EMBASTILLER, v. French literally has a verb that means “to imprison in the Bastille.” Originally it meant “to surround [a city, a place] with fortifications (bastilles),” but it came to refer to holding someone the famous prison in Paris. By extension, it can also be used to indicate putting someone in any old prison. It’s not a common verb, but I love it.
The French don’t call July 14 “Bastille Day.” They celebrate la Fête Nationale or simply le 14 Juillet. July 14, 1789 is the day the Bastille was stormed, but some parts of the internet* will tell you the French national holiday actually/also commemorates July 14, 1790, which was la Fête de la Fédération, a city-wide celebration in Paris on the one-year anniversary of the taking of the Bastille, in the spirit of unity. Louis XVI publicly swore fealty to the nation and vowed to uphold the law, a promise intended to create a constitutional monarchy.
It didn’t work out.
The Revolution continued for several tumultuous, paranoid years, under a government called The Directory. Things officially ended when Napoleon became First Consul in 1799. He crowned himself Emperor in 1804.
La Fête de la Fédération is a weird sort of disappointing anti-climax, a party celebrating something that never came to pass—Louis XVI was beheaded three years later in 1793—but then again, the storming of the Bastille was also a weird sort of anti-climax in one small respect: most of the prisoners had been relocated before the revolutionaries arrived and only seven were liberated. In every other respect, it was climactic as hell. An inexperienced crowd of Parisians took out a hundred guards and seized control of the fortress. Their success was unprecedented and it kicked off the Revolution.
You might have an image in your head of squalid prison cells, since the Bastille has become a historical symbol of tyranny. Maybe you’re thinking of a prison where innocent people are denied toothbrushes and forced to drink from toilet bowls. A really inhumane place. One that stains the soul of whatever nation allows it.
If that’s what you’re imagining, the Bastille was nicer inside than you might expect. This is from Jonathan Beckman’s How to Ruin a Queen, a non-fiction account of the Diamond Necklace Affair that presaged the Revolution:
The cells were sprucely furnished – a bed hung with green baize curtains, a fireplace or stove, a table, a smattering of chairs. Some had mattresses for valets, latrines and armchairs, and residents were allowed to accessorise their rooms. The marquis de Sade installed a wardrobe for his numerous outfits, tapestries and paintings, and 133 books. Prisoners could read books from the lending library or play billiards. Some were allowed visitors (though, most frequently, it was rats who breezed through), consultations with doctors, and took constitutionals on the battlements and the inner courtyard. For many years, none of the doors had bolts. A staff of 110, including a doctor, an apothecary, a midwife and a chaplain, served, on average, fewer than 40 bastillards.
Yeah, check that out! French also has a specific word for people imprisoned in the Bastille: bastillards.
One more little bit about what the bastillards were eating:
Bread, cheese, wine and some kind of potage formed the basic ration, though the higher class of prisoner was fed more handsomely. Marmontel remembered ‘an excellent soup, a succulent side of beef, a thigh of boiled chicken oozing with grease, a little dish of fried, marinaded artichokes or of spinach, really fine Cressane pears, fresh grapes, a bottle of old Burgandy and the best Moka coffee’. The luckiest were permitted luxuries: tobacco, mussels and gooseberry jam.
Shit, that sounds good.
Why, then, was everybody so mad? Well, even with a lending library and strolls through the courtyard, a prison is still a prison. Really fine Cressane pears or not, the people inside were separated from their families. The king could put anybody he wanted in there, for any reason at all. That doesn’t make people feel free, equal, or brotherly. The Bastille was a symbol of one of the worst, most tyrannical aspects of the monarchy. If you’re gonna tear down your country’s entire regime, that’s a good place to start.
*Most regular French people will not mention la Fête de la Fédération when they explain le 14 Juillet. In fairness, I have only a vague elementary-school idea of my own country’s national holiday.
DIAMONDS ARE A GIRL’S BEST DOWNFALL
So what’s the Diamond Necklace Affair?
