Thank you for listening. To the rest is history. For weekly bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series and membership of our much loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club that is thereestishistory.com. no, my lord count, you will not have her. You will not have her because you are a great nobleman. You think you are a great genius, nobility, fortune, rank, position, howthere is no evidence for any of this that has happened?Yeah.The vicomtesse then hands over a third of the fee that's been promised, and then the Baron d'Oliva is driven back into Paris. From this point on, there is no further reference to her title. So she goes back to being Nicole, and there is no further money. And that seems to be the end of the matter. I mean, all very, very strange.And this is from Nicole's own account, isn't it.Well, it's from the account of her lawyer.Yeah. Everything you're going to hear in this story.Yeah.Comes from the accounts given by different lawyers to make money, publish memoirs of what their clients had told them.But also, Dominic, to be fair, to try and get their clients off, as we will see.Yes, of course. So this is Nicole's story. So, Tom, a very kind of Mozart friendly episode, this.It's very, very Mozart friendly.The queen looking on, presumably a mysterious suitor in the darkness, the rose is handed over. All of this kind of thing.I mean, it's made for an opera.Yeah. Turn on the lights for us and tell us, first of all, who is that mysterious man in the cassock that the queen appears to be giving a rose to?Well,heart.And of course, the thing is always with confidence tricks is that people have to want desperately to believe that what they're being told is the case.Yeah, of course.And it's not just the cardinal who wants to believe it. The jewelers do as well because they want to recoup their, their investment.Yeah.So November 1784. So this is a few months after the meeting in the gardens at Versailles. The cardinal gets a letter that has been signed Marie Antoinette de France, which is a signature she would never use because that's not diplomatic at all. And the cardinal, as a former diplomat should have known this, but he doesn't. a sapphic relationship with Marie Antoinette. She describes midnight assignations with the queen. Heavens, I found her so beautiful. I said to myself, it is the goddess flora toying with a humble little flower. So the idea of Marie Antoinette as predatory, as domineering.Yeah. Has groomed her.Has groomed her, yes, exactly. And Chantal Thomas says of her, she was the justine of the pre revolutionary epic. And Justine is the heroine of the Marquis de Sade's most famous novel. And Justine is impeccably virtuous. And because she is virtuous, she is persecuted by the kind of sardian monsters. The aristocrats. Yeah. And essentially, if she is the Justine, then Marie Antoinette is a kind of sardian monster.Simon Sharma says she represented herself as an orphan of an older France, a heroine from the Styx, an innocent gone astray. That's the same point, isn't it? She's an innocent, rather like Nicole, the person who she is actually corrupted, ironically. But in this case, she has been corrupted personally by Marie Antoinette. And of course, that may seem completely bonkers because we know, as you discussed so brilliantly in the last episode, Tom, that Marie Antoinette is actually quite. She's not puritanical, but she's very bourgeois.I don't think she's bourgeois.Her sexual morality is bourgeois, Tom.She's a combination. I mean, she's catholic and she's rousseauian.Okay.She's a combination of kind of old school catholic morality combined with a kind of girlish giddiness.Fair enough. But what she isn't she is not a predatory.No, she's not lesbian.Sort of groomer of little girls or young women or whatever this woman is.But the problem is that these are portrayals of her that have already gained traction, that she's a monster of extravagance and that she's a kind of predatory whore. And the reason this scandal is so devastating is both that it amplifies those stories and that it makes them kind of very, very public. And so in the wake of it, the portrayal of her as a kind of monstrous nymphomaniac is completely turbocharged. So by 1789, and we all know what happens in 1789, a pamphlet is published which describes her sexual record. Nobility, clergy, third estate. This is the backdrop to the meeting of the three estates which we'll be doing in due course. So it's obviously inspired by it. Any man has a right to her favors. The most handsome and robust are the most welcome. Guards, lackeys, actors, height of opprobrium. Oh, indelible shame.Yeah.So kind of loving it. And it's not just the queen who gets caught up on this, so also does her female favorites. So this is when the stories about the duchesse de Polignac, who we talked about yesterday, one of her squad, they get vituperative as well. That is the polignacs, relatively harmless. So is the princess de Lambelle, but they are both cast as kind of co vampires in Marie Antoinette's nymphomaniac coven.Queens of vice, Tom.Queens of vice. And what's fascinating is that, but in the wake of the punishment of de la Motte, you start to get fantasies in which Marie Antoinette and her favorites suffer similar punishments. So a lampoon is published against the duchesse de Polignac and it kind of says, let's see her humiliated, let's see her punished. Let's see her suffer before the gaze of the people. Yes, madame, you must do penance. And as the choice is up to the confessor, here is the penance I impose in the name of the nation. Shave your head, don a gray Hessian, dress as your only adornment, and go to the august assembly of the estates general in this garb to make atonement. Deliver up any remains of your plundering. So it's kind of working with the punishments of convicted prostitutes.And also the austrianness is really important here, isn't it? Because there are two claims additional to this. One that's very common is that she actually her first victim, as it were, or the first person who perhaps groomed her was her own brother, the austrian emperor, Joseph II.Yeah. So the Mozart thing, he's the too many notes king in Amadeus.Yeah. Yes, he is. Yeah. But then the other thing is, of course, that if she is austrian, she's not french and she must therefore be a traitor.Yeah.And the more that the international temperature kind of rises, especially once the revolution has got going, the more people say, you know, she is not merely sexually kind of depraved, she is politically depraved. And, you