men of my household.
“So you have come,” said the Comte; the man bowed low. This part was played by Retaux de Villene.
Oliva was told where to stand and wait while the Comte and Comtesse and Retaux disappeared among the trees. Poor girl! She must have found it rather eerie standing there alone in the grove at night. I wonder what her thoughts were at that moment.
But a man had appeared tall, slim, in a long cloak and a wide-brimmed hat turned down to hide his face. It was the Cardinal de Rohan.
Oliva held out the rose. She must have been astonished by the fervour with which he accepted it. I imagine him, kneeling kissing the hem of her muslin gown.
Then he lifted his eyes and she said what she had been told: “You may hope that the past is forgotten.”
He rose, approached, and a torrent of words burst from him. He was in ecstasy. He wanted to prove his devotion and so on. Poor little Oliva.
What could she understand of this? She was unaccustomed to such fluency. How relieved she must have been to find the Comtesse at her side, taking her arm, pulling her into the shadows!
“Come quickly, Madame. Here comes Madame and the Comtesse d’Artois.”
The Cardinal bowed low and hurried away. The Comtesse, still gripping Oliva, was full of triumph. Oliva had forgotten to hand over the letter, but the plan had succeeded even beyond her hopes.
And after that they had the foolish Cardinal in their web. He really believed that the Comtesse had arranged that meeting with me. How could he have been so foolish? Did he really think that I would come out into the park at night to meet a man? But then he had heard those scurrilous lampoons which had assigned to me a hundred lovers, and like so many people in France he believed them. Perhaps that was why he had this impossible dream of becoming one of them.
A friend of Jeaime’s, a young lawyer, happened to have called at the house at Rue NeuveSaint-Gilles and was there when the carriage arrived bringing the adventurers back from the Grove of Venus; he wrote an account of what he saw, which I have since seen:
“Between midnight and one in the morning we heard the sound of a carriage from which emerged Monsieur and Madame de la Motte, Retaux de Villette and a young woman from twenty-five to thirty years of age with a remarkably good figure. The two women were dressed with elegance and simplicity…. They talked nonsense, laughed, sang, so that one scarcely knew whether they were on their head or their heels.
The lady I did not know shared in the general hilarity, but was timid and kept within bounds. The face of this woman had from the first thrown me into that sort of restlessness which one experiences in the presence of a face one feels certain of having seen before without being able to say where. What had puzzled me so much in her face was its perfect resemblance to that of the Queen. “
Maitre Target of the French Academy, who was one of the counsels for the Cardinal’s defence, wrote:
“It is not surprising to me that in the darkness the Cardinal should have mistaken the girl d’Oliva for the Queen the same figure, same complexion, same hair, a resemblance in physiognomy of the most striking kind.”
So the first little plot had succeeded, and now it was time to begin the greater one. Target put the case clearly when he stated on behalf of his client:
“After this fatal moment [the meeting in the Grove of Venus] the Cardinal is no longer merely confiding and credulous, he is blind and makes of his blindness an absolute duty. His submission to the orders received through Madame de la Motte is linked to the feeling of profound respect and gratitude which are to affect his whole life. He will await with resignation the moment when her reassuring kindness will fully manifest itself, and meanwhile will be absolutely obedient.
Such is the state of his soul. “
Madame de la Motte realised this. She must have been anxious as she felt her way for even her optimistic mind must have realised that one false step could bring the entire edifice of fraud and deceit tumbling to the ground.
Jeanne sought an interview with the Cardinal very shortly after the meeting and told him that the Queen most clearly favoured him, for she, who was the most generous of women, wished to bestow fifty thousand livres on a noble but impoverished family. She was a little short of money at the moment but if the Cardinal could lend her this amount . and give it to Madame de la Motte to bring to her . she would know he was truly her friend.
How could the man be such a fool! —the old question which I and countless others have asked ourselves since this wretched business came to light.
He believed what they said because he wanted to believe; but all the time he was in close touch with Cagliostro, who assured him that he could see into the future and there he saw the Cardinal reaping benefits from his association with a person of very high rank.
That satisfied the superstitious and gullible Cardinal.
Being short of money he borrowed from a Jewish money lender, assuring him he would be honoured if he knew to what purpose the money was to be put.
In this manner Jeanne began to extract more money from the Cardinal, enough for her to be able to buy a mansion in Bar-sur-Aube, where she had once lived in such wretchedness and where she could continue with the fiction that she was now respectfully received at Court on account of her relationship with the Royal Family.
Had she been content with what she had managed to purloin she might have lived for the rest of her life in comfort. But she was an insatiably ambitious woman, and she conceived the plan for the necklace.
It was at one of her parties that she had heard of the jewellers’ trouble. Boehmer and Bassenge talked of nothing but the diamond necklace which they could not sell. They had built their hopes on the Queen, and the Queen did not want their necklace. Madame de la Motte had been boasting about her influence with the Queen; she and her husband had already extracted money from various people on the pretext that they could help them to rich posts at Court. So it was natural that the anxious jewellers should speak to her about the necklace and ask her if she could use her influence to interest me in it.
Madame de la Motte replied that this might be possible-and from that moment the scheme was conceived.
She would do her best to advise the Queen to reconsider buying the necklace. Could she herself see it? Nothing easier. The jewellers would bring it to the Rue NeuveSaintGilles.
I can well imagine how the de la Mottes were dazzled by it. I remembered when I had first seen it how startled I was. It was in truth composed of some of the finest gems in Europe. I would never have wished to wear it. Secretly I thought it vulgar; but it was certainly a magnificent piece-in fact the most splendid I have ever seen.
I can remember it perfectly now. I have seen it so often in the drawing of me which circulated through Paris, for there were many ready to believe that I had stolen the necklace and when they wished to be particularly insulting they drew it about my neck.
In a necklace fitting closely to the neck were seventeen diamonds almost as large as filberts, and this in itself would have been dazzlingly beautiful; but the jewellers had added to this, loops with pear-shaped pendants, clusters and a second rope of diamonds; there was even a third row decorated with knots and tassels of the precious stones, and one of the four tassels in itself would have been worth a fortune. There were two thousand eight hundred carats in the necklace and there had never been one like it. There never would be again neither such a valuable necklace nor such a fateful necklace.
Once having seen it Madame de la Motte could not get it out of her mind. She did not want it as a necklace, but through those brilliant loops and tassels she saw herself living like a queen for evermore. If she possessed the neck lace and broke it up and sold the stones she would be a rich woman for the rest of her life.
Her energetic mind was working fast.
“We would give a thousand louis to anyone who could find us a buyer for the necklace,” tempted Boehmer and Bassenge.
How she must have laughed. A thousand louis. And the necklace worth sixteen hundred thousand livres! She would speak to the Queen, she replied haughtily, but she would not wish her friends the jewellers to reimburse her if she were able to arouse the Queen’s interest.
I can readily imagine their joy. Meanwhile de la Motte was planning her most ambitious scheme of all. The purchaser must naturally be the Cardinal de Rohan. A few letters purporting to come from me, and the foolish man
