The Queen`s Confession

Events leading to the Trial

Looking back, I see the affair of the necklace as the beginning, as the first rumble of thunder in the mighty storm which was to break about my head. I was determined that Rohan should be judged and found guilty; he must be exposed as the swindler I believed um to be. Should he be excused because he was a prince of a noble family? I owed it to my mother as well as my own dignity as Queen of Prance to have him proved guilty of all the sins which I was certain he had committed.

I laughed when I considered what I was sure his family expected. They would imagine that the King would exercise his right to inflict a mild punishment on the Cardinal, perhaps send him a lettre de cachet which would mean a brief exile; then he could return to Court and the incident be for gotten.

I was determined that this should not be.

Louis, as usual, wavered. His good sense told him that he should listen to wise counsellors and obey his own instincts in the matter, which were that the less universally known about the matter the better for us all; but his sentiments towards me and he loved me truly insisted that he listen to my outbursts of fury against a man who had dared presume that I would enter into an underhand negotiation with him. Whenever Rohan’s name was mentioned, I would burst into an angry tirade which often ended in tears.

“The Cardinal must be punished.”

Louis pointed out that the Cardinal belonged to one of the oldest families in France; he was related to the Condes, the Soubises and the Marsans; they believed that they had been personally insulted since a member of their family had been arrested publicly like a common felon.

“Which be isl’ I declared.

“And the whole world should know it.”

“Yes, yes,” replied my husband, ‘you are right, of course. Yet not only his family but Rome itself is displeased that a Cardinal of Holy Church should have been submitted to insult. “

“And why not,” I demanded, ‘when he deserves his fate more than some man who steals bread because he is hungry. “

“You are right,” said my husband.

I embraced him warmly.

“You will never allow a man who has insulted me to go free, I know.”

“He shall have his just rewards.”

All the same Louis allowed the Cardinal to decide whether he would be judged by the King or the Pariement.

He quickly made his choice and wrote to the King, and it struck me at the time that the man who had written that letter to my husband had changed a great deal from the frightened creature who had been summoned to the King’s cabinet on the day he was arrested. He had written:

“Sire, I had hoped through confrontation to obtain proofs that would have convinced Your Majesty beyond doubt of the fraud of which I have been the plaything and I should then have desired no judges except your justice and your kindness. Refused confrontation and deprived of this hope, I accept with most respectful gratitude the permission which Your Majesty gives me to prove my innocence through judicial forms; and consequently I beg Your Majesty to give the necessary orders for my affair to be sent and assigned to the Pariement of Paris, to the assembled chambers.

“Nevertheless if I could hope that the inquiries which have been made, and which are unknown to me, could have led Your Majesty to decide that I am only guilty of having been deceived, I should then beg you.

Sire, to decide according to your justice and your kindness. My relations, penetrated with the same sentiments as myself, have signed.

“I am, with the deepest respect, Cardinal de Rohan De Rohan, Prince de Montbazon Prince de Rohan, Archbishop of Cambrai L.M. Prince de Soubise’ When my husband read this letter he was disturbed. He too was struck by the change in Rohan. His imprisonment in the Bastille had changed him from a very frightened man to an arrogant one.

I could see the speculation in his eyes. He said to me: “If I admitted that the Cardinal is merely a man who has been deceived into taking part in this fraud, he would not wish to be tried by the Parlement.”

I laughed aloud.

“I dare say not. He would rather have your leniency than a judicial sentence when he is proved guilty.”

“What if he is not proved guilty?”

‘you are joking. Of course he will be proved guilty. He is guilty.”

My husband looked at the letter; he was staring at those names at the foot of it—some of the most influential in the country.

I knew that he was hoping that the matter might be hushed up in some way, which I told myself was just what Rohan’s noble family wanted.

But I was determined to bring this affair into the open.

My folly makes me shudder even now.

The most important affair in France was the trial. Information was leaking out daily. The Comtesse de la Motte Valois had been arrested; so had Cagliostro, the notorious magician, and his wife; and so had another creature, a girl of light morals who was known as the Baroness d’Oliva and who was said to have impersonated me. The story was growing more and more fantastic every day. There had been nothing compared with this since the ascent of the balloon which had amazed everyone. But this was even more exciting; this was a trial of a great Cardinal; it was the story of a great fraud, a fabulous diamond necklace which had disappeared from the scene; it was a story of scandal and intrigue, and at the very heart of it was the Queen of France.

I was unaware then of all the twists and turns of this incredible story; but I have since heard many versions of it. In fact I have never ceased to hear of it. It was not really so much the Cardinal de Rohan who stood on trial; it was the Queen of France.

How could I have prevented what was to happen? By being a different woman. By never having entered on a life of selfish pleasure. I was not guilty of all of which I was accused in this nightmare story of a diamond necklace. My tragedy was that my reputation was such that I could have been.

