Chapter XIX: Appendix: Detailed Description of the Diamond Necklace 387 (16)

Madame de la Motte admits having sold to Paris first twenty-two and then sixteen stones, in all thirty-eight stones, for which she received thirty-one thousand livres. She moreover exchanged one stone with a Jew for some china pomade pots and gave Regnier a couple of large stones to mount in rings. The count admits having changed with Furet two of the festoon stones, for which he was allowed two thousand seven hundred livres, having sold or given to Regnier to mount sixteen stones from the tassels, twenty-four very small stones from the sides of the oval stones at the bottom of the tassels, twenty-eight stones encircling the oval pendants, two small stones on each side of the button, six small stones supporting the oval stones between the festoons, and twelve small stones immediately adjoining the ribbon at the top, in all eighty-eight stones. The eight stones encircling the button, and the four stones which supported the tassels, the count admits having in his possession, but they were not at this time unmounted.[468] In addition to the foregoing we must not omit to note the forty small stones which were intrusted to Rétaux de Villette to sell, and for which, no doubt, a market had been long since found in Paris.

The diamonds, therefore, which the De la Mottes themselves admitted the possession of, and those which were proved to have been in their hands, seem to have been as follows:

Sold to Gray 183
Mounted by Gray 61
Sold to Paris 38
Exchanged with Furet 2
Exchanged with a Jew 1
Mounted by Regnier in rings 2
Sold to, and mounted by Regnier 88
Remaining in Count de la Motte’s possession 12
Intrusted to Villette to sell 40
-----
427
=====

As the Necklace contained six hundred and twenty-nine stones, and four hundred and twenty-seven of these were traceable to the De la Mottes, leaving simply two hundred and two, or less than one-third to be accounted for, it follows that Count de la Motte’s statement, to the effect that the queen, or say anybody else even, had “kept two hundred and fifty-six diamonds, comprising the most beautiful part of the Necklace, with ninety-eight small diamonds, and the two finest diamonds of the first size,”[469] in all three hundred and fifty-six diamonds, was, like the generality of his statements respecting the Necklace, a gross lie.

The diamonds parted with seem to have realized the following amounts:

Gray 260,000 livres or francs.
Paris 31,000 ”
Furet 2,700 ”
Regnier 27,000 ”
-------
320,700 livres, or about £12,800.
=======

Madame de la Motte, in her second memorial, puts down the amount received from Paris at 38,000 livres and from Regnier, in money and goods, 58,000 livres, equivalent to an increase of 38,000 livres or upwards of £1,500 to the foregoing amount, bringing up the sum total to £14,300 sterling. If to this we add the value of what the count calls the button stone, for which one thousand guineas were offered him in England, and of the two large brilliants set by Regnier as rings, and valued by him at twenty-five thousand livres, together with the value of the necklace and earrings set by Gray, of the diamond-mounted _bonbonnière_,[470] of the pair of drop earrings set by Regnier, of the eight diamonds encircling the button, and the four others which supported the tassels, together with the forty small stones which Villette tried to sell, we shall arrive at a gross total little short of £20,000.

The Countess de la Motte states that, during one of her confrontations with the Cardinal de Rohan, she said out loud to him, in presence of the judges: “Ever since these gentlemen have been putting interrogatories to us, you know that neither you nor I have told them a word of truth:”[471] so far as she was concerned, possibly about the truest thing she ever said. To show how unworthy of credit the generality of her statements at the trial were, we will run rapidly through her examinations, and pick out simply such of her assertions as are contradicted by independent testimony, or which she subsequently contradicted herself. Of those numerous statements made by her which the cardinal maintained to be false, we shall say nothing.

Lie 1. That she had never represented she had access to the queen (p. 220).[472] She told Grenier that she had reinstated the cardinal in the good graces of the queen, who dared refuse her nothing (p. 237).

2. That she had never shown any letters purporting to be from the queen, for she had never been honoured with any such letters (p. 220). Putting aside D’Oliva’s evidence on this subject (p. 237), we have that of Grenier, who expressly states that she showed him a letter which she said had been written to her by the queen, but would not allow him to read it (p. 237).

3. That all she knew of D’Oliva was from casually meeting her in the Palais Royal (p. 220). She never met her in the Palais Royal, as she herself subsequently admitted.