know, in the course of her sapphic lusts, she's absorbing secrets and passing on secrets to France's enemies.Exactly. So. And there's a sense that Maria Theresa, her mother, has sent her to infect France with her villainy.Yeah.So you may wonder, well, how on earth does Marie Antoinette cope with all this abuse? And the truth is that she treats it all with kind of amused disdain. So as early as 1775, she wrote to Maria Theresa, her mother, saying, we're in the middle of a satirical song epidemic. They have made some up about everyone at court, men and women alike. French license has even extended to the king. I myself have not been spared, although this country is fond enough of malice, the songs are so flat and in such bad taste that they are successful neither with the public nor high society.So two things there. One, she's only 20 years old when she says that. So I always find the stuff about marriage unbelievably repulsive.It's awful.I mean, I just think how anybody can take the side of the pamphleteers and not of the basically girl stroke young woman at the center of them is beyond me. But the other interesting thing is that she is quite wrong about that. So when she says successful neither with the public nor high society, she is dead wrong. They are enormously successful and people do start to believe it.Yeah. And so Chantal Thomas, in her wonderful book about the pamphlets and Marie Antoinette's relationship to them, I mean, she basically says that one of the reasons perhaps, why they don't impinge on Marie Antoinette is that she simply doesn't understand the power of the written word because she doesn't read. She doesn't really read. And she says Marie Antoinette had nothing to learn from the outside world. The hot headed, vehement words of the pamphlets were incomprehensible to her and so failed to touch her. But, you know, there are expressions of public hostility that do have an impact. So in May 1785, and this is, you know, when the scandal is kind of really building up, she goes into Paris and the people there refuse to cheer her, and two years later, she's being booed and hissed on the streets of Paris.Well, Tom, you say that, but actually, Theo, our producer, would tell you that people aren't booing and hissing. They are shouting out, ooh, ooh. And gee, gee gee. That's their equivalent of hissing.Yeah, that's french for boo. Exactly.Yeah.So, you know, one of the chiefs of police in Paris writes to the king at Versailles and says that the queen shouldn't go into the capital, it's unsafe for her. And so Louis XVI passes this on to his wife and forbids her to go to Paris. And Marie Antoinette is deeply, deeply wounded by this. And so she cancels her public engagements in the capital, and she basically retreats to the petty trianor, which, of course, then only makes the stories. What's she up to in there with all her girlfriends?Exactly. That's the tragedy of it. Right. The irony is, of course, she cannot win. She's in a position now where whatever she does will be seen as evidence of guilt. So, ironically, the fact that she tried to be less formal than the court is seen that, you know, she's the cardinal the prime minister of France and to subject France to the dominance of Austria. And so the king is somehow seen as being complicit in this. And so the king and queen of France, the emblems of the greatness of the country, are being cast as agents of an enemy power.Well, Robert Darnton, in his book the Revolutionary Temper, quotes a bookseller at the height of the diamond necklace affair who wrote in his journal or to his brother, I can't remember which, but he wrote, the public spirit has turned against him because he inspires no respect, no fear, no confidence. And he throws away the public's money.For all sorts of follies.You know, that is the lesson that if you are a slightly gullible reader of these pamphlets, these propagandistic kind of pornographic fantasies. That's what you think about the king, that, as Darnson says, he's well meaning but stupid, bewildered, incompetent, timid, indecisive, constantly drunk, unfit even to govern a german principality.Yeah, absolutely. And Darnton is brilliant on why this matters because essentially it's also going with the grain of the crisis that France itself is confronting, that this is a time where the state is running out of money and where people are starting to go hungry. There've been a succession of terrible harvests and all this kind of stuff about diamond necklaces and cook holding and cardinals and all kinds of stuff. It does actually matter because it gives color and venom to what otherwise might be kind of the sense of inchoate forces that are going wrong.Yeah.And so I think, important just to emphasize at this point, as we approach the fateful year 1789, that this is not about republicanism. Again, so much of this is coming from within the court. So it's coming from the Duc de Provence, the king's young brother. It's also coming from the Duke of Orleans, the duc d'Orleans, who is, after the three royal brothers, the most significant peer of the realm, who has a whole area of Paris that is his private fiefdom.Yeah, the Palais royal.The Palais royal. And so he's basically said anyone can publish what they like there. And so it's become a hotbed of all these kind of pamphlets and stuff. So it absolutely doesn't imply republicanism, but it's kind of like the science of an immunity system going down. And it matters because basically the whole body politic seems diseased. And, Dominic, I think in the next two episodes, we're going to explore, you know, beyond the flower gardens of Versailles, exactly how these diseases are kind of manifesting themselves in Paris and in the countryside.So we'll be looking at the crisis that France finds itself in in the 1780s, the crisis that leads to the calling of the states general and the beginning of the revolution. So there'll be a bit of finance, there'll be a lot of politics, there'll be a lot of famine, there'll be all this kind of stuff.Tennis courts.There'll be tennis courts. Of course, we get into the tennis court oath and then, of course, to the fall of the Bastille. Very exciting. So. So if you want to listen to that now and you're a member of the rest is history club, you can, of course, if you're not and you would like to join, then just go to the restishory.com and you can sign up and you'll get all the episodes in this series right away. Very excitingly. But Tom, for those people who are not about to continue the journey, all we can say is abieantou au jeu d'et. Au revoir. Au revoir.

