the mutual recriminations of the persons accused. In the fate of the La Mothes and Mademoiselle Oliva no one professed to be concerned; but the friends of the cardinal were numerous, rich, and powerful; and for months had been and still were indefatigable in his cause. Some days before the trial, the attorney- general had become aware that nearly the whole of the Parliament had been gained by them; he even furnished the queen with a list of the names of those judges who had promised their verdict beforehand, and of the means by which they had been won over. And on the decisive morning the cardinal and his friends made a theatrical display which was evidently intended to overawe those members of the Parliament who were yet unconvinced, and to enlist the sympathies of the public in general. He himself appeared at the bar in a long violet cloak, the mourning robe of cardinals; and all the passages leading to the hall of justice were lined by his partisans, also in deep mourning; and they were not solely his own relations, the nobles of the different branches of his family, the Soubises, the Rohans, the Guimenees; but though, as princes of the blood, the Condes were nearly allied to the king and queen, they also were not ashamed to swell the company assembled, and to solicit the judges as they passed into the court to disregard alike justice and their own oaths, and to acquit the cardinal, whatever the evidence might be which had been, or was to be, produced against him. They were only asking what they had already assured themselves of obtaining. The queen's signature was indeed declared to be a forgery, and the La Mothes, Mademoiselle Oliva, and a man named Retaux de Villette, who had been the actual writer of the forged letters, were convicted and sentenced to the punishment which the counsel for the crown had demanded. But the cardinal was acquitted, as well as a notorious juggler and impostor of the day, called Cagliostro, who had apparently been so entirely unconnected with the transaction that it is not easy to see how he became included in the prosecution; and permission was given to the cardinal to make his acquittal public in any manner and to any extent which he might desire.[9]
The subsequent history of the La Mothes was singular and characteristic. The countess, who had been sentenced to be flogged, branded, and imprisoned for life, after a time contrived, it is believed by the aid of some of the Rohan family, to escape from prison. She fled to London, where for some time she and her husband lived on the proceeds of the necklace, which they had broken up and sold piecemeal to jewelers in London and other cities; but they were soon reduced to great distress. After the Revolution had broken out in Paris, they tried to make money by publishing libels on the queen, in which they are believed to have obtained the aid of some who in former times had been under great personal obligations to Marie Antoinette. But the scheme failed: they were overwhelmed with debt; writs were issued against them, and in trying to escape from the sheriff's officers, the countess fell from a window at the top of a house, and received injuries which proved fatal.
A most accomplished writer of the present day, who has devoted much care and ability to the examination of the case, has pronounced an opinion that the cardinal was innocent of dishonesty,[10] and limits his offense to that of insulting the queen by the mere suspicion that she could place her confidence in such an unworthy agent as Madame La Mothe, or that he himself could be allowed to recover her favor by such means as he had employed. But his absolute ignorance of the countess's schemes is not entirely consistent with the admitted fact that, when he was arrested, his first act was to send orders to his secretary to burn all the letters which he had received from her on the subject; and unquestionably neither Louis nor Marie Antoinette doubted his full complicity in the conspiracy. Louis at once deprived him of his office of grand almoner, and banished him from the court, declaring that 'he knew too well the usages of the court to have believed that Madame La Mothe had really been admitted to the queen's presence and intrusted with such a commission.[11]' And Marie Antoinette gave open expression to her indignation at the acquittal 'of an intriguer who had sought to ruin her, or to procure money for himself, by abusing her name and forging her signature,' adding, with undeniable truth, that still more to be pitied than herself was a 'nation which had for its supreme tribunal a body of men who consulted nothing but their passions; and of whom some were full of corruption, and others were inspired with a boldness which always vented itself in opposition to those who were clothed with lawful authority.[12]'
But her magnanimity and her sincere affection for the whole people were never more manifest than now even in her first moments of indignation. Even while writing to Madame de Polignac that she is 'bathed in tears of grief and despair,' and that she can 'hope for nothing good when perverseness is so busy in seeking means to chill her very soul,' she yet adds that 'she shall triumph over her enemies by doing more good than ever, and that it will be easier for them to afflict her than to drive her to avenging herself on them.[13]' And she uses the same language to her sister Christine, even while expressing still more strongly her indignation at being 'sacrificed to a perjured priest and a shameless intriguer.' She demands her sister's 'pity, as one who had never deserved such injurious treatment;[14] but who had only recollected that she was the daughter of Maria Teresa-to fulfill her mother's exhortations, always to show herself French to the very bottom of her heart;' but she concludes by repeating the declaration that 'nothing shall tempt her to any conduct unworthy of herself, and that the only revenge that she will take shall he to redouble her acts of kindness.'