4. That she had never told D’Oliva she was a lady of the court, on terms of intimacy with the queen (p. 221).

5. That she had never shown D’Oliva letters purporting to have been written by the queen (p. 221). If not, why, at the confrontation, did she wink at D’Oliva, and make signs to her, at this part of her evidence? (p. 237).

6. That the entire story of dressing up D’Oliva to personate the queen, and of the midnight meeting in the park, was a foolish and incredible fable, most wretchedly concocted by the cardinal (p. 221). Subsequently she admits its truth, but pretends the meeting was a mere pleasantry got up to quiet the cardinal (p. 245). Afterwards, in her “Mémoires Justificatifs,” she says it was all arranged at the suggestion of the queen (p. 87).

7. That she never gave one thousand or three thousand livres, or any money whatever, to D’Oliva (p. 221). Putting aside D’Oliva’s circumstantial statement, with dates and figures (p. 95), Villette admitted having taken her three hundred livres on behalf of the countess, and Father Loth proved having taken another four hundred livres to her for her upholsterer.

8. That she never received either the fifty thousand or the hundred thousand livres which the Baron de Planta conveyed to her from the cardinal (p. 221). The Baron de Planta swore that he handed her both these amounts (p. 236). If she did not receive them, how else did she support her extravagant expenditure at this period of her career? Her stories about the liberal gifts she had received from distinguished persons were one by one proved to be false.

9. That the contract was never given to her to obtain the queen’s approval and signature to it (p. 222).

10. That the said approval and signature were not written by any person she knew (p. 222). Villette confessed to having written them by her direction (p. 244), and thereby admitted he had been guilty of forgery, which he would hardly have done had it not been the truth. Although Madame de la Motte adhered to her denial of these facts at all her examinations, in her “Life” (vol. i. p. 345) she admits that Villette forged both signature and _approuvés_ in her presence.

11. That the story about the cardinal bringing the Necklace to her house, and the casket containing it being handed over to a person who came with a note professing to be from the queen, was absolutely false from beginning to end (p. 223). She subsequently admits the truth of all this in her “Mémoires Justificatifs.” (See p. 127.)

12. That she received two boxes of diamonds from the cardinal in the presence of Cagliostro (p. 226). Cagliostro denied this, and Villette emphatically stated that Cagliostro was entirely innocent of any complicity in the Necklace affair (p. 245).

13. That the Count de la Motte went to England to sell the diamonds on behalf of the cardinal, and having done so, handed the cardinal on his return drafts for one hundred and twenty-one thousand livres and various articles of jewellery received in exchange (pp. 226-7). The countess in her “Life” says not a word of this, but asserts (vol. i. p. 355 _et seq._) that she received the diamonds as a present from the queen, and showed them to the cardinal, by whose advice she sent her husband abroad to sell them on her own, certainly not on the cardinal’s account.

14. That she neither knew nor suspected that any of the diamonds sold by her and her husband formed portions of the Necklace (p. 228). She had previously stated the diamonds sold did belong to the Necklace.

15. That she never gave thirty thousand livres to the cardinal to be handed to the jewellers (p. 228). For what purpose, then, did she borrow thirty-five thousand livres from her notary on the very day? It is true she states that she borrowed this amount to lend to Madame de Crussol, but why did she not call Madame de Crussol to prove the fact?

16. That she had no such transactions with Regnier as those deposed to by him (p. 236). When Regnier produces his books in support of his statement, she admits the whole of them, and attributes her former denial to her bad memory.

17. That Villette did not write any letters to the cardinal in the name of the queen (p. 245). Villette himself confessed to having written a considerable number (p. 244).

18. That she had previously deposed to having seen a letter in the hands of the cardinal, purporting to be from the queen, and saying, “The jewel is superb” (p. 259). She had never deposed to anything of the kind.

19. That Laporte deposed she had told him a hundred times she would have nothing to do with the sale of the Necklace (p. 260). No such assertion as this is to be found in Laporte’s deposition.

Of recent writers on the subject of the Diamond Necklace whose versions of the affair are considered damaging to the reputation of the queen, M. Louis Blanc,[473] is the one to whom the most frequent reference is made. But M. Louis Blanc, no matter in whatever direction his sympathies may lie, is too honest a writer to wilfully misrepresent the truth. He does not assert, therefore, that the queen was a party to the fraud, although he insinuates that there are certain grounds for believing she was mixed up with the transaction. We propose, therefore, to examine the arguments which he brings forward inculpatory of the queen, and to see how far these are capable of being refuted.

