Chapter XIII: Appendix: Detailed Description of the Diamond Necklace 387 (10)

The count went to England as the cardinal had suggested, and shortly afterwards the cardinal said to her, “Write to your husband to send me what money he has received, for I have some pressing payments to make. You remember seeing a lady with me during Holy week. I have promised her five hundred thousand livres. She is a German, and is about to marry a gentleman of Versailles so as to legitimatise a child of which I am the father.” On being written to, her husband hastened home again, bringing with him drafts upon Bergaud (Perregaux) for 121,000 livres, a medallion set with brilliants valued at one thousand crowns, a pair of girandole earrings valued at two thousand crowns, a diamond pin, and two large diamond rings, which, together with the drafts for one hundred and twenty-one thousand livres, were handed to the cardinal, who returned the earrings, the pin, and the medallion, saying, “Here, keep these for your trouble.” She told the cardinal that her husband had left behind him, in England, a quantity of diamonds to be sold or else set, to which the cardinal replied, that he would prefer their being sold, but would see about this on his return from Saverne.[253]

One can very well understand that on the conclusion of this marvellous narrative the sitting of the court was adjourned, and that on the following day Madame de la Motte was asked by her judges what witnesses she could bring forward in support of the extraordinary statements she had made. The countess replied there was only the servant who brought her the first box of diamonds from the cardinal, as the note which accompanied it had been taken possession of by the Prince de Rohan with all his other letters to her, when she was confined under lock and key at the Palais-Cardinal.

On being asked to account for the opulence which she was known to have displayed at the very time that she and her husband were, as she said, selling these diamonds on the cardinal’s behalf, she recapitulated various presents of money which she affirmed the cardinal had made her; in addition to which, she said, she had received considerable gifts from the royal princes and princesses and from ministers of the crown. She stated that the diamonds which had been handed to her by the cardinal, including those remaining unsold in England, were of the value of three hundred and seventy-seven thousand livres; nevertheless these did not comprise all that belonged to the Necklace sold to the queen, as the cardinal had given numbers away; and among them, some of the most beautiful to the lady, whom he wanted to marry to a gentleman attached to the suite of the Count de Provence, and others to the Countess de Cagliostro. After having expressly stated that the diamonds she and her husband disposed of did not comprise all that belonged to the Necklace sold to the queen, Madame de la Motte maintained, in reply to questions asked her, that she neither knew nor suspected that any of the diamonds sold by them formed any portion of the Necklace in question; otherwise she would have had nothing to do with them, but would have felt it her duty to have warned the jewellers. When her husband, on seeing such a large number of unset stones, asked the cardinal where they came from, the prince replied that they belonged to an old set of jewels which he had no longer any occasion for now that he was getting old. When reminded that it was at this very time Laporte had spoken to her of the jewellers’ inquietude at finding the Necklace was not worn by the queen, Madame de la Motte observed, that in this case the jewellers ought to have addressed themselves to the cardinal, particularly as she had warned them to be cautious. She denied that the cardinal had at any time expressed astonishment to her at her majesty not wearing the Necklace; the reverse, indeed, was the fact, it was she who had expressed her astonishment to the cardinal.

The countess, as a matter of course, denied having shown to the cardinal a letter purporting to be from the queen respecting the payment of the sum of seven hundred thousand livres to the jewellers; she also denied having given thirty thousand livres to the cardinal to be handed over to them as interest for the delay in the payment of the instalments. When asked what she borrowed from thirty to forty thousand livres from her notary for at this precise date, she was ready with her answer. It was to oblige the Marchioness de Crussol (the same who went to the guillotine with Madame Elisabeth, the king’s sister, when these two poor ladies embraced each other at the foot of the scaffold), who came to her, and told her of the embarrassing position in which the ambassadress of Portugal was placed through having pledged her diamonds, which she was unable to redeem, and which would have been sold if Madame de la Motte had not furnished the money to take them out of pawn.

She tried to persuade her judges that the cardinal had called upon her one morning, and complained to her that he had been duped in the affair of the Necklace; that he had shown her a letter which he imagined had come from the queen, containing these words, “Send by the little countess[254] a sum of money—the amount of which she could not recollect—for these unfortunates. I should be annoyed if they get into trouble.” He suspected, however, that the letter was not in the queen’s handwriting, and that he had been made a dupe of. He paced up and down the room exclaiming, “Has she deceived me, this little countess? has she deceived me? Oh, no! I know Madame de Cagliostro too well; she is not capable of this.”

On being asked if she knew a certain Dame de Courville, she replied that she had seen her with the cardinal in holy week the year previous, and that she knew her as a neighbour living within a few doors of her own house. She then proceeded to say that this was the same lady the cardinal desired to marry to a gentleman belonging to the suite of the Count de Provence, and to whom he had promised to give five hundred thousand livres. When asked if she knew an individual named Augeard[255] or one Bette d’Étienville, or one Marsilly, a counsellor, she replied that she knew none of those persons. This concluded the countess’s first examination, which lasted from the 20th to the 26th of January, an entire week, and of which we have given all the chief points to enable the reader to see the scope and power of Madame de la Motte’s inventive faculties, and her proficiency in the arts of falsehood and deceit.

