Hello everyone, welcome to Tea & Gemstones, your home for a shiny mix of commentary and history of all things sparkly. I am your host, Jen. Today I’m going to tell you the tale of how a diamond necklace helped contribute to the queen of France having her head cut off at the guillotine and an entire country changing its form of government. Sound too crazy to be true? Well, never underestimate the power of a piece of jewelry.
Let’s jump in.
What comes to mind when you hear the name ‘Queen Marie Antoinette of France?’ Probably the phrase, “let them eat cake.” Visions of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, huge towering powder white hair pieces, extravagant dresses wider than a doorway and just general opulence and over the top ultra-luxury that personified the royal French court of the1700s.
Our visuals of Marie Antoinette come from written descriptions in historical record and also from her numerous painted portraits. She loved to wear whites, creams, light blues; hair piled upon her head as more sculpture than hairstyle (some reports speak of hair reaching 3 feet high) and usually topped with feathers. Because why not.
The Queen had a jewelry collection fit for… well, a queen. Some pieces we know of include a graceful white diamond bow brooch with a large yellow diamond hung from the center. There’s a gold pocket watch encased in vivid blue enamel that’s inlaid with seed pearls. A epic, epic piece was a so-called ‘zig-zag’ necklace of 21 graduated drop-shaped grey natural pearls dangling seductively from a ruby collar around which a rope of old cut diamonds weaves. Look, the woman had swag. Frank Everett of Sotheby’s describes Marie Antoinette, “I think she was probably was one of the original “it girl” in terms of her style and her relationship to fashion and jewelry.”
But for all of Marie’s decadent jewels- the piece she is most infamously associated with is one she never wore, or even owned at all. And woefully, many historians connect THIS unnamed necklace and the dramatic circumstances that swirled around it, to the literal death of the French monarchy.
The cast of characters involved in The Affair of the Diamond Necklace are so over the top they seem like something out of a cheesy movie. Here’s the basic rundown: an aged lothario king and his mistress that nobody likes. A notorious adventuress self-proclaiming herself a ‘countess’, a disgraced Catholic Cardinal, a disguised prostitute, two desperate jewelers over their heads in debt and poor Queen Marie Antoinette. How’s that for a line-up?
Okay, the affair of the diamond necklace begins with another sort of affair; King Louis 15th, Marie’s father-in-law, had a mistress named Madame du Barry. The King was about 30 years older than du Barry, who was in her mid-20s. She’s described in several written accounts as a stunning beauty with brown curls and blue eyes. Du Barry wasn’t very popular among the hoity-toity French court because she didn’t come from an aristocratic rich family- she had accomplished her social climbing feat of becoming the King’s mistress basically by being “really ridiculously good looking” and other men in her family and friends finagled her the “job” so they could use her to get close to the King. It’s a bit sad for du Barry being used- but historical accounts really testify that King Louis 15th loved du Barry. And because he loved her, he wanted to make a dramatic statement to everyone in his court that looked down their noses at his girlfriend.
Even though the French royal treasury (aka the King’s bank account) was seriously low on funds from years of disastrous wars, the king commissioned a massively elaborate custom necklace from two jewelers named Charles Boehmer (beau-murr) and Paul Bassenge. (bas-senge). The King is said to have stated he wanted the necklace to quote, “surpass all known others in grandeur” end quote.
This necklace is…. A lot to visually take in. Every inch is encrusted with diamonds. And it’s really two necklaces in one. There’s a choker style chain with three draped scalloped loops of diamonds hanging down and a center showpiece of a huge pear diamond. The second part is a deep V of double rowed diamond chain in a wide ribbon style. In addition, there’s two extra ribbon strands to drape from the shoulders. Every dip and dangle of the wide diamond chains is festooned with a diamond bow AND diamond tassel. Then as the finishing touch, four actual silk ribbons are attached to the sides of the wearer’s neck, with bows, obviously. The more bows the better, I guess. All together the necklace is 647 flawless diamonds.
