The Queen's Confession Part 25

Jeanne would soon have discovered the Cardinal's obsession with me. Then the Comtesse saw a way of improving her status with the Cardinal; it may have been then that it all began.

She had become friendly with a comrade of her husband's, Retaux de Villette, a handsome young man of about thirty, with blue eyes and a fresh complexion, although his hair was already beginning to turn gray. He was an adept at writing verses, imitating well-known actors and actresses and he could write in various styles, even delicately as a woman. This young man became the lover of the Comtesse - perhaps she was genuinely fond of him, or perhaps because the plot was already beginning to form in her mind and she wished to bind him to her.

Jeanne hinted to the Cardinal that I had shown some favor to her. This did not seem impossible, for my friends.h.i.+ps were the source of a great deal of gossip and it was known that it was women with charming looks such as the Princesse de Lamballe and Gabrielle de Polignac who attracted me. Jeanne was extremely attractive; she was also a member of the House of Valois; it was not therefore an impossibility that I should have noticed her and favored her. So far the story progressed reasonably enough.

Jeanne must have been overwhelmed with joy by her success, for the Cardinal showed clearly that he believed her and confided in her his great desire to be received by me.

It might be, she told him, that she could put in a word for him with the Queen. But Jeanne knew that vague promises would not satisfy him; this was where Retaux de Villette could be useful; he could write in a light feminine hand and if he signed his letters with my name, why should not the Cardinal believe that they had been written by me? They were addressed to my dear friend Madame la Comtesse de la Motte-Valois and in them were many expressions of friends.h.i.+p.

How could he have believed that I had written such letters to this woman! Yet it seemed that he did. It has been suggested that Cagliostro was in the plot with the de la Mottes to delude the Cardinal and that the sorcerer mesmerized him into accepting the letters as written by me. I should have said this was ridiculous but for the fact that they had that absurd signature "Marie Antoinette de France." Surely if he had his wits about him, the Cardinal must have realized they were false by that alone.

I have seen some of these letters which were said to have been written by me. I shudder to look at them; and even now with most of the facts in mind I am still mystified.

Jeanne had led the Cardinal to believe that if he could write a justification of his misdeeds over the past years, I would be willing to consider it and perhaps forgive him.

Delightedly he immediately prepared a long apologia on which he spent days - rewriting and correcting, and when it was finished, the Comtesse took it, promising that she would deliver it to me at the earliest possible moment.

A few days later Retaux de Villette wrote a letter on gilt-edged paper with a little fleur-de-lis in the corner.

"I am delighted that I need no longer regard you as blameworthy. It is not yet possible to grant you the audience for which you ask, but I will let you know as soon as it is possible. In the meantime please be discreet."

This letter signed Marie Antoinette de France produced the desired effect on the Cardinal. He was overcome with emotion; he was ready to lavish handsome gifts on the woman who could help him to such progress in his relations.h.i.+p with me. The fact that he did not question the veracity of this shows that he must have been the biggest fool in France. Yet he was not in truth that. Cagliostro had looked into the future for him and advised him to carry on with the project nearest his heart. How often have I asked myself what the magician's role was in the mystery!

Jeanne knew that she could keep the Cardinal believing I was writing to him but whenever I was at a gathering in which he was present, I refused to look his way. For a while this situation might be explained, but it could not go on.

But Jeanne was never at a loss and she devised a grandiose scheme with her husband - the self-styled Comte de la Motte-Valois - and her lover Retaux de Villette. They were short of money, but Jeanne saw a means of becoming very rich. The Cardinal was a man of tremendous resources; he might suffer temporary embarra.s.sments, but his a.s.sets were great. He would be the milch cow who should be milked with the gentlest, cleverest hands. They must plan carefully, though. The Cardinal must be brought face to face with the Queen; the Queen must show her favor toward him. I can imagine those two men, whose wits were so much duller than hers, demanding: "How?" And her cool reply: "We must find someone to play the part of the Queen."

How they must have gaped at her; but she was the brains behind the plot. Had it not worked out so far as she had told them it would? They should leave it to her. Now, what they needed was a young woman who looked sufficiently like me to be pa.s.sed off as me. Everyone knew what I looked like. There were portraits of me in the galleries. They must find someone who had my coloring. They could teach her the rest.

