The Epilogue–Part 2
November 6, 2009 at 2:57 pm | In affair of the diamond necklace, french revolution | Leave a CommentTags: affair of the diamond necklace, affair of the necklace, comte beugnot, french revolution, marie antoinette, retaux de villette, toussaint de beausire
The people who took part in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace were some of the most extraordinary people ever thrown together into one of the most bizarre moments in history. Soothsayers, prostitute, queen, cardinal, jewelers . . . when the trial took place in 1786, they even brought in a clockmaker to give testimony. The lasting consequences of the Affair of the Diamond Necklace brought on the fall of the monarchy in France. So what happened to this amazing cast of (real-life) characters when the Revolution swept across France?
Jacques Clause Beugnot, later Comte Beugnot, was an old friend of Madame de La Motte. He had known her from her less prosperous days in Bar-sur-Aube and had probably been romantically involved with her before she married Nicolas de La Motte. There is some evidence that Beugnot was at least partially involved in the aftermath of the theft of the necklace. He was amongst a group of La Motte friends and family who convened after the first arrests were made, trying to decide what was to be done now. He also, apparently, ended up with a diamonds ring, according to Frances Mossiker. He was shrewd enough to stay out of sight and out of mind when the storm hit. In prison, Madame de La Motte asked him to be her legal counsel, but he wisely did not accept the offer. He was already too closely associated with Madame de La Motte for his own good. Madame de La Motte, for her part, never mentioned Beugnot’s name either during the interrogations or later, when she was writing tell-all memoirs from London. This could be contrued either as an insult (he had been her friend, after all, at the very least) or as a sign of her affection for him (she was making sure suspicion never touched his name).
Beugnot was arrested in 1793 as the Revolution took over Paris. He had been part of the National Assembly, but the Revolutionary fervor was at such a pitch that today’s heroes were tomorrow’s villains. He was let out through a web of hazy connections–his wife’s uncle knew someone who knew someone, and he was let out of prison without falling under the blade of Doctor Guillotine’s machine. He was given the title of Comte (it was clearly not hereditary) and held several posts under the restored monarchy: director general of the national police, Marine Minister, Postmaster General, and Minister of State. He became quite a respectable and respected figure, and it seems very few remembered the hints of the scandal that had almost clung to him. He must have been grateful, to his dying day, that Madame de La Motte had not spoken his name.
Retaux de Villette was literally kicked out of France after being exiled by the Parlement de Paris. He was, as tradition dictated, given a loaf of bread and was booted in the ass. He went to Venice, where he claimed in his memoirs to have languished, though he also made some pretty outrageous claims about his romantic life. In 1790, those memoirs were published, and nothing more was heard of him (at least, it seems Frances Mossiker could find no more information on him, and neither could I).
Marie-Antoinette of course was the guillotine’s most famous victim. When she arrived from Austria to France as the new, young, pretty Dauphine, she was well-received. Of course, this all turned very sour in the coming years. Was it all because of her own behavior–her extravagance and the appearance of callous uncaring about her starving subjects? Or was she the scapegoat of the coming revolution, which would have come with or without her? In either case, she was widely reviled as Madame Deficit, La Autrichienne (the Austrian bitch), and many other rude and crude things. Her image was used in pornographic pamphlets as well as in fashion plates. The Affair of the Necklace was a huge blow to her reputation. More accurately, it was the Parlement’s refusal to convict Cardinal Rohan for criminal presumption. The Parlement was, in effect, saying that Marie-Antoinette was so dishonorable and had such a bad reputation that the Cardinal was perfectly justified in believing he had arranged a midnight rendezvous with her. All the nasty rumors and tales were given official sanction. This was a very, very bad outcome for the Queen. Indeed, she somehow sensed that the verdict was a disaster and she collapsed in tears.
Shortly before Marie-Antoinette’s execution, the topic of Madame de La Motte was brought up by Public Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville:
Question: Was it not at the Petit Trianon that you knew the woman La Motte?
Answer: I have never seen her.
Question: Was she not your victim in the famous affair of the diamond necklace?
Answer: She cannot have been, since I did not know her.
Question: Then you persist in your system of denial?
Answer: I have n system of denial. It is the truth I have spoken and will persist in speaking.