In the arguments which M. Louis Blanc advances to prove that an intimacy subsisted between Madame de la Motte and the queen, and that the latter carried on an intrigue with the Cardinal de Rohan, and was a party to the purchase of the Necklace, although he does not exactly maintain the genuineness of the letters said to have passed between the queen and the cardinal, he insinuates as much, and entirely ignores the fact of Villette’s confession that these letters were written by him. The same may be said with regard to Madame de la Motte’s presumed intimacy with Marie-Antoinette. She boasted, observes M. Louis Blanc, of her relations with the queen, which she would not have done had there been no foundation for them, for fear of the imposture being discovered; which is equivalent to saying that people will not tell lies for fear they should be found out, a proposition which the amount of falsehood current in the world proves to be untenable.

M. Louis Blanc dwells upon the fact of Madame de la Motte having desired the jewellers to be very cautious in their dealings with the cardinal, but he says nothing of the excellent use she put this to in her defence, and which proves she had an ulterior object in acting as she did. In like manner she made all she could of the circumstance of her having declined a commission on the sale of the Necklace. But what did she want with a commission?—she meant to have the Necklace itself. To receive a commission from the jewellers for having cheated them out of their property was a little too much for even the Countess de la Motte.

The box containing the Necklace, says M. Louis Blanc, was given to Lesclaux [Desclaux], the queen’s _valet de chambre_. The supposition is, that he was known to the cardinal, who parted with the box without taking any receipt for it.

The cardinal declared that Villette was the person to whom the box was given; and Villette was certainly there at the time, for the countess’s _femme de chambre_ proved having opened the door to him, and admitting him to Madame de la Motte’s apartment. It is true that a striking difference existed between the individual described by the cardinal and Rétaux de Villette; but this proves but little, for if the countess could trick out a Palais Royal courtesan with sufficient art to palm her off upon the cardinal as Marie-Antoinette, whom the cardinal did know, she would certainly have been competent to transform the forger Villette into the fair-complexioned, light-haired, slim _valet de chambre_ Desclaux, whom the cardinal did _not_ know.

M. Louis Blanc states Madame de la Motte informed the cardinal that the queen would acknowledge the receipt of the Necklace the next day by a secret sign, which was given, an important fact admitted by the Abbé Georgel himself.

We do not find that Madame de la Motte made any such statement. She says the queen wrote a note on the following day acknowledging the receipt of the Necklace.[474] As to the secret sign no one besides the Abbé Georgel, whose narrative M. Louis Blanc admits is full of grave errors, says a word about it, not even the cardinal.

As the time approached for the payment for the Necklace, Madame de la Motte, says M. Louis Blanc, manifests no anxiety.

She manifests every anxiety. She borrows thirty-five thousand livres from her notary on the security of her jewels, thirty thousand of which she takes to the cardinal for him to hand to the jewellers as interest on the purchase money, and thereby induce them to wait. She neither dines, nor sups, nor sleeps at home on that day, her anxiety is so great.

The cardinal declared to M. Baudard de Saint-James, says M. Louis Blanc, that he had seen in the queen’s hands the seven hundred thousand livres destined for the first payment on account of the Necklace. Böhmer, too, informs Madame Campan that the cardinal had told him he had seen the queen take the money from a portfolio in a Sèvres porcelain secretary.

Presuming the cardinal to have said what is stated, it proves nothing against Marie-Antoinette. It was an exaggeration on his part of something which Madame de la Motte had told him; in plain language a lie, told by him to reassure the jewellers and Baudard de Saint-James, who was one of their largest creditors.

M. Louis Blanc tells us that the cardinal hides Madame de la Motte, for fear she should let out the secret of the correspondence, and presses her to fly beyond the Rhine.

All this is denied by the cardinal, and his word is equally worthy of credit with that of the Countess de la Motte, whose statement M. Louis Blanc has adopted.

M. Louis Blanc mentions as a point in the Countess’s favour, that after the arrest of the cardinal she refuses to fly.

It was three o’clock in the morning when, worn out by excitement and fatigue, she had great need of rest, and when she did not believe the danger so imminent as it proved to be, that she refused to fly. What she would have done a few hours later, had she not been arrested in the meanwhile, is another question.

According to M. Louis Blanc the authorities refused to arrest Count de la Motte.