It was now Cagliostro’s turn to be examined. In answer to questions put to him, he said that he was a professor of medicine, of noble birth, and had travelled largely in Asia and Africa, as well as Europe, most of the chief cities of which he had visited. He was intimately acquainted with the Prince de Rohan, and since his (the count’s) arrival in Paris, on the 30th of January in the past year, had been in the habit of seeing him generally three or four times a week. During this period the prince and his friends had occasionally dined with him at his house in the Rue Saint-Claude. The Necklace, respecting which so much had been said, was purchased before this time. He remembered the cardinal expressing certain doubts to him with regard to the genuineness of the signature affixed to the contract, when he, sharing in them, advised the grand almoner to throw himself at the king’s feet and confess everything that had transpired; but this he resolutely refused to do.

With regard to the scene at the Hôtel de Strasbourg, described by the Countess de la Motte, Cagliostro asserted this was merely an attempted experiment in animal magnetism, in which he was no great believer. The ribbons which the child was dressed out in were some that were lying about the apartment. He denied having placed his drawn sword on the child’s head, and having made use of the words ascribed to him; but admitted there was a bottle of clear water on which the child placed her hand. The affair was got up entirely at the instigation of Madame de la Motte, who displayed great anxiety respecting the forthcoming accouchement of some great lady, and he performed the experiment in the hope of calming her. The countess’s story about the table with a large number of lighted candles upon it, and the naked sword and poignard, and the crosses of Jerusalem and St. Andrew, had not a particle of truth in it. He never placed Madame de la Motte’s hand upon these things, and nothing of what she had described took place. The cardinal did not fetch any diamonds from his secretary, and, indeed, the whole affair was a pure piece of invention. The cardinal had given him and his wife a few articles of jewellery as presents; all these things, and whatever other diamonds he possessed, had been seized by the police, and were still in their custody, and could be produced. The cardinal had never given the Countess de Cagliostro any diamonds forming part of the Necklace, nor any sum of money arising from the sale of the diamonds. He had never told the cardinal that his wife was intimate with the queen. She had never seen the queen, and was never once at Versailles, and could have had no correspondence with any one for the best of all reasons—she could not write.[256]

Cagliostro, in his examination, having stripped the countess’s highly inventive narrative of its marvellous character, and exposed her falsehoods with respect to the diamonds, and having, moreover, previously stated in his memorial that he had cautioned the Cardinal de Rohan to be on his guard against Madame de la Motte, whom he stigmatized as a wretch, but that the cardinal would not believe him, the countess’s indignation knew no bounds. Knowing the doubtful kind of reputation that attached to Cagliostro, and the peculiar nature of the relations commonly believed to subsist between him and the cardinal, who, it was thought, aided and abetted him in his endeavours to discover the philosopher’s stone—it was commonly reported that Cagliostro had prevailed on the cardinal to obtain possession of the Necklace, that he might experiment upon the diamonds and centriple their value[257]—the countess believed she could readily have diverted not merely suspicion towards the “low empiric,” as she was now in the habit of styling him, but have induced a firm conviction of his guilt. This had been her aim from the outset, as is evident from the insinuations in which she indulged in her memorial with regard to Cagliostro, whom she, or rather her counsel, introduces in the following grandiloquent style:

“His name, his surname, his quality? he and the woman attached to his fortunes?—The Count and so-called Countess de Cagliostro!

“His age?—One of his valets said that he knew not the age of his master, but for himself he had been one hundred and fifty years in his service. As for the master, he sometimes gave three hundred years as his age, at other times he said he had assisted at Galilee at the marriage of Cana.[258]

“His country?—A Portuguese Jew, or Greek, or Egyptian from Alexandria, who had brought with him to Europe the sorceries and allegories of the East.

“His habits and his religion?—Doctor of the cabalistic art; one of those extravagant members of the Rosy Cross who profess to raise the dead, and make them hold converse with the living—masters of all the sciences, skilled in the transmutation of baser metals into gold—beneficent spirits who attend the poor for nothing, and sell immortality to the rich.

“His fortune? in short, his means of supporting that luxurious ostentation which he has displayed before our eyes?—A sumptuous hôtel, elegant furniture, a well-supplied table, servants in all sorts of liveries; and the court of this hôtel always noisy with carriages, announcing in the midst of an intelligent nation visionaries of every rank—in a word, Cagliostro, without inheriting anything, without purchasing anything, without selling anything, without acquiring anything, is possessed of all. Such is this man.

“What are his great deeds?—Many are known in the different courts of Europe, others are known to Madame Böhmer;[259] but let us confine ourselves to the third filtration of the Necklace, when it is needful to dispose the Count de la Motte to carry to a foreign country a considerable quantity of diamonds. This is the grand result furnished by the crucible of the operator.”[260]

Cagliostro, it may be observed, was greatly excited on hearing of the arrest of his wife, and on afterwards learning that she was ill, became perfectly frantic. He pretended to believe that she was dead or at her last extremity, and threatened to kill himself if he were not permitted to see her, or she were not immediately set at liberty.[261]

XXX.