Caveat: academics tread gingerly around this kind of history, the kind where you get characters and a story, because tracing ideas and popular movements instead of individuals usually offers a fuller understanding of the moment. (Historians also tread gingerly around linking the past with the present, as I was doing above. YOLO.) So, sure, let’s be bare-minimum intellectually responsible for two seconds: throughout the 18th century, belief in the divine right of kings was already weakening, the power of popular opinion was on the rise as demonstrated by widespread political and satirical pamphlets, Voltaire and Rousseau and Diderot and the other Lumières were kicking up a fuss about democracy and deism, plus 80 other economic and social factors that I’m too lazy or ignorant to list here, all of that contributed to the French Revolution.
Okay, now back to the good part.
The Diamond Necklace Affair is a real-life heist movie combined with a Mozart opera. Honestly if it were fiction and I were editing it, I’d be like “dial it back a little, all this foreshadowing is too heavy-handed,” but it really happened and it is so fucking fun to talk about. Sorry, historians. Cover your eyes.
I’m working from Jonathan Beckman’s How to Ruin a Queen here, which is a good read, although I had a few quibbles. I wrote extensively about this book and the Affair on twitter in March and April, but “extensively” and “twitter” don’t go together well, so here’s a more readable version, with paragraphs and shit. Honestly, talking about the Diamond Necklace Affair was what made me realize that I needed a space (this space!) to write something longer, because I am a wordy motherfucker. But anyway, if you already read this in twitter-thread form, scroll on by.
How to Ruin a Queen reminded me a lot of a book I read last year, Amy Reading’s The Mark Inside, a history of confidence schemes in the US. Confidence artists gain the trust of strangers and then take them for all they’re worth, and they rely on appearances—physical beauty, elegant clothes, manners, education, or a combination of all of these—in order to gain that trust. Human beings are, unfortunately, easily tricked creatures.
JANE: are you sure you should trust this guy Wickham? you met him literally 5 minutes ago
LIZZY: (incredulously) you think a hot person would just lie? just stand there and be hot and lie?August 28th 2018 4,403 Retweets 19,115 Likes
Reading’s thesis, in The Mark Inside, is that confidence schemes go hand in hand with US history: the rise of speculation, the idea of a new nation where anyone could make it, the desire to believe anyone who seemed beautiful or polite or well-groomed or educated was a trustworthy person.
This last one is not particular to the US, but it seems inextricable from the class system. Well-groomed people with good manners don’t lie! The same things that mark someone’s nobility of rank mark their nobility of spirit, and that’s why aristocrats deserve to be in charge of society. There’s such a tension in 18th-century French literature about être (being) and paraître (seeming), whether you can judge someone’s insides by their outsides. That makes a lot of sense when you consider their society was ruled by this class system essentially based on nothing.
Beckman writes, “In 1788 the royal genealogist Antoine Maugard estimated that, at most, a quarter of noble titles were genuine.” Seventy-five percent of these motherfuckers are lying about who they are and where they came from. A whole social class of con artists.
At the time, some people had real prejudices about the upper class being better, smarter, and more deserving. But if the royal genealogist is estimating that 75% of noble titles are fraudulent, everybody knows things are fishy. Besides which, even if people are telling the truth about their titles, what is a title, really?
Beaumarchais’s 1778 play The Marriage of Figaro tackled this issue (and barely made it past the censors). In Figaro’s famous speech, he says, “Nobility, fortune, rank, position! How proud they make a man feel! What have you done to deserve such advantages? Put yourself to the trouble of being born—nothing more. For the rest—a very ordinary man!” (Translation source.)
So we’re in late 18th-century France. You either have a title or you wish you did. Our protagonist—not to say our hero—doesn’t quite have a title, but she is descended from a bastard line of the Valois dynasty, former kings of France. Her name is Jeanne de la Motte.
What being the grandchild of a king’s bastard gets you, it turns out, is a shitty impoverished childhood where your abusive parents drill into you that you are a princess and, equally importantly, princesses do not work. Jeanne’s mom takes her out to beg in the streets, hoping the sight of a princess in rags will inspire pity. It works some of the time, but eventually Jeanne decides she can do better.
She’s not a great beauty, but she’s fine-looking, and she’s smart and great with people. By now she’s convinced that she should be living better than this, because she’s a princess. Jeanne uses her skills to persuade a wealthy family to take pity on her, a princess, and manages to get off the streets. Thus begins a lifetime of borrowing and persuasion and social climbing.