The police agents who arrested the countess had no instructions to arrest her husband, whose complicity in the fraud was not then suspected. The count, however, took good care not to allow them a second opportunity, for in a very few hours he made for the coast as fast as post horses could convey him. M. Louis Blanc complains that Madame de la Motte’s explanations of the confessions of D’Oliva and Villette, and of the deposition of Gray the jeweller, are not allowed to figure in the report of the trial.

M. Louis Blanc has fallen into a grave error here. The countess’s explanations of these different matters figure at full length in the verbatim reports of her two examinations, preserved in the National Archives.[475] Gray’s declaration, too, published in the cardinal’s “Pièces Justificatives,” was, we should imagine, filed by the registrar of the Court.

The silence of the queen on receiving the jeweller’s letter of July 12th is regarded by M. Louis Blanc as evidence of her guilt.

Marie-Antoinette read this letter with no particular attention, and burnt it, says Madame Campan, the moment afterwards in her presence. There was a certain mystery in the language—the Necklace itself not being even mentioned—which, though it might have been clear enough to the queen had she been the purchaser of the jewel, was otherwise full of ambiguity. Besides, she had a firm conviction that Böhmer was somewhat touched in his head—a conviction, by the way, very generally entertained by persons about the court, and openly alluded to during the discussion on the sentence in the Court of Parliament (p. 268).

The cardinal’s well-known diplomatic skill, says M. Louis Blanc, made it impossible for him to have been deceived.

Diplomatic skill counts for little against the arts and wiles of an intriguing woman, and one with whom, it must be remembered, her dupe was madly infatuated; for does not Beugnot tell us that, whilst glancing over some of the hundreds of letters from the Cardinal de Rohan to Madame de la Motte, he saw with pity “the ravages which the delirium of love, aided by that of ambition, had wrought on the mind of this unhappy man?”[476] This is the keynote to much that may seem inexplicable in the cardinal’s conduct in the latter stages of the Necklace affair.

According to M. Louis Blanc Madame de la Motte endeavours to screen the queen.

Whatever she may have done at her preliminary examination, she did not screen the queen before the Court of Parliament, but pretended she had seen in the cardinal’s possession two hundred letters written to him by Marie-Antoinette. All the countess’s aim was to screen herself, no matter whom she sacrificed to attain this object.

M. Louis Blanc says that the Count de la Motte proclaims his intention of speaking the truth, but M. de Vergennes will not consent to his being brought to Paris.

When the trial was over, the count made a great parade of the evidence he could have given. He was too good a judge, however, to come forward at the trial. M. de Vergennes, moreover, could hardly have refused his consent to the count’s coming to Paris out of consideration for the queen, as he had long been her secret enemy, and was an admitted partisan of the cardinal’s.

It is asserted by M. Louis Blanc that the Princess de Lamballe visits the Salpêtrière, and gives alms to the superior for the countess.

M. Louis Blanc does not state whence he derived this information, which we find repeated by another writer on the dubious authority of an anonymous journal written prior to March, 1801.[477] The countess herself, however, makes no allusion to this circumstance either in her “Mémoires Justificatifs” or in her “Life.”

Finally, M. Louis Blanc asserts that the Count de la Motte is paid two hundred thousand livres to suppress the publication of the countess’s “Mémoires Justificatifs.”

No authority is given for this statement, and we doubt if any such large amount, or indeed anything approaching to it, was ever paid. Still, whatever may have been the sum paid for the suppression of these “Mémoires,” even if the queen were a party to the transaction, it proves really nothing against her. Our own criminal records abound in instances of victims submitting to extortion for a long series of years, to save themselves from threatened exposure—to escape being accused of some degrading crime of which they are known to have been perfectly innocent.

It is no part of our plan to enter upon a defence of Marie-Antoinette against those other accusations which the bitter hatred of individuals and the fierce passions of the time laid to her charge. One of her ablest defenders has said, that “all of youth, all of the woman, all of humanity in the unfortunate Queen of France, is explained by these words of the Prince de Ligne: ‘The queen’s pretended gallantry was nothing more than a sentiment of profound friendship for a few individuals and a queen’s womanly coquetry, that aimed at pleasing every one.’” Time, which rights all things, is at last doing Marie-Antoinette justice, and “she whom patriotism accused, and demagogism condemned, humanity has well nigh absolved.”