'Marie Antoinette' Recap: Season 2 Episode 4

Marie Antoinette airs Sundays at 9:00 pm on WTTW and is available to stream by WTTW Passport members. Recap the previous and following episodes and season.
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Cardinal Rohan finally meets the queen at night outside Versailles, but she is quickly spirited away when someone is spotted approaching. Rohan tells her he will arrange the sale of the diamond necklace for her. He is warned not to tell anyone who the true buyer is, and that the queen will not acknowledge the purchase in public, lest the public know about her exorbitant spending. Nevertheless, Rohan lets slip to the jeweler Boehmer that he is working on behalf of the queen.

Except it’s not the queen, but just some woman Jeanne hired to play her. Jeanne will finally get her necklace.

Another version of Marie Antoinette is revealed at the same time in Paris: Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s portrait of the queen. Her simple, “indecent” dress inspires derision. Louis immediately orders it taken out of display.

Antoinette is lambasted by the government’s household committee, who demand that a replacement portrait be painted. Antoinette bristles, but Louis also scolds her. She’s spoiling the reputation of the crown, and Louis’ cousin Orléans (formerly Chartres) is speeding the process via his printing of cartoons attacking her at his Palais Royal.

So Antoinette clandestinely visits the Palais with Yolande and is distressed by the cartoons and a bawdy satirical performance about her. Orléans spots her before she flees.

Antoinette laments that Louis was right. Yolande tells her that she sometimes speaks to Louis in the nursery for their children; she can try to help him see Antoinette’s point of view. But Antoinette has decided to conform and remake herself as a “proper” queen. Louis is going to Cherbourg to see the progress of a new port, and Antoinette promises that her image will be reformed by the time he returns.

Louis is going to observe the fruits of the investments his new financial controller Calonne is making, and to take the temperature of the country. Parliament has reluctantly approved a loan for the government, but they are beginning to suspect that something is off in its public accounting of its funds. (France is secretly in debt.) Seeing the progress of the port, Louis finally agrees to Calonne’s suggestion to raise taxes on the nobility and clergy.

Louis realizes that everyday people seem to like him, and Yolande points out that any discontent is usually redirected on to a mistress or the queen – it’s why Antoinette is unpopular. At Cherbourg, after Louis wades into the sea for the first time in delight, Yolande offers to be his mistress and therefore scapegoat, in exchange for protection and greater influence. Louis refuses, despite some desire; that’s not the kind of man he is. He will protect Yolande regardless, but simply has to be a good enough king that there’s no discontent to accrue to Antoinette.

He returns to find a changed Antoinette. She has dismissed her lover Fersen, so that he has finally acquiesced to his father and begun to consider wives. She gets a modest haircut and wears a conservative dress for her new portrait – but still receives scorn from the court, which makes her realize that she’ll be wrong in their eyes no matter what she changes.

Her erstwhile friend Lamballe tells her a version of this when she finds her sitting sadly alone on the floor in the dark. You can only please yourself, she says. So Antoinette wears her more conservative look for her new portrait, still painted by Le Brun, but has her children sit playfully for the portrait with her. She is the “mother of France.” The household committee loves it.

So does Louis. Antoinette begins to tell him about Fersen, but he stops her. I know you love someone else, he says. We must seize happiness wherever we find it, he continues, giving his tacit consent to her continuation of the affair. Antoinette seizes it.

Louis has unwittingly prevented another affair. His brother Provence and one of his aunts have come to him with evidence alleging the presence of a spy for Orléans at court: Marguerite, the educated new lover of Provence’s wife Josephine. Provence is jealous and lonely, and his aunt points out that he needs Josephine to produce heirs for him. So Louis banishes Marguerite from court, to Josephine’s fury. He also refuses to tell Josephine where the evidence came from, so she turns to Provence to take revenge. They can spread rumors of Louis’ erratic behavior, thus priming him to be pushed aside in favor of Provence as king – and then Provence can bring Marguerite back to court.

Another relationship due to be broken is that between Jeanne and her partner in crime Villette. Her husband, Nicolas La Motte, has been summoned to Paris by her to aid in the sale of the diamond necklace. He tells her that Villette is a liability, and she should do to him what she did to La Motte himself.

So after Villette, posing as a “special guard” of the queen, retrieves the necklace from Rohan and the court jeweler Boehmer despite Boehmer’s fear of handing over the necklace to a single man, La Motte attacks Villette in the street and takes the necklace. When Villette runs to the rooms he and Jeanne rent, he finds her wearing the necklace and La Motte there. He tells Jeanne La Motte attacked him and she kicks her husband out – but he stabs her. She gasps, “Run!” to Villette while bleeding on the floor. Villette flees.

But it was all staged. Preparing to leave with the necklace, La Motte burns papers for Jeanne – and notices writing appear on them in the flame. He learns that Jeanne got them from the queen’s rooms – they’re her unsent love letters to Fersen – and keeps a few for himself without telling Jeanne.

He then breaks up the necklace, taking part of it to sell. But Jeanne doesn’t want to flee France for London with La Motte. She wants to continue playing a noble, trusting that Rohan will simply pay for the necklace himself when he realizes he has been scammed, in order to prevent the queen from finding out or others learning of his stupidity.

When Rohan hides in a confessional at court from Boehmer, who’s demanding his payment, Jeanne follows him. Rohan admits his situation, and Jeanne encourages him to pay Boehmer: it’s the only solution. But Rohan is destitute: he has spent all his family’s money. So he will hire a spy to find the queen’s guard who took the necklace and, Rohan thinks, stole it for himself. And the man – Villette – will hang when he is found.

But Jeanne has already secured a place for herself at Versailles. After giving her new friend Lamballe a necklace, Lamballe has offered to find her lodging at Versailles.

Rohan tells the charlatan Cagliostro about his situation, and Cagliostro informs him that the letters he received from the queen are forged. Meanwhile, Boehmer, failing to get his money from Rohan, approaches the queen.