there is no evidence for any of this that has happened?

Yeah.

The vicomtesse then hands over a third of the fee that's been promised, and then the Baron d'Oliva is driven back into Paris. From this point on, there is no further reference to her title. So she goes back to being Nicole, and there is no further money. And that seems to be the end of the matter. I mean, all very, very strange.

And this is from Nicole's own account, isn't it.

Well, it's from the account of her lawyer.

Yeah. Everything you're going to hear in this story.

Yeah.

Comes from the accounts given by different lawyers to make money, publish memoirs of what their clients had told them.

But also, Dominic, to be fair, to try and get their clients off, as we will see.

Yes, of course. So this is Nicole's story. So, Tom, a very kind of Mozart friendly episode, this.

It's very, very Mozart friendly.

The queen looking on, presumably a mysterious suitor in the darkness, the rose is handed over. All of this kind of thing.

I mean, it's made for an opera.

Yeah. Turn on the lights for us and tell us, first of all, who is that mysterious man in the cassock that the queen appears to be giving a rose to?

Well,heart.And of course, the thing is always with confidence tricks is that people have to want desperately to believe that what they're being told is the case.Yeah, of course.And it's not just the cardinal who wants to believe it. The jewelers do as well because they want to recoup their, their investment.Yeah.So November 1784. So this is a few months after the meeting in the gardens at Versailles. The cardinal gets a letter that has been signed Marie Antoinette de France, which is a signature she would never use because that's not diplomatic at all. And the cardinal, as a former diplomat should have known this, but he doesn't. a sapphic relationship with Marie Antoinette. She describes midnight assignations with the queen. Heavens, I found her so beautiful. I said to myself, it is the goddess flora toying with a humble little flower. So the idea of Marie Antoinette as predatory, as domineering.Yeah. Has groomed her.Has groomed her, yes, exactly. And Chantal Thomas says of her, she was the justine of the pre revolutionary epic. And Justine is the heroine of the Marquis de Sade's most famous novel. And Justine is impeccably virtuous. And because she is virtuous, she is persecuted by the kind of sardian monsters. The aristocrats. Yeah. And essentially, if she is the Justine, then Marie Antoinette is a kind of sardian monster.Simon Sharma says she represented herself as an orphan of an older France, a heroine from the Styx, an innocent gone astray. That's the same point, isn't it? She's an innocent, rather like Nicole, the person who she is actually corrupted, ironically. But in this case, she has been corrupted personally by Marie Antoinette. And of course, that may seem completely bonkers because we know, as you discussed so brilliantly in the last episode, Tom, that Marie Antoinette is actually quite. She's not puritanical, but she's very bourgeois.I don't think she's bourgeois.Her sexual morality is bourgeois, Tom.She's a combination. I mean, she's catholic and she's rousseauian.Okay.She's a combination of kind of old school catholic morality combined with a kind of girlish giddiness.Fair enough. But what she isn't she is not a predatory.No, she's not lesbian.Sort of groomer of little girls or young women or whatever this woman is.But the problem is that these are portrayals of her that have already gained traction, that she's a monster of extravagance and that she's a kind of predatory whore. And the reason this scandal is so devastating is both that it amplifies those stories and that it makes them kind of very, very public. And so in the wake of it, the portrayal of her as a kind of monstrous nymphomaniac is completely turbocharged. So by 1789, and we all know what happens in 1789, a pamphlet is published which describes her sexual record. Nobility, clergy, third estate. This is the backdrop to the meeting of the three estates which we'll be doing in due course. So it's obviously inspired by it. Any man has a right to her favors. The most handsome and robust are the most welcome. Guards, lackeys, actors, height of opprobrium. Oh, indelible shame.Yeah.So kind of loving it. And it's not just the queen who gets caught up on this, so also does her female favorites. So this is when the stories about the duchesse de Polignac, who we talked about yesterday, one of her squad, they get vituperative as well. That is the polignacs, relatively harmless. So is the princess de Lambelle, but they are both cast as kind of co vampires in Marie Antoinette's nymphomaniac coven.Queens of vice, Tom.Queens of vice. And what's fascinating is that, but in the wake of the punishment of de la Motte, you start to get fantasies in which Marie Antoinette and her favorites suffer similar punishments. So a lampoon is published against the duchesse de Polignac and it kind of says, let's see her humiliated, let's see her punished. Let's see her suffer before the gaze of the people. Yes, madame, you must do penance. And as the choice is up to the confessor, here is the penance I impose in the name of the nation. Shave your head, don a gray Hessian, dress as your only adornment, and go to the august assembly of the estates general in this garb to make atonement. Deliver up any remains of your plundering. So it's kind of working with the punishments of convicted prostitutes.And also the austrianness is really important here, isn't it? Because there are two claims additional to this. One that's very common is that she actually her first victim, as it were, or the first person who perhaps groomed her was her own brother, the austrian emperor, Joseph II.Yeah. So the Mozart thing, he's the too many notes king in Amadeus.Yeah. Yes, he is. Yeah. But then the other thing is, of course, that if she is austrian, she's not french and she must therefore be a traitor.Yeah.And the more that the international temperature kind of rises, especially once the revolution has got going, the more people say, you know, she is not merely sexually kind of depraved, she is politically depraved. And, you know, in the course of her sapphic lusts, she's absorbing secrets and passing on secrets to France's enemies.Exactly. So. And there's a sense that Maria Theresa, her mother, has sent her to infect France with her villainy.Yeah.So you may wonder, well, how on earth does Marie