The Girls' Book of Famous Queens

Marie Antoinette was now in the flower of her beauty, on which French biographers love to dwell. Tilly said, “Her eyes recalled all the changes of the waves of the sea, and seemed made to reveal and reflect the blue of the sky.” Her fine throat and the lofty carriage of her head were remarkable; and she once said, laughingly, to Madame Le Brun, “If I were not a queen, should not I look insolent?”

“As one would have offered a chair to another woman, one would have offered a throne to her; and when she descended the marble staircase at Versailles, preceded by the officers who announced her approach, saluted in the great court by the beating of drums and the presentation of arms, all heads were uncovered respectfully, all hearts were filled with admiration of the woman, as well as with loyalty to the queen.”

Who shall tell the true story of the diamond necklace? It will probably never be told. The papers of the Cardinal de Rohan, which might have thrown much light upon the subject, were unfortunately destroyed. Little did Marie Antoinette think, as she entered Strasburg in triumph on her marriage journey, that she would encounter, in the magnificent robes of a cardinal’s coadjutor, a man who was to prove her deadly foe, – the insolent and profligate Prince Louis de Rohan. He had been ambassador at Vienna, where he had disgusted Maria Theresa by his profligacy and arrogance. She had procured his withdrawal. He had not been allowed to appear at the court of Versailles; and now for ten long years he had fretted and fumed under a sense of the royal displeasure. Boehmer, the crown jeweller, had, for a period of years, 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 had reached the royal pitch of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. This costly “collar” he offered to the king, who would willingly have bought it for the queen had she desired it; but Marie Antoinette replied, that if the money were to be spent, it had better be used in fitting a frigate for the royal navy. His Most Christian Majesty concurred exactly in this sentiment, and, returning the necklace to Boehmer with the words, “We have more need of ships than of diamonds,” thought no more about the matter. Not so did the Cardinal de Rohan, and the intrigante Madame de Lamotte. They had made up their minds to possess the three hundred and fifty thousand dollars represented by the glittering gems. So they laid their clever heads together, and, by forging notes of the queen and sundry other little plots which were wonderfully successful, obtained the necklace, leaving Boehmer to look to the queen for payment. Of course payment was not forthcoming, and in his distress the jeweller related the affair to Madame Campan, telling her he feared he had been duped. Madame Campan proceeded at once to Versailles, and laid the matter before the queen. It was the 15th of August, 1784, Assumption day, and Prince Louis de Rohan, in full pontificals, and wearing the Grand Cross of St. Louis, arrived at Versailles to perform mass in the royal chapel; but he had scarcely entered the Œil de Bœuf, when he was summoned to the cabinet of the king. As he entered, Louis XVI. turned upon him suddenly, inquiring, “You have purchased diamonds of Boehmer?” “Yes, sire,” was the trembling reply. “What have you done with them?” the king added. “I thought,” replied the cardinal, “that they had been delivered to the queen.” “Who commissioned you to make this purchase?” “The Comtesse de Lamotte,” was the reply; “she handed me a letter from her Majesty, requesting me to obtain the necklace for her. Indeed, I thought I was obeying her Majesty’s wishes by taking this business upon myself.”

“How could you imagine, sir,” indignantly interrupted Marie Antoinette, “that I should have selected you for such a purpose, when I have not addressed you for eight years, and how could you suppose that I should have acted through the mediation of such a character as Madame la Comtesse de Lamotte?”

The cardinal was in the most violent agitation; he drew from his pocket a letter, directed to the Comtesse de Lamotte, and signed with the queen’s name. Her Majesty glanced at it, and instantly pronounced it a forgery, and the king added, “How could you, a prince of the church and grand almoner of my household, not have detected it? This letter is signed Marie Antoinette de France. Queens sign their names short; it is not even the queen’s handwriting.” Then drawing a letter from his pocket, and handing it to De Rohan, he said, “Are you the author of that letter?”

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

“I have no wish, Monsieur le Cardinal,” the king added, “to find you guilty; explain to me this enigma; account for all these manœuvres with Boehmer. Where did you obtain these securities and these promissory notes, signed in the queen’s name?”