She was a forceful woman; and both men were her slaves. It was the so-called Comte de la Motte who found Marie-Nicole Lequay, later known as the Baroness d'Oliva. The girl was young, about six years younger than I; her hair was similar in color to mine; she had blue eyes and an ample bosom. In fact she was known among her friends as the "Little Queen"; so her resemblance to myself had often been noticed. She was a milliner but followed another occupation - though more amateur than professional - besides that of making hats and at this time had a protector, Jean-Baptiste Toussaint. She was apparently a gentle creature, an orphan who had been placed with a guardian whose means of earning a living was to take in children to board - and from whom she had run away after being badly treated. She had had many lovers - not necessarily lovers who paid her; she was an easygoing gentle girl who was generous with her favors.

The Comte de la Motte met her in the Palais Royale, where gay young people sauntered or sat in order to make each other's acquaintance. He was immediately struck by her likeness to me and brought her to the house in Rue Neuve-Saint-Gilles, which was where the de la Mottes lived when in Paris.

Jeanne immediately saw the possibilities and it was she who changed the girl's name to Baroness d'Oliva - a near anagram of Valois. Soon she was telling the girl that the Queen would be grateful to her forever if she would do one little thing for her.

The poor simple girl was so overwhelmed that she was easily persuaded. Jeanne must have summed her up as too stupid and innocent to do much more than make an appearance and perhaps, with careful coaching, say one sentence; but that would be enough, as long as Jeanne was present to conduct the operation and step in quickly if things should go wrong.

Jeanne de la Motte must be the most audacious woman in the world. Who else would have conceived such a plan? Others might have been as villainous, but who would have been so wildly adventurous? Perhaps it was because she was certain of her powers to succeed that she did it. She had everything ready for the girl. Her hair was carefully powdered and dressed high, though not elaborately. She had copied that simple dress of mine in which Vigee-LeBrun had painted me ... the long white gaulle which had been called a chemise, and which had caused such a stir when the picture had been exhibited in the salon a short while before. This was made in muslin. Over the dress was put a mantle of fine white wool and on her head a very wide-brimmed hat to shade her face. With more than a slight resemblance to me the girl might well, in the dusk, be mistaken for me.

Rosalie, Jeanne's maid, a girl of about eighteen, black-eyed and saucy, who found living in the household of the Comtesse de la Motte an exciting adventure, helped her to dress and during this process Jeanne taught her her words which were: "You may hope that the past will be forgotten." The poor girl had no idea what this meant. She had to concentrate on suppressing the accent of the Paris streets, on acquiring a faint foreign accent, on making a graceful gesture with her hands.

I can imagine the poor child, dominated by these people - particularly Jeanne - excited at playing the role of a Queen whom she had often been told she resembled, and at the same time being paid for it. Jeanne had hinted that not only would she be recompensed by herself and the Comte but that the Queen herself would no doubt wish to show her grat.i.tude. Why should she ask what it was all about? She would not have been given an explanation and if she had, she would not have been able to grasp it. No! Her part was to do as she was told and she doubtless only hoped that she could play it to satisfaction. In the pocket of her muslin gown was a letter which she must take out and give to the man whom she would meet; she must also hand him a rose and not forget her words.

It was a dark night - no moon, no stars - ideal for the scene. Everything was quiet in the park - the only sound that would be heard would be that of the water playing in the fountains. The Comtesse and her husband led the young girl in her muslin dress across the terrace and through the pines and firs, the elms, willows, and cedars to the Grove of Venus.

A man arrived dressed in something which the girl would readily accept was the livery of one of the gentlemen of my household.

"So you have come," said the Comte; the man bowed low. This part was played by Retaux de Villette.

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 fervor 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 a.s.signed 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 Jeanne's, a young lawyer, happened to have called at the house at Rue Neuve-Saint-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 and 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 a kind 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 defense 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 puts 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 a duty. His submission to the orders received through Madame de la Motte is linked to the feeling of profound respect and grat.i.tude which are to affect his whole life. He will await with resignation the moment when her rea.s.suring kindness will manifest itself, and meanwhile will be absolutely obedient. Such is the state of his soul."

Madame de la Motte realized this. She must have been anxious as she felt her way, for even her optimistic mind must have realized 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 favored him for she, who was the most generous of women, wished to bestow fifty thousand livres on a n.o.ble 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 themselves 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 a.s.sured him that he could see into the future and there he saw the Cardinal reaping great benefits from his a.s.sociation with a person of very high rank. That satisfied the superst.i.tious and gullible Cardinal.