Toussaint de Beausire was the young man who was arrested alongside Nicol d’Oliva in Brussels, Belgium. The two of them had left Paris because Brussels was much cheaper and Toussaint was deeply, deeply in debt. [Naturally, I give this a slightly different spin in the work of fiction I'm slaving away at: they flee Paris because they hear everyone connected with the Comtesse de La Motte is being arrested, and they want to avoid being arrested; obviously, they fail.] Toussaint was a failed architect who had gotten into debt very early in life and never actually made it through school because he kept pulling very bad pranks and swindling people. His family threatened to put him in a mental asylum by declaring him mentally incompetent.
After being put in the Bastille for a short time, Beausire was let go because it was fairly clear he had no direct knowledge of what had happened concerning the La Mottes and the diamond necklace. He had simply been there when the police found Mademoiselle d’Oliva. His family promptly did as they had threatened, putting him in an asylum. He was released from there as well a little later on.
Beausire probably married Nicole d’Oliva at some point–Frances Mossiker refers to them as being man and wife though she never specifies when and where it happened. It might well be that Mossiker, writing in the 60’s, said they were married because they had a child (who was later legitimized). In any case, they certainly ended up together, though it was far from a happy reunion. Beausire was not a great guy; according to reports that quoted Nicole d’Oliva herself, he kept his wife and son in a squalid back room while he enjoyed himself in the front room with lots of women. Lots and lots of fishy stories pop up here and there about the characters in the affair of the necklace, so you can judge the veracity of this story for yourself. In any case, Nicole died shortly thereafter at a convent, leaving Beausire free to remarry, which he did (producing six children in the process).
Beausire was one of the people who brought down the Bastille on July 14, 1789. He became a firebrand of the Revolution and made quite a name for himself. Of course, no one was safe as the tides changed day by day during the Revolution, and Beausire ended up in jail. It is perhaps unsurprising, given his character, that he turned informant, saving his own ass and getting a hated relative (one of those who had put him in an asylum) guillotined. Beausire was tried but acquitted and lived until 1818. Good guys finish last, I guess.
The Epilogue-Part 1
October 20, 2009 at 5:49 am | In affair of the diamond necklace, french revolution, history | Leave a CommentTags: cardinal rohan, comtesse de la motte, count cagliostro, epilogue, french revolution, jeanne de la motte, jeanne de la motte-valois, london, nicolas de la motte, Nicole d'Oliva, paris
The Conciergerie prison, where the Comtesse de La Motte was briefly imprisoned.
When the verdict was given on May 31, 1786, it’s unlikely that anyone could have foreseen what was about to befall France. These were the waning years of the ancien regime, and the verdict in the Affair of the Necklace was one of the warning bells of the monarchy’s demise. That the Parlement had effectively reproved their Queen for her wanton behavior was extraordinary.
So what became of some of our main characters?
Jeanne de La Motte-Valois, having been sentenced to be whipped, branded, imprisoned for life, and stripped of all her possessions, was led out into the Cour du Mai early on a June morning in 1786. Even though it was early, there was a massive crowd. Jeanne was branded twice with a V, for voleuse (thief), though she surely thought of it as V for Valois. She struggled so hard that instead of being branded on both shoulders, one brand was on her shoulder and the other was on her breast. After this ordeal, she fainted. When she recovered, she was transferred to the Salpetrière prison. After about a year of imprisonment, she made her escape in June 1787. She makes quiet a harrowing tale out of it in her memoirs. Despite an upswelling of sympathy for her, even from a staunch friend of the Queen’s like the Princess de Lamballe, Jeanne could not stay in France, so she went to London, where she was assured a warm welcome. The English were more than willing to take in someone who had so successfully discomfitted the French king and queen. They might ot have been so pleased with her if they realized how badly she had undermined the position of the monarchy and the social order it symbolized. In London, she published a series of tell-all memoirs, which are entertaining but exaggerated in some places and simply not credible in others. Two years later, the Bastille, where Jeanne had been imprisoned briefly, was taken by a mob on July 14, 1789. This must have given her great satisfaction. But she wasn’t to live long enough to see Marie-Antoinette, whom she considered to be her enemy, beheaded. Jeanne died August 23, 1791, about two years before the death of Marie-Antoinette. There were reports that police had come to arrest Jeanne or that she was pushed by sympathisers of the French monarchs. She may have fallen, or even jumped. No one can really be sure, but conspiracy theories abound. On July 20, 1792, the revolutionary court reversed the conviction of Jeanne de La Motte.