The cardinal was trembling in every nerve: “Sire, I am too much agitated now to answer your Majesty; give me a little time to collect my thoughts.” “Go into my cabinet,” replied the king; “you will there find papers, pens, and ink. At your leisure, write what you desire to to say to me.”

But the written statements of M. de Rohan were as unsatisfactory as his verbal ones. In half an hour he returned with a paper covered with blottings, alterations, and erasures. Louis’ anger was aroused, and, throwing open the folding doors, he cried out in imperious tones, – very unusual for him, – which resounded through the Œil de Bœuf and grande galerie: “Arrest the Cardinal de Rohan!” The Baron de Bretuil approached through the crowd of astonished courtiers, and, summoning the officer on guard, he indicated the cardinal with the words, “De par le roi, Monseigneur, you are arrested; at your risk, officer.” But, before the cardinal could be removed, he had spoken three words in German to one of his officials, and given him a slip of paper. The horse on which the man rode post haste to the cardinal’s palace in Paris, fell dead in the courtyard; but the red portfolio, containing the supposed autographs of the queen’s letters, lay in ashes before it could be sealed up in the name of justice and of the king. The cardinal was taken to the Bastile. More arrests followed, including that of the Comtesse de Lamotte. For nine months the trial lasted before the Council of the Grand Chambre. The Pope protested against a prince of the church being made accountable for his acts to any but the highest ecclesiastical tribunal (an assembly of the cardinals at Rome); while the haute noblesse looked on the cause of the Prince de Rohan as their own, considering the rights and privileges of their rank intrenched upon, when a near relative of the princes of the blood was put on his trial before the Council of the Grand Chambre. So the cardinal was eventually acquitted, and Madame de Lamotte alone was severely punished by flogging and branding on both shoulders.

Their Majesties were chagrined at the acquittal of M. de Rohan and shocked at the punishment of the countess. The former was an insult to the king, the latter to the queen; for Madame de Lamotte boasted a descent from the House of Valois and royal blood within her veins. Such was the affair of the Diamond Necklace, which, though apparently trivial in itself, involved consequences of the most momentous importance.

“Mind that miserable affair of the necklace,” said Talleyrand; “I should be in nowise surprised if it should overturn the French monarchy.”

Whoever were the guilty ones, Marie Antoinette was entirely innocent. She, however, experienced all the ignominy she could have encountered had she been involved in the deepest guilt, and the affair furnished a fine theme for the malevolence of Bellevue and Luviciennes.

Respect for royalty was on the wane. The king, of course, had shared with the queen in the disrespect which Mesdames, his aunts, were desirous should rest on her alone; and the insulting conduct towards him of his brothers, Monsieur le Comte de Provence and the libertine, the Comte d’Artois, who, according to an eye-witness, “on occasions of great state or solemnity, will pass before the king twenty times, push him aside, tread on his feet, and this, apparently, without any thought of apology or excuse,” together with the affair of the Diamond Necklace, were well calculated to debase him further in the eyes of his courtiers and in public opinion. Nowhere was this more evident than when the court assembled in the Grand Gallery of Versailles, where once the Grand Monarque held his réunions called “Appartements.” At such times, “a stranger would have found it difficult to recognize the king by any particular attention or any deference paid to him.” What, then, must have been the agonized sensations of the perturbed spirit of the superb Louis Quatorze, if ever, to look on his degenerate posterity, he revisited the scene of his former greatness and grandeur, where once he sat enthroned like Jupiter among the inferior gods, and where all around him were but too willing to fall down in the dust at his royal feet, had it been his “bon plaisir” that they should do so! Ah, those were palmy days for church and state!

