As the countess was sitting one morning in the spacious room provided for her in the prison, in a loose robe, conversing gayly with some friends, and surrounded by all the appliances of wealth, an attendant appeared to conduct her into the presence of the judges. Totally unprepared for the awful doom impending over her, she rose with careless alacrity and entered the court. The terrible sentence was pronounced. Immediately terror, rage, and despair seized upon her, and a scene of horror ensued which no pen can describe. Before the sentence was finished, she threw herself upon the floor, and uttered the most piercing shrieks and screams. The tumult of agitation into which she was thrown, dreadful as it was, relaxed not the stern rigor of the law. The executioner immediately seized her, and dragged her, shrieking and struggling in a delirium of phrensy, into the court-yard of the prison. As her eye fell upon the instruments of her ignominious and brutal punishment, she seized upon one of her executioners with her teeth, and tore a mouthful of flesh from his arm. She was thrown upon the ground, her garments, with relentless violence, were stripped from her back, and the lash mercilessly cut its way into her quivering nerves, while her awful screams pierced the damp, chill air of the morning. The hot irons were brought, and simmered upon her recoiling flesh. The unhappy creature was then carried, mangled and bleeding, and half dead with torture, and terror, and madness, to the prison hospital. After nine months of imprisonment she was permitted to escape. She fled to England, and was found one morning dead upon the pavements of London, having been thrown from a third story window in a midnight carousal.
Innocence of the queen.
Such was the story of the Diamond Necklace. Though no one can now doubt that Maria Antoinette was perfectly innocent in the whole affair, it, at the time, furnished her enemies with weapons against her, which they used with fatal efficiency. It was then represented that the Countess Lamotte was an accomplice of the queen in the fraudulent acquisition of the necklace, and that the Cardinal de Rohan was their deluded but innocent victim. The horrible punishment of Madame Lamotte, who boasted that royal blood circulated in her veins, was understood to be in contempt of royalty, and as the expression of venomous feeling toward the queen. Both Maria Antoinette and Louis felt it as such, and were equally aggrieved by the acquittal of the cardinal and the barbarous punishment of the countess.
Of de Rohan's criminality.
Whether the cardinal was a victim or an accomplice is a question which never has been, and now never can be, decided. The mystery in which the affair is involved must remain a mystery until the secrets of all hearts are revealed at the great day of judgment. If he was the guilty instigator, and the poor countess but his tool and victim, how much has he yet to be accountable for in the just retributions of eternity! There were three suppositions adopted by the community in the attempt to solve the mystery of this transaction:
The three suppositions.
Influence of the first.
1. The first was, that the queen had really employed the Countess Lamotte to obtain the necklace by deceiving the cardinal. That it was a trick by which the queen and the countess were to obtain the necklace, and, by selling it piecemeal, to share the spoil, leaving the cardinal responsible for the payment. This was the view the enemies of Maria Antoinette, almost without exception, took of the case; and the sentence of acquittal of the cardinal, and the horrible condemnation of the countess, were intended to sustain this view. This opinion, spread through Paris and France, was very influential in rousing that animosity which conducted Maria Antoinette to sufferings more poignant and to a doom more awful than the Countess Lamotte could by any possibility endure.
2. The second supposition was, that the cardinal and the countess forged the signature of the queen to defraud the jeweler; that they thus obtained the rich prize of three hundred and twenty thousand dollars, intending to divide the spoil between them, and throw the obloquy of the transaction upon the queen. The king and queen were both fully convinced that this was the true explanation of the fraud, and they retained this belief undoubted until they died.
The third supposition.
Probably the true one.
3. The third supposition, and that which now is almost universally entertained, was, that the crafty woman Lamotte, by forgery, and by means of an accomplice, who very much, in figure, resembled Maria Antoinette, completely duped the cardinal. His anxiety was such to be restored to the royal favor, that he eagerly caught at the bait which the wily countess presented to him. But, whoever may have been the guilty ones, no one now doubts that Maria Antoinette was entirely innocent. She, however, experienced all the ignominy she could have encountered had she been involved in the deepest guilt.