Stories About Famous Precious Stones

by Adela E. Orpen

The cardinal glanced imploringly at the Queen who turned upon him eyes blazing with anger.

"Sire, I have been deceived," cried the cardinal, becoming suddenly pale, "I will pay for the necklace myself."

More angry questions from the King, more faltering confused answers from the cardinal, and meanwhile the stern implacable face of the incensed Queen turned towards him. The door opens, a captain of the guard enters: "In the King's name follow me!" says the officer, and grand-almoner of France, the cardinal-prince of Rohan is led off under arrest.

Thus far the action of every one concerned is comprehensible enough, but after this it becomes so extraordinary that it is no wonder if the enemies of the Queen pretended there was a dark mystery behind which had yet to be revealed. The unrelenting hatred of Marie Antoinette, which made her demand the cardinal's head in vengeance for his audacity in aiming at her affections, seems to have blinded her to every other consideration but that of ruining her enemy. Madame de la Motte was, it is true, arrested and thrown into the Bastile, but so bent were the royal party upon destroying the cardinal that they held out hopes of acquittal to the adventuress herself if she would accuse the cardinal. Nay, more, they offered to pay for the hateful jewel if Böhmer would give damaging evidence against the cardinal. Having thus completely put themselves in the wrong the case came on for trial before a bench of judges, who seem to have acted with perfect uprightness and impartiality. And this, too, when public feeling was running very high in Paris and the Reign of Terror only five years off.

All the perpetrators of the crime, except Madame de la Motte, confessed to their share in it; so the whole series of gigantic cheats and trickeries was exposed. The forger confessed to his forgery, and the girl confessed to the scene she had acted in the gardens of the Trianon. At length the cardinal had to admit to himself that the woman la Motte, who had bewitched his senses to the detriment of his fair fame, had also cheated his purse to an almost fabulous extent and had involved him in the crime of high treason which in days of more absolute power would undoubtedly have cost him his head. The cardinal was acquitted of the capital crime, but was condemned to lose his post of grand-almoner, to retire into the country during the King's pleasure, and to beg their Majesties' most humble pardon—a sufficiently severe sentence one would suppose for having been made a fool of by a designing woman. Marie Antoinette heard of the cardinal's "acquittal," as she called it, with a burst of tearful rage which transpires through her letters to her sisters at the time. She laments in them the pass to which the world had come when she could do nothing but weep over her wrongs and was powerless to avenge them.

The rest of those concerned were variously dealt with. The Count de la Motte was condemned to the galleys for life, but he had already escaped to London, so the sentence did not much matter in his case. The forger Villette was banished. In his case the decree of the court was carried out in the old-fashioned way: he was led to the prison gate with a halter round his neck, where the executioner gave him a loaf of bread and a kick and bade him begone forever. The sentence on Madame de la Motte was sufficiently rigorous. She was to be whipped at the cart's tail, branded, and then imprisoned for life. The whipping was but slightly administered, but a large V (voleuse-thief) was marked with a red-hot iron on her shoulder: a fact which caused the jocose to say that she was marked with her own royal initial, V standing for Valois as well as for voleuse.

After a couple of years in prison the authorities connived at her escape, in pursuance it was believed of orders from Versailles. Marie Antoinette's unpopularity was, if possible, increased by the affair of the necklace, and the cardinal became a hero for a short time until others more conspicuous arose to overshadow him. Even yet, however, the unhappy necklace continued to work for evil towards the Queen. Safe in England Madame de la Motte wrote her Memoirs, which are nothing but a mass of libels and a tissue of falsehood all directed against the Queen. For private political purposes it suited the Duke of Orleans to spread them as much as possible, for the great aim of his life was to discredit the Queen.

Madame de la Motte died miserably in London from the effects of a jump from a second story window which she took to escape from bailiffs who were arresting her for debt. All the money she obtained from the diamond necklace was not able to save her from want and misery. She was only thirty-four years old at the time of her death. The Count de la Motte lived on into the reign of Charles X. and begging to the last also died in want. The Cardinal de Rohan became an émigré after his brief hour of Parisian popularity and died in exile. The jewelers became bankrupt and the firm sank into oblivion.

And Marie Antoinette?

Ah well, she had nothing to say to the direful necklace. She never probably so much as touched it with a finger-tip during the whole course of her life, but she was taxed with its theft on her way to the scaffold, and a generation ago her memory was again loaded with the crime by M. Louis Blanc. Marie Antoinette has had every possible and impossible crime cast upon her by writers who sought in her person to degrade the idea of a monarchy, but slowly history is removing this dirt from the garment of her reputation. She was silly and headstrong in her youth and did harm by her thoughtlessness, but she was neither so silly nor so headstrong as many of the queens, her predecessors, nor did she do one tithe of the mischief that some of them attempted. She chanced, however, upon troublous times, and therefore everything she did was reckoned a crime, as also many things which she did not do, such as the stealing of the Diamond Necklace.