1786. FEB.–MARCH.

THE TRIAL: THE CONFRONTATIONS OF THE ACCUSED WITH EACH OTHER AND WITH THE WITNESSES.

The examinations having at length terminated, the confrontations of the accused with each other, and with the principal witnesses, now commenced. At the time these were going on, the accused, in accordance with custom, were deprived of the assistance of their counsel, who were not permitted to hold any intercourse whatever with them. Madame de la Motte and the cardinal were first confronted with each other. The countess describes being ushered into the hall of the Bastille, and the cardinal making his appearance shortly afterwards. The oaths having been administered, the opponents surveyed each other attentively; though, says Madame, the cardinal, “pretending to amuse himself with his pencil, which he twirled about in his fingers, affected not to regard me,” and the duello of words at once began. And it was a mere duello of words, for the real points of the affair seem hardly to have been touched upon. At the outset the countess evidently thought she was getting much the best of the contest, for she observes in her “Life,” that in her replies to the cardinal’s interrogatories her expressions “were so strongly pointed, so pertinent and forcible, that every one present gave smiles of approbation.”[262] When questioned as to whence she derived the means for such an unwonted display of opulence as she was known to have exhibited, she pointed to the cardinal, and gave the judges distinctly to understand that the relations subsisting between them were those of lover and mistress, and not benefactor and supplicant as had been commonly supposed; hence the motive for the liberal gifts which she had received at the hands of the Prince de Rohan.[263]

As the contest went on, the cardinal, according to Madame’s version, got some further awkward thrusts which touched him to the quick, and made him “look uneasy, and turn suddenly pale, and complain of a violent headache,” which stayed the proceedings for a time. When these were resumed, the countess thought it necessary to object to what she styles some impropriety on the part of the cardinal—he put some pertinent question which it was not convenient for her to answer—whereupon a three hours’ altercation ensued, during which the plethoric cardinal grew “red as fire,” while madame, less excited “came off,” she tells us, “with flying colours,” the judges bestowing upon her “smiles of encouragement.” Thus ended the first day’s confrontation.

The day following, the cardinal entered the hall quite chapfallen; “instead of his former fierce and haughty demeanour, his eyes appeared to ask pardon, and his countenance was sweet and engaging.”[264] His “mildness” gave the countess “fresh spirits, and increased her hopes,” but a scene of wrangling began immediately—each accused the other of having had the Necklace, and of knowing what had become of it. “At this moment,” remarks the countess, “I was not mistress of my temper, and loaded them all with reproaches,” which brought down upon her a severe reproof from the judges, which did not, she confesses, “in the least tend to abate her violence.”[265] The second day’s proceedings terminated, therefore, in a greater tempest than the first had done.

If we believe what Madame de la Motte says, the cardinal, as the confrontations progressed, grew quite sentimental. Weak and foolish to the extreme point of folly we know the grand almoner to have been, still, now that the film was removed from his eyes, we can hardly credit that he acted the old dotard’s part as the countess would have us believe. “He blew me over kisses,” she says, “and when he discovered my eyes turned aside upon any other object, he played with his pencil to attract my notice.” At another time, “he clasped his hands eagerly together, and lifting up his eyes to heaven, ‘Ah!’ exclaimed he, ‘how unhappy we are!’ He even shed tears.”[266]

On a subsequent occasion the countess pretends that when they were by themselves at one end of the hall the cardinal approached her, took her by the hand, and led her to the fireplace, and that while they were there standing in an attitude of the most friendly regard, engaged in earnest conversation, she suddenly rang the bell, which brought in De Launay, governor of the Bastille, and two of his officers, who surprised them in the attitude above described. “The lieutenant, De Losme,” she observes, “could scarce pardon me to see me holding discourse with my executioner, ‘a person,’ said he, with indignation, ‘that endeavours to prove you a thief;’” and who did, indeed, in due course, not only prove her to be a thief, but procured her a felon’s punishment.

Although, according to her own account, these confrontations opened so triumphantly for her, the countess at their close had lost much of that confidence which her overweening vanity had led her to feel, and tried hard to prolong the proceedings by urging that application should be made to the king for permission for her to send a letter to her husband, “to engage him to come in person to confront and disprove this preconcerted system of lying accusations which pretends that he has gone off with a part of the necklace.” As if the count could not have come forward, and done all this of his own accord, as he might possibly have been tempted to do had he not entertained a wholesome fear of the scourge and the branding-iron, and of being chained to the oar as a galley slave for the rest of his life.

Judging from the countess’s report of these confrontations, they would seem to have been merely a series of wordy wranglings; it is, however, quite certain that in the course of them many facts damaging to her in the last degree were brought to light. Her wretched poverty, up to the very moment when she touched the first fifty thousand livres of the cardinal’s money, was proved beyond a doubt, as well as the comparative affluence which she displayed immediately afterwards. And the same with respect to the almost Oriental style of luxury in which the De la Mottes commenced to live immediately after the count had returned from England with the proceeds arising from the sale of the diamonds to the jeweller Gray.