It’s astonishing how much of Jeanne’s real life reads like a Marivaux novel (La Vie de Marianne, notably, but also Le Paysan parvenu) about a plucky social climber charming people into helping her. Everybody in 18th-century France is a hustler, and Jeanne is the best of them. She looks and acts the part, so people believe her. She starts calling herself comtesse Jeanne de la Motte Valois (so nobody forgets she’s descended from Valois kings). She does not have permission to do this, and she is not a countess of anything, but nobody stops her. She joins those 75% of titled people who are lying through their teeth. Naturally, she goes to Versailles.
There is a famous scene in Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne where virtuous orphan Marianne gains the attention of handsome noble Valville because she falls to the ground when a carriage nearly runs her over. Valville rescues her and carries her back to his house, where they engage in a little hurt/comfort flirtation and quasi-striptease while Marianne takes off her shoe in front of him.
You know how Jeanne tries to get attention and sympathy from Marie Antoinette the first time she passes by the queen? She faints.
I don’t know if Jeanne had read Marivaux. Beckman mentions some but not all of her reading. Marivaux was popular, but there are certainly other instances of the trope. It’s not as though “swoon to get attention” is an unheard-of technique. Regardless, Jeanne’s ploy doesn’t work. Marie Antoinette is no Valville. She asks if the stranger who fainted is alright and then completely forgets about her. Jeanne, undeterred by the truth, spins the incident into the beginning of a close friendship. She tells everybody who will listen that the Queen is her bestie.
Most importantly for our purposes, Jeanne tells the Cardinal de Rohan. He’s a wealthy and powerful middle-aged man with a position in the church and a title (prince du sang, a French title indicating foreign royalty, in this case the Holy Roman Empire). The Cardinal de Rohan has had pretty much everything in life handed to him, and he wants for nothing, except he maybe kinda one time offended Maria Theresa, Empress of the Holy Roman Empire, Marie Antoinette’s mom. So Marie Antoinette doesn’t like him.
Never having been denied before, the thing Rohan wants most in the world is for Marie Antoinette to like him. Promote him to minister of whatever, make him even more important at court. So when Jeanne comes along like, “oh yeah, I can do that for you, I definitely 100% for real know the Queen and am BFFs with her,” Rohan bites.
I’m simplifying a lot here.
A Venn diagram labelled “The Diamond Necklace Affair” with two mostly overlapping circles, one labelled “the complex political landscape of 1780s Versailles” and one labelled “a fuckton of ambitious liars tryna get rich”
So anyway, now we get to the diamonds. The previous king, Louis XV, had ordered an extravagant diamond necklace for his mistress, Madame du Barry. 2,800 carats of diamonds! This thing is like an armored breast plate. Louis XV dies of smallpox without paying, so the jewelers get stuck with it.
Those two dangling ropes of diamonds on the left and right would have hung down the wearer’s back for balance—to keep the wearer from tipping forward because of the weight. For real.
An aside: this type of necklace is sometimes called a collier d’esclavage in French. Collier is both “necklace” and “collar,” and esclavage is “slavery.” YIKES. Beckman makes a big deal out of this language—the necklace becomes a terrible burden to everyone involved with it. But he never says “the extravagance of this necklace was only possible because European powers were kidnapping innocent people into chattel slavery, profiting from their labor, and pillaging and exploiting the rest of the world.” Feels like a weird omission and I had to point it out. I know this story’s not about slavery, but it’s not like slavery goes away if we just choose not to mention it.
Anyway, this necklace is so absurdly expensive that literally only royalty will be able to afford it, so the jewelers are hoping Marie Antoinette will relieve them of the diamonds and their debt.
Does Marie Antoinette want a gift intended for another woman? Hell no. Also, she doesn’t like that style of necklace. It obscures the long, elegant column of her neck.
See what I mean about the heavy-handed foreshadowing?
Enough about Marie Antoinette’s neck. Back to Jeanne and Rohan, who are now friends and possibly also Friends (historical record is unclear, but my money’s on Yeah They Did). Jeanne knows about this famous necklace, and it’s on her mind while she draws Rohan deep into her confidence scheme.