Gathering all those diamonds and assembling the necklace took poor Charles and Paul, the jewelers, a looooong time. Like two years. Now, I feel like Charles & Paul are not very good businessmen. Here’s why: When the king commissioned the necklace… he didn’t pay for it. Didn’t even put down a deposit. No down payment. I guess when you are the King of France you could just order a custom 15 million dollar necklace (that’s how much it ended up being by the way- 15 million dollars) with just a verbal request. Charles & Paul dutifully started work on the order. But get this- after a year of work- the necklace is only half finished, and King Louis the 15th up and dies. His mistress Madame du Barry is forced out of court to live in the countryside (I told ya, nobody really likes her). So this entire Affair of the Diamond Necklace could have never happened, it could have ended before it really began if the jewelers Charles & Paul had just… stopped making the necklace. It was only halfway done, and they hadn’t been paid anything yet. Why didn’t they close the project and use the diamonds and precious metals for other, actually paid for, pieces? We don’t know. Their choice to continue had …. *all* the consequences.
The entire cost of raw materials and production for the necklace was all on Charles and Paul, coming out of their own pockets. They kept up work on the necklace for another entire year after the King’s death, until the piece was finished. And Charles and Paul are almost bankrupt from the cost of making it. I have no sympathy for the situation- it’s their own fault. They try and find a buyer, but with the 15 million dollar price tag, the only people who could ever afford it are royals. After Louis the 15th’s death, the royals in charge are the new king, his son, Louis the 16th and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette.
In 1778, we have historical court records of Charles and Paul making an official sales pitch to the new king Louis to ‘pretty please buy this necklace as a gift for Marie Antoinette.’ So, the king was kinda like, “eh, I dunno- if the Queen wants it, I guess sure.” (This King Louis the 16th is well known in history for his.. bland and kind of simpering, wishy-washy personality). But Marie Antoinette heard the price tag for the necklace and is reported to have said, “we have more need of battleships than of necklaces.” And also… miss Marie haaaated Madame du Barry. She didn’t want du Barry’s fashion scraps- even if they were covered in diamonds. No sale.
For the next six years, Charles and Paul keep trying to sell this necklace all over Europe. You sort of have to admire their dogged determination even if it doesn’t make sense. In the middle of those six years, the jewelers had a final official sales pitch to Marie Antoinette in 1781 after she gave birth to her son, like, “hey… how about your dead father-in-law’s hated mistress’ necklace for a push present?” And Marie is like, “no, get outta here, stop asking me!” We don’t actually have record of what she said, but I can imagine how I would feel right after giving birth and ol’ Charles and Paul s how up yet again.
All this to say- in 1784, this unsellable necklace is widely, infamously known. And the 647 flawless diamond extravagance was about to cross paths with another infamous character of history, a French adventuress and con woman named Jeanne (genie) de la Motte. Jeanne was married to a man named Nicholas who had some dubious claims to be noble through some distant relatives, but without any real proof of lineage, Jeanne called herself a “countess” whenever she went to hang around the French court. Back then, any member of the public who was dressed up fancy enough could be allowed to go hang out around the royal family and court. Records state upwards of 500 people a day just all hung out, gossiping, watching French court business go down.
Now, our panicked, in debt jewelers Charles and Paul are frequently at the French court, obviously trying to sell jewelry to the people gathered there every day. And Charles and Paul took notice of Jeanne de la Motte because Jeanne had a habit of telling everyone at Court all about how she was a low-key best friend of Queen Marie Antoinette. French court is so chaotic- the original Gossip Girl vibes of backstabbing, secrets and rumors with hundreds of people everyday. No one ever assumed Jeanne was lying. Charles and Paul wanted more than anything in the world to somehow convince the Queen to buy their 15 million dollar necklace, so in late 1784, early 1785, the jewelers approach Jeanne with a proposition. “Hey ‘Countess’, can you maybe convince your best friend to buy our necklace?” And Jeanne, the savvy con woman replied, “for a commission, of course I can.” And desperate Charles and Paul agreed. And Jeanne set to work on her plan.