The countess in her confrontation with Laporte—who had first mentioned the Necklace to her, and had introduced her to the crown jewellers—tried to wheedle him by such a shallow manœuvre as thus addressing him: “I believe you to be an honest man, Monsieur Laporte. Forget for a moment that you have made any deposition, and distinctly answer my questions.” Laporte, however, stuck to his text, and nothing favourable to the countess could be extracted from him.[267] When she and the Baron de Planta, the cardinal’s equerry, are brought face to face, he declines to swear black to be white, and persists in saying that he had himself carried to her the two several sums of fifty thousand livres and one hundred thousand livres, for which she had applied to the cardinal in the queen’s name. “I swear in the presence of justice, and on my honour and my head,” exclaimed the indignant baron, “that I myself gave you these amounts from the Cardinal de Rohan to be remitted to the queen;”[268] whereupon madame pronounces him to be mad, and in proof of her assertion recounts, with evident unction, the particulars of an attempted indelicate assault upon her by the baron in the month of October, 1784.[269] Regnier, the goldsmith and jeweller who supplied the De la Mottes with a service of plate, &c., and received diamonds in discharge of his account, having given his version of his transactions with the count and countess, the latter, following her usual system of denial, contradicts Regnier point blank, whereupon he exhibits the entries in his books made at the time. She then admits everything, and asks herself, with seeming astonishment, how it was possible in less than a year for her to have so far lost her memory.[270]

The countess, when confronted with Father Loth, loaded him with a shower of reproaches. “You bad man,” exclaimed she, “it is you who have led my husband astray; you have introduced him to disreputable women. You have persuaded him to live on bad terms with me. You have robbed me.”[271] Grenier, the goldsmith and money-lender, had deposed that Madame de la Motte had ordered of him two superb robes of Lyons silk, saying she intended making a present of them to the queen; in reply to which he had told her point blank that it was not likely she would dare to take the liberty of making presents to her majesty. Whereupon the countess remarked, that there was no such ceremony as he supposed between relations! She had, moreover, told him that she had reinstated the cardinal in the queen’s good graces, and that her majesty dared refuse her nothing, and had also shown him a letter which she said had been written to her by the queen, but which she would not allow him to read.[272] When brought face to face with Grenier, she exclaimed, “He has been in the Bastille for fifteen days, and when he comes out his first act is to depose against me out of revenge, because I once had him put outside my house, and because it was in relation to me that he was imprisoned.”[273]

With regard to her confrontations with the Demoiselle d’Oliva, the countess complains that questions were put to the latter in such a form that she had only to answer yes or no. “I did not let this escape me,” she remarks, “but desired Dupuis de Marcé, one of the reporters of the case, appointed by the parliament, to suffer her to speak, and not to be her mouthpiece. He turned red, was stung with rage, and getting up like a demoniac, put an end to the sitting.”[274] When it was resumed, and that portion of D’Oliva’s declaration was read which spoke of the letters, purporting to have been written by the queen, which the countess had shown her, Madame de la Motte cannot conceal her agitation. She makes signs to D’Oliva, winks her eyes at her, and finding that she takes no notice, keeps repeating the action. When charged with this, she replies in a furious tone of voice, “I make signs to you? Yes, I make you a sign that you are a monster for having said such a thing.” She then proceeds to charge D’Oliva with having behaved immodestly when on a visit to her at Charonne, says she was guilty of positive indecencies, that she was only a common courtezan, who had been for some time her husband’s mistress, and who had usurped a title to which she had no claim. She next enlarged upon D’Oliva’s affairs generally, and spoke of her pecuniary embarrassments, and of the real and supposed disappointments she had experienced, with “audacity, arrogance, and fury;” for all of which she was duly taken to task by D’Oliva’s counsel in a new edition of his client’s “Mémoire.” “Proud and vile woman,” the memorial proceeds to say, “who caressed me when I could serve you, who disdained me when I exposed you, who hate me when I confound you, descend, descend from the supreme height of your genealogical tree, from whence you brave the law, impose upon its administrators, and insult by turns your unfortunate co-accused.”[275]

As for Cagliostro, on whom and on whose wife the countess had tried her utmost to shift a portion of her own guilt—out of revenge, we suppose, for the count having been the first to suggest to the cardinal that she had tricked him in the Necklace business—he is “this oracle who bewitched the cardinal’s understanding,” a low alchemist, a false prophet and profaner of the true religion, a mountebank and a vagabond. To which Cagliostro pertinently replied, “Not always a false prophet, for had the Prince de Rohan taken my advice he would have seen through the artifices of the countess, and neither of us been where we are. To her numerous calumnies I will content myself with making a laconic reply, the same that was made by Pascal under parallel circumstances—a reply which politeness forbids me to make in the vulgar tongue, but which madame’s counsel will translate for her, _Mentiris impudentissime_.”[276] The countess, not knowing the meaning of the phrase, imagined, correctly enough, that it was something exceedingly offensive, and to use her own language, “put an end to the scene by throwing a candlestick at the quack’s head! Cagliostro, enraged and foaming at the mouth, said to me, ‘He will come, thy Villette! he will come! it is he that will speak!’”[277]

