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| Jeanne de la Motte's entry in the St Mary-at-Lambeth burial register |
A
casual passerby would have seen some odd goings-on at Mount Row in Lambeth on
the night of 6 June 1791 when a pair of heavily built men forced their way into
one of the lodging houses. A few minutes later a distraught young woman leaves
the same house in something of a rush and, despite apparently not being able to
speak English, manages to persuade the occupants of a neighbouring house to let
her in. She is observed by one of the men from an upstairs window and
eventually both of the men follow her into the street and into next door. Noise
and confusion follow their entry and then a third storey window of the house
opens and the young woman flies out and falls to the pavement, striking a tree
on the way down. It is impossible to say
if she fell, jumped, was pushed or even thrown out of the window but it is clear
she is badly injured; she seems to have broken more than one limb and she has
lost an eye.
In
the days that follow the newspapers explain what happened;
A female
foreigner, who lodged in the neighbourhood of Mount-row, Lambeth, being on
Monday night arrested upon an action for a trifling sum of money, was so much
affected, that she leaped out of a two pair of stairs window, by which act the
broke both her legs, and was otherwise so much bruised, that her life is
despaired of. She proves to be the famous Comtesse de !a Mott. As soon as the Bailiffs arrested her, she
asked them to drink a glass of wine, and,
on pretence of getting it, left the room, and immediately locked the door. From
the window they saw her go into an adjoining house, and pursued her. She lies
terribly mangled; her left eye cut out — one of her arms and both her legs are
broken. Caledonian Mercury 9 June 1791
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| Jeanne de la Motte |
The trifling sum of money was £30 and the
young woman was the 35 year old Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, Comtesse de la
Motte. She and her husband, the shadowy Count de la Motte, were fugitives who
had earned the undying rancour of the French Royal family and who were
terrified of Royalist retribution even though the Revolution was in full throe
and Louis XVI and his Queen Marie Antoinette had far more pressing matters to
deal with. Jeanne took two and a half
months to die of her injuries, finally expiring on the 21 August, reportedly
after over indulging in mulberries for which she had a particular weakness. She
was buried five days later at St Mary-at- Lambeth by William Vyse who as well
as being the rector of St Mary’s was
also Chaplain to Archbishop Cornwallis, Lambeth Palace being next door to the
church. In the registry the rector
recorded the deceased as Jean St Rymer De Valois, Countess De La Motte. The Count was not at her funeral; he was in
Belgium fighting a duel in which he killed William Grey a Bond Street jeweler,
no doubt in a dispute over payment for the diamonds that his wife had stolen
and that had led to her public flogging and imprisonment in Paris;
An Affair of
Honour, which has been attended I with fatal Consequences, took place at
Brussels a few Days ago. A Dispute between the famous Count La Motte and Mr.
William Gray, of Bond-Street, London, which originated on some trivial
Circumstance, had occasioned a Duel, in which the latter fell. A Brace of
pistols being fired by each without Effect, they had Recourse to Swords; and
Mr. Gray having a Cast in his Eye, and being less versed in the Management of
that Weapon than his Antagonist, yielded an easy Victory. Oxford Journal 27 August 1791
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| The churchyard at St Mary-at-Lambeth |
Jeanne
de Valois-Saint-Rémy was born in July 1756 in the Chateau of Fontette near the
town of Barbe-sur-Aube in Champagne. Her father Jacque was an illegitimate
grandson of Henri II and a near penniless drunkard who had frittered away what
was left of the family fortune by gambling. He had fallen so low as to marry a
servant with whom he produced six children, supporting them by poaching off the
estates he had once owned. Poverty drove
the family to Paris where a broken Jacque died in the workhouse. Jeanne’s
mother promptly married a Sardinian guardsman and the family moved to Boulogne.
The Guardsman raped the 8 year old Jeanne and made her earn her keep by begging
in the streets of the town. Jeanne stood
on the main carriage route with her baby sister strapped to her back, holding a
sign which said “Pity the poor orphan of the blood of Valois.” The Marquise de Boulainvilliers,
driving past in her Phaeton, took pity as instructed and became Jeanne’s patron
for a decade. Placing the sisters in a convent didn’t stop the Marquise’s
husband debauching the adolescent Jeanne. At the age of 20 she ran away from
the convent back to her place of birth in Barbe-sur-Aube where she was taken in
by a Madame Surmont, the wife of the
local Prefect. The good woman soon regretted her charity when her husband
became smitten by the girl; she however reserved her favors for the Bishop of
Langres by whom she became pregnant. Jeanne
deftly side stepped the potential scandal by ensnaring Madame Surmont’s beloved
nephew, guardsman Nicolas La Motte, into a hasty marriage. Jeanne had twins, girls, but they died soon
after birth.
