The Queen's Necklace Read Online Free PDF

influence of Mme de Pompadour, despite his complete lack of talent. It was he who, together with an Austrian duke, achieved the remarkable feat of leading an army of 60,000 to defeat against 20,000 soldiers of Frederick the Great at Rossbach, the decisive battle of the Seven Years War.
    The other branch, Rohan-Guéménée, is noted chiefly for the fact that despite annual revenues of astronomical proportions, its representatives went bankrupt in 1781, in debt to the tune of thirty-three million livres, taking countless lesser folk down with them, simple Breton sailors who had put their money with them in the expectation of life annuities. The Guéménées, finding what was left of their fortune insufficient to maintain their lifestyle, were forced to give up their courtly status and pretensions. Their bankruptcy contributed significantly to the general loss of respect for the aristocracy.
    The Strasbourg bishopric was part of the family inheritance, so to speak. Half-a-century before the grand entry of Marie-Antoinette, another Rohan had received a foreign princess at the cathedral door. This was Maria Leszczynska, who became the unhappy wife of Louis XV.
    Duc Louis de Rohan was born in 1734. In 1760 he was appointed coadjutor to his uncle the Bishop of Strasbourg, and simultaneously made Bishop of Canopus in Egypt
in partibus infidelium
—the honorary prelate of a diocese that had been in the hands of pagans for well over a thousand years. The top echelons of the Church had always included persons of the highest social rank, but by the seventeenth century the aristocratic families associated with the French Court had appropriated the sees of bishops and archbishops exclusively for themselves. Not only was Rohan’s uncle a bishop, his cousin Ferdinand de Rohan was Archbishop of Cambrai, and the ducal La Rochefoucauld family alone filled three episcopal sees: Rouen, Beauvais and Saintes. The Court aristocracy, like the princes of the Church, made few adjustments to their personallives or outward manner of living—one of the reasons why the French Church was so weak in the eighteenth century. The gulf between its upper ranks and the poorly-endowed lower clergy was every bit as great as that between the aristocracy and the nation at large. At a critical moment in the early days of the Revolution representatives of the lower ranks of the clergy aligned themselves with the citizenry, an act that had decisive consequences.
    Louis de Rohan was not just a dignitary of the church. Since 1761 he had also been a member of the Académie Française, counting among the ‘Immortals’. Of its thirty-eight members in 1789 (two places were vacant) there were seven nobles and five senior churchmen—an aristocratic age indeed. Earlier, under Louis XIV, France’s bishops and academicians had been almost entirely of bourgeois origin. The final years of the Ancien Régime were by far the most aristocrat-dominated.
    What sort of man was this Duc Louis de Rohan? According to his contemporaries he was extremely refined and well-mannered, a witty companion, and a fine speaker—by no means a disgrace to the Academy. He was both chivalrous and genuinely good-hearted, and his followers noted countless touching acts of charity carried out behind the scenes: a true son of the times, a man of feeling, as indeed was his royal master, Louis XVI.
    But these facts tell us almost nothing, and the surviving portraits of the man add little more. They show the refined but somewhat expressionless features of the frail, rather spoilt, offspring of elderly parents: the face of a man almost impossible to describe. The sort of man of whom you might say: had he not been born a prince he would be indistinguishable from anyone else. But that judgement would be superficial. Rohan was a true-born prince—his Rohan qualities were as integral to his being as any inherited predisposition to disease of the organs. They determined his character and his fate as surely as