace between Great Britain and the United States of America. Dissatisfaction of the French minister.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1782 (SEPTEMBER), and (SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER).

FRANCE: A. D. 1784-1785. The affair of the Diamond Necklace.

The chief actor in the affair of the diamond necklace, which caused a great scandal and smirched the queen's name, was an adventuress who called herself the Comtesse de Lamotte, and claimed descent from Henry II., but who had been half servant, half companion, to a lady of quality, and had picked up a useful acquaintance with the manners and the gossip of court society. "Madame de Lamotte's original patroness had a visiting acquaintance with the Cardinal Prince Louis de Rohan, and in her company her protégée learned to know him also. Prince Louis, who had helped to receive Marie Antoinette at Strasburg, had been the French ambassador at Vienna, where he had disgusted and incensed Maria Theresa by his worldliness, profligacy, and arrogance. She had at last procured his withdrawal, and her letters expressing a positive terror lest he should come near Marie Antoinette and acquire an influence over her, were not without their effect. He was not allowed to appear at Court, and for ten long years fretted and fumed under a sense of the royal displeasure. ... He was now a man bordering on fifty, grey-headed, rosy, 'pursy,' with nothing save his blue blood and the great offices which he disgraced to recommend him. Madame de Lamotte, hovering about Paris and Versailles, where she had lodgings in La Belle Inage, tried to make her own of backstairs gossip, and picked up a hint or two. Suddenly a great idea struck her, founded on the history of a magnificent necklace dangled before bright eyes, over which many an excitable imagination gloated. The Queen had a court jeweller, Bœhmer, who had formerly been jeweller to the King of Saxony at Dresden. ... For a period of years he had been collecting and assorting the stones which should form an incomparable necklace, in row upon row, pendants and tassels of lustrous diamonds, till the price reached the royal pitch of from eighty to ninety thousand pounds English money. This costly 'collar,' according to rumour, was ... meant, in the beginning, for the Comtesse du Barry. In the end, it ... was offered with confidence to the Queen. ... She declined to buy--she had enough diamonds. ... There was nothing for it but that Bœhmer should 'hawk' his necklace in every Court of Europe, without success, till the German declared himself ruined, and passionately protested that, if the Queen would not buy the diamonds, there was no resource for him save to throw himself into the Seine. But there was a resource, unhappily for Bœhmer, unhappily for all concerned, most so for the poor Queen. Madame de Lamotte, in keeping up her acquaintance with Prince Louis de Rohan, began to hint darkly that there might be ways of winning the royal favour. She threw out cunning words about the degree of importance and trust to which she had attained in the highest quarters at Versailles; about the emptiness of the Queen's exchequer, with consequent difficulties in the discharge of her charities; about the secret royal desire for the famous necklace, which the King would not enable Marie Antoinette to obtain. The blinded and besotted Cardinal drank in these insinuations. The black art was called in to deepen his convictions. In an age when many men, especially many churchmen, believed in nothing, in spite of their professions, naturally they were given over to believe a lie. Cagliostro, astrologer and modern magician, was flourishing in Paris, and by circles and signs he promised the priest, De Rohan, progress in the only suit he had at heart. Still the dupe was not so infatuated as to require no proof of the validity of these momentous implications, and proof was not wanting; notes were handed to him, to be afterwards shown to Bœhmer, graciously acknowledging his devotion, and authorising him to buy for the Queen the diamond necklace. These notes were apparently written in the Queen's hand (that school-girl's scrawl of which Maria Theresa was wont to complain); but they were signed 'Marie Antoinette de France,' a signature which so great a man as the Cardinal ought to have known was never employed by the Queen, for the very good reason that the termination 'de France' belonged to the children and not to the wife of the sovereign. Even a further assurance that all was right was granted. The Cardinal, trembling in a fever of hope and expectation, was told that a private interview with the Queen would be vouchsafed