THE DIAMOND by JULIE BAUMGOLD

Author:JULIE BAUMGOLD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

William Pitt the Younger, the second son of Lord Chatham, was then prime minister in England. He was already for almost ten years the master of his country while Napoleon was but a captain, chased from Corsica, arriving anew in France. Pitt had become chancellor of the Exchequer at twenty-three, and prime minister when he was only twenty-four.

Marie-Antoinette tried desperately to reach Pitt, to know his mind on the Revolution, to know if he might save them. She remembered the young Pitt who had come to her court and how she had teased him about the grocer who would present him to society. At the same time, she feared Pitt and told Madame Campan, “I never pronounce the name of Pitt but I feel death at my shoulder.” She then felt Pitt was the enemy of France, that he was seeking revenge for the support France gave to the Americans in 1781. She even thought Pitt served the Revolution in France. Still she wanted to know his mind.

The queen had asked the princess de Lamballe to try to get to Pitt through the duchess of Gordon, who had great political influence. The princess failed. When she was half inviting and half discouraging the princess to come back to her after Varennes, the queen wrote, “Many about us profess to see the future as clear as the sun at noonday. But, I confess, my vision is still dim…. If we do not see you, send me the result of your interview at the precipice.” The “precipice” was her code word for William Pitt. Marie-Antoinette was fond of code and cipher and wrote to foreign powers in a cipher based on a certain edition of Bernadin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (a love story that the emperor likes and that I read to him some nights before he sleeps).

The fatal diamond, now taken from the king of France and locked at the Committee of Public Safety, connected Pitt and the queen of France. What a round this was! Louis XVI, descendant of one who refused to buy Pitt’s diamond, now looked to Pitt’s great-grandson to help him keep the throne, and Marie-Antoinette, descendant of Madame, whose son had bought the Régent, was petitioning this mighty Pitt.

By then I had not yet begun to fight. I was with the princess de Lamballe in the émigré salons and at the masked balls in Aix-la-Chapelle. The queen wrote to the princess that she and the king were in the clutches of a “race of tigers.” She said don’t come back to me, but the princess knew just what that meant and returned to her friend by mid-November.

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