The diamond necklace was commissioned by Louis XV for his mistress, Madame du Barry, from the crown jewellers, Boehmer and Bassenge. With the death of the King, the necklace was not paid for, almost bankrupting the jewellers and leading to various unsuccessful schemes to secure a sale to Queen Marie-Antoinette.
The Affair of the Diamond Necklace was a mysterious incident in the 1780s at the court of Louis XVI of France involving his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette. The reputation of the Queen, which was already tarnished by gossip, was ruined by the implication that she had participated in a crime to defraud the crown jewellers of the cost of a very expensive diamond necklace. The Affair was historically significant as one of the events that led to the French populace's disillusionment with the monarchy, which, among other causes, eventually culminated in the French Revolution.
Background
In 1772, Louis XV decided to make Madame du Barry, with whom he was infatuated, a special gift at the estimated cost of 2,000,000 livres. He requested the Parisian jewelers, Boehmer and Bassenge, to create a unique diamond necklace which would surpass in grandeur any other necklace up to that moment. It would take the jewelers several years and a lot of money to collect such a unique set of diamonds. In the meantime, Louis XV had died of smallpox, and du Barry was banished from court.
The necklace consisted of many large diamonds arranged in an elaborate design of festoons, pendants and tassels. The jewellers hoped it could be a gift to the new Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, and indeed in 1778 the new king, Louis XVI, offered it to his wife as a present. By one account, the Queen refused it with the statement that the money would be better spent equipping a man-of-war. Some said that Marie Antoinette refused the necklace because she did not want to wear any jewel which had been designed for another woman, especially if that woman was a courtesan disliked by the Queen. According to others, Louis XVI himself changed his mind.
After having vainly tried to place the necklace outside of France, the jewellers again attempted to sell it to Marie Antoinette after the birth of the dauphin Louis-Joseph in 1781. The Queen again refused.
The Affair
Jeanne de Saint-Remy de Valois
A con artist who called herself Jeanne de Saint-Rémy de Valois conceived a plan to use the necklace to gain wealth and possibly power and royal patronage. A descendant of an illegitimate son of Henry II of France, Jeanne de Valois had married an officer of the gendarmes, the soi-disant comte de la Motte, and was living on a small pension which the King had granted her.
In March 1784 she became the mistress of the Cardinal de Rohan, a former French ambassador to the court of Vienna.[1] The Cardinal was regarded with displeasure by Queen Marie Antoinette for having spread rumors about the Queen's behavior to her formidable mother, the Austrian empress Maria Theresa. The Queen had also learned of a letter in which the Cardinal spoke of Maria Theresa in a way that Marie Antoinette found offensive.
At the time, the Cardinal was attempting to regain the favour of the Queen in order to fulfill his quest to become one of the King's ministers. Jeanne de la Motte, having entered court by means of a lover named Rétaux de Villette, persuaded Rohan that she had been received by the Queen and enjoyed her royal favour. Upon hearing of this connection, Rohan resolved to use the "comtesse" to regain the Queen's goodwill. Jeanne began to assure the Cardinal that she was making efforts on his behalf.
This was the beginning of an alleged correspondence between Rohan and the Queen, the adventuress duly returning replies to Rohan's notes, which she affirmed had come from the Queen. The tone of the letters became very warm, and the Cardinal, convinced that Marie Antoinette was in love with him, became ardently enamoured of her. He begged Jeanne to obtain a secret night-time interview for him with the Queen, and such a meeting was arranged in August 1784. In a grove in the garden of the Palace of Versailles, the Cardinal met with a lady whom he believed to be the Queen herself. This woman was in fact a prostitute, Nicole Leguay d'Oliva, who had been hired by Jeanne due to her resemblance to the Queen. Rohan offered d'Oliva a rose, and, in her role as the Queen, she promised him that she would forget their past disagreements.
Jeanne de la Motte took advantage of the Cardinal's belief in her by borrowing large sums of money from him, telling him that they were for the Queen’s charity work. Enriched by these, Jeanne was able to make her way into respectable society. Because she quite openly boasted about her relationship with the Queen, many assumed the relationship between the two was genuine.