Being short of money, he borrowed from a Jewish moneylender a.s.suring him he would be honored 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 jewelers' trouble. Boehmer and Ba.s.senge 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 jewelers 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 jewelers would bring it to the Rue Neuve-Saint-Gilles.

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 jewelers had added to this loops with pear-shaped pendants, cl.u.s.ters, and a second rope of diamonds; there was even a third row decorated with knots and ta.s.sels of the precious stones and one of the four ta.s.sels 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 ta.s.sels she saw herself living like a Queen forevermore. If she possessed the necklace 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 Ba.s.senge.

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 jewelers to reimburse her if she were able to arouse the Queen's interest.

I can readily imagine their joy. Meanwhile Madame 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 was like a fish on the hook. Of course he would enter into negotiations for the necklace if it were my wish.

Madame de la Motte told the jewelers that the purchase would go through. A very great n.o.bleman would make it on behalf of the Queen. She, Madame de la Motte, did not wish her name to be mentioned in the affair - it would be between the Cardinal de Rohan, the Queen, and the jewelers.

Overcome with joy, seeing a way out of all the anxieties of the past, the jewelers offered Madame de la Motte a precious stone in payment for her services. This she refused. She was only too happy to help, she said.

To the Cardinal she explained that I wished to buy the necklace without the King's knowledge; and that I should need to do so on credit, since I was short of money at the time.

"Her Majesty will pay by installments," she explained, "and this will fall due at intervals of three months. Naturally, for such an arrangement the Queen must have an intermediary. She at once thought of you."

The Cardinal during the trial explained what had happened: "Madame de la Motte brought me a supposed letter from the Queen in which Her Majesty showed herself anxious to buy the necklace, and pointed out that, being without the necessary funds for the moment, and not wis.h.i.+ng to occupy herself with the necessary arrangements in detail, she wished that I would treat the affair and take all the steps for the purchase and fix suitable periods for payments."

On receipt of this letter the Cardinal was delighted. He would be happy to do anything for Her Majesty. He would feel honored to make any arrangement she desired. The price was fixed at sixteen hundred thousand livres, payable within two years in four six-monthly installments. The necklace would be handed to the Cardinal on February 1st and the first installment would be due on August 1, 1785. He drew up this agreement in his own hand and gave it to Madame de la Motte to show to her dear friend the Queen. Back came the note on gilt-edged paper with the fleur-de-lis in the corner signed "Marie Antoinette de France" to say that the Queen was satisfied with the arrangements made and deeply grateful to the Cardinal.

It is strange that when the Cardinal saw the necklace, he had his first doubts. This man who believed that I would meet him by night in the Grove of Venus, who believed that he had a chance of becoming my lover, was astonished that I could wish to wear such a vulgar ornament as the diamond necklace.

He wavered. He would wish, he told Madame de la Motte, to have a doc.u.ment signed by the Queen authorizing him to buy the necklace for her.

Madame de la Motte was not disturbed. Why not? Retaux de Villette had provided other doc.u.ments. Why not this one? In due course it was produced, signed in the usual way "Marie Antoinette de France" and the word "Approved" was written beside each clause in what purported to be my handwriting.

How could the Cardinal have looked at that signature and not known it false? How could he have believed I would sign myself thus?

I remember these questions being asked continually during the trial and afterward; and one pamphleteer gave a possible answer: "People are so easily persuaded as to the truth of what they desire ... It was such a mistake as might easily have been made by a man with a lively agitated mind like that of the Cardinal who was pleased, delighted even with an arrangement which fed some sentiment, some new view in the endless labyrinth of his imagination."

The deal was made. On February 1st Boehmer and Ba.s.senge brought the necklace to the Cardinal, who, that same day, took it to the Rue Neuve-Saint-Gilles, where Madame de la Motte was waiting to receive it. He was invited to wait in a room with a gla.s.s door through which he could watch the transfer of the necklace. He saw a young man in the Queen's livery present himself to the Comte and Comtesse de la Motte with the words "By order of the Queen." He took the casket and disappeared.

The Cardinal took his leave and as soon as he had gone, Retaux de Villette, who had played the part of Queen's messenger, returned with the casket; and the conspirators sat down at a table to gloat over the finest diamonds in Europe.

But they had not made this plan merely to look at diamonds. They must be broken up and sold.

They got to work without delay.

