remonstrances from her mother, though certainly not excessive for her rank; and Louis, knowing her partiality for them, had more than once made her costly gifts of the kind. But her taste for them had cooled; her children now engrossed far more of her attention than her dress, and she was keenly alive to the distress which still prevailed in many parts of the kingdom, and to the embarrassments of the revenue, which the ingenuity of Calonne did not relieve half so rapidly as his rashness encumbered it. Accordingly, her reply to Boehmer's application that she would purchase his necklace was that her jewel-case was sufficiently full, and that she had almost given up wearing diamonds; and that if such a sum as he asked, which was nearly seventy thousand pounds, were available, she should greatly prefer its being spent on a ship for the nation, to replace the
The king, who thought that she must secretly wish for a jewel of such unequalled splendor, offered to make her a present of the necklace, but she adhered to her refusal. Boehmer was greatly disappointed; he had exhausted his resources and his credit in collecting the stones in the hope of making a grand profit, and declared loudly to his patrons that he should be ruined if the queen could not be induced to change her mind. His complaints were so unrestrained that they reached the ears of those who saw in his despair a possibility of enriching themselves at his expense. There was in Paris at the time a Countess de la Mothe, who, as claiming descent from a natural son of Henri II., had added Valois to her name, and had her claim to royal birth so far allowed that, as she was in very destitute circumstances, she had obtained a small pension from the crown. Her pension and her pretensions had perhaps united to procure her the hand of the Count de la Mothe, who had for some time been discreditably known as one of the most worthless and dangerous adventurers who infested the capital. But her marriage had been no restraint on a life of unconcealed profligacy, and among her lovers she reckoned the Cardinal de Rohan, who, as we have already seen, was as little scrupulous or decent as herself.
As, however, the cardinal's extravagance had left him with little means of supplying her necessities, Madame La Mothe conceived the idea of swindling Boehmer out of his necklace, and of making de Rohan an accomplice in the fraud. The one thing which in the transaction is difficult to determine is whether the cardinal was her willing and conscious assistant, or her dupe. That his capacity was of the very lowest order was notorious, but he was a man who had been bred in courts; he knew the manner in which princes transacted their business, and in which queens signed their names. He had long been acquainted with Marie Antoinette's figure and gestures and voice; while, unhappily, there was nothing in his character which was incompatible with his becoming an accomplice in any act of baseness.
What followed was a drama of surprises. It was with as much astonishment as indignation that Marie Antoinette learned that Boehmer believed that she had secretly bought the necklace, which openly and formally she had refused, and that he was looking to her for the payment of its price. And about a fortnight later it was like a thunder-clap that a summons came upon the Cardinal de Rohan, who had just been performing mass before the king and queen, to appear before them in Louis's private cabinet, and that he found himself subjected to an examination by Louis himself, who demanded of him with great indignation an explanation of the circumstances that had led him to represent himself to Boehmer as authorized to buy a necklace for the queen. Terrified and confused, he gave an explanation which was half a confession; but which was too complicated to be thoroughly intelligible. He was ordered to retire into the next room and write out his statement. His written narrative proved more obscure than his spoken words. In spite of his prayers that he might be spared the degradation of being arrested while still clad in his pontifical habits, he was at once sent to the Bastile. A day or two afterward Madame La Mothe was apprehended in the provinces, and Louis directed that a prosecution should be instantly commenced against all who had been concerned in the transaction.
For the queen's name had been forged. The cardinal did not deny that he had represented himself to Boehmer as employed by her for the purchase of the jewel which, as he said, she secretly coveted, and for the payment of its price by installments. But, as his justification, he produced a letter desiring him to undertake the business, and signed 'Marie Antoinette de France.' He declared that he had never suspected the genuineness of this letter, though it was notorious that such an addition to their Christian names was used by none but the sons and daughters of the reigning sovereign, and never by a queen. And eventually his whole story was found to be that Madame La Mothe had induced him to believe that she was in the queen's confidence, and also that the queen coveted the necklace and was resolved to obtain it; but that she was unable at once to pay for it; and that, being desirous to make amends to the cardinal for the neglect with which she had hitherto treated him, she had resolved on employing him to make arrangements with Boehmer for the instant delivery of the ornament, and for her payment of the price by installments.