I must set down the story of the Diamond Necklace, which gradually came to my knowledge while the tension was growing over that trial—and during it.

As I learned it I lost my carelessness. I believe this was the first time I really began to understand the mood of Prance, that I first became aware of that crumbling pedestal which supported the Monarchy.

The Prince de Rohan was at the very centre of the drama; he was the dupe, it seemed; but bow a man of his education and culture could have been so easily duped it is difficult to understand; perhaps it had something to do with the strange Cagliostro who was arrested with Rohan and who remains a vague and shadowy figure, the mystery man. Magician or charlatan? That is something I shall never know.

Perhaps the most important figure in the whole unsavoury affair was the Comtesse de la Motte-Valois, that woman who, from afar, since this unfortunate affair occurred, has been writing her sensational lying and pornographic stories of my life—my enemy whom I have never met, to whom I have done no harm except to have ascended the throne of France. Hers was an unusual story. She claims descent from the royal Valois, that branch of the family of France which ruled before the Bourbons. She was the daughter of a certain Jacques Saint-Remy, who claimed descent from King Henri II. This appeared to be the truth, for Henri II had had an illegitimate son by a certain Nicole de Savigny, and this child, christened Henri after him, was legitimised by him and created Baron de Luz and de Valois.

Jeanne suffered great poverty in her childhood, but she had heard that she was descended from the Valois and never forgot it. In the days when she was living on the proceeds of her great fraud she bore the arms of her family—Sargent a une fasce d’azur, char gee de trois fleurs de Us for—on her carriage, in her house, anywhere where she could put it.

The child Jeanne was brought up in a state of abject poverty, and this, added to the knowledge that she was of royal blood, may well have been

at the root of her hatred for me and her desire to gain, at any cost, the status which she believed belonged to her.

No doubt when Henri de Saint-Remy, son of Henri II, lived in the chateau it had been a beautiful place, but during the years which followed, the Saint-Remys found it impossible to keep up their standard of living; the ditches about the chateau became filled with stagnant water; the roof had fallen in and the upper part was exposed to the weather. By the time Jeanne’s father was born, it was a ruin.

He was a man of great physical strength but had not desire to regain his family’s fortunes if it meant work. He was only interested in drink and debauchery, and gradually sold little by little, all that remained of the chateau.

He seduced one of the village girls named Jossel, and when their child was born, married her. She was a woman of loose morals, and as Jeanne’s father cared only for drink she soon began to dominate the household.

Jeanne was one of three children; neither parent cared for them, and they were kept in a miserable hut, naked, for they had no clothes and they would have starved to death but for the efforts of the cure and some of the peasants who took pity on them.

When I think of all this now, I can forgive her, because I know misery even greater than she must have endured as a child; but at that time it was difficult to understand. Now I see that she felt a need to take revenge on society; and I can even feel it in my heart to be sorry for this woman.

How wretched the child must have been, but while she was naked and shivering with cold and hunger, she never lost sight of the fact that she was descended from the royal Valois.

There came a time when the family decided to take to the road. There were four children, Jacques, Jeanne, Marguerite-Anne and Marie-Anne.

Poor little Marie-Anne was a year and a half and could only totter, so they decided they could not take her with them; they wrapped her in swaddling clothes and hung her on the door of a farmhouse. Leaving her there they set out, and now began the real nightmare for the children. Their mother was a strong handsome peasant and she decided to make use of her attraction; their father was ailing, so she fumed him out and took up with a soldier as depraved and cruel as herself. The children were sent out to beg and if they did not return with money were severely beaten. Then came Jeanne’s stroke of luck.

Her cry when she stood by the roadside begging was:

Give alms to a poor orphan sprung from the blood of the Valois. ” This naturally provoked jeers now and then, but it did attract some attention, and one day the Marchioness de Boulainvilliers passing in her carriage heard what the child said, was curious, and stopped to question her. She was immediately struck by the child’s beauty and proud bearing; she believed the story of royal descent and decided to help. She took Jeanne and her little sister Marguerite-Anne and sent them to school, where very soon Marguerite-Anne caught smallpox and died. Meanwhile Jeanne’s father had died in great poverty in the hotel-Dieu in Paris; her mother’s paramour left her and she returned with Jacques to Bar sur Arbe, her native town, where she took up a Bfe of prostitution. Jacques ran away to sea and joined a ship at Toulon, where with the help of Madame de Boulainvilliers he made a good career in the Navy and actually died at the time the affair of the necklace came to light.

Jeanne had left her nightmare childhood behind her; and it is not surprising that she made up her mind that never would she fall into such dire misery again.