Nicolas de La Motte
Nicolas de La Motte threatened to publish an exposé about the Queen and Breteuil (one of her chief ministers) from London. He had gone to London as soon as his wife was arrested and clearly wasn’t about to go back and be arrested and suffer the same fate as his wife. When his wife escaped from prison and arrived in London, they found themselves at loggerheads. She was emotionally unstable, attempting to throw herself from a window at least once and attacking Monsieur de Calonne, her lover who mocked her over a game of cards. Nicolas returned to Paris from London in August 1789, one month after the Bastille fell. He became adept at extorting money for doing nothing. He played the dying monarchy off of the rising revolutionary government and was able to live very well off of the proceeds. He was paid off by the Rohan family to not publish all he knew about the Affair of the Necklace.
Nicole d’Oliva was let out of the Conciergerie prison on May 31, 1786, and was given a place to live by her lawyer, Blondel. After spending some time there, she moved in with Toussaint de Beausire, the man whom she had been arrested with in Brussels and whose child she gave birth to in the Bastille. Beausire was a very sordid character. He’d been in trouble since he was a child, but came from a respected family of architects. It isn’t clear whether he actually married Nicole (or when, if he did), but he kept her in very conditions while he lived it up. He abused her and purposefully kept her and her child in squalor. She retreated to a convent and died in 1789, at the age of only 28. Toussaint lived on, made it through the Revolution, remarried, and lived until 1818. Real life isn’t always fair.
Cardinal Rohan was nominated to the Estates-General, then took his seat at the National Assembly (the revolutionary body). He refused to be held up as a martyr to royal tyranny. He objected to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which made the French Church subordinate to the French government and eradicated the monastic roders. Rohan withdrew from the National Assembly and left France for his estates in Ettenheim, in what is now Germany. As French priests fled from the Revolution, he sheltered them. The remainder of his life was far more respectable than it had been, and he died in 1803 in his bed. His niece’s husband, the Duke d’Enghien, wrote, “Cardinal Rohan, fully conscious as he took the last sacraments, died a death so noble as to be truly edifying to all present–a fact that may astonish you as much as it did me.” [from Mossiker's The Queen's Necklace pg. 547]
Count Cagliostro left France and continued to wander the world. He ran afoul of the Papacy in Italy and in 1789 was imprisoned in the Castel Sant’ Angelo. Cardinal Rohan remained loyal to him, but the Cardinal’s letter of recommendation didn’t help Cagliostro. He was put on trial under the Inquisition for the crime of being a Freemason, which was punishable by death. The trail dragged on for two years, but he was naturally found guilty (this was the Inquisition). His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. His wife, too, was sentenced to life in prison, where she probably died in 1794. He was transferred to the Castel San Leo, a more secure prison, and was dead by the time French troops invaded papal lands in 1797, though a newspaper had reported him dead in 1795 (was he really dead at that time, or did he die sometime between the article and the invasion by the French?).
There are more characters to follow. Next time, I will be exploring their fates.
Wolf Hall
October 8, 2009 at 5:10 am | In writing | 2 Comments
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel has just won the Booker Prize. Congratulations.
I think this is great news for historical fiction writers like me. It’s encouraging to see a historical novel taken seriously and awarded accordingly. I am hoping that this kind of attention will help me get my humble efforts published. I like to think they’re good and stand on their own merits, but surely it can’t hurt to have a historical novel in the news.
Wolf Hall is a Tudor novel, but it apparently isn’t the bodice-buster cliche that seems to be everywhere. The Tudors are very popular right now. I love the Tudors, so I find it hard to complain, but I do roll my eyes sometimes at the way the time and place are distorted out of recognition. Take the TV show The Tudors. Wolf Hall follows Thomas Cromwell, who brought down Anne Boleyn, tried to establish Anne of Cleves, and was brought down when that failed. Naturally, there’s more to the story than that: Hilary Mantel wrote a book on him.
I haven’t read the book, but I was particularly interested in this quote from a Bookseller article:
In her account of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power from blacksmith’s son to the righthand man of Henry VIII, Mantel has changed “that hoary old genre [historical fiction] for ever and redrawn its contours”.
I wonder what she’s done that so revolutionary? I have to admit to being a little skeptical about the claim. It’s all been done before, and surely she hasn’t shattered the genre and remade it. I am hoping that this will really put historical fiction–good, serious historical fiction–in the public eye. I feel like it’s a bit neglected. I admit that here, in the UK where I’m currently studying, historical fiction seems to get more attention.