Antoinette cope with all this abuse? And the truth is that she treats it all with kind of amused disdain. So as early as 1775, she wrote to Maria Theresa, her mother, saying, we're in the middle of a satirical song epidemic. They have made some up about everyone at court, men and women alike. French license has even extended to the king. I myself have not been spared, although this country is fond enough of malice, the songs are so flat and in such bad taste that they are successful neither with the public nor high society.So two things there. One, she's only 20 years old when she says that. So I always find the stuff about marriage unbelievably repulsive.It's awful.I mean, I just think how anybody can take the side of the pamphleteers and not of the basically girl stroke young woman at the center of them is beyond me. But the other interesting thing is that she is quite wrong about that. So when she says successful neither with the public nor high society, she is dead wrong. They are enormously successful and people do start to believe it.Yeah. And so Chantal Thomas, in her wonderful book about the pamphlets and Marie Antoinette's relationship to them, I mean, she basically says that one of the reasons perhaps, why they don't impinge on Marie Antoinette is that she simply doesn't understand the power of the written word because she doesn't read. She doesn't really read. And she says Marie Antoinette had nothing to learn from the outside world. The hot headed, vehement words of the pamphlets were incomprehensible to her and so failed to touch her. But, you know, there are expressions of public hostility that do have an impact. So in May 1785, and this is, you know, when the scandal is kind of really building up, she goes into Paris and the people there refuse to cheer her, and two years later, she's being booed and hissed on the streets of Paris.Well, Tom, you say that, but actually, Theo, our producer, would tell you that people aren't booing and hissing. They are shouting out, ooh, ooh. And gee, gee gee. That's their equivalent of hissing.Yeah, that's french for boo. Exactly.Yeah.So, you know, one of the chiefs of police in Paris writes to the king at Versailles and says that the queen shouldn't go into the capital, it's unsafe for her. And so Louis XVI passes this on to his wife and forbids her to go to Paris. And Marie Antoinette is deeply, deeply wounded by this. And so she cancels her public engagements in the capital, and she basically retreats to the petty trianor, which, of course, then only makes the stories. What's she up to in there with all her girlfriends?Exactly. That's the tragedy of it. Right. The irony is, of course, she cannot win. She's in a position now where whatever she does will be seen as evidence of guilt. So, ironically, the fact that she tried to be less formal than the court is seen that, you know, she's the cardinal the prime minister of France and to subject France to the dominance of Austria. And so the king is somehow seen as being complicit in this. And so the king and queen of France, the emblems of the greatness of the country, are being cast as agents of an enemy power.Well, Robert Darnton, in his book the Revolutionary Temper, quotes a bookseller at the height of the diamond necklace affair who wrote in his journal or to his brother, I can't remember which, but he wrote, the public spirit has turned against him because he inspires no respect, no fear, no confidence. And he throws away the public's money.For all sorts of follies.You know, that is the lesson that if you are a slightly gullible reader of these pamphlets, these propagandistic kind of pornographic fantasies. That's what you think about the king, that, as Darnson says, he's well meaning but stupid, bewildered, incompetent, timid, indecisive, constantly drunk, unfit even to govern a german principality.Yeah, absolutely. And Darnton is brilliant on why this matters because essentially it's also going with the grain of the crisis that France itself is confronting, that this is a time where the state is running out of money and where people are starting to go hungry. There've been a succession of terrible harvests and all this kind of stuff about diamond necklaces and cook holding and cardinals and all kinds of stuff. It does actually matter because it gives color and venom to what otherwise might be kind of the sense of inchoate forces that are going wrong.Yeah.And so I think, important just to emphasize at this point, as we approach the fateful year 1789, that this is not about republicanism. Again, so much of this is coming from within the court. So it's coming from the Duc de Provence, the king's young brother. It's also coming from the Duke of Orleans, the duc d'Orleans, who is, after the three royal brothers, the most significant peer of the realm, who has a whole area of Paris that is his private fiefdom.Yeah, the Palais royal.The Palais royal. And so he's basically said anyone can publish what they like there. And so it's become a hotbed of all these kind of pamphlets and stuff. So it absolutely doesn't imply republicanism, but it's kind of like the science of an immunity system going down. And it matters because basically the whole body politic seems diseased. And, Dominic, I think in the next two episodes, we're going to explore, you know, beyond the flower gardens of Versailles, exactly how these diseases are kind of manifesting themselves in Paris and in the countryside.So we'll be looking at the crisis that France finds itself in in the 1780s, the crisis that leads to the calling of the states general and the beginning of the revolution. So there'll be a bit of finance, there'll be a lot of politics, there'll be a lot of famine, there'll be all this kind of stuff.Tennis courts.There'll be tennis courts. Of course, we get into the tennis court oath and then, of course, to the fall of the Bastille. Very exciting. So. So if you want to listen to that now and you're a member of the rest is history club, you can, of course, if you're not and you would like to join, then just go to the restishory.com and you can sign up and you'll get all the episodes in this series right away. Very excitingly. But Tom, for those people who are not about to continue the journey, all we can say is abieantou au jeu d'et. Au revoir. Au revoir.

heart.

And of course, the thing is always with confidence tricks is that people have to want desperately to believe that what they're being told is the case.