It is pleasing to be able to close so odious a subject by the statement that the disgrace which the cardinal had thus brought upon himself may be supposed in some respects to have served as a lesson to him, and that his conduct in the latter days of his life was such as to do no discredit to the noble race from which he sprung.
A great part of his diocese as Bishop of Strasburg lay on the German side of the Rhine; and thither,[15] when the French Revolution began to assume the blood-thirsty character which has made it a warning to all future ages, he was fortunate to escape in safety from the fury of the assassins who ruled France. And though he was no longer rich, his less fortunate countrymen, and especially his clerical brethren, found in him a liberal protector and supporter.[16] He even levied a body of troops to re-enforce the royalist army. But, when the First Consul wrung from the Pope a concordat of which he disapproved, he resigned his bishopric, and shortly afterward died at Ettenheim,[17] where, had he remained but a short time longer, he, like the Duke d'Enghien, might have found that a residence in a foreign land was no protection against the ever-suspicious enmity of Bonaparte.
CHAPTER XXI. The King visits Cherbourg.-Rarity of Royal Journeys.-The Princess Christine visits the Queen-Hostility of the Duc d'Orleans to the Queen.- Libels on her.-She is called Madame Deficit.-She has a Second Daughter, who dies.-Ill Health of the Dauphin.-Unskillfulness and Extravagance of Calonne's System of Finance.-Distress of the Kingdom.-He assembles the Notables.-They oppose his Plans.-Letters of Marie Antoinette on the Subject.-Her Ideas of the English Parliament.-Dismissal of Calonne.- Character of Archbishop Lomenie de Brienne.-Obstinacy of Necker.-The Archbishop is appointed Minister.-The Distress increases.-The Notables are dissolved.-Violent Opposition of the Parliament-Resemblance of the French Revolution to the English Rebellion of 1642.-Arrest of d'Espremesnil and Montsabert.
It was owing to Marie Antoinette's influence that Louis himself in the following year began to enter on a line of conduct which, if circumstances had not prevented him from persevering in it, might have tended, more perhaps than any thing else that he could have done, to make him also popular with the main body of the people. The emperor, while at Versailles, had strongly pressed upon him that it was his duty, as king of the nation, to make himself personally acquainted with every part of his kingdom, to visit the agricultural districts, the manufacturing towns, the fortresses, arsenals, and harbors of the country. Joseph himself had practiced what he preached. No corner of his dominions was unknown to him; and it is plain that there can be no nation which must not be benefited by its sovereign thus obtaining a personal knowledge of all the various interests and resources of his subjects. But such personal investigations were not yet understood to be a part of a monarch's duties. Louis's contemporary, our own sovereign, George III., than whom, if rectitude of intention and benevolence of heart be the principal standards by which princes should be judged, no one ever better deserved to be called the father of his country, scarcely ever went a hundred miles from Windsor, and never once visited even those Midland Counties which before the end of his reign had begun to give undeniable tokens of the contribution which their industry was to furnish to the growing greatness of his empire; and the last two kings of France, though in the course of their long reigns they had once or twice visited their armies while waging war on the Flemish or German frontier, had never seen their western or southern provinces.
But now Marie Antoinette suggested to her husband that it was time that he should extend his travels, which, except when he had gone to Rheims for his coronation, had never yet carried him beyond Compiegne in one direction and Fontainebleau in another; and, as of all the departments of Government, that which was concerned with the marine of the nation interested her most (we fear that she was secretly looking forward to a renewal of war with England), she persuaded him to select for the object of his first visit the fort of Cherbourg in Normandy, where those great works had been recently begun which have since been constantly augmented and improved, till