Brightly dawned the 5th of May, 1789, and Versailles, with its tapestries, its garlands, and its throngs of gayly dressed visitors, wore a festive, smiling air. To many it was indeed a joyous day, – a day of hope; for the king had granted the States General. Such an assemblage France had not witnessed for more than a hundred and fifty years. No wonder, then, it was looked forward to as the dawn of national liberty. But as the procession winds its way along the vast streets of Versailles, the people see, with pain, how marked are the distinctions of rank and costume which divide their representatives from the nobles and the clergy. To the episcopal purple, the croziers, and grand mantles of the dignitaries of the church succeed the long black robes of the “inferior clergy.” Then in all the splendor of velvet and cloth of gold, lace ruffles and cravats, floating plumes and mantles of state, come the haute noblesse. Then follow the modest Third Estate of the realm; the absence of finery in their humble garb is atoned for in the eyes of the populace who receive them with hearty cheers, which they have refused the nobles who have preceded them. One only is generally known. It is the “plebian count” de Mirabeau. The cortège of the princes, who are surrounded by courtiers, is allowed to pass in silence. Louis XVI. appears; as usual, he moves without dignity, simple, in spite of his Cross of St. Louis and his cordon bleu. Marie Antoinette moves with her accustomed majesty, but her face wears an anxious look. Her lips are closely pressed, as if in a vain effort to dissemble her trouble, for not only is her Dauphin, whose birth had been so proudly hailed, at the point of death, but she is this day greeted, not with the old loyal shouts of “Vive la reine!” but with new insulting cries of “Vive d’Orleans!” Monsieur le Comte de Provence is grave and pensive, and apparently impressed with the importance of the occasion. He walks with difficulty, owing to his extreme corpulency. The Comte d’Artois shows evident signs of ennui and bad temper, and casts disdainful glances to the right and left upon the crowd that lines the streets, and so, although they little think it, those high-born men and women march onward to their fate. “For although no really hostile sentiments can be said to have then animated that vast throng, nevertheless, alike among those who formed the procession and those who were only its spectators, there was a lurking latent feeling that something strange, something hitherto unknown, coming from the past and pressing on to the future, was moving onwards towards France.”

It was the revolution to be decreed by the Étâts Généraux. On the 23d of June, the king held a séance royale at Versailles. It was attended with all the appareil and state of the “bed of justice” of the old régime. The noblesse had determined, if possible, to crush the Third Estate; but the king hardly knew how to utter the arrogant and defiant words which had been put into his mouth. It was the lamb attempting to imitate the roar of the lion. “Je veux, j’ordonne, je commande” was the burden of the king’s speech, which was read by the keeper of the seals, upon his knees. One may imagine how it was received by the Tiers État.

The address closed with the following words: “I command you, gentlemen, immediately to disperse, and to repair to-morrow morning to the chambers appropriate to your order.”

The king and his attendant court left the hall. The noblesse and the clergy followed him. Exultation beamed upon their faces, for they thought that the Tiers État was now effectually crushed. The Commons remained in their seats. The crisis had arrived. There was now no alternative but resistance or submission, rebellion or servitude. The Marquis de Brézé, grand master of ceremonies, perceiving that the assembly did not retire, advanced to the centre of the hall, and in a loud, authoritative voice, – a voice at whose command nearly fifty thousand troops were ready to march, – demanded, “Did you hear the command of the king?”

“Yes, sir,” responded Mirabeau, with a glaring eye and a thunder tone; “we have heard the king’s command, and you who have neither seat nor voice in this house are not the one to remind us of his speech. Go, tell those who sent you, that we are here by the power of the people, and that nothing shall drive us hence but the power of the bayonet.”

And the grand master of ceremonies went out backwards from the presence of the orator of the people, as it was etiquette to go from the presence of the king.

The noblesse, in the meantime, were in exultation. They deemed the popular movement effectually crushed, and hastened with their congratulations to the queen. Marie Antoinette was much elated, and presenting to them the Dauphin, she exclaimed, “I intrust him to the nobility.”