Yeah, of course.

And it's not just the cardinal who wants to believe it. The jewelers do as well because they want to recoup their, their investment.

Yeah.

So November 1784. So this is a few months after the meeting in the gardens at Versailles. The cardinal gets a letter that has been signed Marie Antoinette de France, which is a signature she would never use because that's not diplomatic at all. And the cardinal, as a former diplomat should have known this, but he doesn't. a sapphic relationship with Marie Antoinette. She describes midnight assignations with the queen. Heavens, I found her so beautiful. I said to myself, it is the goddess flora toying with a humble little flower. So the idea of Marie Antoinette as predatory, as domineering.Yeah. Has groomed her.Has groomed her, yes, exactly. And Chantal Thomas says of her, she was the justine of the pre revolutionary epic. And Justine is the heroine of the Marquis de Sade's most famous novel. And Justine is impeccably virtuous. And because she is virtuous, she is persecuted by the kind of sardian monsters. The aristocrats. Yeah. And essentially, if she is the Justine, then Marie Antoinette is a kind of sardian monster.Simon Sharma says she represented herself as an orphan of an older France, a heroine from the Styx, an innocent gone astray. That's the same point, isn't it? She's an innocent, rather like Nicole, the person who she is actually corrupted, ironically. But in this case, she has been corrupted personally by Marie Antoinette. And of course, that may seem completely bonkers because we know, as you discussed so brilliantly in the last episode, Tom, that Marie Antoinette is actually quite. She's not puritanical, but she's very bourgeois.I don't think she's bourgeois.Her sexual morality is bourgeois, Tom.She's a combination. I mean, she's catholic and she's rousseauian.Okay.She's a combination of kind of old school catholic morality combined with a kind of girlish giddiness.Fair enough. But what she isn't she is not a predatory.No, she's not lesbian.Sort of groomer of little girls or young women or whatever this woman is.But the problem is that these are portrayals of her that have already gained traction, that she's a monster of extravagance and that she's a kind of predatory whore. And the reason this scandal is so devastating is both that it amplifies those stories and that it makes them kind of very, very public. And so in the wake of it, the portrayal of her as a kind of monstrous nymphomaniac is completely turbocharged. So by 1789, and we all know what happens in 1789, a pamphlet is published which describes her sexual record. Nobility, clergy, third estate. This is the backdrop to the meeting of the three estates which we'll be doing in due course. So it's obviously inspired by it. Any man has a right to her favors. The most handsome and robust are the most welcome. Guards, lackeys, actors, height of opprobrium. Oh, indelible shame.Yeah.So kind of loving it. And it's not just the queen who gets caught up on this, so also does her female favorites. So this is when the stories about the duchesse de Polignac, who we talked about yesterday, one of her squad, they get vituperative as well. That is the polignacs, relatively harmless. So is the princess de Lambelle, but they are both cast as kind of co vampires in Marie Antoinette's nymphomaniac coven.Queens of vice, Tom.Queens of vice. And what's fascinating is that, but in the wake of the punishment of de la Motte, you start to get fantasies in which Marie Antoinette and her favorites suffer similar punishments. So a lampoon is published against the duchesse de Polignac and it kind of says, let's see her humiliated, let's see her punished. Let's see her suffer before the gaze of the people. Yes, madame, you must do penance. And as the choice is up to the confessor, here is the penance I impose in the name of the nation. Shave your head, don a gray Hessian, dress as your only adornment, and go to the august assembly of the estates general in this garb to make atonement. Deliver up any remains of your plundering. So it's kind of working with the punishments of convicted prostitutes.And also the austrianness is really important here, isn't it? Because there are two claims additional to this. One that's very common is that she actually her first victim, as it were, or the first person who perhaps groomed her was her own brother, the austrian emperor, Joseph II.Yeah. So the Mozart thing, he's the too many notes king in Amadeus.Yeah. Yes, he is. Yeah. But then the other thing is, of course, that if she is austrian, she's not french and she must therefore be a traitor.Yeah.And the more that the international temperature kind of rises, especially once the revolution has got going, the more people say, you know, she is not merely sexually kind of depraved, she is politically depraved. And, you know, in the course of her sapphic lusts, she's absorbing secrets and passing on secrets to France's enemies.Exactly. So. And there's a sense that Maria Theresa, her mother, has sent her to infect France with her villainy.Yeah.So you may wonder, well, how on earth does Marie Antoinette cope with all this abuse? And the truth is that she treats it all with kind of amused disdain. So as early as 1775, she wrote to Maria Theresa, her mother, saying, we're in the middle of a satirical song epidemic. They have made some up about everyone at court, men and women alike. French license has even extended to the king. I myself have not been spared, although this country is fond enough of malice, the songs are so flat and in such bad taste that they are successful neither with the public nor high society.So two things there. One, she's only 20 years old when she