#jonathan beckman

[readordiebyemilyt]

I’m quarantining until Monday, and I’m glad to have audiobooks.

[johnmurraybeagle]

Jonathan Beckman on Marie Antoinette, handwriting and the Paris archives

It’s obviously a pleasure to see my book in its finished form – the safe delivery after a prolonged pregnancy. It’s also an oddly alienating one. Laid out on the page, the words suddenly seem, well, not mine any more. Not at all in a bad way – printed in Bembo, well-leaded, well-kerned, with generous margins, they look suave, muscular, authoritative, dare I say? This was not how I felt while writing them. I work in Scrivener, a brilliant program for organising notes and drafts. Suffering from an innate conservatism that on a bad day might be taken for congenital laziness, I did not change its default typeface from Optima. It’s a bleak sans-serif, inoffensive, perhaps, but lacking in any personality (I was not surprised to discover that it had enjoyed a seven-year spell as the chosen font for Marks and Spencer’s internal correspondence). As I wrote, it seemed to thwart my sentences as they strove for elegance. However much I polished them, Optima turned them dowdy. Halfway through – and a software update later – the default typeface had switched to Cochin. Now I was presented with the opposite problem. Cochin was so imposing, so elegant that had I typed up the football scores they would have sung like poetry. Cochin’s italic ampersand is such a thing of fluid beauty that I had to restrain myself from gratuitously inserting irrelevant book titles or names of ships. Every word looked gorgeous in Cochin, but were they any good?

We do judge books by covers and we judge words by their physical appearances – their cursiveness, their ligatures, their line. Through the writing of How to Ruin a Queen my emotional temperature has been tied to the look of words. It has fallen and risen as they’ve obstructed my understanding or revivified a dormant world. This seems particularly appropriate for the Diamond Necklace Affair, a story that hinges upon a series of forged letters: the cardinal de Rohan, previously Marie Antoinette’s sworn enemy, believed he had received letters from the queen assuring him of forgiveness and promising him high political office. At the very heart of the Affair sits a bill of sale for an immensely expensive diamond necklace signed, everyone presumed, by the queen herself.

I went to Paris in the spring of 2010 ready to immerse myself in the documents related to the Affair. Eagerly, I opened up the box filled with the witness statements and cross-examinations about the necklace’s disappearance, and I nearly cried. The page was aswarm with indistinguishable letters in densely packed lines which wriggled out of my understanding like a haul of sprats. Was that an a? It might equally be an e or an o or an n. Ds looked like ps; fs looked like ss; anything with a descender below the line required a stab in the dark. And there were dozens of pages, hundreds of thousands of words, to pick through in order to hear the truth behind the cacophony of claims and counterclaims.

More experienced friends reassured me that I would get my eye in. It happened little by little but, before long, I began to recognize that what had previously appeared to be twelve loops followed by a t:

  were, in fact, the words Ce moment. As I sank deeper into my research, I learned something of the man whose handwriting I was struggling over. His name was Frémin and, according to Rohan’s fixer, Abbé Georgel, he passed transcripts of interrogations to Rohan’s legal team that they had no right to see. In the memoirs of Rohan’s adversary, Jeanne, comtesse de La Motte-Valois, I read that Frémin had been deliberately obstructive, emending her words as he took them down. Ludicrous paranoid fantasies render Jeanne’s work largely unreliable, but she was not wrong in suspecting Frémin of working against her.

Towards the end of the trial, Frémin and his heavy-inked words, like knotted curls of hair, disappeared, to be replaced with a much more refined script composed of flicks and touches, as though the writer wished his pen to spend the least amount of time possible touching the page. Had Frémin, I wondered, finally been caught leaking papers and dismissed? Or was there some more prosaic reason for the change of clerk? One fragment I read suggested that Frémin had been replaced by Monsieur Mouton, his brother-in-law, as Frémin was too chatty and worked at half the pace of other clerks. Yet, if this was the reason, it’s strange they waited until the last few days of hearings to dump him.  By the end of my research, I was managing to wring sense from the scrappiest and scratchiest of hands (these were normally government ministers, who had secretaries to call on when they needed to write neatly). I even had a go at deciphering the letters in invisible ink – the words now faded to rusty smudges – that Rohan had smuggled out of his cell.

Archival work can be arduous and mind-numbing and infuriating, but there are moments that bring you up short. On my first morning in the National Archives, I ordered up the wrong box of documents. I knew this as soon as I opened it – it was, as I recall, about some agricultural matters – but I took out the first sheaf of papers and leafed through them anyway. At the bottom of the final page were a number of signatures. One of them, unmistakably, was Robespierre’s. The document must have been signed off by the Committee of Public Safety, one of thousands dealt with in those months of furious energy as the Revolution came to a head. Now, as I stared down the gelid executioner of so many innocent Frenchman, I felt that our encounter on the page was far more intimate than any stage-managed one that might be had with a living politician or celebrity. It’s at moments like these that you feel, almost physically, history creeping up behind you and tapping you on the shoulder.

How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette, the Stolen Diamonds and the Scandal that Shook the French Throne by Jonathan Beckman is published in paperback on 23rd April 2015.