The Marquis de Brézé now entered the council-chamber, to inform the king that the deputies still continued their sitting, and asked for orders. The king walked impatiently once or twice up and down the floor, and then replied hastily, “Very well! leave them alone.” Louis XIV. would have sent every man of them to the Bastile or the scaffold; but the days of Louis XIV. were no more. It was the 14th of July, 1789. All Paris was in confusion. Mobs ransacked the city in pursuit of arms. Every sword, pistol, and musket from private residences were brought forward. The royal arsenal, containing mainly curiosities and suits of ancient armor, was sacked, and while all the costly objects of interest were left untouched, every available weapon was taken away. But why all this turmoil, terror, and excitement? Out at Versailles was Marshal Broglie, proud and self-confident, in conference with the court, and having at his command fifty thousand troops abundantly armed and equipped, all of whom could in a few hours be concentrated in the streets of Paris. Upon the Champ de Mars, Benseval had assembled his force of several thousand Swiss and German troops, cavalry and artillery, and at any moment this combined force might be expected to pour, in the king’s name, upon his “good city of Paris,” and chastise his rebellious subjects with terrible severity; while the enormous fortress of the Bastile, with its walls forty feet thick at the base and fifteen at the top, rising with its gloomy towers one hundred and twenty feet in the air, with its cannon charged with grapeshot, already run out at every embrasure, commanded the city; while that remained in the hands of the enemy there was no safety. Could the Bastile be taken? Preposterous! It was as unassailable as the rock of Gibraltar. The mob surged around the Hotel de Ville demanding arms and the immediate establishment of a citizen’s guard. But arms were not to be had. It was well known that there were large stores of them somewhere in the city, but no one knew where to find them. What is this? A rumor runs through the crowd: “There are arms at the Hotel des Invalides; muskets, thirty thousand and more;” and now the discordant cries resolve into one long and steadfast shout, “Les Invalides! Les Invalides!” and in the bright sunshine of this July morning, upon the esplanade of the Invalides, thirty thousand men stand grim and menacing. But there is no resistance. The gates are thrown open and the mob rush in. They find in the armory thirty thousand muskets and six pieces of cannon; and now, as by common instinct, resounds the cry, “La Bastile! La Bastile!” The crowds across the Seine take up the shout, while from the Champs Élysées, the Tuileries Gardens, and the Palais Royal, comes back, as it were, the echo, indistinct at first, but in ever-increasing volume, “La Bastile! La Bastile!” as one hundred thousand men, shouting, swearing, and brandishing their pikes and guns, rush forward, a living torrent, to assail with these feeble means, that fortress par excellence of France, – a fortress which the army of Monsieur le Prince, le grand Condé, had besieged in vain for three and twenty days.

Enormous, massive, blackened with age, the gloomy emblem of royal prerogative, exciting by its mysterious power and menace the terror and execration of every one who passed beneath its shadow; its eight great towers darkening the air in gloomy grandeur, the world-renowned prison of the Bastile, the fortress par excellence, loomed lofty at the entrance of Paris, in the very heart of the Faubourg St. Antoine.

De Launey, the governor, from the summit of his towers had, for many hours, heard the roar of the insurgent city; and now, as he saw the black mass of countless thousands approaching, he turned pale and trembled. M. Thuriot was sent by the electors of the Hotel de Ville to summon the Bastile to surrender. The drawbridge was lowered and he was admitted. De Launey received him at the head of his staff. “I summon you,” said Thuriot, “in the name of the people.” But De Launey, who was every moment expecting the arrival of troops from Versailles, refused to surrender the fortress, but added that he would not fire upon the people if they did not fire upon him. Thuriot, perceiving the cannon, and knowing that the governor had received an order from the Hotel de Ville to dismount them, exclaimed: —

“You have not had the cannon dismounted.”

“I have had them drawn in; that is all.”

“You will not have them dismounted, then?”

“No! the king’s cannon are here by the king’s order, sir; they can only be dismounted by an order from the king.”

“Monsieur De Launey,” said Thuriot, “the real king, whom I counsel you to obey, is yonder”; and he showed to the governor the vast crowd filling the square before the fortress, and whose weapons glittered in the sunshine.