says that. So I always find the stuff about marriage unbelievably repulsive.It's awful.I mean, I just think how anybody can take the side of the pamphleteers and not of the basically girl stroke young woman at the center of them is beyond me. But the other interesting thing is that she is quite wrong about that. So when she says successful neither with the public nor high society, she is dead wrong. They are enormously successful and people do start to believe it.Yeah. And so Chantal Thomas, in her wonderful book about the pamphlets and Marie Antoinette's relationship to them, I mean, she basically says that one of the reasons perhaps, why they don't impinge on Marie Antoinette is that she simply doesn't understand the power of the written word because she doesn't read. She doesn't really read. And she says Marie Antoinette had nothing to learn from the outside world. The hot headed, vehement words of the pamphlets were incomprehensible to her and so failed to touch her. But, you know, there are expressions of public hostility that do have an impact. So in May 1785, and this is, you know, when the scandal is kind of really building up, she goes into Paris and the people there refuse to cheer her, and two years later, she's being booed and hissed on the streets of Paris.Well, Tom, you say that, but actually, Theo, our producer, would tell you that people aren't booing and hissing. They are shouting out, ooh, ooh. And gee, gee gee. That's their equivalent of hissing.Yeah, that's french for boo. Exactly.Yeah.So, you know, one of the chiefs of police in Paris writes to the king at Versailles and says that the queen shouldn't go into the capital, it's unsafe for her. And so Louis XVI passes this on to his wife and forbids her to go to Paris. And Marie Antoinette is deeply, deeply wounded by this. And so she cancels her public engagements in the capital, and she basically retreats to the petty trianor, which, of course, then only makes the stories. What's she up to in there with all her girlfriends?Exactly. That's the tragedy of it. Right. The irony is, of course, she cannot win. She's in a position now where whatever she does will be seen as evidence of guilt. So, ironically, the fact that she tried to be less formal than the court is seen that, you know, she's the cardinal the prime minister of France and to subject France to the dominance of Austria. And so the king is somehow seen as being complicit in this. And so the king and queen of France, the emblems of the greatness of the country, are being cast as agents of an enemy power.Well, Robert Darnton, in his book the Revolutionary Temper, quotes a bookseller at the height of the diamond necklace affair who wrote in his journal or to his brother, I can't remember which, but he wrote, the public spirit has turned against him because he inspires no respect, no fear, no confidence. And he throws away the public's money.For all sorts of follies.You know, that is the lesson that if you are a slightly gullible reader of these pamphlets, these propagandistic kind of pornographic fantasies. That's what you think about the king, that, as Darnson says, he's well meaning but stupid, bewildered, incompetent, timid, indecisive, constantly drunk, unfit even to govern a german principality.Yeah, absolutely. And Darnton is brilliant on why this matters because essentially it's also going with the grain of the crisis that France itself is confronting, that this is a time where the state is running out of money and where people are starting to go hungry. There've been a succession of terrible harvests and all this kind of stuff about diamond necklaces and cook holding and cardinals and all kinds of stuff. It does actually matter because it gives color and venom to what otherwise might be kind of the sense of inchoate forces that are going wrong.Yeah.And so I think, important just to emphasize at this point, as we approach the fateful year 1789, that this is not about republicanism. Again, so much of this is coming from within the court. So it's coming from the Duc de Provence, the king's young brother. It's also coming from the Duke of Orleans, the duc d'Orleans, who is, after the three royal brothers, the most significant peer of the realm, who has a whole area of Paris that is his private fiefdom.Yeah, the Palais royal.The Palais royal. And so he's basically said anyone can publish what they like there. And so it's become a hotbed of all these kind of pamphlets and stuff. So it absolutely doesn't imply republicanism, but it's kind of like the science of an immunity system going down. And it matters because basically the whole body politic seems diseased. And, Dominic, I think in the next two episodes, we're going to explore, you know, beyond the flower gardens of Versailles, exactly how these diseases are kind of manifesting themselves in Paris and in the countryside.So we'll be looking at the crisis that France finds itself in in the 1780s, the crisis that leads to the calling of the states general and the beginning of the revolution. So there'll be a bit of finance, there'll be a lot of politics, there'll be a lot of famine, there'll be all this kind of stuff.Tennis courts.There'll be tennis courts. Of course, we get into the tennis court oath and then, of course, to the fall of the Bastille. Very exciting. So. So if you want to listen to that now and you're a member of the rest is history club, you can, of course, if you're not and you would like to join, then just go to the restishory.com and you can sign up and you'll get all the episodes in this series right away. Very excitingly. But Tom, for those people who are not about to continue the journey, all we can say is abieantou au jeu d'et. Au revoir. Au revoir.