Madame de Boulainvilliers was good to her, and when she was old enough to leave school placed her with a dress maker in the Faubourg Saint-Gennain; but Jeanne was too proud to remain there. In her autobiography, which she produced after the trial and which of course everyone was eager to read, she said she became ‘a washerwoman, a water-carrier, a cook, an ironer, a needle-woman, everything except a happy and respected girl. “

That was what Jeanne craved for above everything to win the respect which she considered due to her rank.

Madame de Boulainvilliers was a kindly woman; she realised that Jeanne could never settle down, and understood the reason, so she took her into her home and there Jeanne lived for a while as a member of the household. Madame de Boulainvilliers did not forget little Marie-Anne, who had had the good fortune to be taken in by the goodhearted farmer when he had discovered her hanging on his door; the good lady sent for her, and since she had grown into a well-mannered girl decided that she should go with her sister Jeanne to a finishing-school for young ladies. Now Jeanne was not only a beautiful young woman of twenty-one, she was an educated one, but remembering she had sprung from the Valois, she wanted to be treated as a royal personage.

When Jeanne was twenty-four she was sdll restless and dissatisfied, and she then met a soldier some two years older than herself. This was Mark-Antoine-Nicolas de la Motte, an officer in the gendarmerie. They became lovers and it was necessary for them to marry hastily. Twins were born a month after the wedding, but in a few days they were dead.

Jeanne was the leading spirit in this union, it appeared, and de la Motte soon learned that he must do as he was told. One of the first things he was obliged to do was to assume the title of Comte. He obeyed his wife, and her haughty manners, her habit of reminding everyone that she was descended from the Valois, soon made everyone accept the title as a natural one. They became known as the Comte and Comtesse de la Motte Valois

Jeanne and her husband, in need of money, for how could a descendant of the royal house of Valois be expected to live on the pay of an officer of the gendarmerie, immediately began to make plans. An opportunity arose when Madame de Boulainvilliers visited Strasbourg as a guest in the chateau of Saveme, the magnificent home of the Cardinal de Rohan. Jeanne remembered that the Cardinal was notoriously fond of women, and she was undoubtedly attractive. With her air of haughty refinement, her lovely chestnut hair and blue eyes under black eyebrows, her colouring was startling.

She decided to use the Cardinal, but at this stage she was not sure how. The wildest of plans would occur to her later when a series of strange events fell into their places setting the stage and making possible this plot which would otherwise have seemed too incredible for reality.

I have already written much of the Cardinal de Rohan. I shall never be able to get that man out of my mind, and even now when I have become resigned to my fate and my understanding of others has grown I still feel a great revulsion every time I hear his name or allow his image to cloud my thoughts.

I suppose he was handsome in his way, for he was known as La Belle Eminence. Sometimes I think he was an extremely foolish man—indeed he must have been, for who but a simpleton would have allowed himself to be used as he was?

I can recall his face clearly; there is something childlike about it—round and like a doll’s, unwrinkled and highly coloured; the only ageing feature was his white hair, which grew far back from his forehead, and even this merely accentuated the ruddy roundness of his face. He was very tall and carried himself with grace and great dignity; and in his Cardinal’s robes he was a figure of magnificence.

He held the Bishopric of Strasbourg, which was the richest in France;

he was a Prince of the Empire, Landgrave of Alsace, Abbe of the Grand Abbey of Saint-Vaast and Chaise-Dieu, Provisor of Sorbonne, Grand Almoner of France, Superior-General of the Royal Hospital of the QuuueVingts, and Commander of the order of the Holy Ghost And this was the man who had been arrested at Versailles like a common felon—as his family said.

At the time he made the acquaintance of Jeanne de la Motte-Valois the Cardinal was under the spell of Cagliostro.

I do not know the truth about Cagliostro. Who does? Some laugh at him.

Others say that he was in possession of some of the great secrets of the universe. The fact remains that while he was close to the Cardinal, the Cardinal accepted ridiculous falsehoods as truth.

There were so many stories about the magician. I have heard descriptions of him from my servants who waited in the streets to catch a glimpse of him. His coat was of blue silk, his shoes were fastened by buckles made of diamonds; even his stockings were studded with gold; he glittered as he walked, for diamonds and rubies covered his hands; his flowered waistcoat was set with gems which sparkled so fiercely that they dazzled the eyes of all who beheld them.

When he was arrested, shortly after the Cardinal, I heard many stories of his strangeness. The one which most impressed me was that of how he stopped in the square of Strasbourg before a crucifix and declared in a loud voice which could be heard by all those around—and there was always a crowd following him: “How could an artist who had never seen him have made such a perfect likeness?”

“Your lordship knew Christ?” asked a hushed voice close by.

“We are on terms of friendship,” was the answer.

“How many times we strolled together on the shady shore of Lake Tiberias. His voice was of great sweetness, but he would not listen to me. He loved to walk on the shore, where he picked up a band of fishermen. This and his preaching brought him to a bad end.” Then to his servant he added:

“Do you remember that day when they crucified Christ in Jerusalem?”

