'Marie Antoinette' Recap: Season 2 Episode 5

Marie Antoinette airs Sundays at 9:00 pm on WTTW and is available to stream by WTTW Passport members. Recap the previous and following episode and previous season.
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Boehmer has sold his opulent diamond necklace but failed to receive payment, and so has approached the king and queen to blame the man who organized the sale: Cardinal Rohan. Louis has him arrested – in public, during a mass, no less.

The cardinal says he bought the necklace on behalf of Marie Antoinette and mentions their correspondence, but Antoinette denies it all. Louis sends Rohan to the Bastille prison and orders an investigation.

Just before guards search Rohan’s rooms, Jeanne finds the letters she wrote him as the queen and burns them.

The prosecutor Fleury leads the investigation and quickly determines that the cardinal must have stolen the necklace. Fleury and Louis’ adviser Vergennes urge a discreet punishment – the Rohans are one of the wealthiest, most powerful families in the country. But Antoinette wants a public trial, so that her name is cleared in the matter. She notes Vergennes’ connection to the Rohans.

Indeed, Vergennes visits the cardinal in jail, and the cardinal insists that he bought the necklace for the queen.

Louis is inclined to support his wife, but he also wants to enact a tax on landholders in order to raise revenue, per his financial controller Calonne’s suggestion, and knows such a move would anger some of the same nobility who would serve as the jury in a trial of the cardinal.

This willingness to antagonize the nobility plays into the plan of Louis’ brother Provence and Provence’s wife Josephine to paint Louis as unstable and in need of removal – leading Provence to become king. Provence searches Louis’ papers and finds the proposal for the land tax, and sends word of it to the disaffected Marquis de Malherbe.

The investigation into the theft of the necklace also turns up Jeanne, her fake charity, and her invocation of the queen’s friendship on behalf of the charity. An embarrassed Lamballe, who found rooms for Jeanne at Versailles, apologizes to Antoinette for being taken in by Jeanne. She commiserates with the queen’s aunt Victoire, Jeanne’s earliest supporter, who herself became pregnant by a married man when she was only 14 – she could have been one of the “poor fallen women” for whom Jeanne was claiming to raise money.

Antoinette herself is once again pregnant – illegitimately. The child must be her lover Fersen’s, and he wants to play a part in the child’s life – something she says is impossible – but she can’t go through with another pregnancy. Yolande gives her an abortifacient tea and tells her to go for a hard ride, but that fails.

When the Rohans hear of the cardinal’s imprisonment, they march into Versailles. The Madame de Rohan demands that her great-nephew be released – or else. Antoinette stands up to her, saying that any damage to the Rohan name is the cardinal’s fault, not Louis’. Louis finds his defiance and tells the Rohans that he’s putting the cardinal on trial.

Antoinette finds a witness to testify against the cardinal when Jeanne is arrested. Jeanne manages to burn letters first and nearly escapes the guards through a window and then on a stolen horse, but immediately blames the cardinal for both the disappearance of the necklace and for creating a fake charity once she is captured. Antoinette, watching the interrogation from the shadows, agrees with Jeanne’s disparagement of the cardinal, and convinces her to testify. The queen is not sure if Jeanne is telling the truth, but Fleury says she’s credible enough for a jury.

Lamballe also doesn’t trust Jeanne, and warns Antoinette not to rely on her in the trial because she is so cunning. Antoinette has defended Lamballe to Yolande, saying Lamballe is simply lonely because Yolande has isolated her, but she now tells the princess that she doesn’t want her at the trial if she won’t support her.

Jeanne also implicates Cagliostro, for whom the cardinal is a patron, so Antoinette is surprised to see him leaving the royal apartments. Louis’ heir, the dauphin, has no hope of recovery from a spinal condition, so Louis has authorized his governess Yolande to try anything, and she brought in Cagliostro. Yolande wants to tell Antoinette about the direness of the dauphin’s condition, but Louis wants to wait and grant her some more time living without dread of her son’s death. Nevertheless, Antoinette suspects something, as she has told Lamballe.

After he tries to treat the dauphin, Cagliostro is arrested at the Palais Royal, the home of Louis’ bitter cousin Orléans (formerly Chartres). Orléans’ revolutionary mistress Félicité stops Orléans from preventing the arrest – it and the arrest of the cardinal can help them drive anger and resistance to Louis. She is already distributing brochures about the “tyrant king.”

She has tried to enlist the help of Cagliostro and the network of Freemasons to which he belongs, but he has refused. Now that he is behind bars, however, he gives her his Freemason ring and tells her about a guard named “Armand” (actually Jeanne’s cast-aside partner Villette) who conveyed the “queen’s” correspondence to the cardinal and took the necklace.

Meanwhile, Orléans forges an alliance with the Rohans, offering the use of the exceptional lawyer Target. The lawyer tells the cardinal that Jeanne’s charity was fake and that both Jeanne and Cagliostro have been arrested. The cardinal realizes that Cagliostro was right: his letters from the queen were forged, and must have actually been written by Jeanne.

Malherbe wants to meet Provence to learn about the land tax, so Josephine contrives a plan to cast more doubt on Louis. Provence strolls with Malherbe on a night when Provence has told the astronomy-loving Louis about a lunar eclipse. The two men thus see Louis staring up at the sky in a nightgown, leading Malherbe to wonder about his fitness to rule. If he were removed, Antoinette would serve as regent for the dauphin, but her own reputation might not survive the trial of the cardinal – and then Provence would become king. Malherbe and some friends are already considering voting against Louis in the trial because of the land tax, despite their conservative leaning.

But new evidence might come to light, thanks to Félicité and the Freemasons. They have found Armand, aka Villette, and beaten him. They nail him into a box.