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.
The Trial
The Queen was innocent and to give greater publicity to her innocence she desired the Parlement to judge the case. The result was that the Queen was thought guilty and that discredit was thrown on the Court.
I saw that he (de Rohan) would be unable to appear any more at Court.
But the action, which will last several months, may have other results. It began by the issue of a warrant of arrest which suspends him from all rights, functions and faculty of performing any civil act until judgment is pronounced. Cagliostro, charlatan. La Motte and his wife together with a girl named Oliva, a mud lark of the gutters, are in the same boat. What associates for a Grand Almoner, a Rohan and a Cardinal!
The Queen’s grief was extreme. “Come,* said Her Majesty to me, ‘come, and lament for Your Queen, insulted and sacrificed by cabal and injustice …” The King came in and said to me: “You find the Queen much afflicted; she has great reason to be so.”
All the actors in die Diamond Necklace affair were in the Bastille, with the exception of the Comte de la Motte, who had escaped to London with what was left of the necklace, and the whole of the court and the country was working itself up into a fever of excitement and expectation.
Each day Paris was filled with excited crowds. No one talked of anything but the coming trial. The Cardinal had changed completely. He was lodged in a fine apartment at the Bastille, very different from that used by ordinary prisoners, and there he took three of his servants to look after him. He-paid one hundred and twenty livres a day for his lodging; and he was allowed to receive visits from his family, his secretaries, and of course his counsel, with whom he was preparing his defence. The drawbridge of the Bastille had to be kept lowered all through the day, so many visitors were there; he even gave a banquet in his rooms at which champagne was served. He continued to administer the business his position demanded as though the Bastille were another of his palaces which for the sake of convenience he was temporarily obliged to occupy. He took daily exercise in the Governor’s garden or walked on the platform of the towers.
Supported by his powerful family he was gaining confidence When he heard that Louis had appointed Breteuil as one of his interrogators he immediately protested on the grounds that Breteuil was an enemy.
Louis, eager to be fair, at once agreed to make a change and substituted Vergennes, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, for Breteuil, and instead of Breteuil’s assistant he ordered that Marshal de Castries, Minister of Marine, should assist Vergennes.