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| Cardinal Rohan |
Jeanne’s
much vaunted Valois blood eventually led to her being granted an annual pension
by the Crown but it was not enough for a penniless girl with grand ambitions.
Her opportunity to further these came when Madame Boulainvilliers introduced her to Cardinal Rohan, the
Bishop of Strasbourg. The Rohans were an important, powerful and vastly wealthy
aristocratic family and Cardinal Rohan was a worldly prelate with a taste for
politics. He had been one of the political faction opposed to the Austrian
marriage of Louis XVI and had been sent on a special mission to Vienna to try
and prevent it. He only succeeded in earning the personal enmity of the Empress
Maria Teresa and her daughter Marie Antoinette. Once Marie was Queen Rohan’s
political career was over and he was barely tolerated at court. The Cardinal was enchanted by Jeanne and she
soon became his mistress and confidante. The only other person Rohan trusted
implicitly was Count Cagliostro; placing himself in the unfortunate position of
having two of the 18th century’s greatest swindlers as his personal
advisers, a situation that would eventually cost him dearly.
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| Nicole d'Oliva |
With Cardinal Rohan’s backing
Jeanne took to haunting Versailles, continually calling on officials and courtiers
with petitions and requests for the money, property and titles that she felt
she was entitled to on account of her Valois blood. When this didn’t work she
tried sleeping with court officials and telling outrageous lies about her close
personal relationship with the Queen. She became such a pest that officials eventually
increased her pension in an effort to get rid of her but it was not enough for
the voracious Jeanne. Cardinal Rohan swallowed the story of Jeanne’s new
friendship with Marie Antoinette and humbly accepted her advice that he start a
campaign to restore himself into Royal favor by writing a letter to the Queen
begging her forgiveness for the errors of his past. Jeanne recruited a friend, a master forger
named Rétaux de Villette, to produce a reply that came ostensibly from the
Queen herself. Encouraged by the faked response Rohan wrote more letters to the
Queen to which Rétaux wrote increasingly warm, even intimate replies. Flattered by this apparent interest from the
Queen Rohan was soon penning treasonous love letters to her majesty. The worldly
prelate seems not to have smelled a rat, even when ‘the Queen’ began asking him
for substantial donations towards charity. He seemed not to notice that the
penurious Jeanne was suddenly affluent, living in better accommodation and
dressing in finer clothes. Rohan’s ardor increased to the point where he was
desperate to meet the Queen in private.
Jeanne put off the meeting for as long as possible but when she ran out
of excuses she arranged a rendezvous on a moonless night in an overgrown arbor
in the gardens at Versailles. Another friend Nicole d'Oliva, a prostitute, was
recruited as stand in for Marie Antoinette. The private interview was quick, no
more than a few minutes, undertaken in conditions of great secrecy – the
excited Rohan was barely able to stutter a few endearments to the heavily
disguised Queen and had no time to receive any in return. Instead ‘the Queen’
thrust a single red rose into his hand before rushing away to spend the night
writing him a long passionate letter.
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| The famous necklace |
It was not only the Cardinal
who believed Jeanne’s story of her friendship with Marie Antoinette; the court
jewelers Barsenge and Bohmer hearing false rumors of her intimacy with the
Queen approached her to intercede with her majesty on their behalf. They were
anxious to sell a colossally expensive diamond necklace, a piece which cost so
much that only the King could afford to buy it. Unfortunately the King had
declined the purchase and the jewelers were left with a necklace into which
they had sunk almost all their capital. They hoped that Jeanne could help them
solve their liquidity problem by approaching the Queen on their behalf. She
immediately saw the potential to make a fortune from the besotted Cardinal
Rohan. On her instructions Rétaux the
forger wrote a charming letter to Rohan, ostensibly from the Queen, explaining
that she desperately wanted the necklace but that the King was in temporary
financial difficulties and had told her she had to make sacrifices. Could her
dearest Cardinal please advance her a loan to buy the trinket? The cost was an
eye watering 1,600,000 livres, a sum so vast even the lovelorn prelate started
to feel uneasy but the jewelers were prepared to accept payment in installments
and by the time the first payment had been made the King could probably be
relied on to come up with the rest.
Rohan anxiously decided he needed further help in making such a big
decision so he asked Count Cagliostro to consult the spirits for him, they
surely would know what to do. The Count did as he was asked and was pleased to
tell Rohan that the auguries were all good and he should go ahead. Jeanne soon
had the necklace, which she passed on immediately to her husband who wasted no
time prising the diamonds from their settings before hot footing it off to
Brussels and London to sell them.