Then came the astonishing climax to the story: “No, my lord,” replied the servant in the hushed tones of reverence with which the great man was addressed, ‘your lordship forgets I have only been in your service for the last fifteen hundred years. “

He was a small fat man with the appearance of being in his forties; he had large bright animated eyes, and a strong voice. He was undoubtedly fascinating, for often those who went to him to jeer at him and expose him as a fraud became his most earnest admirers.

Of course there were those who said he talked gibberish which people thought was brilliant wit and wisdom because they could not understand it. He had a formula for certain questions and when he was asked who he was would reply, “I am he who is!” and would add: “I am he who is not!” which was so baffling’ that most people who heard became very deferential and pretended they were the wise ones who could understand the meaning of his imagery.

There were countless sinister murmurs about him. He was a Freemason and wished to set up Egyptian Free masonry in France; he was in the pay of secret societies and his motives were more devious than the duping of a foolish Cardinal. He had discovered the philosopher’s stone and could transmute base metals into gold and make precious stones. Stories of the cures he had effected on his journeys were told everywhere. He could look at a man who was crippled and make him walk.

He would not give his attention to all sufferers, however, and he reserved the right to treat those whom he favoured.

There was a Comtesse de Cagliostro a young woman of charm and beauty who was said to be ‘not of this world. ” No one knew where she came from any more than they knew her husband’s origins. She was ‘an angel in human form who had been sent to soften the days of the Man of Marvels.” Cagliostro was a faithful husband who never gave one amorous glance in any other woman’s direction. All he was interested in was his own doctrine.

In spite of the wild life he had led, there was about the Cardinal a touch of innocence; he was a lecher, but a roman tic one; superstitious in the extreme, he was very much attracted by the occult. Moreover he delighted in splendour; be admired fine clothes, and above all magnificent jewellery; and Cagliostro was a magician who, by his great wisdom, could bring sparkling jewels from his crucible. Such an achievement could not fail to impress the Cardinal, and in a very short time he had invited Cagliostro to Saveme, where the two became great friends.

The Cardinal wore an enormous jewel the size of an egg, which he declared he had seen Cagliostro pluck fro tn the crucible. How the Cardinal was duped, whether the Cardinal was duped, remains a secret, but it was a fact that Cagliostro lived in great splendour with his Comtesse in the palace of Saveme and that the Cardinal could scarcely bear him out of his sight.

And then in the private apartments of the Cardinal’s palace these two men began to talk of me. I had become an obsession with the Cardinal.

I had stubbornly refused to receive him at Court; I had remembered my mother’s warnings about him; I had tried to prevent his being Grand Almoner; he knew that I disliked him, and he wanted my favour with the desperation of a man who has only had to take what he desires all his life and suddenly finds something denied him.

There was. something even more sinister which had crept into the Cardinal’s mind. He wanted to be my lover. The thought of this took possession of his mind. He began to think of little else. Did he talk of me to Cagliostro? Did he ask what chances he had of success with me? If he had calked with me instead of the magician I could have told him that never . never never should I have looked at him with favour even if I had been the kind of woman who forgets her marriage vows.

Why did Cagliostro lend himself to this mad scheme? Did he know what was going on? Could it be true that he had gifts like Mesmer’s and could make people act as he wished at certain times? And did he wish me to be caught up in this gigantic scandal because his masters of some of the secret lodges of the world were eager to see the end of the Monarchy in France?

At the rime it seemed that this was merely the story of a gullible man, a scheming woman and a man of mystery. I was involved the central figure in the plot, the character who never makes an actual appearance during the whole of the play but without whom there would be no play.

Jeanne de la Motte-Valois speedily became the Cardinal’s mistress; that was an inevitable sequel. She also became Cagliostro’s friend.

Did she suspect he was a charlatan? Did he know that she was a scheming woman? Whichever way one turns in this incredible story there is mystery.

Jeanne would soon have discovered the Cardinal’s obsession with me.

Then the Comtesse saw a way of improving her status with the Cardinal; it may have been then that it all began.

She had become friendly with a comrade of her husband’s, Retaux de Ville’tte, a handsome man of about thirty, with blue eyes and a fresh complexion although his hair was already beginning to turn grey. He was an adept at writing verses, imitating well-known actors and actresses, and he could write in various styles, even delicately as a woman. This young man became the lover of the Comtesse—perhaps she was genuinely fond of him, or perhaps because the plot was already beginning to form in her mind and she wished to bind him to her.

Jeanne hinted to the Cardinal that I had shown some favour to her.

This did not seem impossible for my friendships were the source of a great deal of gossip and it was known that it was women with charming looks such as the Princesse de Lamballe and Gabrielle de Polignac who attracted me. Jeanne was extremely attractive; she was also a member of the House of Valois; it was not therefore an impossibility that I should have noticed her and favoured her. So far the story progressed reasonably enough.