Referring to her confrontation with Madame Dubarry, the countess observes, “I cannot withstand the temptation of saying a few words concerning the part assigned to the ‘queen dowager,’ the immaculate Dubarry of monastic memory. She stated that I had been at her house to solicit her protection, and that I had left with her a memorial, signed ‘Marie-Antoinette de France.’ The fact is, I only went to her house out of curiosity in a good coach and four. Upon her signifying to me that she thought the branch of Valois had been extinct, I gave her a memorial of my genealogy, signed ‘_Marie-Antoine_ d’Hozier de Sérigny, Judge of the Nobility of _France_.’ When confronted with me she assumed an air of haughtiness and insolence, but I hastened to make her sensible of the distance between her birth and mine.”[278] This wrangling between such a pair of demireps must have been highly amusing to all who chanced to be witnesses of it.

The cardinal, alluding to the confrontations in one of his memorials, says that Madame de la Motte generally either cried or went into convulsions at them, and that with her, audacity, gaiety, and tears succeeded each other by turns, according as she found herself capable of sustaining a part, or felt herself forced to succumb to feelings of remorse and fear.[279]

During Lent of 1786, while the public excitement with reference to the Necklace trial was at its height, the Abbé Georgel, grand-vicar to the cardinal, whose office of grand almoner gave him spiritual jurisdiction over the royal chapel at Versailles, the Hospital of the Quinze-Vingts, and the Assumption, caused to be printed and posted on the doors of the churches and sacristies dependent on the grand almonry, a charge, wherein he quoted the words of St. Paul to his disciple Timothy, exhorting him to blush neither for his captivity nor for his bonds. Copies of this charge were even posted in the royal chapel itself.

The zeal of the Abbé Georgel here carried him a little too far. The king and queen were deeply irritated, and the Baron de Breteuil sent for the offender and spoke sharply to him on the subject. Instead of expressing regret, the faithful grand-vicar, intoxicated with the success he had already met with in thwarting the enemies of the cardinal, his master, ventured to brave the minister of justice, replying to his remonstrances with firmness, and insisting on his right to exercise the powers which the cardinal had delegated to him. The minister, taken aback at so much assurance on the part of a mere abbé, required Georgel to furnish him with an explanation in writing. This the grand-vicar did in the following terms:

“I had the honour to observe to you, sir, that monseigneur the cardinal not being under the bonds of a legal decree, enjoyed, even where he was, his rights as citizen, bishop, and grand almoner in all their fulness; that a detention which had not been pronounced by law did not take away from a prisoner the right to exercise his civil and ecclesiastical functions; that such an interdiction could be the consequence only of a decree of banishment or imprisonment; that the grand-vicars of monseigneur the Cardinal de Rohan, furnished with his powers, were legally authorized to exercise in his name and under his orders their respective functions; and that our legal code was precise on the application of these principles.

“You then tell me, sir, to send you all these details in writing. I obey the minister of the king, and shall await with the profoundest respect the orders of his majesty respecting the conduct which I ought to show in my quality of grand-vicar.”[280]

This was another false step on the abbé’s part, for the minister retaliated by a _lettre-de-cachet_, and the only order the grand-vicar received from his majesty was a command, dated March 10, 1786, to depart from Paris within four-and-twenty hours for Mortagne in Brittany. Thus at a most critical point in the proceedings instituted against him was the cardinal suddenly deprived of the services of his able and energetic grand-vicar.

On the 26th of March, owing to the exertions of Counsellor D’Epréménil, who pressed her case on the attention of the parliament, the Countess de Cagliostro succeeded in regaining her liberty after upwards of seven months’ confinement in the Bastille; and about this time the women of Paris, who were great partisans of the cardinal’s during the entire period of his imprisonment, took to wearing in their toilettes a combination of scarlet and straw-colour ribbons, jocularly entitled “cardinal on the straw”—meaning the cardinal in prison. Grand dames of fashion, too, at the Easter promenade of Longchamp, came out in straw bonnets with scarlet crowns, and trimmed with scarlet ribbon, which Mademoiselle Bertin, the queen’s milliner—at this moment out of favour at court—had introduced under the name of _chapeaux au Cardinal_.[281]

XXXI.

1786. APRIL–MAY.

ARREST OF THE FORGER VILLETTE—HIS EXAMINATIONS AND CONFRONTATIONS.

It is now that Rétaux de Villette is unearthed with the Abbé Georgel’s sleuth-hounds in full cry. Tracked from town to town, and from village to village, he is at length run down at Geneva, having, says one account, since the news of the Necklace affair, crossed the Swiss frontier, assumed various disguises, and turning his musical talents to account, acted the part of a vagrant musician, playing on his mandoline along the streets and highways to amuse the passers-by. One version of his capture represents him as having been trepanned in some low Geneva tavern, whilst overcome by drink, into enlisting in some phantom regiment, by which adroit manœuvre he was enticed from off the “sacred republican soil,” and carried away to Paris in triumph.[282] Another version affirms that he had got mixed up in a local brawl at the time the abbé’s emissaries pounced upon him, which is likely to be the truer statement of the two, as it is corroborated by his own account of his arrest. “A disturbance,” he says, “probably brought about by design, arose in the public streets between two Geneva watchmakers. A Frenchman, witness of the affair, interposed as peace-maker; whereupon he was seized, together with the two disputants. ‘Where do you come from?’ was asked of him. ‘From Lyons.’ ‘Ah! there has been a great robbery recently committed there. What brought you to Geneva?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘What is your name?’ ‘Rétaux de Villette.’ ‘To prison with him!’ A few days afterwards an inspector of police arrived from Paris, and carried off the prisoner to the Bastille.”[283]