The whole story might have been discovered much earlier, for a few days after the Cardinal had handed over the necklace, a jeweler called at the headquarters of the Paris police to give the information that a man had brought him some extraordinarily fine diamonds which had obviously been taken from their settings by an unskilled person. As a result Retaux, returning to the shop, was arrested.

With great plausibility Retaux explained that the diamonds had been placed in his possession by one of the King's relatives, the Comtesse de la Motte-Valois. He was able to prove this and at the name of Valois the police retracted and Retaux was released.

But it had been a warning that it was a mistake to try to dispose of the best diamonds in Paris and the Comte set out for London to sell the stones. When he returned, he was a rich man - although the London jewelers had benefited greatly by the sale, for naturally he did not get the full value of the diamonds. Now Madame de la Motte was in her element. She was a woman who could live in the present and did not much concern herself with the future - an att.i.tude of mind which I understood perfectly.

She made a royal departure to Bar-sur-Aube with servants in splendid uniform; a carriage drawn by four English horses - carpets, tapestries, furniture, and clothes; she needed twenty-four carts to carry all her possessions with which she intended to furnish her mansion. On her English berlin of a delicate pearl gray color she had the arms of the House of Valois engraved with the motto: Rege ab avo sanguinem nomen, et lilia. - From the King my ancestor I derive my blood, my name, and the lilies.

There she lived royally as she must always have longed to live since she had heard that she had Valois blood in her veins. But surely she must have known that it could not last. There must be a reckoning.

Perhaps like myself she had to learn that what one sows one must reap. The Cardinal had been arrested and had told his story implicating Jeanne. Two days later guards arrived at Bar-sur-Aube. Jeanne knew resistance was useless; she was taken prisoner and lodged in the Bastille.

CHAPTER 18.

"The Queen was innocent and to give greater publicity to her innocence she desired the Parliament to judge the case. The result was that the Queen was thought guilty and that discredit was thrown on the Court."

-Napoleon at St. Helena "I saw that he [de Rohan] would be unable to appear any more at Court. But the action which will last several months may have other results. It began by the issue of a warrant of arrest which suspends him from all rights, functions, and faculty of performing an civil act until judgment is p.r.o.nounced. Cagliostro, charlatan, La Motte and his wife together with a girl named Oliva, a mudlark of the gutters, are in the same boat. What a.s.sociates for a Grand Almoner, a Rohan and a Cardinal!"

-Marie Antoinette to Joseph II "The Queen's grief was extreme ... 'Come,' said Her Majesty to me, 'come, and lament for Your Queen, insulted and sacrificed by cabal and injustice ...' The King came in and said to me: 'You find the Queen much afflicted; she has great reason to be so.'"

-Madame Campan's Memoirs The Trial ALL THE ACTORS IN THE DIAMOND necklace affair were in the Bastille with the exception of the Comte de la Motte who had escaped to London with what was left of the necklace, and the whole of the Court and the country was working itself up into a fever of excitement and expectation.

Each day Paris was filled with excited crowds. No one talked of anything but the coming trial. The Cardinal had changed completely. He was lodged in a fine apartment at the Bastille, very different from that used by ordinary prisoners, and there he took three of his servants to look after him. He paid one hundred and twenty livres a day for his lodging; and he was allowed to receive visits from his family, his secretaries, and of course his counsel, with whom he was preparing his defense. The drawbridge of the Bastille had to be kept lowered all through the day, so many visitors were there; he even gave a banquet in his rooms, where champagne was served. He continued to administer the business his position demanded as though the Bastille were another of his palaces which for the sake of convenience he was temporarily obliged to occupy. He took daily exercise in the Governor's garden or walked on the platform of the towers.

Supported by his powerful family, he was gaining confidence. When he heard that Louis had appointed Breteuil as one of his interrogators, he immediately protested on the grounds that Breteuil was an enemy. Louis, eager to be fair, at once agreed to make a change and subst.i.tuted Vergennes, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, for Breteuil, and instead of Breteuil's a.s.sistant he ordered that Marshal de Castries, Minister of Marine, should a.s.sist Vergennes.