Now Jeanne and her husband had a… let’s call it an open marriage. Because that’s what it was, haha. They both had side lovers and didn’t hide it from each other. And in 1784 when she took on her sales assignment from Charles and Paul, Jeanne has positioned herself as the mistress to a Catholic high ranking clergy member, a Cardinal named Louis de Rohan (ro-hun). Unlucky for him, Cardinal de Rohan was out of favor with Queen Marie Antoinette for a couple of reasons. Number one, he has vocally opposed her marrying into the French family in the first place. Not really rolling out the welcome mat to start a friendship with that one. Two, he had acted a fool on a trip to Vienna in front of Marie’s mother, the Empress of Austria. Historical record states the Cardinal “made a great spectacle of himself.” And three, the Cardinal made no secret he had mistresses and taken bribes in the past, and Marie Antoinette did not like that. So she basically blacklisted him.
If you were out of favor with a member of the French royal family, your social and political life took a huge hit. No one wanted to be seen with you. No parties. No insider political deals. And most importantly, you were not welcome at French court. Cardinal de Rohan desperately wanted the Queen to like him so he could stop being a social outcast. Jeanne saw her boyfriend’s desire to be popular as her ticket to the necklace.
Jeanne started telling Cardinal de Rohan all about her close friendship with the Queen. Since the Cardinal was shunned from court and didn’t have any high society friends, he never heard anything to refute Jeanne’s version of the truth. He thought his girlfriend was now besties with the very person HE wanted to be friends with. Jeanne told the Cardinal, “ you know… I bet my girl Marie would read a letter from you.” So he wrote an adoring “please forgive me for smack-talking you and your family and for being a venal clergy man” apology letter and gave it to Jeanne, who promised to hand-deliver it to her gal pal.
And lo and behold, a few days later- Cardinal de Rohan is thrilled when Jeanne brings him Marie Antoinette’s reply letter! The Queen writes she accepts his apology and wants to be friends, but they have to keep their friendship secret so Marie can save face in French court for now, since she blacklisted de Rohan. De Rohan was so overjoyed to be in the Queen’s favor again, he asked Jeanne to arrange he and the Queen to meet in person to confirm their friendship. Jeanne dutifully sets it up, and one dark night, Cardinal de Rohan meets the Queen in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, where he gives her roses and the Queen promises to “forget and forgive past disagreements.”
De Rohan thinks his life just changed drastically and he starts regularly expressing his loyalty and devotion through letters happily couriered to the Queen by his girlfriend Jeanne. And the Cardinal is not wrong in his thinking that the very course of his life had just been altered- it certainly had.
But it was all a lie.
Jeanne and her husband were the ones writing the Queen’s replies to de Rohan. The Cardinal is getting catfished. He is fully fooled, he thinks he has a secret relationship going with Marie Antoinette. And that dark garden meeting? That wasn’t the Queen. It was a prostitute Jeanne hired and dressed up to look like her royal highness. I guess we can assume Cardinal de Rohan wanted to believe it was Marie so badly, he never questioned the validity of the woman in front of him. Maybe he hadn’t seen the Queen up close before or maybe the garden was just really, really dark that night. Whatever the circumstances, Cardinal de Rohan bought was Jeanne was selling, hook line and sinker.
Once the Cardinal is locked into the ruse, Jeanne slyly makes her move. On January 21st, 1785, she tells de Rohan her bestie Marie really wants to buy an expensive necklace, but she can’t do so publicly because the country is not exactly economically thriving. Would her dear friend de Rohan please do her a favor? The Cardinal jumped at the chance to endear himself further in the Queen’s eyes and agreed. His written instructions (forged, of course) arrived from the Queen. De Rohan was to go to Charles and Paul and tell them he was supposed to pick up the necklace secretly for Marie Antoinette and then de Rohan would begin paying for the necklace in installments to the jewelers and the Queen would secretly reimburse de Rohan back later.