This must have been about the commencement of April, and no sooner did Villette find himself within the grip of the French police for the second time than he became quite chapfallen. On the road to Paris he was low-spirited to a degree, constantly speaking of himself as a lost man, as a victim about to be sacrificed. His distress, he tells us, was “aggravated by the jokes of the officers, in which they appeared to take a malicious pleasure.”[284] Now and then when cheered with wine he would chat confidentially with police-inspector Quidor concerning his _liaisons_ with Madame de la Motte, and would let fall scraps of information respecting the “_belle demoiselle_” of the Palais Royal, the part she played at the midnight meeting at Versailles, and the influence which the countess exercised over the Prince de Rohan; but with regard to everything that related to the Necklace, and the _billets-doux_—“gilt edged,” or bordered with “vignettes bleues,”—and the forged signature to the contract with the jewellers, he preserved a discreet silence.

When housed within the gloomy walls of the Bastille he became slightly, but only slightly, more communicative. He railed at his former mistress for having been the cause of his ruin; described how he came to Paris to obtain a situation in the marshalsea, when, unfortunately for him, he fell into the snares of the siren, who, by pretending to have influence in high quarters, won his confidence, and by promising to do something better for him than his modest expectations led him to hope for, induced him to relinquish all idea of the post he was on the point of securing. Being frequently at her house, the countess employed him in drawing up and copying memorials setting forth the claims of the house of Valois, and asking sometimes for restitution, and at others for pecuniary assistance; also memorials on behalf of individuals in whom Madame de la Motte took an interest, addressed either to the ministers, or to persons in high official positions, from whom places were solicited for the applicants.

At his first examination Villette confessed absolutely nothing but what he was well aware was already known beyond the possibility of doubt. For instance, he admitted that he was acquainted with Mademoiselle d’Oliva, and that he accompanied the count and her to Versailles on a particular day, in the evening of which she was dressed out, and went with the countess to the park, where he and the count also proceeded. In substance he admitted the acting of the part of the queen by D’Oliva, who left the park with him and the count—the countess going off with the Cardinal de Rohan and the Baron de Planta. Villette scrupulously avoided everything like an admission of having written any letters for the countess. He denied having written a letter for D’Oliva to give to the cardinal, or one for the countess to read to D’Oliva as though it were from the queen. He believed D’Oliva was paid for the part she acted, but did not know the amount; he himself carried her three hundred livres on one occasion. When questioned respecting the Necklace, he replied that he knew absolutely nothing about it, nor of the negotiation for its purchase, nor of the letters said to have passed between the cardinal and the queen relative to this purchase. He confessed he was very frequently at Versailles, but could not tell whether he was there on the particular day the Necklace is said to have been delivered. At any rate he knew nothing of the circumstances connected with its delivery, was not the bearer of any letter respecting it, and certainly did not write any such letter. Was not aware of the Necklace being taken to pieces, though he admitted having had some diamonds given to him to sell. Did not know the object of the count’s journey to London; was not aware that he sold any diamonds there, or that he returned to Paris with letters of credit for a considerable amount. He admitted having assumed the name of Augeard, but only as a disguise for carrying on intrigues with women.

Villette of course utterly denied all knowledge of the signature to the contract, but when asked if he thought the cardinal was able to discern whether the signature was genuine, he replied, that for his own part, without possessing the intelligence of the cardinal, had he been in his place he would not have been duped. During the time he was in familiar intercourse with the De la Mottes they appeared, he said, to live like persons of means, but he knew nothing of their sources of income. With respect to their opulence, although he had witnessed it, he had never shared it, save as a hanger-on—a guest who always had a seat at their table. With regard to the De la Mottes’ motive for leaving Paris in August last, he understood from madame that her circumstances were embarrassed. He admitted having received four thousand livres from madame, but only as a loan to enable him to visit Italy, where he had long desired to go; and confessed to having slept part of the night in a cabriolet in the courtyard of the De la Motte hôtel ere setting forth on his journey early on the following morning. Finally he stated that he had had no correspondence with the De la Mottes subsequent to his departure.[285]