In less comfortable quarters in the Bastille, Madame de la Motte was preparing her defense. Her fertile imagination was to invent many a fantastic story during the trial; but when Retaux and the Baroness d'Oliva were arrested, she must have been very uneasy. She had warned Oliva that she might be arrested, for it was very much to Madame de la Motte's interest that the girl was not able to tell of that scene in the Grove of Venus. Oliva had tried to escape with her lover, Toussaint de Beaussire, but they had been arrested at Brussels. Retaux de Villette was caught in Geneva; and these two with the Comte and Comtesse de Cagliostro were in the Bastille. So important was the affair considered that great efforts had been made to bring the Comte de la Motte back to France. England did not recognize extradition and would do nothing to help, so the Comte was wiser than his co-adventurers in escaping to that country. His whereabouts were discovered to be on the border between England and Scotland; an elaborate plot was made and a s.h.i.+p was sent to Newcastle-on-Tyne, where his landlord and landlady were asked to slip a drug into his wine so that he might be bundled into a sack, carried on board, and brought to France; but he discovered the plot in time and escaped.

When the prisoners were arrested, wild rumors filled the streets. The Cardinal was named as the biggest scoundrel France had ever known. Stories of the orgies which took place at the Saverne were circulated; every woman whose name was temporarily in the news was said to have been his mistress.

Paris was against the Cardinal; but the Court was against me. I suddenly became aware of this in the looks which came my way and in the sorrow of friends like my dear Campan and Elisabeth. Gabrielle was uncertain; she was surrounded by her family and the Cardinal belonged to one of the greatest houses in France. That was the crux of the matter. The Cardinal had been publicly arrested and that was an insult to the n.o.bility.

It gradually began to dawn on me how much I was hated, and to doubt the depth of these people who had always shown me such respect and, as I thought, affection.

Then suddenly public opinion changed - as it will without reason it seems - but I suppose nothing happens without reason. The people of Paris, so quick to sense a turn in affairs, were now giving their allegiance to the Cardinal. He had ceased to become the villain of the piece; he was the maligned hero. There had to be a villain, of course - or a villainess. The Comtesse de la Motte? Well, she was deeply involved, but the story would be more intriguing if there was a sinister and shadowy figure in the background - and that figure was a Queen.

But for the Queen, it was whispered, none of this could have happened.

Every day accounts of the affair were published. One printer produced a day-to-day account of events, and people could scarcely wait for his sheets to come from the press. The Cardinal was again the Belle Eminence - so dignified, so handsome; and the fas.h.i.+onable color for ribbon was half red half yellow, called Cardinal sur la paille. Stories were told about him. His lechery had now become gallantry. When he had been arrested, he had managed while pretending to latch his shoe to scribble a note to his confidant the Abbe Georgel asking him to destroy certain papers concerning the necklace affair which were in his Paris mansion. The Abbe had obeyed, removing a great deal of valuable evidence. This was talked of now and instead of accepting the fact that the Cardinal had made a bid to avoid incriminating himself, this was construed as his desire to prevent a Certain Person's being involved.

I was pregnant again; I was worried about the health of my eldest son. I was becoming more serieuse, more aware, and this must necessarily depress me. I was spending more and more time with my family, but the affair of the diamond necklace could not be kept out of my private life. I was deeply involved - even though I had taken no part in it.

The Cardinal's counsels were the finest in Paris. Men such as Target, de Bonnieres, and Larget-Bardelin; Target was recognized as one of the s.h.i.+ning lights of the French Bar. Sixty-year-old Maitre Doillot acted for Madame de la Motte and she so fascinated him that he became merely her mouthpiece and in fact she defended herself through this medium. As this turned out, it was not an advantage for the prisoner, but it did mean that the most fantastic explanations of what had taken place were given. Oliva was given a young advocate fresh from school who was immediately attracted by her.

The excitement was becoming more and more intense. There was no conversation except that which concerned the affair of the necklace. Madame Cagliostro had been released as she was proved to have had nothing to do with the affair. She went to her hotel in the Rue Saint-Claude, there to await the verdict; and when the highest people in the land called to imply that they believed she had been wronged, she received them with signs of weeping on her face. Indeed, it was considered fas.h.i.+onable to call on the lady.

This was an indication of how popular feeling was going. The people were already beginning to whisper that it was one who was not standing trial who was really guilty.

According to custom the consultations between prisoners and their advocates were published; these were sold in large numbers; the speeches for the defense were published before they were spoken and therefore the people could follow the way the trial was going.

So much has been written of this affair; so many theories have been brought forward; and how can I say which is the true one?

I believed then that the Cardinal was guilty; I could not understand how he could have been deceived as so many people believed he had been. But everyone else believed him innocent.