Because it’s 18th-century France, and this real actual historical event is just like Dangerous Liaisons (I LOVE IT SO MUCH), they write letters. Jeanne gets her friend Rétaux de Villette to write letters as Marie Antoinette. “The Queen” corresponds with Rohan for a long time. They get friendly. They get Friendly. Rohan uses tu (informal you) with the Queen. Intimate shit.
The letters aren’t enough for him. He wants to meet the Queen.
Obviously that's not gonna work for Jeanne, since she made this whole thing up. In her letters, “the Queen” indicates she’s not ready to meet in public. Jeanne does what any opera buffa character would do: she finds a sex worker who looks like the Queen, dresses her up, and organizes a midnight meeting in the gardens of Versailles.
For real.
Rohan kneels before the woman he thinks is the Queen. She hands him a rose and says from behind her fan “you know what this means.” Then they hear someone (Jeanne's friend Rétaux de Villette) making noise in the bushes nearby, so they scram.
Rohan, who apparently did not make time to go see The Marriage of Figaro playing at the Théâtre-Français in the summer of 1784 —which is all gardens at midnight and people disguised as each other—is like, “Wow! The Queen! Definitely for real the Queen. No one has ever been tricked by a midnight meeting in a garden.”
He doesn’t come off real bright, Rohan.
When Jeanne tells him the Queen has a super secret mission for him, which is to buy The Necklace on her behalf, Rohan’s all in. He makes arrangements with the jewelers: the bill will be paid in installments, and the first payment will arrive in six months. (I cannot believe they agreed to this, but I guess they were desperate to get rid of the damn thing.) Rohan gets the necklace. Jeanne sets up an exchange with a servant—the Queen is still hesitant to be seen with Rohan in public, and she’s embarrassed about buying the necklace when France should by buying warships, you understand—and the necklace disappears into the hands of one of her friends. Rohan thinks it’s being delivered to the Queen, although the Queen has said she won’t wear it in public for a while, since she’s embarrassed.
You know what happens. Jeanne, her husband, and Rétaux de Villette dismantle the necklace. The individual diamonds are sold in foreign cities, usually to less scrupulous dealers, because legitimate ones are suspicious. Some real Ocean’s 8 shit.
Jeanne has a good time for a while. She buys herself some nice furniture and tableware. (She already had nice stuff, but she was living on credit. Everyone in this story is constantly in debt. Constantly.) If it were me and I'd just stolen the most expensive diamond necklace in the world, I think I'd use some of my newfound wealth to get the fuck out of the country, but remember: Jeanne is descended from Valois kings. France belongs to her and she wants people to know that. She stays.
Rohan, stuck with the bill for the necklace, is gettin’ real nervous. The Queen still won’t acknowledge him in public. She hasn’t worn the necklace.
If Rohan is nervous, the jewelers are sweating buckets. They're in debt for those diamonds (now gone) and they're waiting on those payments (not coming).
Finally, it all falls apart. The jewelers get in touch with the Queen about the necklace, and Marie Antoinette, a supporting character in all this nonsense, goes “What necklace?”
Uhhhhh, the most expensive diamond necklace in the entire world?
“Oh, THAT necklace. I already told you I didn’t want it.”
Little pieces of the scam start to surface. Obviously, stealing diamonds is a crime. And fraud is a crime. But did you know that in Ancien Régime France, there was a specific crime called lèse-majesté, which means disrespecting the King or the Queen?
Also, it’s treason.
Remember that Rohan was using tu in his letters to the Queen? Except the real Queen never gave him permission to do that? Yeah. That counts as lèse-majesté. Rohan’s in trouble.
The King gives Rohan a choice: get judged by the King's justice, or takes his chance at trial. Rohan, knowing the Queen doesn’t like him, has a pretty legit fear that in this case the King’s justice might just be death. So he picks a trial.
Nobody involved knows it yet, but that’s when things really go to shit.
Rohan gets imprisoned in the Bastille. Jeanne hears about this and does the totally routine and innocent thing of burning all her correspondence. Rohan gets word out of prison secretly and has all his correspondence burned, too, like you do when you have nothing to hide.