Less than a month’s reflection in the Bastille seems to have sharpened Rétaux de Villette’s memory on several essential points, for he writes a letter to the Count de Vergennes, in which he confesses everything except the receipt of the casket containing the Necklace; this he persisted in denying to the last. In consequence of this letter he is again brought up for examination, when, the contract being produced and shown to him, he admits the words “approuvé” and the signature to have been written by himself alone, not in imitation, however, of the queen’s handwriting, but in his own ordinary hand.[286] It was done, he said, at the request of Madame de la Motte, and on her assurance that it was to oblige the cardinal. He also confessed to having written, at the countess’s dictation, all the _billets-doux_—gilt-edged, or bordered with _vignettes bleues_—which purported to have been addressed by the queen to the Prince de Rohan, and two letters in particular, in which the queen charged Madame de la Motte to ask the cardinal, in her name, first of all for sixty (fifty) thousand livres, and secondly for one hundred thousand livres, for an immediate payment the queen had to make.[287] Villette positively denied having been the bearer of a billet purporting to have been written by the queen on the evening of the 2nd of February, and of receiving the casket containing the Necklace, and he complacently referred to the striking difference that existed between the individual indicated by the Cardinal de Rohan and himself. The former, he remarked, had big black eyebrows, a pale thin face, and slender figure; whereas his eyebrows were light, his face full and somewhat rubicund, and his figure inclined to be portly. With regard to the Necklace, he knew that it had been broken up, and that the diamonds intrusted to him to sell formed part of it, but he denied having had any of the diamonds given to him, or of having received money from Madame de la Motte for appending the forged signature to the contract. “It is true she has lent me money,” observed he, “and I have kept a note of it, but whenever I have spoken to madame on the subject she has always been polite enough to say that she did not wish the matter mentioned.” Finally, he expressed his firm belief that Cagliostro was entirely innocent of any complicity in the affair.[288]

The countess now undergoes a second examination at which she denies that Villette wrote any letters to the cardinal in the name of the queen. Having had time to reflect upon the weight of evidence against her, she now admits the truth of the statement with respect to the meeting between the cardinal and D’Oliva in the park of Versailles, but pretends the affair was a mere pleasantry got up to quiet the restless cardinal. She still denied that she had applied to him for the several sums of fifty thousand and one hundred thousand livres, and maintained that she had never received these amounts. Denied, moreover, having ever seen the contract with the jewellers, and having got Villette to sign the same. When told that Villette had confessed, she simply replied that she could not conceive his motive for stating the signature to be his; said she first knew of the signature being forged when the cardinal showed her part of a note written by the queen. Next day, after having again reflected, we find her adhering to her text, and contenting herself with remarking that Villette had been overpersuaded to say that he signed the document, and by her orders.

At Rétaux de Villette’s first confrontation with the countess, after making the damaging admissions which he had done, he seems to have given way to feelings of remorse at having betrayed, as he says, “a woman whom I loved to adoration, and who had loaded me with benefits.” He declared that De Launay, Dupuis de Marcé, Fremyn, the Count de Vergennes, and others, had forced him to assert, with the view of saving himself, that the countess alone had instigated him to write the false signature of the queen so as to cheat the cardinal, whereupon the sitting was immediately broken up without giving him time to finish what he was about to say.[289]

When confronted, however, with Madame de la Motte on a subsequent occasion, he tries his hardest, though in vain, to induce her to speak the truth. He told her that her denials could be no longer accepted as proofs while he, the principal agent, and other witnesses were giving her the lie. “You will not see,” he continued, “that everybody accuses you, and that your voice necessarily loses its power. It is useless to deny that the cardinal, you, and I are culpable in this affair. You seek to destroy the avowal which I make of my own guilt. You say that I lie when I accuse myself of forgery. You ruin yourself in acting thus, and evidently do not understand your own interests.”[290]

Madame, however, conceived that she did, and was prepared with her rejoinder, which she made with all the tact and vehemence of the professional advocate. “The observations,” remarked she, “that M. Villette has made are only made to frighten me. I fear nothing, and am perfectly calm. To all his remarks I persist in replying that I neither urged him to write the signature nor the ‘_approuvés_,’ nor any other similar writing purporting to come from the queen. If M. Villette is good enough to say that he has written the signature and the ‘_approuvés_,’ it is owing to the fear with which he has been inspired on being told that his ordinary handwriting bore so striking a resemblance to the signature appended to the document, and that he would be certain to be condemned, by reason of this resemblance alone, to corporal punishment. He has been told that if he confessed to this, his punishment would be materially lightened. This is what has caused him to make the confession, which I maintain is false.... I repeat that I am in nowise guilty. I await with calmness the punishment that may be awarded me, and I ask no grace.

“With regard to M. le Cardinal, whom M. Villette has just said he believed to be as guilty as we two, I shall not charge myself with his defence, nor with that of any other person, not knowing whether he is guilty or no. If I were in possession of any secret that would tell against the cardinal in the Necklace affair I should not hide it, because for a long time past he has caused me much suffering. As for myself, I again say that I have no confession to make, as M. Villette pretends I have, for I am not guilty, and I am persuaded that he is no more guilty than myself. If I were guilty I would make a confession, in the hope that my punishment would be less grave. As it is, I could only make a false confession; and although M. Villette tells me that every proof has been obtained against me, and that I have only my bare assertions to oppose to these, I repeat again that I leave my judges at liberty to find me guilty, still asserting that I am innocent and free from crime.”[291]

With this smart peroration of madame’s the confrontations were brought to a close, and the accused were remanded back to their several quarters in the gloomy old fortress to await the next step which the law would in due course take. The revelations of D’Oliva, and more particularly those of Villette, by utterly changing the aspect of things, had sadly weakened the countess’s confidence in her line of defence, and the hold which she believed she had on the sympathy of the public. To retain so much of the latter as was possible, she published a third memorial, or summary, as it was called—her second was simply a rejoinder to Cagliostro—made up, as was her custom, of an artful combination of ingenious fallacies well calculated to perplex, if not to delude, the understanding.