a sapphic relationship with Marie Antoinette. She describes midnight assignations with the queen. Heavens, I found her so beautiful. I said to myself, it is the goddess flora toying with a humble little flower. So the idea of Marie Antoinette as predatory, as domineering.

Yeah. Has groomed her.

Has groomed her, yes, exactly. And Chantal Thomas says of her, she was the justine of the pre revolutionary epic. And Justine is the heroine of the Marquis de Sade's most famous novel. And Justine is impeccably virtuous. And because she is virtuous, she is persecuted by the kind of sardian monsters. The aristocrats. Yeah. And essentially, if she is the Justine, then Marie Antoinette is a kind of sardian monster.

Simon Sharma says she represented herself as an orphan of an older France, a heroine from the Styx, an innocent gone astray. That's the same point, isn't it? She's an innocent, rather like Nicole, the person who she is actually corrupted, ironically. But in this case, she has been corrupted personally by Marie Antoinette. And of course, that may seem completely bonkers because we know, as you discussed so brilliantly in the last episode, Tom, that Marie Antoinette is actually quite. She's not puritanical, but she's very bourgeois.

I don't think she's bourgeois.

Her sexual morality is bourgeois, Tom.

She's a combination. I mean, she's catholic and she's rousseauian.

Okay.

She's a combination of kind of old school catholic morality combined with a kind of girlish giddiness.

Fair enough. But what she isn't she is not a predatory.

No, she's not lesbian.

Sort of groomer of little girls or young women or whatever this woman is.

But the problem is that these are portrayals of her that have already gained traction, that she's a monster of extravagance and that she's a kind of predatory whore. And the reason this scandal is so devastating is both that it amplifies those stories and that it makes them kind of very, very public. And so in the wake of it, the portrayal of her as a kind of monstrous nymphomaniac is completely turbocharged. So by 1789, and we all know what happens in 1789, a pamphlet is published which describes her sexual record. Nobility, clergy, third estate. This is the backdrop to the meeting of the three estates which we'll be doing in due course. So it's obviously inspired by it. Any man has a right to her favors. The most handsome and robust are the most welcome. Guards, lackeys, actors, height of opprobrium. Oh, indelible shame.

Yeah.

So kind of loving it. And it's not just the queen who gets caught up on this, so also does her female favorites. So this is when the stories about the duchesse de Polignac, who we talked about yesterday, one of her squad, they get vituperative as well. That is the polignacs, relatively harmless. So is the princess de Lambelle, but they are both cast as kind of co vampires in Marie Antoinette's nymphomaniac coven.

Queens of vice, Tom.

Queens of vice. And what's fascinating is that, but in the wake of the punishment of de la Motte, you start to get fantasies in which Marie Antoinette and her favorites suffer similar punishments. So a lampoon is published against the duchesse de Polignac and it kind of says, let's see her humiliated, let's see her punished. Let's see her suffer before the gaze of the people. Yes, madame, you must do penance. And as the choice is up to the confessor, here is the penance I impose in the name of the nation. Shave your head, don a gray Hessian, dress as your only adornment, and go to the august assembly of the estates general in this garb to make atonement. Deliver up any remains of your plundering. So it's kind of working with the punishments of convicted prostitutes.

And also the austrianness is really important here, isn't it? Because there are two claims additional to this. One that's very common is that she actually her first victim, as it were, or the first person who perhaps groomed her was her own brother, the austrian emperor, Joseph II.

Yeah. So the Mozart thing, he's the too many notes king in Amadeus.

Yeah. Yes, he is. Yeah. But then the other thing is, of course, that if she is austrian, she's not french and she must therefore be a traitor.

Yeah.

And the more that the international temperature kind of rises, especially once the revolution has got going, the more people say, you know, she is not merely sexually kind of depraved, she is politically depraved. And, you know, in the course of her sapphic lusts, she's absorbing secrets and passing on secrets to France's enemies.

Exactly. So. And there's a sense that Maria Theresa, her mother, has sent her to infect France with her villainy.

Yeah.

So you may wonder, well, how on earth does Marie Antoinette cope with all this abuse? And the truth is that she treats it all with kind of amused disdain. So as early as 1775, she wrote to Maria Theresa, her mother, saying, we're in the middle of a satirical song epidemic. They have made some up about everyone at court, men and women alike. French license has even extended to the king. I myself have not been spared, although this country is fond enough of malice, the songs are so flat and in such bad taste that they are successful neither with the public nor high society.

So two things there. One, she's only 20 years old when she says that. So I always find the stuff about marriage unbelievably repulsive.

It's awful.

I mean, I just think how anybody can take the side of the pamphleteers and not of the basically girl stroke young woman at the center of them is beyond me. But the other interesting thing is that she is quite wrong about that. So when she says successful neither with the public nor high society, she is dead wrong. They are enormously successful and people do start to believe it.

Yeah. And so Chantal Thomas, in her wonderful book about the pamphlets and Marie Antoinette's relationship to them, I mean, she basically says that one of the reasons perhaps, why they don't impinge on Marie Antoinette is that she simply doesn't understand the power of the written word because she doesn't read. She doesn't really read. And she says Marie Antoinette had nothing to learn from the outside world. The hot headed, vehement words of the pamphlets were incomprehensible to her and so failed to touch her. But, you know, there are expressions of public hostility that do have an impact. So in May 1785, and this is, you know, when the scandal is kind of really building up, she goes into Paris and the people there refuse to cheer her, and two years later, she's being booed and hissed on the streets of Paris.

Well, Tom, you say that, but actually, Theo, our producer, would tell you that people aren't booing and hissing. They are shouting out, ooh, ooh. And gee, gee gee. That's their equivalent of hissing.

Yeah, that's french for boo. Exactly.

Yeah.

So, you know, one of the chiefs of police in Paris writes to the king at Versailles and says that the queen shouldn't go into the capital, it's unsafe for her. And so Louis XVI passes this on to his wife and forbids her to go to Paris. And Marie Antoinette is deeply, deeply wounded by this. And so she cancels her public engagements in the capital, and she basically retreats to the petty trianor, which, of course, then only makes the stories. What's she up to in there with all her girlfriends?