My only reservation is that this is yet another Tudor novel, albeit a (presumably) very good one. I feel like there’s more than enough Tudor material out there to last a few decades. Can we get some ancient Babylonain fiction up in here? Maybe some American frontier fiction? Some English Civil War? Something rarely seen? Please?
Here’s the link to the book on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com [it comes out October 13 in the US].
Finding Toussaint
September 22, 2009 at 11:27 am | In affair of the diamond necklace, french revolution | Leave a CommentTags: affair of the diamond necklace, affair of the necklace, french revolution, historical research, Nicole d'Oliva, research, toussaint de beausire
I uncovered a puzzling and rather unsettling error in historical research by an author I trusted.
A man by the name of Toussaint de Beausire played a very small part in history but a much bigger part in the work of historical fiction I’m currently slogging through. The fiction is really just the words and one or two characters–remarkable amounts of information exist about everyone, everything, and ever place involved.
In doing my research, I relied on Frances Mossiker’s The Queen’s Necklacefor my information on most things. The characters involved all gave his-hand accounts, which are translated and pieced together by Mossiker. What is said by the people involved is inherently suspect; these people all had strong motives to lie (generally speaking). Not to mention, quite a few of them were writing these years (sometimes many years) after the events, and their memories are demonstrably faulty.
Which is, I think, what must have happened in the case of Abbé Georgel, the secretary of Cardinal Prince Louis de Rohan [see the sidebar for a link to my post on Rohan], who was the man duped into handing over a necklace of 2400 carats to a pretty, youngish adventuress.
The error in question is this: Mossiker quotes Abbé Georgel’s summation of the end of both Beausire and Nicole d’Oliva [see the sidebar for a link to my post on Oliva]. He died by guillotine, she died alone and abandoned in convent. Having taken a look at some other secondary sources, and some birth and death records, it seems that Abbé Georgel and Mossiker (who supports his words in a footnote) are both wrong.
The person in question, Beausire, was the husband of one Nicole d’Oliva, a reformed lady of the night. Nicole was, as the link to my profile makes clear, involved in the jewel heist of the century without being aware of what she was doing. Nicole met Cardinal Rohan in the darkened gardens of the Chateau de Versailles and during the trials. There is no reason to believe that Beausire ever came any closer than that to Abbé Georgel: Beausire’s wife saw Georgel’s employer briefly in a garden. The relationship is pretty tenuous.
Georgel also wrote his memoirs in 1817, over thirty years after the events took place.
Both explain the error that Georgel made. These were, more or less, tangential characters, especially to Georgel, who was interested mostly with the Cardinal and the conniving Comtesse. He had barely known these people, and besides so many years had passed . . . he remembered the sad demise of Nicole d’Oliva, and remembered something vague about Beausire.
As it turns out, Toussaint de Beausire appears to have lived until 1818. In fact, he must have been alive when Abbé Georgel’s memoirs made the error about his (Beausire’s) death. I found this book online as I was doing a quick search to see if I could find anything more about Beausire’s exact date of death. On page 69 of Cagliostro and Company by Frantz Funck-Brentano and translated by George Maiment, I found a very full account of Toussaint de Beausire. His story is fascinating. He was quite the juvenile delinquint, running away from school, stealing from his teachers, running up debts. The real kicker came at the end, when it says that Beausire not only lived until 1818, but had remarried after Nicole d’Oliva died (young and abandoned by Beausire). He had six children by his second wife and was a servant of the Empire under Napoleon.
This needed further investigation. As far as I knew, Beausire had been executed during the French Revolution. I was inclined to believe Mossiker, who I’d been following, and assume that the authors of this new resource had mixed up my Beausire with someone else with a similar name. I dug into a few genealogy sites and found a few interesting documents. There was a record of the birth of Toussaint’s child by Nicole d’Oliva. There was a marriage license for a man I could only assume was that same son many years later. Then I found some other births. The mother’s name seemed to match what was said in Cagliostro and Company. However, the name used for the father was slightly different. The initials were a bit off. It was as though Toussaint was used sometimes as a surname and other times as a first name. In any case, this still left some room open for the possibility that there were two men with similar names and that everything attributed to Beausire in Cagliostro and Company had been the works of another man.