Jeanne must have been overwhelmed with joy by her success, for the Cardinal showed clearly that he believed her and confided in her his great desire to be received by me.

It might be, she told him, that she could put in a word for him with the Queen. But Jeanne knew that vague promises would not satisfy him; this was where Retaux de Villette could be useful; he could write in a light feminine hand, and if he signed his letters with my name, why should not the Cardinal believe that they had been written by me? They were addressed to my dear friend Madame la Comtesse de la Motte-Valois and in them were many expressions of friendship.

How could he have believed that I had written such letters to this woman? Yet it seemed that he did. It has been suggested that Cagliostro was in the plot with the de la Mottes to delude the Cardinal, and that the sorcerer mesmerised him into accepting the letters as written by me. I should have said this was ridiculous but for the fact that they had that absurd signature “Marie Antoinette de France.” Surely if he had his wits about him the Cardinal must have realised they were false by that alone.

I have seen some of these letters which were said to have been written by me. I shudder to look at them; and even now, with most of the facts in mind, I am still mystified.

Jeanne had led the Cardinal to believe that if he could write a justification of his misdeeds over the past years I would be willing to consider it and perhaps forgive him.

Delightedly he immediately prepared a long apologia on which he spent days, rewriting and correcting, and when it was finished the Comtesse took it promising that she would deliver it to me at the earliest possible moment.

A few days later Retaux de Villette wrote a letter on gilt-edged paper with a little fleur-delis in the corner.

“I am delighted that I need no longer regard you as blameworthy. It is not yet possible to grant you the audience for which you ask, but I will let you know as soon as it is possible. In the meantime please be discreet.”

This letter, signed “Marie Antoinette de France,” produced the desired effect on the Cardinal. He was overcome with emotion; he was ready to lavish handsome gifts on the woman who could help him to such progress in his relationship with me. The fact that he did not question the veracity of this shows that he must have been the biggest fool in France. Yet he was not in truth that. Cagliostro had looked into the future for him and advised him to carry on with the project nearest his heart. How often have I asked myself what the magician’s re1e was in the mystery I Jeanne knew that she could keep the Cardinal believing I was writing to him, but whenever I was at a gathering in which he was present I refused to look his way. For a while this situation might be explained but it could not go on.

But Jeanne was never at a loss, and she devised a grandiose scheme with her husband—the self-styled Comte de la Motte-Valois—and her lover Retaux de Villette. They were short of money, but Jeanne saw a means of becoming very rich. The Cardinal was a man of tremendous resources; he might suffer temporary embarrassments, but his assets were great. He would be the milch cow who should be milked with the gentlest, cleverest hands. They must plan carefully, though.

The Cardinal must be brought face to face with the Queen; the Queen must show her favour towards him. I can imagine those two men, whose wits were so much duller than here, demanding: “How?” And her cool reply:

“We must find someone to play the part of the Queen.”

How they must have gaped at her; but she was the brains behind the plot. Had it not worked out so far as she had told them it would? They should leave it to her. Now, what they needed was a young woman who looked sufficiently like me to be passed off as me. Everyone knew what I looked like. There were portraits of me in the galleries. They must find someone who had my colouring. They could teach her the rest.

She was a forceful woman; and both men were her slaves. It was the so-called Comte de la Motte who found Marie Nicole Lequay, later known as the Baroness d’Oliva. The girl was young, about six years younger than I; her hair was similar in colour to mine; she had blue eyes and an ample bosom. In fact she was known among her friends as the “Little Queen’; so her resemblance to myself had often been noticed. She was a milliner, but followed another j occupation—though more amateur than professional—besides , that of making hats, and at this time had a protector, Jean Baptiste Toussaint. She was apparently a gentle creature, an orphan who had been placed with a guardian whose means of earning a living was to take in children to board and from whom she had run away after being badly treated. She had had many lovers—not necessarily lovers who paid her; she was an easy-going gentle girl who was generous with her favours.

The Comte de la Motte met her in the Palais Royale, where gay young people sauntered or sat in order to make each other’s acquaintance. He was immediately struck by her likeness to me and brought her to the house in Rue NeuveSaint-Gilles which was where the de la Mottes lived when in Paris.

Jeanne immediately saw the possibilities, and it was she who changed the girl’s name to Baroness d’Oliva—a near anagram of Valois. Soon she was telling the girl that the Queen would be grateful to her for ever if she would do one little thing for her.

The poor simple girl was so’ overwhelmed that she was easily persuaded. Jeanne must have summed her up as too stupid and innocent to do much more than make an appearance and perhaps, with careful coaching, say one sentence; but that would be enough, as long as Jeanne was present to conduct the operation and step in quickly if things should go wrong.

