Free How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace Affair by Jonathan Beckman Page B

October 1782, owing over 1,500 livres in unpaid rent, after Jeanne had hurledtheir landlord’s wifedown the stairs. Nicolas and Jeanne then took a six-year lease on the top floor, coach house and stables of 10 rue Neuve-Saint-Gilles in the Marais, and in May 1783, once they were able to afford the furnishings, finally moved in. The apartment was literally down the road from the Hôtel de Rohan-Strasbourg.
    During the seventeenth century the Marais had housed the ancient noble dynasties and ennobled magistrates and bureaucrats. By the end of the eighteenth century, many had migrated westwards to the new faubourgs and the district acquired a reputation as a redoubt of pious reaction, full of crotchety old-timers who referred to the philosophes as‘people for burning’ and in high summer remained indoors to play cards. (This helps explain Rohan’s prolonged friendship with Jeanne – she may have been the most entertaining company around.) Abandoned mansions were dissected into tenements and workshops, as a sludge of petits bourgeois seeped up through the quartier from the riverbank.
    The La Mottes’ financial situation had in no way ameliorated – the need to maintain a foothold in both the capital and at Court consumed every penny. They regularly travelled to the palace: Nicolas for his regimental duties and Jeanne to wait and grovel, wait and grovel. But to be treated seriously one needed servants, even if one’s wardrobe was spartan and there was no bread for the table.Jeanne regularly pawned her best clothes. At the end of each week, she and her maid would wash by hand her two muslin skirts and two linen dresses. Nicolas, a threadbare dandy, remained in bed for days on end because he had nothing suitable to wear. The cook ordered food on credit – when it ran out, everyone went hungry. They borrowed silver tableware and pretended it was their own. When their goods were threatened with seizure, they stashed their furniture with neighbours and placed mirrors and curtains in pawn. The bailiffs arrived to naked rooms and blank faces, but the belongings still needed to be redeemed. On one occasion Jeanne wrote to her adopted sister, the baronne de Crussol, that ‘the greater part of my things are at the Mont de Piété [the pawnbrokers] . . . if by Thursday I do not find six hundred livres, I shall be reduced tosleeping on straw’.
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    The La Mottes followed the Court.October 1783 found them in Fontainebleau: Nicolas spent each day wandering through the heated rooms of the chateau to stave off the cold; Jeanne kept herself warm and solvent with a succession of gentleman visitors. From Fontainebleu the La Mottes switched back to Versailles, to a greasy inn on the Place Dauphine, where they dined on cabbage, lentils and haricot beans.
    Then, after two years of chivvying and pleading and loitering and dreaming, Jeanne struck a potentially lucrative seam: she obtained an interview with Madame Elisabeth, the king’s sister. * On meeting her, she fainted. The sense of occasion may have been overwhelming, but it is more likely that her swoon was premeditated. Jeanne had bored even herself with the legal intricacies of her own petition. Her claims were so self-evident, she believed, that their acknowledgement would be determined merely by the level of sympathy she induced. How better to reinforce them than by showing herself on the point of collapse, by demonstrating that she was so sensitive to the mysterious power of royalty that, in its presence, her spirit left her body and flew towards it? When Jeanne came to, having been whisked home, she instructed her servant Deschamps that ‘if Madame sends one of her people to ask after me, tell them that I’ve had a miscarriage [and] that Iwas bled five times’. Madame did send her doctors to enquire after Jeanne’s health, along with a gift of ten louis, but that was the extent of her concern.
    Despite not being invited back to Madame Elisabeth’s, Jeanne acted as though she