It did not take her long “to break it up,” as Marie Antoinette had advised Böhmer to do years before. Her manner of disposing of the diamonds, which she “picked from the setting with a knife,” was itself a romance. But it is impossible in so hurried a résumé of this imbroglio to enter into any particulars that have no connection whatever with Cagliostro.
The dénouement arrived six months later when the first instalment of 400,000 livres became due. Madame de Lamotte awaited it with perfect indifference. She had involved the Cardinal too deeply to have any fears for herself. The very peril to which he was exposed was her safety. At all costs Rohan would be obliged to pay for the necklace to prevent a scandal.
She made a mistake, however, in not informing him in time that the Queen was not in a position to pay the instalment, whereby as her security the liability devolved on him. For never dreaming that such a contingency was possible, he was utterly unprepared for it when it came. Crippled with debt, he was unable to put his hand on 400,000 livres at a moment’s notice. The difficulty he found in raising the sum made Böhmer so nervous that he consulted Madame Campan, one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. She informed the jeweller that he was mad if he imagined the Queen had bought his necklace. Hereupon Böhmer in great agitation rushed off to Madame de Lamotte, who coolly informed him she suspected he was being victimized.
“But,” she added reassuringly, “the Cardinal is, as you know, very rich; he will pay. Go to him.”
This was a master-stroke; for the Countess had as much reason to believe that Böhmer would take her advice as that the Cardinal, to avoid a scandal which meant his ruin, would assume the entire responsibility of the purchase of the necklace. Unfortunately, the distracted jeweller instead of going to the Cardinal tottered off to the King!
By a dramatic coincidence it was Assumption Day, the one day in the year on which the Cardinal was entitled to appear at Versailles, when as Grand Almoner he celebrated mass to which the Royal Family always went in state. He and the Court were waiting in the Oeil-de-Boeuf for the King and Queen to appear in order to accompany them to the Chapel of St. Louis, when a door opened and a chamberlain summoned his Eminence to the sovereign. Everybody knows what followed. Böhmer, having obtained an audience of Louis XVI, had related to that amazed monarch all the details of the transaction by which the necklace had been bought for the Queen. This story, repeated in the presence of Marie Antoinette, whose honesty and virtue it alike impugned, stung her to fury. Exasperated though she was by Böhmer’s assertion that she had purchased his necklace, which for ten years she had refused to do, she might nevertheless have excused him on the ground of his insanity. But when he charged her with having employed Rohan, whom she hated, to purchase the necklace through a confidante of whom she had never heard, she was transported with indignation. Forgetting that she was a Queen, which she did too often, she remembered only that she was a woman, and without thinking of the consequences, insisted that the Cardinal should be arrested and her reputation publicly vindicated. Louis XVI, whose misfortune it was to be guided by her when he shouldn’t, and never when he should—a misfortune that in the end was to cost him crown and life—at once ordered the arrest of the Grand Almoner, who, attired in his pontifical robes, was carried off then and there to the Bastille like a common criminal before the eyes of the entire Court.
The arrest of the Cardinal[31] was in due course followed by that of the Countess de Lamotte, Cagliostro and his wife, the “Baroness d’Oliva,” who had acted the part of the Queen in the park of Versailles, Réteaux de Vilette, who had forged the Queens letters to Rohan, and several others on whom suspicion had fallen. “The Bastille,” as Carlyle says, “opened its iron bosom to them all.”[32]
Such in brief is the story of the rape of the Diamond Necklace.
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