Jeanne de la Motte must be the most audacious woman in me world. Who else would have conceived such a plan? Others might have been as villainous, but who would have been so wildly adventurous? Perhaps it was because she was certain of her power to succeed that she did it.

She had everything ready for the girl. Her hair was carefully powdered and dressed high though not elaborately. She had copied that simple dress of mine in which Vigee Le Brim had painted me the long white gaulle which had been called a chemise, and which had caused such a stir when the picture had been exhibited in the salon a short while before. This was made in muslin. Over the dress was put a mantle of fine white wool, and on her head a very wide-brimmed hat to shade her face. With more than a slight resemblance to me, the girl might well, in the dusk, be mistaken for me.

Rosalie, Jeanne’s maid, a girl of about eighteen, black-eyed and saucy, who found living in the household of the Comtesse de la Motte an exciting adventure, helped her to dress, and during this process Jeanne taught her her words, which were: “You may hope that the past will be forgotten.” The poor girl had no idea what this meant. She had to concentrate on suppressing the accent of the Paris streets, on acquiring a faint foreign accent, on making a graceful gesture with her hands.

I can imagine the poor child, dominated by these people particularly Jeanne excited at playing the re1e of a Queen whom she had often been told she resembled, and at the same time being paid for it. Jeanne had hinted that not only would she be recompensed by herself and the Comte, but that the Queen herself would no doubt wish to show her gratitude. Why should she ask what it was all about? She would not have been given an explanation, and if she had, she would not have been able to grasp it. No! Her part was to do as she was told, and she doubtless only hoped that she could play it to satisfaction. In the pocket of her muslin gown was a letter which she must take out and give to the man whom she would meet; she must also hand him a rose and not forget her words.

It was a dark night no moon, no stars ideal for the scene. Everything was quiet in the park the only sound that would be heard would be that of the water playing in the fountains. The Comtesse and her husband led the young girl in her muslin dress across the terrace and through the pines and firs, the elms, willows and cedars to the Grove of Venus.

A man arrived dressed in something which the girl would readily accept was the livery of one of the gentle men of my household.

“So you have come,” said the Comte; the man bowed low. This part was played by Retaux de Villene.

Oliva was told where to stand and wait while the Comte and Comtesse and Retaux disappeared among the trees. Poor girl! She must have found it rather eerie standing there alone in the grove at night. I wonder what her thoughts were at that moment.

But a man had appeared tall, slim, in a long cloak and a wide-brimmed hat turned down to hide his face. It was the Cardinal de Rohan.

Oliva held out the rose. She must have been astonished by the fervour with which he accepted it. I imagine him, kneeling kissing the hem of her muslin gown.

Then he lifted his eyes and she said what she had been told: “You may hope that the past is forgotten.”

He rose, approached, and a torrent of words burst from him. He was in ecstasy. He wanted to prove his devotion and so on. Poor little Oliva.

What could she understand of this? She was unaccustomed to such fluency. How relieved she must have been to find the Comtesse at her side, taking her arm, pulling her into the shadows!

“Come quickly, Madame. Here comes Madame and the Comtesse d’Artois.”

The Cardinal bowed low and hurried away. The Comtesse, still gripping Oliva, was full of triumph. Oliva had forgotten to hand over the letter, but the plan had succeeded even beyond her hopes.

And after that they had the foolish Cardinal in their web. He really believed that the Comtesse had arranged that meeting with me. How could he have been so foolish? Did he really think that I would come out into the park at night to meet a man? But then he had heard those scurrilous lampoons which had assigned to me a hundred lovers, and like so many people in France he believed them. Perhaps that was why he had this impossible dream of becoming one of them.

A friend of Jeaime’s, a young lawyer, happened to have called at the house at Rue NeuveSaint-Gilles and was there when the carriage arrived bringing the adventurers back from the Grove of Venus; he wrote an account of what he saw, which I have since seen:

“Between midnight and one in the morning we heard the sound of a carriage from which emerged Monsieur and Madame de la Motte, Retaux de Villette and a young woman from twenty-five to thirty years of age with a remarkably good figure. The two women were dressed with elegance and simplicity…. They talked nonsense, laughed, sang, so that one scarcely knew whether they were on their head or their heels.

The lady I did not know shared in the general hilarity, but was timid and kept within bounds. The face of this woman had from the first thrown me into that sort of restlessness which one experiences in the presence of a face one feels certain of having seen before without being able to say where. What had puzzled me so much in her face was its perfect resemblance to that of the Queen. “

Maitre Target of the French Academy, who was one of the counsels for the Cardinal’s defence, wrote:

“It is not surprising to me that in the darkness the Cardinal should have mistaken the girl d’Oliva for the Queen the same figure, same complexion, same hair, a resemblance in physiognomy of the most striking kind.”