Marie Antoinette, Queen of France
The jewellers Boehmer and Bassenge resolved to use her to sell their necklace. She at first refused their commission, but then changed her mind and accepted it.
On January 21, 1785, Jeanne told the Cardinal that Marie Antoinette wanted to buy the necklace, but, not wishing to purchase such an expensive item publicly during a time of need, the Queen wanted the Cardinal to act as a secret intermediary. A little while later, Rohan came to negotiate the purchase of the famous necklace for the sum of 2,000,000 livres, to be paid in instalments. He claimed to have the Queen's authorization for the purchase, and showed the jewellers the conditions of the bargain approved in the Queen's handwriting. Rohan took the necklace to Jeanne's house, where a man, whom Rohan believed to be a valet of the Queen, came to fetch it. Jeanne de la Motte's husband secretly took the necklace to London, where it was broken up in order to sell the large individual diamonds separately.
When the time came to pay, Jeanne de la Motte presented the Cardinal's notes, but these were insufficient, and Boehmer complained to the Queen, who told him that she had never received or ordered the necklace. She had the story of the negotiations repeated for her. Then followed a coup de théâtre. On August 15, 1785, Assumption Day, when the whole court was awaiting the King and Queen in order to go to the chapel, the Cardinal de Rohan, who was to officiate, was taken before the King, the Queen, the Minister of the Court Breteuil and the Keeper of the Seals Miromesnil to explain himself. Rohan produced a letter signed "Marie Antoinette de France", on reading which the King became furious that Rohan, a prince étranger, could have let himself be fooled, since royalty do not use surnames. Rohan was arrested and taken to the Bastille, where he destroyed the correspondence he had thought had been with the Queen. In addition, Jeanne was not arrested until three days later, after having destroyed her papers.
The police set to work to find all her accomplices, and arrested the prostitute Nicole Leguay d'Oliva and Rétaux de Villette, who confessed that he had written the letters given to Rohan in the queen's name, and had imitated her signature on the conditions of the bargain. The famous charlatan Cagliostro was also arrested, although it is doubtful whether he had any part in the affair.
The Cardinal de Rohan accepted the Parlement de Paris as judges. A sensational trial resulted (May 31, 1786) in the acquittal of the Cardinal, of the girl Nicole and of Cagliostro. Jeanne de la Motte was condemned to be whipped, branded and sent to the prostitutes' prison, the Salpêtrière; but the whipping and branding were not executed, and in June of the following year she escaped from prison disguised as a boy.[2] In his absence, her husband was condemned to the galleys for life. Villette was banished.
The scandal
Public opinion was much excited by this trial. Most historians come to the conclusion that Marie Antoinette was relatively blameless in the matter, that Rohan was an innocent dupe, and that the Lamottes deceived both for their own ends. This was also broadly the finding of the Paris Parlement, although they did not comment on the actions of the Queen.
Despite the findings to the contrary, many people in France persisted in the belief that the Queen had used the Lamottes as an instrument to satisfy her hatred of the Cardinal de Rohan. Various circumstances fortified this belief. There was the Queen's disappointment at Rohan's acquittal, and the fact that the Cardinal was afterwards deprived by the King of his charges and exiled to the Abbey of la Chaise-Dieu. In addition, the people assumed that the Parlement de Paris's acquittal of Rohan implied that Marie Antoinette was somehow in the wrong. All of these factors led to a huge decline in the Queen's popularity and encouraged an image of her among the masses as a manipulative spendthrift, interested more in vanity than in the welfare of France and the French.
Jeanne de Lamotte took refuge in London and published her Mémoires, in which she once again accused the Queen.
Significance
The Affair of the Diamond Necklace was important in discrediting the Bourbon monarchy in the eyes of the French people years before the French Revolution. Marie Antoinette became even more unpopular, and salacious gossip about her made her even more of a liability to her husband. She was never able to shake off the idea in the public imagination that she had perpetrated an extravagant fraud for her own frivolous ends. The circulation of stories concerning sexual scandal and expensive jewelry made her seem out of touch with ordinary French workers. Nonetheless, the affair prompted Louis XVI to become closer to his wife, and may have inclined him to be more defensive of and more responsive to her leading up to and during the revolution.
The affair in fiction
References
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