The Affair of the Diamond Necklace
On 31 May 1786 Paris relished the humiliation of Marie Antoinette as the Affaire du collier de la reine concluded in court.
The necklace didn’t have a name. People described it as ‘en esclavage’ – a slave necklace – for the way its triple rows of diamonds, 647 of them, hung like chains around the neck. It didn’t have an owner, either. Its creator, Charles Auguste Boehmer, court jeweller to Louis XVI, made it expecting a royal sale. Worth two million francs, only royalty could afford it. But Marie Antoinette wasn’t buying. ‘We have more need for ships than diamonds’, she said. Desperate, Boehmer lowered the price. He offered instalment plans. But bankruptcy loomed.
Then he met Jeanne de Saint-Remy, the comtesse de la Motte-Valois, an intimate of the queen’s. She had a friend, the cardinal de Rohan, who was out of favour at court and desperately wanted to be in. She could help them both.
Jeanne arranged for Rohan to meet Marie Antoinette at midnight in the Grove of Venus, a notorious spot at Versailles. The queen gave him a rose, a token of friendship, before flitting away. Soon after she wrote instructing him to acquire the necklace for her. He bought it – payment pending – and passed it to Jeanne.
Unfortunately, Jeanne was neither a countess nor a friend of the queen. She had hired a milliner-turned-streetwalker, Nicole Leguay, to play the queen. The letters were forged. Jeanne prised the stones from their settings with a kitchen knife. A lover sold some in Paris; her husband sold most in London.
Why did the queen not wear the necklace? Rohan wondered. Then Boehmer demanded payment; frustrated, he went to Marie Antoinette, who was stunned. The story was ‘a labyrinth’, she said. Her mind ‘lost in it’. When the case was tried public sympathy swung behind Rohan. Marie Antoinette was surely to blame. Wasn’t she just the sort of woman to meet men at midnight?
Rohan was acquitted on 31 May 1786. Thousands gathered outside the Bastille to celebrate the queen’s humiliation. Louis XVI exiled Rohan to a remote abbey in the Auvergne. Jeanne was publicly flogged, stripped naked, and branded with a ‘V’ for ‘voleuse’ (‘thief’). Then she was imprisoned for life. Boehmer was bankrupted.
The necklace ruined everyone. Even Marie Antoinette, whom it never touched.