So the first little plot had succeeded, and now it was time to begin the greater one. Target put the case clearly when he stated on behalf of his client:

“After this fatal moment [the meeting in the Grove of Venus] the Cardinal is no longer merely confiding and credulous, he is blind and makes of his blindness an absolute duty. His submission to the orders received through Madame de la Motte is linked to the feeling of profound respect and gratitude which are to affect his whole life. He will await with resignation the moment when her reassuring kindness will fully manifest itself, and meanwhile will be absolutely obedient.

Such is the state of his soul. “

Madame de la Motte realised this. She must have been anxious as she felt her way for even her optimistic mind must have realised that one false step could bring the entire edifice of fraud and deceit tumbling to the ground.

Jeanne sought an interview with the Cardinal very shortly after the meeting and told him that the Queen most clearly favoured him, for she, who was the most generous of women, wished to bestow fifty thousand livres on a noble but impoverished family. She was a little short of money at the moment but if the Cardinal could lend her this amount . and give it to Madame de la Motte to bring to her . she would know he was truly her friend.

How could the man be such a fool! —the old question which I and countless others have asked ourselves since this wretched business came to light.

He believed what they said because he wanted to believe; but all the time he was in close touch with Cagliostro, who assured him that he could see into the future and there he saw the Cardinal reaping benefits from his association with a person of very high rank.

That satisfied the superstitious and gullible Cardinal.

Being short of money he borrowed from a Jewish money lender, assuring him he would be honoured if he knew to what purpose the money was to be put.

In this manner Jeanne began to extract more money from the Cardinal, enough for her to be able to buy a mansion in Bar-sur-Aube, where she had once lived in such wretchedness and where she could continue with the fiction that she was now respectfully received at Court on account of her relationship with the Royal Family.

Had she been content with what she had managed to purloin she might have lived for the rest of her life in comfort. But she was an insatiably ambitious woman, and she conceived the plan for the necklace.

It was at one of her parties that she had heard of the jewellers’ trouble. Boehmer and Bassenge talked of nothing but the diamond necklace which they could not sell. They had built their hopes on the Queen, and the Queen did not want their necklace. Madame de la Motte had been boasting about her influence with the Queen; she and her husband had already extracted money from various people on the pretext that they could help them to rich posts at Court. So it was natural that the anxious jewellers should speak to her about the necklace and ask her if she could use her influence to interest me in it.

Madame de la Motte replied that this might be possible-and from that moment the scheme was conceived.

She would do her best to advise the Queen to reconsider buying the necklace. Could she herself see it? Nothing easier. The jewellers would bring it to the Rue NeuveSaintGilles.

I can well imagine how the de la Mottes were dazzled by it. I remembered when I had first seen it how startled I was. It was in truth composed of some of the finest gems in Europe. I would never have wished to wear it. Secretly I thought it vulgar; but it was certainly a magnificent piece-in fact the most splendid I have ever seen.

I can remember it perfectly now. I have seen it so often in the drawing of me which circulated through Paris, for there were many ready to believe that I had stolen the necklace and when they wished to be particularly insulting they drew it about my neck.

In a necklace fitting closely to the neck were seventeen diamonds almost as large as filberts, and this in itself would have been dazzlingly beautiful; but the jewellers had added to this, loops with pear-shaped pendants, clusters and a second rope of diamonds; there was even a third row decorated with knots and tassels of the precious stones, and one of the four tassels in itself would have been worth a fortune. There were two thousand eight hundred carats in the necklace and there had never been one like it. There never would be again neither such a valuable necklace nor such a fateful necklace.

Once having seen it Madame de la Motte could not get it out of her mind. She did not want it as a necklace, but through those brilliant loops and tassels she saw herself living like a queen for evermore. If she possessed the neck lace and broke it up and sold the stones she would be a rich woman for the rest of her life.

Her energetic mind was working fast.

“We would give a thousand louis to anyone who could find us a buyer for the necklace,” tempted Boehmer and Bassenge.

How she must have laughed. A thousand louis. And the necklace worth sixteen hundred thousand livres! She would speak to the Queen, she replied haughtily, but she would not wish her friends the jewellers to reimburse her if she were able to arouse the Queen’s interest.

I can readily imagine their joy. Meanwhile de la Motte was planning her most ambitious scheme of all. The purchaser must naturally be the Cardinal de Rohan. A few letters purporting to come from me, and the foolish man was like a fish on the hook. Of course he would enter into negotiations for the necklace if it were my wish.

Madame de la Motte told the jewellers that the purchase would go through. A very great nobleman would make it on behalf of the Queen.

She, Madame de la Motte, did not wish her name to be mentioned in the affair it would be between Cardinal de Rohan, the Queen and the jewellers.

Overcome with joy, seeing a way out of all the anxieties of the past,

the jewellers offered Madame de la Motte a precious stone in payment for her services. This she refused. She was only too happy to help, she said.