Quite a lot is attributed to Beausire in Cagliostro and Company. He was active in the French Revolution, turning informant and getting a relative executed because of an old grudge. There are speeches and such attributed to him. There is an account of his trial–he was acquitted. This was still a little baffling; he was meant to have been condemned. With the records I’d found, I was beginning to suspect that Mossiker was wrong and Cagliostro and Company was right.
Then I stumbled across ancestry.com’s archive of those guillotined during the French Revolution. Search as I might, Beausire was not there. This, to my mind, closed the case. The mystery appears to be solved. As far as I can tell, Frances Mossiker took Georgel’s word for Beausire’s death. Unfortunately, she didn’t double check his words. This is understandable but a little sloppy. As said before, Beausire was peripheral and Mossiker clearly had some respect for Georgel’s words. She must have believed enough of what he said to not check on this one small item. Of course, I’m probably one of very, very few people who would ever think to ask about Toussaint de Beausire, but when I did, I found that Mossiker had fallen down a little here. Don’t get me wrong; the book is fantastic and I rely on it heavily, but it’s a lesson to check things if and when you can.
Heads Will Roll
September 21, 2009 at 1:49 pm | In french revolution | Leave a CommentAncestry.com has recently put up the records of those guillotined during the French Revolution in the time of the Terror.
The monarchy had fallen; in its place were successive governments that all seemed to lose control as quickly as they acquired it. The moment the group in power was overtaken, they were sent to the Dr Guillotine’s machine in their turn.
Not a few (in fact, quite a lot) of the deaths were due to personal vendettas. If you had been quarrelling with your cousin for fifteen years about your debts, and you suddenly found yourself in a position to inform on your cousin, even if it weren’t true . . . well, human nature being what it is, lots of people took that opportunity and accused neighbors and family members who they thought had it coming. In the time of the Terror, real evidence wasn’t usually necessary, and the result was usually a swift chop of a sharp blade. Amongst the most famous of the French Revolution’s victims: Louis XVI (whose occupation is listed as “roi”–I think that might be humor, though it isn’t funny), his sister Madame Elisabeth, and Marie Antoinette. Interestingly, Marie Antoinette is listed as Marie d’Autriche Antoinette–perhaps a nod to her unflattering nickname, La Autrichienne ["the Austrian bitch"]?
The Verdict
August 27, 2009 at 1:55 pm | In Nicole d'Oliva, count cagliostro, diamond necklace affair, jeanne de la motte, nicolas de la motte, prince louis de rohan, retaux de villette | Leave a CommentTags: cardinal rohan, comtesse de la motte, count cagliostro, marie antoinette, nicolas de la motte, Nicole d'Oliva, parlement de paris, retaux de villette, verdict
*SPOILER ALERT*
If you don’t want to know what happened to whom, then please don’t read on! If, however, you’re curious about what happened to all these characters who I have bringing to you one by one, then please read on.
Early on the morning of Mary 31, 1786, the courtyard of the Palais de Justice and all of the surrounding streets and byways were filled with people waiting to hear the verdict in the trial of the century, a trial that had captured the imagination on the entire French kingdom. A Cardinal of the Church was accused of theft, forgery, and lèse-majesté(criminal disrespect for the person of the monarch, in this case Marie-Antoinette); a young, pretty adventuress was accused of masterminding a plot to steal a necklace worth a large fortune and tricking the Cardinal; a mystic, Rosicrucian, and fraud was accused of–sort of, somehow–being involved in the theft; and a young prostitute was accused of impersonating the queen in the gardens of the Chateau de Versailles.
Cardinal Prince Louis de Rohan had a very large, very powerful family. As court was opened very early on May 31st, 19 powerful members of his family (from the Soubise, Guéménée, and Lorraine) arrived in mourning. It was a show of support for their relative and respect for the Parlement de Paris, the court hearing the case.
Before this trial began, many witnesses had been examined. It was something of a parade, including everyone from a clockmaker to the Du Barry herself. The Prosecutor General, Monsieur Joly de Fleury, wrote down his recommendations to the court before the accused were brought before it. The recommendations were sealed, to be opened after the accused persons were questioned by the lords of the Parlement. Once this was done, the seal would be broken and the recommendations read and the voted on. Continue reading The Verdict…
Nicolas de La Motte
August 7, 2009 at 4:03 pm | In affair of the diamond necklace, characters, nicolas de la motte | Leave a CommentTags: affair of the necklace, comte de la motte, comtesse de la motte, diamond necklace affair, nicolas de la motte
Nicolas Marc-Antoine de La Mottewas “homely but a man of splendid physique” according to Jacques Claude (late Comte) Beugnot. Monsieur de La Motte married a young lady by the name of Jeanne de Valois de St Remy. She was a member of an impoverished (and illegitimate) arm of the Valois royal line of France; her family was descended from Henri II the entire inheritance had been squandered. He was a gentleman and a cavalry officer in the Gendarmerie. According, again, to Beugnot (who may have not been well-disposed towards La Motte), La Motte was adroit at “Wrangling credit” and had poor behavior so that he never advanced within the cavalry.