M. Feuillet de Conches has, among his collection of autographs, an extensive MS. in the countess’s handwriting, consisting of her observations upon the various “Mémoires” issued on behalf of her co-accused, and of reports of what passed at her own examinations and confrontations. This was evidently prepared for the use of her advocate, M. Doillot, who drew up her memorials from materials she supplied him with, and whom it is quite certain, from the evidence furnished by this MS., Madame de la Motte did not scruple to attempt to deceive, just as she tried to deceive her judges, and, indeed, every one else with whom she came in contact.[292]

“Her foot on earth, her forehead in the skies,
Things done relates, not done she feigns,
And mingles truth with lies.”

In neither of the countess’s memorials does she seek in any way to implicate Marie-Antoinette, nor make the least claim to that intimacy with royalty which she subsequently maintained in her “Mémoires Justificatifs” with such wanton audacity, and again in her “Life, written by herself,” but lays everything to the charge of the cardinal, fascinated, deluded, and overruled by Cagliostro. As a type of the depravity of the human heart when no moral laws restrain its licence, a book more astounding and impudent than “The Life of Jeanne de St. Remi de Valois, Countess de la Motte,”—from which, in the course of our narrative, we have extracted everything of the least importance wearing an air of truth—was, perhaps, never written.

New memorials, however, were of no use now. Her game, which had been most audaciously played, was played out. People of every class turned against her. The queen and the cardinal were no longer victims to that prejudiced and hastily-formed opinion which, without waiting for the pleadings of the lawyers or the verdict of a jury, passes sentence beforehand. Alone and apart from even her fellow-prisoners, this powerful impostor stood detected as the liar, the swindler, the thief, the contriver of the plot, the single and crafty director of a complicated fraud. And the man who was the first to betray her, and “whose villany and diabolical machinations,” to quote the countess’s own words, had caused all this to come to light, had been one of her familiars—friends she could hardly be said to have had—a constant hanger-on at her house, an almost daily guest at her table, “who, by way of rendering himself necessary,” says the countess, “pretended that, as my husband and I were young people, it was requisite we should have some trusty person to superintend our domestics. He superintended, and had the disposal of everything in the house, and when I went into the country he had all the keys, and the care of paying my servants.”[293] Recalling all this to mind in her “Life,” the countess heaps on Father Loth some of her choicest expletives—“serpent” and “viper” being the most favourite. He is, for instance, “the serpent that stung me to the heart;” “the serpent that darted his envenomed sting against me;” “the dangerous viper that stung the bosom that cherished it;” “this disgrace to human nature;” “this iniquitous monk, who embezzled my money and my watch;” “this perjured and malignant monk;” “this solitary savage;” “this dexterous hypocrite;” “this hypocritical, this notorious villain;” “this monster,” “this profligate and abandoned wretch;” “this wretch who has violated every moral obligation.”[294]

The countess’s confederates had confessed themselves guilty, but there was this excuse for them—they were merely her tools and instruments. Villette, in his time of tribulation, might well protest that he was not that great friend and confidant of Madame de la Motte which he was represented to be, for, said he, “_she had no friends, and her confidence never was bestowed absolutely on any one_.” She merely instructed her instruments in what was necessary to the parts they had to perform, and kept the secret of the combinations entirely to herself.[295] D’Oliva had captivated the public by her ingenuous explanation of a stratagem which, it was evident to every one, she had had no share in conceiving or conducting to its issue, although she had taken a part in it. And as to the forger Villette, he had rendered so great a service to the law by his complete exposure of the crime which had been committed, and had so disarmed resentment by his apparent contrition, as to call forth towards himself a kind of latent pity, in which contempt and disgust were to some extent mingled.

With regard to the countess, nothing seemed capable of subduing the wanton energy of this bold bad spirit. Confronted alternately with the cardinal, with the girl D’Oliva, with Cagliostro, and with Rétaux de Villette, besides several minor witnesses, she stood, as we have seen, face to face with them, unabashed against them all. At first she denied everything; accused them of the very crimes she had herself committed; charged them with inventing, conducting, and executing the fraud from first to last; even swore that her two chief confederates, standing there as witnesses against her, had been suborned by the relations of the cardinal, and had formed a conspiracy to shift their own dishonour upon her. She told her judges to remember that she was a Valois, descended from the princes who had formerly reigned over them. Perching herself on this imaginary pedestal, she seemed to forget that she was a prisoner on her trial before the country, and thundered her denunciations against her fellow-prisoners in the loudest key, every eye shrinking and quailing beneath her own. Her judges were for the moment amazed and overawed by an assurance which far surpassed anything hitherto seen in a court of justice, whilst the cardinal respectfully styled her “madame” whenever he addressed her.