To the Cardinal she explained that I wished to buy the necklace without the King’s knowledge; and that I should need to do so on credit since I was short of money at the time.

“Her Majesty will pay by instalments,” she explained, ‘and this will fall due at intervals of three months. Naturally for such an arrangement the Queen must have an intermediary. She at once thought of you. “

The Cardinal during the trial explained what had happened:

“Madame de la Motte brought me a supposed letter from the Queen in which Her Majesty showed herself anxious to buy the necklace, and pointed out that, being without the necessary funds for the moment, and not wishing to occupy herself with the necessary arrangements in detail, she wished that I would treat the affair and take all the steps for the purchase and fix suitable periods for payments.” On receipt of this letter the Cardinal was delighted. He would be happy to do anything for Her Majesty. He would feel honoured to make any arrangement she desired. The price was fixed at sixteen hundred thousand livres, payable within two years in four six-monthly instalments. The necklace would be handed to the Cardinal on February 1st and the first instalment would be due on August 1st 1785. He drew up this agreement in his own hand and gave it to Madame de la Motte to show to her dear friend the Queen. Back came the note on gilt-edged paper with the fleur-delis in the corner signed “Marie Antoinette de France’ to say that the Queen was satisfied with the arrangements made and deeply grateful to the Cardinal.

It is strange when the Cardinal saw the necklace he had his first doubts. This man who believed that I would meet him by night in the Grove of Venus, who believed that he had a chance of becoming my lover, was astonished that I could wish to wear such a vulgar ornament as the diamond necklace.

He wavered. He would wish, he told Madame de la Money, to have a document signed by the Queen authorising him to buy the necklace for her.

Madame de la Motte was not disturbed. Why not? Retaux de Villette had provided other documents. Why not this one? In due course it was produced, signed in the usual way, “Marie Antoinette de France,” and the word “Approved’ was written beside each clause in what purported to be my handwriting.

How could the Cardinal have looked at that signature and not known it false? How could he have believed I would sign myself thus?

I remember these questions being asked continually during the trial and afterwards; and one pamphleteer gave a possible answer:

“People are so easily persuaded as to the truth of what they desire. It was such a mistake as might easily have been made by a man with a lively agitated mind like that of the Cardinal who was pleased, delighted even, with an arrangement which fed some sentiment, some new view, in the endless labyrinth of his imagination.”

The deal was made. On February 1st Boehmer and Bassenge brought the necklace to the Cardinal, who that—same day took it to the Rue NeuveSaint-Gilles, where Madame de la Motte was waiting to receive it. He was invited to wait in a room with a glass door through which he could watch the transfer of the necklace. He saw a young man in the Queen’s livery present himself to the Comte and Comtesse de la Motte with the words “By order of the Queen.” He took the casket and disappeared.

The Cardinal took his leave, and as soon as he had gone, Retaux de Villette, who had played the part of the Queen’s messenger, returned with the casket; and the conspirators sat down at a table to gloat over the finest diamonds in Europe.

But they had not made this plan merely to look at diamonds. They must be broken up and sold. They got to work without delay.

The whole story might have been discovered much earlier, for a few days after the Cardinal ‘had handed over the necklace a jeweller called at the headquarters of the Paris police to give the information that a man had brought him some extraordinarily fine diamonds which had obviously been taken from their settings by an unskilled person. As a result, Retaux, returning to the shop, was arrested.

With great plausibility Retaux explained that the diamonds had been placed in his possession by one of the King’s relatives, the Comtesse de la Motte-Valois. He was able to prove this, and at the name of Valois the police retracted and Retaux was released.

But it had been a warning that it was a mistake to try to dispose of the best diamonds in Paris, and the Comte set out for London to sell die stones. When he returned he was a rich man—although the London jewellers had benefited greatly by the sale, for naturally he did not get the full va hie of the diamonds. Now Madame de la Motte was in her element. She was a woman who could live in the present and did not much concern herself with the future—an attitude of mind which I understood perfectly She made a royal departure to Bar-sur-Aube with servants in splendid uniforms, a carnage drawn by four English horses—carpets, tapestries, furniture and clothes, she needed twenty-four carts to carry all her possessions with which she intended to furnish her mansion. On her English berline of a delicate pearl-grey colour she had die arms of the House of Valois engraved with die mono:

“Rege ab aw sangwnem, nomen, et lilia.” From die King my ancestor I derive my blood, my name, and die lilies.

There she lived royally as she must always have longed to live since she had heard diat she had Valois blood in her veins. But surely she must have known diat it could not last. There must be a’ reckoning.

Perhaps like myself she had to learn that what one sows me must reap.

The Cardinal had been arrested and had told his story implicating Jeanne. Two days later guards arrived at Bar-sur-Aube. Jeanne knew resistance was useless; she was taken prisoner and lodged in die Bastille.