This was strange enough to have excited the suspicions of most men. What followed was stranger still. Not content with forging the queen's handwriting, Madame La Mothe had even, if one may say so, forged the queen herself. She had assured the cardinal that Marie Antoinette had consented to grant him a secret interview; and at midnight, in the gardens of Versailles, had introduced him to a woman of notoriously bad character named Oliva, who in height resembled the queen, and who, in a conference of half a minute, gave him a letter and a rose with the words, 'You know what this means.' She had hardly uttered the words when Madame La Mothe interrupted the pair with the warning the Countesses of Provence and Artois were approaching. The mock queen retired in haste. The cardinal pressed the rose to his heart; acted on the letter; and protested that he had never doubted that he had seen the queen, and had been acting on her commands in obtaining the necklace from Boehmer and delivering it to Madame La Mothe, though he now acknowledged that he had been imposed upon, and offered to pay the jeweler for his property.
There were not wanting those who advised that this offer should be accepted, and that the matter should be hushed up, rather than that a prince of the Church should be publicly disgraced by a prosecution for fraud. But Louis and Marie Antoinette both rightly judged that their duty as sovereigns of the kingdom forbade them to compromise justice by screening dishonesty. It was but two years before that a great noble, the most eloquent of all French orators, had singled out Marie Antoinette's love of justice as one of her most conspicuous, as it was one of her most noble, qualities; and the words deserve especially to be remembered from the melancholy contrast which his subsequent conduct presents to the voluntary tribute which he now paid to her excellence. In 1783, the young Count de Mirabeau, pleading for the restitution of his conjugal rights, put the question to the judges at Aix before whom he was arguing, 'Which of you, if he desired to consecrate a living personification of justice, and to embellish it with all the charms of beauty, would not set up the august image of our queen?'
She and her husband might well have felt they were bound to act up to such a eulogy. Some of their advisers also, and especially the Baron de Breteuil and the Abbe de Yermond, fortified their decision with their advice; being, in truth, greatly influenced by a reason which they forbore to mention, namely, by their suspicion that the untiring malice of the queen's enemies would not have failed to represent that the suppression of the slightest particle of the truth could only have been dictated by a guilty consciousness which felt that it could not bear the light; and that the queen had forborne to bring the cardinal into court solely because she knew that he was in a situation to prove facts which would deservedly damage her reputation.
It is impossible to doubt that the resolution which was adopted was the only one consistent with either propriety or common sense. However plausible may be the arguments which in this or that case may be adduced for concealment, the common instinct of mankind, which rarely errs in such matters, always conceives a suspicion that it is dictated by secret and discreditable motives; and that he who screens manifest guilt from exposure and punishment makes himself an accomplice in the wrong-doing, if he was not so before. But, though Louis judged rightly for his own and his queen's character in bringing those who were guilty of forgery and robbery to a public trial, the result inflicted an irremediable wound on one great institution, furnishing an additional proof how incurably rotten the whole system of the Government must have been, when corruption without shame or disguise was allowed to sway the highest judicial tribunal in the country.
The Parliament of Paris, constantly endeavoring throughout its whole history to encroach upon the royal prerogative, had always founded its pretensions on its purity and disinterestedness. Since its re-establishment at the beginning of the present reign, it had advanced its claim to the possession of those virtues more loudly than ever; yet now, in the very first case which came before it in which a noble of the highest rank was concerned, it was made apparent not only that it was wholly destitute of every quality which ought to belong to a judicial bench, of a regard for truth and justice, and even of a knowledge of the law; but that no one gave it credit for them, and that every one regarded the decision to be given as one which would depend, not on the merits of the case, but on the interest which the culprits might be able to make with the judges.[8]
The trial took place in May of the following year. We need not enter into its details; the denials, the admissions,