Now… this all seems suspicious as heck to me and like it would fall apart under any questioning. So, good thing (for Jeanne at least) no one asked any questions. The Cardinal marched off to Charles and Paul, showed them the written letter… and the jewelers were so thrilled to finally be selling their necklace- they just handed it over!! And sticking to their… obviously super smart way to do business- they don’t collect any money up front, no down payment. They hand the 15 million dollar necklace to de Rohan. De Rohan leaves their meeting and takes the necklace to Jeanne’s house where a valet, a male messenger, is waiting. He says he is from the Queen’s household and de Rohan hands him the necklace and the valet leaves. De Rohan goes home, thinking he has just secured his triumphant return to French high society.
But that male messenger? He’s a secret second boyfriend of Jeanne’s, a man named Retaux (re-toe) de Villette. And he took the necklace apart and sold all its diamonds on the black market, mostly in London, historians believe. The money was funneled back to be spilt with Jeanne and her husband.
So the heist had been pulled off, the 15 million dollar necklace had bloodlessly been parted from it’s creators with nary a coin spent. I would have to commend Jeanne on her cleverness… but for all her sneakiness and cunning… the woman seemed to have no end game for her con. After her big score with the necklace… she stays in Paris. She stays in the French court like nothing has happened. And not surprisingly, the house of cards crashes down. Charles and Paul wait a little while for their first payment for the necklace. They pester Cardinal de Rohan, who in turns asks Jeanne. Jeanne gives him a little bit of money (we don’t know how much, or from where she got it), and de Rohan gives it to Charles and Paul. Not satisfied, or perhaps sensing a swindle… Charles and Paul then go straight to what they consider the source- the Queen herself. They approach Queen Marie Antoinette in court and ask for payment for the necklace.
Understandably, the Queen is super confused. She hasn’t heard anything about this necklace since she declined to buy it in 1781. It’s four years later, what the heck? Charles and Paul show her the written letter of her “instructions” the Cardinal gave them basically as a trade for the necklace. And there’s a big-time red flag. The signature at the end of the letter is wrong. Jeanne and her con men forger team didn’t know that French royals only ever signed personal letters with just their first name. So having “Marie Antoinette de France” on a personal letter would never ever happen, she would have signed with her birth name, “Maria Antonia.”
With this discovery, everything fell apart rapidly. The Cardinal was arrested, and it was a domino effect from there. He pointed the authorities at Jeanne and her obvious trail of lies. Everyone was arrested within days, Jeanne, her husband Nicholas, the prostitute from the garden, and Retaux (re-toe) de Villette. Randomly, the authorities also arr ested this guy named Alessandro Cagliostro, who was an occultist and magician, and had no involvement in the Affair but the authorities wanted an excuse to banish him from France for his beliefs, so they used this as an excuse. Everybody is arrested and sent to the Tower of Bastille.
Okay, so remember when I said there had been a point in time where the Affair of the Diamond Necklace could have just… stopped? When Charles and Paul decided to keep assembling the necklace after the king who commissioned it had died. That was a choice that pushed this narrative forward instead of ending it. Well there is a second moment in time that could have lessened the historical impact of the Affair. It is the choice of the King and Queen of France to host a big public spectacle of a trial for the offenders. After finding out about the Affair, the royals could have paid off Charles and Paul and quietly punished the team of thieves. No one in the public had to know any of this happened. However, the French royals incorrectly thought this whole situation was a golden opportunity for them to improve their bad reputation. They wanted to convey to the public that they were trying not actually lavish spenders of money and look- they had caught some thieves! But that completely backfired on them.