While everybody suspected in this affair is in the Bastille, their lawyers are writing these texts called mémoires justificatifs, which are a strange hybrid of legal writing and narrative. The mémoires get published for public consumption, and they have print runs of tens of thousands or sometimes a hundred thousand copies. Paris has about 600,000 people at this moment, and 47% of the men are literate, as well as 27% of the women. Beckman says it's possible every literate person in Paris got themselves a copy of these texts. The texts are likely getting read aloud in public spaces for the benefit of the illiterate. That's how obsessed the nation was by this trial.
It's a curious moment for the public. The Queen plays a bit part in this story. People are using her name and her reputation and she can’t stop them. She seems kind of flawed and human. A weird and novel idea: royals, they're just like us!
Then people start to ask, well, so how come they’re royal?
I don't want to put the whole weight of history on this one Affair—remember earlier when I said I was gonna be bare-minimum intellectually responsible? Witness me. Still, this Affair sweeps the attention of the nation, and it seriously tarnishes the Queen's reputation.
In a turn of events that I, 21st-century reader who is sorta rooting for the pathological liar con artist, patently do not understand: the French public sympathizes with the Cardinal de Rohan. The rich 50-something who got duped? His whole defense is “I just can’t believe anybody would lie to me” and somehow that sells things.
Jeanne, meanwhile, is lying in astounding quantities. They have a court stenographer, and this trial lasts months, so sometimes there are even instances where they read back to her something she said months ago. And she’ll calmly be like “I never said that.”
WHAT. I mean. It’s so brazen. You kinda gotta respect her.
(But also I feel gross about it, because this wild lying with no respect for the truth or other people’s memories or written records reminds me of... something I can't quite put my finger on. Could it be that The Past is actually kind of like The Present?)
For the public, Jeanne is a divisive figure, but she fascinates people. (I get it, 18th-c French people, I really do.) Eventually she gets sentenced to be branded with a V (for voleuse, thief) and imprisoned for life. The Cardinal gets off way lighter but still loses face.
It doesn’t stop there. After the sentencing, somebody breaks Jeanne out of prison. We still don’t know who! She escapes, makes it to London, starts writing a new Mémoire Justificatif of her own.
You know why I'm including her writing? Because Jeanne transforms her make-believe friendship with the Queen into a (heavily implied) make-believe lesbian love affair. Here’s Beckman quoting her: “There is a sexual shimmer to Jeanne’s ambivalent language. ‘Remember those moments of intoxication that I scarcely dare recount,’ she addresses the queen. ‘You lowered yourself to me.’”
No wonder these mémoires are selling so well.
Post-prison-break, Jeanne has a rough time of it in London. She continues to live on credit and lie to everyone around her, and it catches up to her. The police come to her apartment and she flees, flinging herself out a window and breaking her leg, which eventually kills her.
Jeanne de la Motte-Valois shows up, “Elvis Lives” style, in anecdotes for decades afterward. And her husband Nicolas, who did live a good long time after the affair, has a cameo in Les Mis! He’s in Marius’s grandfather’s royalist salon:
…le comte de Lamothe-Valois, duquel on se disait à l’oreille avec une sorte de considération : Vous savez ? C’est le Lamothe de l’affaire du collier (III, 1, i)
…the count of Lamothe-Valois, of whom they whispered in awe: Do you know? That’s the Lamothe from the Diamond Necklace Affair
As for Marie Antoinette, the Diamond Necklace Affair’s very public trial drags her name through this huge scandal and makes her seem like a regular person. A dupe. Not a Queen. And then a few years later, the Revolution comes and, well, obscures the long, elegant column of her neck for good.
Beckman’s portrayal of Marie Antoinette is ultra sympathetic. I wouldn’t normally be mad about that, but he briefly disparages the Revolutionary fishwives. I’m not into a reading of history where we can have sympathy for Queens and not fishwives. The fishwives were fucking great.
Marie Antoinette really didn't do anything wrong in the Diamond Necklace Affair. Just a wrong place, wrong time thing. She was a bystander. But she did live on the stolen wealth of the starving masses.
Jeanne herself was a Royalist, being descended from the Valois, no matter that she didn't get along with the contemporary royals. She didn’t see herself as an agent of bringing down the monarchy. She just wanted those diamonds.