He lived in Bar-sur-Aube where his uncle was one of the most prominent citizens. He met Mademoiselle de Valois (later Madame or Comtesse de La Motte) at his uncle’s house. He was a lively, powerful character, and she was an impetuous, wild character. They hit it off immediately. Mademoiselle de Valois is rather tight-lipped about the lead-up to her marriage to La Motte on June 6, 1780, and no wonder. Beugnot, who was something an admirer of Mademoiselle in his own right, says that he received letters from Bar-sur-Aube telling him that a romance had begun between Mademoiselle de Valois and Monsieur de La Motte. “All in the same month,” he says,” they wrote me, first, that there seemed possibility of an engagement; in the next letter, that the engagement had been announced . . . and then, in almost no time at all, that the marriage had been celebrated.” The marriage was sanctioned by Mademoiselle de Valois’s foster mother (the Marquise de Boullainvilliers) and the Bishop de Langres, an old friend (and perhaps lover) of Mademoiselle. Beugnot’s “astonishment” at the rapidity of the romance was relieved when Madame de La Motte gave birth to twins a month later. Continue reading Nicolas de La Motte…
Literary Delusions of Grandeur
July 27, 2009 at 10:21 am | In affair of the diamond necklace, writing | Leave a CommentTags: ancien regime, diamond necklace affair, french revolution, historical fiction, writing
Curiosity alone would have led me to read about the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, but nothing could have gotten me hooked on it quite like the idea of writing about it–creatively–myself.
The basic idea came to me a few years ago, when I was a sophomore in college and walking from my dorm room to the bathroom down the hall (ugh–don’t remind me about the bathroom-down-the-hall setup!). I won’t say what the idea was because that would give away a good portion of my novel, in fact it would give away pretty much the entire portion not dictated by history.
I actually didn’t have a situation to go along with the idea yet, but it didn’t take me long to put together the affair of the diamond necklace with the idea I’d had. Sadly, I can’t recall exactly how this all went down, but I soon came across The Queen’s Necklace by Frances Mossiker, which is an absolutely fantastic book and gave me the nudge that I needed to get writing on this subject.
So I got to work on it and wrote and wrote. I’ve been writing on it for something like four years with a lot of disparate pieces to show for it. It is an extremely difficult story to get your hands on. It’s very slippery. Every actor in the affair gave a different version of the story in their own voices; they contradicted each other and, often, they even contradicted themselves. And the shear volume of information is daunting. Everyone had a memoir, and between them they documented an amazing amount of detail. I’m fairly committed to getting as close to the historical record as I possibly can, so it was overwhelming to have to cut and paste together a quilt of a dozen different first-hand versions of the story. Who to believe? What details to keep?
Then there was the VERY sticky problem of who to enlist as my point of view character. Should I tell it from Madame de La Motte’s perspective? This is where I began, writing tens of thousands of words in the third person from her perspective. Then I expanded the third-person to include Monsieur (future Comte) Beugnot. So, instead of spending the entire book looking in on Mme de La Motte, we look in on her and on Monsieur Beugnot for a few scenes. Then I began to rely more and more on Beugnot. A few times throughout this, I took a stab at making Nicole d’Oliva the main character, sometimes told from the first person, sometimes from the third person. I went back to Beugnot, tried switching it to first-person and decided it would need to be rewritten if I did that. Sigh. I probably had at least a hundred thousand words at this point.
About a year ago, I finally made a legitimate stab at writing from Nicole d’Oliva’s first-person perspective. I had always found her one of the most accessible characters (oddly), and the character who could be used to greatest effect. She can see and hear a lot without quite realizing what’s going on. Nicole is brought into the situation but kept in the dark. It’s a bit like a detective in a murder mystery who picks up clues along the way and solves the mystery at the end. Except this detective doesn’t know there’s a mystery to be solved and this detective is an 18th-century Parisian prostitute. I will give away the fact that (in my novel) Nicole finds out what’s going on–about the necklace theft–before the plot is brought out in the public.