“Sir,” replied De Launey haughtily, “you may, perhaps acknowledge two kings; but I, the governor of the Bastile, – I know but one, and he is Louis XVI. who has affixed his name to a commission by virtue of which I command here both men and things”; and, stamping his foot, he added angrily: “In the name of the king, sir, leave this place at once.” Thuriot withdrew, but he had hardly emerged from the massive portals and crossed the drawbridge of the moat, which was immediately raised behind him, ere the people commenced the attack. Uproar and confusion ensued. One hundred thousand men, filling all the streets and alleys, all the windows and house-tops of the adjacent buildings, opened upon the Bastile an incessant fire, harmlessly flattening their bullets against the massive stone walls. Priests, nobles, wealthy citizens, ragged and emaciate mendicants, men, women, boys, and girls, were mingled in the assault, pressing side by side; apparently the whole of Paris, with one united will, combined against the great bulwark of tyranny. For five hours the attack continued; at five in the afternoon, the French soldiers raised a flag of truce upon the towers. This movement plunged De Launey into despair. One hundred thousand men were beleaguering his fortress. The troops from Versailles had not arrived, and three-fourths of his garrison had already abandoned him, and gone over to his assailants. Death was his inevitable doom. Seizing a match he rushed toward the magazine, determined to blow up the citadel. There were one hundred and thirty-five barrels of gunpowder in the vaults. Two subaltern officers crossed their bayonets before him, and the lives of one hundred thousand people were saved. Gradually the flag of truce was seen through the smoke; the firing ceased, and the cry resounded through the crowd, and was echoed along the streets of Paris, “La Bastile surrenders!” “The fortress which Louis XIV. and Turenne had pronounced impregnable, surrendered not to the arms of its assailants, for they had produced no impression upon it; it was conquered by the public opinion which pervaded Paris, and which vanquished its garrison.” While these scenes were transpiring at Paris, Versailles was in excitement. Courier after courier arrived, breathless, announcing that the Bastile was taken, that the troops in Paris refused to fire upon the crowd, that De Launey was slain, and that the cavalry of Lambese were flying before the people.

No eye was closed at Versailles that night, unless, perchance, it was that of the king, Louis XVI.; for all felt the counter-shock of that terrible concussion with which Paris was still trembling. The French guards, the bodyguards, and the Swiss, drawn up in platoons and grouped near the openings of all the principal streets, were conversing among themselves, or with those of the citizens whose fidelity to the monarchy inspired them with confidence; for Versailles has at all times been a royalist city. Religious respect for the monarchy and for the monarch was ingrafted in the hearts of its inhabitants as if it were a quality of its soil. Having always lived near kings, fostered by their bounty, beneath the shade of their wonders, having always inhaled the intoxicating perfume of the fleur-de-lys, and seen the brilliant gold of the garments, and the smiles upon the august lips of royalty, the inhabitants of Versailles, for whom kings had built a city of marble and porphyry, felt almost kings themselves; and, even at the present day, – even now, when the splendid palace of Louis Quatorze stands silent in its grandeur; when no longer the marble court is thronged with gorgeous equipages, and

“Up the chestnut alley, all in flower so white and pure,Strut the red and yellow lacqueys of the Madame Pompadour;”

when the vast gardens where once Louis, the Grand Monarque, surrounded by his train of lords and ladies, moved majestic, “monarch of all he surveyed and of all who surveyed him,” are silent and deserted; – even now, Versailles must either belie its origin, or, considering itself as a fragment of the fallen monarchy, and no longer feeling the pride of power and wealth, must at least retain the poetical associations of regret and the sovereign charms of melancholy. By his answer to the Marquis de Brézé, Mirabeau had struck the very face of royalty.

By the taking of the Bastile, the people had struck it to the heart, paralyzed its nerves of action, and given it a death-blow. “But the monarch of France, from his palace at Versailles, heard the thunders of the distant cannonade, and yet inscribed upon his puerile journal, ‘Nothing!’”

“Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad;” and the adage applies fitly to the French court during the six months preceding the overthrow. Never had the nobles been so haughty and domineering. Never had they looked upon the people with such supreme contempt. Their arrogance passed all bounds. Even Marie Antoinette exclaimed in terror, “This noblesse will ruin us!”

The Flanders regiment had been stationed at Versailles; and on the 1st of October a banquet was given to the officers at the palace. Wine was liberally supplied from the royal cellars, and was so liberally partaken of that the banquet became a scene of riot and disorder. The revolutionary movement was cursed intensely, and the national cockade trampled under foot. The tidings of this fête spread rapidly through Paris, exciting great indignation. The court was feasting; the people starving. Versailles was filled with rejoicing; Paris with mourning.