The public heard all the details of the Affair of the Diamond Necklace and they interpreted the entire trial as a huge smoke show, hiding the fact that Marie Antoinette had actually written the letters to Cardinal de Rohan, and had conned the jewelers out of their prized necklace. Basically, the public thought the trial was a government cover-up.
The official verdicts from the trial were mixed. Cardinal de Rohan was acquitted of wrong doing, and he actually experienced a surge in public popularity- his acquittal was seen as a victory over a vindictive Queen who had never openly liked de Rohan. Jeanne de Motte was whipped and sent to prison for life. But ever the clever woman, she dressed up as a boy and escaped less than a year into her sentence, and get this- she went to London and wrote a memoir about the Affair from her point of view, which sold a bunch of copies and did not help Marie Antoinette’s unpopularity. The poor prostitute who had to dress up as the Queen in the garden, her name was Nicole, she told the court she had no idea what was going on, when Jeanne hired her to be the Queen she thought it was an acting role. The court believed her and freed her, and then Nicole fell in love and got together with her defense attorney. The two conmen involved, Nicholas de Motte and Retaux de Villette, skipped town. Even though he had fled the country, Nicholas got condemned to life as a gallery slave. Well, no one knows where he went, but he sure didn’t end up a slave, he just vanished from history. As for Retaux, the court didn’t seem to know exactly what punishment he should get, so they just decided to banish him from the country. Retaux thought that was fine, he was already gone, he went to Italy and also wrote a disparaging book about the Affair, which helped darken Marie Antoinette’s reputation.
That is the true loser in all of this: the Queen’s reputation. She was already very unpopular due to her early history of excessive spending, and the trial heighted public dislike to a level historians mark as “near-hatred.” The aftermath of the trial of the Affair of the Diamond Necklace was a public relations nightmare for the Queen. Thousands of pamphlets and flyers began circulating talking about how terrible she was, with drawings of her with her head on a beast’s body, stating how, quote, “she symbolized, among other things, the lavishness and corruption of a dying regime” end quote. It was game over for Marie Antoinette in terms of having a life among the common French people. She was rarely seen in public after the trial of the Affair. The country’s population had fully turned against her and the monarchy. Indeed, less than three years later, the French Revolution would begin and in 1793, Marie Antoinette was executed at the guillotine.
Can one piece of jewelry bring down a monarchy? No. Can one necklace help provide a spark to light the tinder of a revolution? I submit that yes, this one did.
Now, the diamond necklace was broken apart into pieces and sold on the black market. But you know, a diamond is forever. And there were 647 diamonds in that necklace. Where did those 647 diamonds go? We have no way of tracing those stones, but I like to sit with the thought that there are people out there in the world who own a piece of this infamous diamond necklace. The 647 diamonds live on… somewhere. Sparkly anonymous representatives of their moment in history.
That’s all for this episode of Tea and Gemstones, I hope you enjoyed it. If you have an idea for a future episode or just want to connect, message us on Instagram @ Tea and Gemstones, or on Twitter. Please see the podcast show notes for a link to our blog for a transcript of this episode and the bibliography. Our theme music is by Joseph McDade. Thanks for listening everyone, and until next time, stay sparkly.
T&G Episode 003
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Diamond Necklace, The Affair of The.” Wikisource, the Free Online Library, 18 Jan. 2018, en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Diamond_Necklace,_The_Affair_of_the.
“Cardinal de Rohan.” Wikipedia, 13 Sept. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_de_Rohan.
Daubeney, Frederick Sykes. Marie Antoinette and the Diamond Necklace from Another Point of View. Bibliolife DBA of Bibilio Bazaar II LLC, 2015.
History, Alpha. “The Affair of the Diamond Necklace.” French Revolution, 7 Oct. 2020, alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/affair-of-the-diamond-necklace.
“Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy.” Wikipedia, 3 Aug. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_de_Valois-Saint-R%C3%A9my.
Barker, Nancy (Summer 1993). "Let Them Eat Cake: The Mythical Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution". The Historian. 55 (4): 709–724.
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