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| Marie Antoinette points the finger at Cardinal Rohan |
The plot unraveled when the
first installment of the money fell due to Barsenge and Bohmer; Rohan found himself unable to come up with
the cash by the appointed date. The two jewellers panicked and approached the
Queen directly to politely remind her that the money was due. She of course claimed
to know nothing and so the jewelers produced the contract of sale to which Rétaux
the forger had obligingly appended her name on behalf of Jeanne. Soon Cardinal
Rohan, Jeanne, the unfortunate Cagliostro, Rétaux the forger and Nicole the
prostitute all found themselves under arrest. The King decreed that there
should be a public trial, a serious misjudgment given the general unpopularity
of the Royal family. Both Jeanne and Cagliostro published spirited (and
meretricious) defenses which became best sellers in France and newspapers all
over Europe took a keen interest in the progress of the trial itself. Public
opinion in France believed Rohan to be an innocent victim of Marie Antoinette,
the Queen merely using Jeanne and her disreputable friends to discredit and
humiliate the Cardinal. The verdict of the Paris Parlement, where the trial was
held, reinforced the popular view; Rohan was acquitted of all charges against
him, as was Cagliostro, and the full brunt of blame for the affair fell on
Jeanne and her two accomplices. Jeanne was ordered to be whipped and branded
and sentenced to life imprisonment.
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| Jeanne is publicly branded in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice |
Early in the morning of 21
June 1786 Jeanne was dragged out of her cell in the Palais de Justice wearing
only a petticoat and shawl by 8 men who bodily carried her to the main
courtyard. She put up a ferocious struggle as her captors tied a halter rope
around her neck and attached her to a cart to be whipped. The courtyard had
been set up with benches for the public to see the spectacle and despite the
earliness of the hour a crowd of several hundred people quickly gathered. The
guards seemed almost sorry for her and the lashing across her shoulders and
neck was half hearted according to most accounts. One of the guards then
stripped her half naked to allow the executioner to brand a V on her shoulder
and breast with a red hot iron. As he scorched her breast the swooning Jeanne
rallied momentarily and sank her teeth into his hand, biting off a sizeable
chunk of flesh before passing out. Whilst she was unconscious her hair was
shorn to the scalp. Later she was given the coarse grey uniform of the Salpêtrière
before being taken away to that notorious prison for prostitutes.
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| Jeanne's flight from the Salpêtrière |
Her sentence
was life imprisonment but in the event she served less than six years, somehow
escaping and fleeing to London. We only have her own, highly improbable account
of how she managed to escape her Parisian jail. She claims well wishers
smuggled writing materials to her with which she produced a sketch of the key
to her cell (which she merely managed to snatch glimpses of in the hands of the
nuns who served as jailers), the sketch was then smuggled out of the prison and
used to make a duplicate key which was smuggled back in along with a suit of
men’s clothes. When the opportunity arose Jean donned the suit and wig and let
herself out of her cell and a further three locked doors and escaped from the
prison by mingling amongst a crowd of sightseers on a visit to see the locked
up prostitutes. Once free she made her way to Luxembourg and then to London
where she was joined by her husband. In London she wrote her bestselling “Memoires
Justificatifs de La Comtesse de Valois de La Motte,” but seemed to make very
little money from them if she was forced to live in a common lodging house in
Lambeth and died being dunned for a mere £30.
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Illa Meery as Jeanne de la Motte, in the silent film "Cagliostro" (1929) By Richard Oswald. |
Perhaps we have not heard the
last of Jeanne; on ‘Find A Grave’s web page about her, an anonymous poster left
the following message in January 2012:
In another lifetime
on earth I was Jeanne De Saint-Remy de Valois. To those kind and beautiful
souls who have left flowers THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart, it's been
very healing. To those few who have left negative comments, believe me, I have
paid for my actions in this lifetime by carrying huge amounts of guilt and
shame and suffered, which has impacted on every aspect of my life. Her actions
were not 'nice' to say the very least, but unless you walk in another's shoes,
I would ask you not to judge, think of the poverty and the abuse. I have met
Marie-Antoinette again in this life-time and I felt so guilty and ashamed that
I could not bear to be in her company and I sobbed for about an hour aterwards.
I'm still trying to work through the energy of that life, but I'm grateful for
this opportunity to share with whoever comes across this.-Anonymous
Added: Jan. 7, 2012
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