to him at midnight in the Park of Versailles. At the appointed hour, on the night of the 28th of July, 1784, De Rohan, in a blue greatcoat and slouched hat, was stationed, amidst shrouding, sultry darkness, in the neighbourhood of the palace. Madame de Lamotte, in a black domino, hovered near to give the signal of the Queen's approach. The whisper was given, 'In the Hornbeam Arbour,' and the Cardinal hurried to the spot, where he could dimly descry a tall lady in white, with chestnut hair, blue eyes, and a commanding air, if he could really have seen all these well-known attributes. He knelt, but before he could do more than mutter a word of homage and gratitude, the black domino was at his side again with another vehement whisper, 'On vient' (They come). {1255} The lady in white dropped a rose, with the significant words, 'Vous savez ce que cela veut dire' (You know what that means), and vanished before the 'Vite, vite' ('Quick, quick ') of the black domino, for the sound of approaching footsteps was supposed to indicate the approach of Madame and the Comtesse d'Artois, and the Cardinal, in his turn, had to flee from detection. What more could be required to convince a man of the good faith of the lady. ... Bœhmer received a hint that he might sell his necklace, through the Prince Cardinal Louis de Rohan, to one of the great ones of the earth, who was to remain in obscurity. The jeweller drew out his terms--sixteen hundred thousand livres, to be paid in five equal instalments over a year and a-half--to which he and Prince Louis affixed their signatures. This paper Madame de Lamotte carried to Versailles, and brought it back with the words written on the margin, 'Bon Marie Antoinette de France.' In the meantime, Bœhmer, the better to keep the secret, gave out that he had sold the necklace to the Grand Turk for his favourite Sultana. The necklace was, in fact, delivered to Prince Louis and by him entrusted to Madame Lamotte, from whose hands it passed --not into the Queen's. Having been taken to pieces, it was sent in all haste out of the kingdom, while the Cardinal, according to his own account, was still played with. ... It goes without saying that no payment, except a small offer of interest on the thirty thousand, was forthcoming. The Cardinal and Bœhmer were betrayed into wrath, dismay, and despair. Bœhmer took it upon him to apply, in respectful terms, to her Majesty for payment; and when she said the whole thing was a mistake, the man must be mad, and caused her words to be written to him, he sought an interview with Madame Campan, the first woman of the bedchamber, at her house at Crespy, where he had been dining, and in the gardens there, in the middle of a thunder-shower, astounded her with his version of the story. ... The Cardinal was taken to the Bastille. More arrests followed, including those of Madame de Lamotte, staying quietly in her house at Bar-sur-Aube, and the girl Gay d'Oliva, an unhappy girl, tall and fair haired, taken from the streets of Paris, and brought to the park of Versailles to personate the Queen. It was said the Queen wept passionately over the scandal--well she might. The court in which the case was tried might prove the forgery, as in fact it did, though not in the way she expected; but every Court in Europe would ring with the story, and she had made deadly enemies, if not of the Church itself, of the great houses of De Rohan, De Soubise, De Guéménée, De Marsan, and their multitude of allies. The process lasted nine months, and every exertion was made for the deliverance of the princely culprit. ... The result of the trial was that, though the Queen's signature was declared false, Madame de Lamotte was sentenced to be whipped, branded, and imprisoned for life, her husband was condemned to the galleys, and a man called Villette de Retaux, who was the actual fabricator of the Queen's handwriting, was sentenced to be banished for life. The Cardinal Prince Louis de Rohan was fully acquitted, with permission to publish what defence he chose to write of his conduct. When he left the court, he was escorted by great crowds, hurrahing over his acquittal, because it was supposed to cover the Court with mortification."

_Sarah Tytler, Marie Antoinette, chapter 12._

ALSO IN: _T. Carlyle, The Diamond Necklace (Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, volume 5)._

_H. Vizetelly, The Story of the Diamond Necklace._

FRANCE: A. D. 1787-1789. Struggle of the Crown with the Parliament of Paris. The demand for a meeting of the States-General yielded to. Double representation of the Third Estate conceded. The make-up of the States-General as elected by the three Estates.