The Queen's Necklace Read Free Page A

On 3rd September 1783 the Versailles Peace Treaty was signed (and what a fateful second such treaty was to follow it!). The French were not much pleased by its conciliatory terms, but were nonetheless delighted that they had erased the blot inflicted on their
gloire
during the Seven Years War.
    But it was above all in the world of ideas that this all-embracing upsurge could be felt. In 1780, Tocqueville tells us, the French lost the feeling that their country was in decline, and it is precisely at this moment that we see the emergence of the belief in human perfectibility, the notion that in time both man and the world could become ever better and better—in short, the idea of Progress. The signs were everywhere: flying boats soaring into the skies—Montgolfier with his hot-air balloon and Charles suspended beneath one filled with hydrogen; some, like Pilâtre de Rozier, plunging into
La Manche
and drowning; others, like Blanchard, flying over it and planting the French flag on the English side. New machines were being invented, new medicines discovered. Under Buffon’s canny eye the immense age of the planet was coming to light. Since the excavations at Pompeii the glories of the ancient world had come to enjoya new renaissance, and people were starting to have a true understanding both of how it felt to be alive in those days, and of the classical cult of beauty:
magnus ab integro saeculorum nascitur ordo
—A whole new order is being born out of the fullness of time.
    No, in no way could it be said that this was an age of decadence, the morbidly-beautiful autumn of an old and dying regime. Historical periods cannot be likened to decades: each carries the seeds of the next. Everyone knows Talleyrand’s famous observation: “No one who has not lived under the Ancien Régime can know the full sweetness of life.” Familiarity with that sweetness was of course confined to those of privileged birth, and they were rather few in number. Even so, for everyone else the France of Louis XVI can hardly have been hell, though at the height of its raging turmoil they came close enough to it.
    At the end of the eighteenth century France was ‘in training’. Spengler uses this sporting term for those nations capable of shaping both their own history and that of the wider world. France was in training, limbering up for the great Rationalist miracle that no one saw coming—the Revolution. The purpose of this history is to explore the secret workings of that process of unconscious preparation.

Chapter Two
The Comtesse
    H AVING NOW INTRODUCED OUR SUBJECT , that is, our subject with a capital ‘S’—the fateful Nibelung Treasure—we should now, as in the old films, present the actors centre stage. These portraits, and the histories behind them, will claim a fair amount of space, but that is only natural insofar as our tragedy—or comedy—is one of character, as our school textbooks conceive of the form: if we placed such and such a person in a given situation on stage, each would be bound to behave in such and such a way, their fates following from their characters. By simply stating what sort of people we are dealing with we shall have told you half our story.
    Our heroine, or rather, one of our heroines, the Comtesse de la Motte, began her career at a rather humble level. When she first appears on our stage, she is eight years old and a beggar. Prior to that, she had tended geese, but reluctantly.
    The Marquise de Boulainvilliers, accompanied by her husband, was on her way by coach to their estate at Passy, which at that time was not a suburb of Paris but a separate little village, some way from the capital, where Parisians took their holidays. The carriage was going very slowly. A little girl, holding an even smaller child in her arms, ran towards the coach and began to beg, in the following remarkable terms:
    “In God’s sacred name I implore you, spare a few coppers for two little orphans who carry the royal blood of