LA MOTTE: Your master's not exactly a quick study.
FEMALE VOICE, offstage, singing: "When a man cheats on his wife—"
MALE VOICE, offstage: No no no! Just try to remember it's not a dirge, chérie. Try it again, only lighter this time.
FEMALE VOICE, offstage: You try it. It's an impossible tune.
YOUNG MAN: Perhaps I could be of some service?
LA MOTTE: As a matter of fact, I'm dying of thirst.
ROHAN, waving the letter; An assignation! The Queen suggests an assignation!
LA MOTTE: Why am I not surprised?
ROHAN: The Grove of Venus. Wednesday next.
The young man winks, reaching lewdly into his trousers while pretending to tuck in his shirt.
They all exit, stage right.
A scrim descends, stage rear, concealing the dancing monkey wallpaper. Though it's been painted to look like a formal garden in the moonlight, the room is brightly lit; a rehearsal of the last act of Beaumarchais's Marriage of Figaro is in progress. Enter Antoinette, in the part of Suzanne, masquerading as the Countess Almaviva in a long white cloak, together with Artois, dressed as Figaro.
ANTOINETTE, singing: "When a man cheats on his wife, the world says he's a champ, but let his wife do likewise, and the world calls her a tramp. Who can possibly explain why the world is so insane? Because the men make up the rules, the men make all the rules."
ARTOIS: Better. Much better. But you're going to have to sing louder if you want to reach the back row. And at some point you've got to remove that cloak so everyone can see who you really are.
ANTOINETTE: Suzanne, you mean? Or Marie Antoinette, Queen of France? She lets the cloak fall to the floor, singing: "But let his wife do likewise—"
ARTOIS: Your secret's safe with me, chérie.
ANTOINETTE: I have no secrets.
ARTOIS: Just as I said.
They exit, arm in arm, laughing, stage right.
The lights dim and darken. In place of the scrim, an actual grove of pine trees, their branches forming a vault through which patches of moonless, starless sky can be seen, within which night birds hover and roost. The musical sound of nearby fountains, a statue of Venus visible, stage rear, pouring water from a ewer. Enter Rohan, stage right, his body enveloped in a dark blue cloak, his face hidden by a broad-brimmed hat; when he reaches the center of the grove he is approached by a woman wearing a white lawn dress identical to the one worn by Antoinette in Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun's most recent portrait and holding a single long-stemmed red rose. Though the woman has the Queen's ash blond hair, blue eyes, and remarkably good figure, she is in fact a Palais Royal streetwalker who goes by the name of Oliva.
ROHAN, kneeling to kiss the hem of her skirt: Dearest!
OLIVA, handing him the rose: You know what this means.
She races off into the shadows, stage right, and the curtain falls.
Necklace
It was hideous, an abomination. It looked like a collar a circus horse would wear, a huge clanking thing in four tiers (not counting the knotted tassels and pendants), consisting of 647 diamonds the size of robins' eggs. It weighed more than the Dauphin. The Queen wouldn't have been caught dead in it.
Created for Madame Du Barry by the court jewelers, Böhmer and Bassenge, the necklace in question was of a type called rivière, as in river of diamonds, and was the discerning benefactor's gift of choice for his Palais Royal whore. "Rivières flow very low," sneered the pamphleteers, "because they're returning to their source."
Unfortunately Louis XV died before he had a chance to pay for the necklace, and despite Böhmer's best efforts to interest Marie Antoinette — even threatening to hurl himself in the Seine if she refused to buy it — for a while it looked as if the jewelers were going to be stuck with the thing. The diamonds in it were worth over one and a half million livres, not to mention the time that had gone into its creation. Böhmer and Bassenge were desolate, desperate. They were two nice Belgian men, getting on in years, alone in the world, without a leg to stand on.
And then, melodrama!
And then, a miracle!
Jeanne de La Motte, who was a very shrewd woman, managed to convince Cardinal Rohan, who was a very silly man, that the Queen secretly loved him, even though everyone knew she'd despised him for years. La Motte conjured a heady mix of romance and the occult, of love letters and a starlit assignation — finally tricking the Cardinal into authorizing the purchase of the necklace on behalf of his Queen.
Once the jewelers had handed the necklace over to La Motte's lover, disguised as the Queen's private courier, he immediately broke it into pieces and began to fence it around Paris and London. "I love imagining the most beautiful diamonds in the world on the world's most beautiful neck," Böhmer said in a note to Antoinette, which she burned to bits, going on the not unreasonable assumption that the man was mad.
That neck! Rohan was baffled. That perfect white neck, but why was it not wearing the necklace? Candlemas had come and gone, and still no sign of it. The skin so smooth, so white, so creamy and delicious! That perfect white column where he longed to press his lips.
He couldn't believe it when the King had him arrested on the Feast of Corpus Christi, and sent him to the Bastille. His lawyer spread the news that he was languishing there in irons, but in fact he was lounging in a very comfortable apartment, dining on oysters and drinking the finest wine.
Popular sentiment held that Rohan exhibited an "excess of candor," meaning everyone knew that he was stupid. Meaning everyone knew he was somehow worthy of their forgiveness, of their love. He was tried before the Parliament of Paris and acquitted on May 31, 1786.
The necklace ceased to exist except as a diamond here, a diamond there. A pair of pendant earrings. A brooch. A single stone hidden in a black velvet bag in a mahogany box, traded for a snuffbox and a pair of silver asparagus tongs.
Rohan's Aria
(after Beaumarchais)
ROHAN (singing)
Slander's like a gentle wind,
a gentle zephyr pitched so low
you hardly feel it, till it lightly,
oh so sweetly starts to grow.
Piano, piano, slowly seeping,
sotto voce, softly creeping,
slyly sneaking, deftly slipping,
faintly humming, lightly tripping,
as the storm begins to blow.
First a mere insinuation,
then a hinted accusation,
what began as innuendo
all at once starts to crescendo,
louder, bolder, brazen-sounding,
stomping, beating, thumping, pounding,
screaming, banging, booming, clanging,
spreading horror through the air…
November. My thirty-third birthday. Day of the Dead, 1788. Beasts howling in the forests. Ice like diamonds. Every night at dinner the water froze in the jugs. Every night at dinner the King gorged himself on roast meat and wine. His eyes got smaller and yellower, he quoted Milton. The Dauphin was getting weaker; the Dauphin was dying. He didn't want to eat. The idea of eating three meals a day bored into his brain like a worm into an apple.