Exactly. That's the tragedy of it. Right. The irony is, of course, she cannot win. She's in a position now where whatever she does will be seen as evidence of guilt. So, ironically, the fact that she tried to be less formal than the court is seen that, you know, she's the cardinal the prime minister of France and to subject France to the dominance of Austria. And so the king is somehow seen as being complicit in this. And so the king and queen of France, the emblems of the greatness of the country, are being cast as agents of an enemy power.Well, Robert Darnton, in his book the Revolutionary Temper, quotes a bookseller at the height of the diamond necklace affair who wrote in his journal or to his brother, I can't remember which, but he wrote, the public spirit has turned against him because he inspires no respect, no fear, no confidence. And he throws away the public's money.For all sorts of follies.You know, that is the lesson that if you are a slightly gullible reader of these pamphlets, these propagandistic kind of pornographic fantasies. That's what you think about the king, that, as Darnson says, he's well meaning but stupid, bewildered, incompetent, timid, indecisive, constantly drunk, unfit even to govern a german principality.Yeah, absolutely. And Darnton is brilliant on why this matters because essentially it's also going with the grain of the crisis that France itself is confronting, that this is a time where the state is running out of money and where people are starting to go hungry. There've been a succession of terrible harvests and all this kind of stuff about diamond necklaces and cook holding and cardinals and all kinds of stuff. It does actually matter because it gives color and venom to what otherwise might be kind of the sense of inchoate forces that are going wrong.Yeah.And so I think, important just to emphasize at this point, as we approach the fateful year 1789, that this is not about republicanism. Again, so much of this is coming from within the court. So it's coming from the Duc de Provence, the king's young brother. It's also coming from the Duke of Orleans, the duc d'Orleans, who is, after the three royal brothers, the most significant peer of the realm, who has a whole area of Paris that is his private fiefdom.Yeah, the Palais royal.The Palais royal. And so he's basically said anyone can publish what they like there. And so it's become a hotbed of all these kind of pamphlets and stuff. So it absolutely doesn't imply republicanism, but it's kind of like the science of an immunity system going down. And it matters because basically the whole body politic seems diseased. And, Dominic, I think in the next two episodes, we're going to explore, you know, beyond the flower gardens of Versailles, exactly how these diseases are kind of manifesting themselves in Paris and in the countryside.So we'll be looking at the crisis that France finds itself in in the 1780s, the crisis that leads to the calling of the states general and the beginning of the revolution. So there'll be a bit of finance, there'll be a lot of politics, there'll be a lot of famine, there'll be all this kind of stuff.Tennis courts.There'll be tennis courts. Of course, we get into the tennis court oath and then, of course, to the fall of the Bastille. Very exciting. So. So if you want to listen to that now and you're a member of the rest is history club, you can, of course, if you're not and you would like to join, then just go to the restishory.com and you can sign up and you'll get all the episodes in this series right away. Very excitingly. But Tom, for those people who are not about to continue the journey, all we can say is abieantou au jeu d'et. Au revoir. Au revoir.

the cardinal the prime minister of France and to subject France to the dominance of Austria. And so the king is somehow seen as being complicit in this. And so the king and queen of France, the emblems of the greatness of the country, are being cast as agents of an enemy power.

Well, Robert Darnton, in his book the Revolutionary Temper, quotes a bookseller at the height of the diamond necklace affair who wrote in his journal or to his brother, I can't remember which, but he wrote, the public spirit has turned against him because he inspires no respect, no fear, no confidence. And he throws away the public's money.

For all sorts of follies.

You know, that is the lesson that if you are a slightly gullible reader of these pamphlets, these propagandistic kind of pornographic fantasies. That's what you think about the king, that, as Darnson says, he's well meaning but stupid, bewildered, incompetent, timid, indecisive, constantly drunk, unfit even to govern a german principality.

Yeah, absolutely. And Darnton is brilliant on why this matters because essentially it's also going with the grain of the crisis that France itself is confronting, that this is a time where the state is running out of money and where people are starting to go hungry. There've been a succession of terrible harvests and all this kind of stuff about diamond necklaces and cook holding and cardinals and all kinds of stuff. It does actually matter because it gives color and venom to what otherwise might be kind of the sense of inchoate forces that are going wrong.

Yeah.

And so I think, important just to emphasize at this point, as we approach the fateful year 1789, that this is not about republicanism. Again, so much of this is coming from within the court. So it's coming from the Duc de Provence, the king's young brother. It's also coming from the Duke of Orleans, the duc d'Orleans, who is, after the three royal brothers, the most significant peer of the realm, who has a whole area of Paris that is his private fiefdom.

Yeah, the Palais royal.

The Palais royal. And so he's basically said anyone can publish what they like there. And so it's become a hotbed of all these kind of pamphlets and stuff. So it absolutely doesn't imply republicanism, but it's kind of like the science of an immunity system going down. And it matters because basically the whole body politic seems diseased. And, Dominic, I think in the next two episodes, we're going to explore, you know, beyond the flower gardens of Versailles, exactly how these diseases are kind of manifesting themselves in Paris and in the countryside.

So we'll be looking at the crisis that France finds itself in in the 1780s, the crisis that leads to the calling of the states general and the beginning of the revolution. So there'll be a bit of finance, there'll be a lot of politics, there'll be a lot of famine, there'll be all this kind of stuff.

Tennis courts.

There'll be tennis courts. Of course, we get into the tennis court oath and then, of course, to the fall of the Bastille. Very exciting. So. So if you want to listen to that now and you're a member of the rest is history club, you can, of course, if you're not and you would like to join, then just go to the restishory.com and you can sign up and you'll get all the episodes in this series right away. Very excitingly. But Tom, for those people who are not about to continue the journey, all we can say is abieantou au jeu d'et. Au revoir. Au revoir.