As for the diamonds, what happened to them? We don’t know. The paper trail is lost. But since they’re big ol’ honkin’ diamonds, they would have been hard to destroy. Presumably they’re still out there in somebody’s bank vault.
In small-r romance, I read Joanna Bourne’s The Black Hawk (m/f, historical), which is about British and French spies working against each other and falling in love over the course of the Revolution and through the fall of the First Empire, because I’m on top of my goddamn theme this week. And because this book is fantastic.
Joanna Bourne can balance a romance and a spy plot like nobody else, and her prose is the most delicate, musical thing. When she writes dialogue, you can always tell who’s a native French speaker and who’s a native English speaker, and she does it without any gimmick-y phonetic spellings. Bourne doesn’t even have to mention language:
She said, “I suppose you are angry with me,” and did not look at him.
“Why the hell should I be angry? I wake up and you’ve left me a damn letter saying you’re tired of me. Fine. Just fine.” The civilized veneer of Monsieur Adrian Hawkhurst was sometimes very thin indeed.
She said, “I did not say I was tired of you.”
“The hell you didn’t.”
“I said we will no longer be lovers.”
“You didn’t say it. You wrote me a buggering letter.”
She had seen Hawker truly angry only three times. He became incalculable and menacing when he was angry.
He did not dismay her in the least. “It was a gracefully written letter and took me considerable time to compose. We have been foolish. Now we will cease to be foolish.”
“Oh, right. We’re going to embrace good sense, you and me. We’re going to be prudent. Fuck that.”
“There is no need to be crude.”
Look at that! Look at it. A contraction here, a change of register there, no cringeworthy transcription of accents in sight. It’s perfect, I tell you. Every sentence in this book is this careful and considered, and you can always tell whose point-of-view a scene is in when you read the first sentence.
Bourne’s a whiz with a comparison, too: “She ran plans through her mind, as a woman might run a strand of pearls through her fingers, every pearl familiar in shape and texture.” Hell yeah. Not only is this a gorgeous image, it also goes to show that Joanna Bourne knows exactly what kind of woman I like. Justine is a marvel of scheming and ruthless practicality, secretly kind and tender and honorable. And she’s a staunch Republican (in the French Revolution sense of believing that voting is a right, not the atrocious contemporary US sense of believing that voting is a privilege).
This book isn’t so much enemies-to-lovers as strange-bedfellows-the-whole-time, but Justine and Hawker are often pitted against each other by their work. It also has a lovely kind of symmetry in that she’s a former aristocrat who often poses as a servant for her work, and he’s a former thieving street kid who often poses as a lord for his work, and they meet in the middle. It’s beautifully characterized and beautifully plotted and I could keep saying good things about it for another thousand words, but this newsletter is always too long and this week’s is ludicrous, so I will stop myself.
In books that are neither Romance nor romance (but maybe a little of both, and still on this week’s 14 Juillet theme), because I am a caricature of myself, I also read A Tale of Two Cities (by Charles Dickens with one K, not to be confused with A Sale of Two Titties).
Anyway, why pick this up if I haven’t finished Les Mis yet? Because I wrote this sentence in my current manuscript: “A Tale of Two Cities had been lying face-down, open to the last page he’d read, and now it was closed, its black-and-gold cover face-up and as good as a signature.” Then I decided it was illegal to refer to a novel I hadn’t read. Instead of editing that sentence like a reasonable human being, I started reading the book. It took me four or five hours, which may constitute the most hours I have ever put into a single sentence of fiction. But it was a good time!
I did love this:
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all.
Hot take: Charles Dickens? Pretty good writer.
I listened to this passage in audio while I was driving down the freeway, an experience Dickens never had, but I did pass through a great (well, medium) city by night. I would have thought of all the people who lived there, each living their own life I could never know about, even without Charles Dickens instructing me to, but from now on I’ll think of it in his words.
This is a lot like Flaubert’s cracked cauldron passage that I cited last week: other people are unknowable, and words don’t help. In Flaubert’s case, the words themselves are the problem, inadequate to convey the true depth of our feelings. Here, the words are a metaphor—the heart is a dear book—but the fundamental loneliness remains. You’ll never get to read the end of that book.
Shh, Charles Dickens, I’m reading as fast as I can.