So, here I am several months after starting in on this project and I’ve gotten much further with a much better result than I have on any of my other various attempts. It was a very, very tough nut to crack, but after seveal years of failed attempsts, I think it finally cracked.
Currently, I’m about 55 thousand words in. The typical novel is around 70 to 80 thousand words; historical novels run longer. At this point, the plot to steal the necklace hasn’t been brought to light. I’m guessing I have another 20 or 30 thousand words left to go. This will make it a reasonable length–my last work in progress (out on query/partial request) is 120 thousand words. There have been a few spots in this work that caught me up and a few things at the beginning that need to be reworked, but the writing has gone remarkably smoothly.
I will keep this blog updated with any major developments on the literary front, but for the most part this blog is devoted to the historical events. But if this story, God willing, ends up published, this blog will certainly be the first place to have the news.
Nicole d’Oliva
July 19, 2009 at 11:23 am | In Nicole d'Oliva, affair of the diamond necklace, characters, diamond necklace affair | Leave a CommentThe Characters #5: Nicole d’Oliva
I’ve come across some varying versions of Nicole d’Oliva’s name, but from what I can gather, her true name was Marie Nicole Leguay d’Oliva. She was also christened “Baronness ['Barone' in French] d’Olisva” by the Comtesse de La Motte. She was also known around the Palais Royal and to the police as Mlle de Designy. Most descriptions give her name as Nicole d’Oliva, however (many people at this time had two or more first names and used the second, in this case Nicole).
Young Nicole was born in Paris in 1761, “of honest if humble family. She says in her memoirs that her “first misfortune was to be orphaned at too tender an age, deprived of parents’ care and vigilance which would have warded off the dangers inevitable to an unprotected girlhood”.
Nicole did not have any guidance or opportunities in her life. Like many women before and since, she was given very options and turned to prostitution. The oldest profession has many different levels, from the cheap hooker on the corner to the well-kept maitresse en titre, a woman who had a semi-official role and title as the mistress of the king. During Nicole’s childhood, Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry were the first ladies in the land, the mistresses of Louis XV. Nicole may have looked to their example of what even an uneducated, unprivileged young woman could accomplish. No doubt she aspired to creating a comfortable life for herself. However, she was still pretty far down on the ladder of life.
Who is Count Cagliostro?
July 16, 2009 at 10:38 am | In affair of the diamond necklace, count cagliostro, diamond necklace affair | Leave a CommentIn the comments to my short write-up on Count Cagliostro, someone introduced a very interesting topic.
Who IS Count Cagliostro?
In my post on Cagliostro, I said he said “almost certainly” Giuseppe Balsamo, an Italian peasant from a humble family. His true identity is still disputed, but what’s clear is that he was not Egyptian and he was not three thousand years old (as he claimed). He had an Italian accent and was only too mortal.
The evidence linking Cagliostro to Giuseppe Balsamo is the following:
1. An anonymous letter was sent to the Paris police. The man claimed to be from Palermo, where he knew a man named Antonio Braconniere, who claimed to have identified Count Cagliostro as his nephew, Giuseppe Balsamo. Braconierre made this identification by looking at popular engravings of the time. In other words, print of drawings, which were probably not particularly accurate representations of Cagliostro.
2. Cagliostro confessed to it under the Inquisition–in other words, under torture.
Still, Giuseppe Balsamo seems to be the only and the most likely candidate for Cagliostro’s true identity. The young Balsamo was involved in the kind of scamming and petty trickery that you might expect from a con man in training.
But, some might ask, how could this uneducated peasant suddenly metamorphose into the sophisticated Count Cagliostro, accepted into the highest circles of European society? A good spot of acting and a lot of psychological acuity, I think. He had no trouble pretending to be what he was not. He also understood people’s weaknesses and how to exploit them. A can man works through lies and cultivating trust in his victims. This does not really need much education or cultivation, just a knowledge of what buttons to press. Cagliostro was also smart enough not to stay around the same places for too long; he and his wife moved about quickly before they wore out their welcome.
So, personally, I do believe they are the same person. Frankly, there is no positive proof that Cagliostro was Balsamo, and there probably never will be. There is still room for conjecture.
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