QUEEN’S DIAMONDS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22356, 1 September 1934, Page 12

QUEEN’S DIAMONDS

SCANDAL OF A NECKLACE A REMARKABLE FORGERY. No child ever bore a more beautiful name than Jeanne de Saint-Remy de Valois. Sho was born in 1756 near Bar-sur-Aube, daughter of the dissolute squire of the Chateau de Fontette, who married a servant girl. He became bankrupt, migrated to Boulogne, died in a workhouse there. His widow, after various adventures, lived with a private soldier in a dilapidated attic. Jeanne, aged eight, and her younger sister, Marguerite, went out daily to beg in the streets, and were mercilessly beaten if they returned with less money than was expected. When she left school at 14 Jeanne worked as dressmaker’s' apprentice, washerwoman, cook. Eventually she married a policeman named Lamotte; later she gave birth to twins, who survived but a few days. Yet she was reputed to have royal blood in her veins, elected herself Countess do la Motte, _ “ gatecrashed” into the Court of Louis XVI at Versailles, and was the chief conspirator in a scandal which helped to precipitate the French. Revolution. That scandal, retold with historic finesse by Mr Jocelyn Rhys, concerned a necklace, worth £65,000, which the Paris firm of Bohmer, court jewellers, washed to sell Queen Marie Antoinette. It comprised a row of very large stones round the neck, a double row of diamonds lying on the breast, and loops and tassels of diamonds. Bohmer had borrowed half its value from the paymaster-general of the navy and other people; the interest was mounting up; but still the Queen would- not buy—not even when the jeweller burst into tears and implored her, on his knees, either to do so or give him her royal pernvission to drown himself in the Seine. The Countess de la Motte, then an impecunious hanger-on of the court, getting deeper and deeper into debt, heard of this necklace and hatched an audacious fraud. She had become familiar with the Cardinal de Rohan, Grand Almoner of France, and duped him into believing that she could influence the Queen, who disliked him, to look upon him with a more favourable eye. This adventuress had even gone so far as to arrange a secret meeting between cardinal and Queen at night in “the Queen’s shrubbery." In this brief encounter, although he did not know it, his role was that of Malvolio; for a friend of the countess impersonated the Queen and graciously allowed -him to kiss the hem of her gown. A Malvolio, intent on royal favour and preferments, makes a good catspaw. The countess did not hesitate to use him as such. She told him that the King refused to buy the Queen this very costly necklace, but Marie Antoinette had resolved to buy it secretly herself and elected the cardinal her agent to negotiate with the jewellers. The deal was arranged in January, 1785. ine £65,000 was to be paid in four instalments, the first on August 1, the remaining ones at intervals of four months thereafter. The countess went off to consult the Queen” and returned with the news that Marie Antoinette approved of the terras, but would not sign any document. The cardinal insisted upon some ratification under the Queen's hand, and eventually the document, which had already been signed by Bohmer . . • and by de Rohan as responsible intermediary, was brought back to the cardinal by Jeanne with “ Bon. Marie Antoinette de France written in the margin. . De Rohan, wdio was also a prince, took that for the autograph of the Queen, and so did the jewellers, to whom it was shown! The necklace was delivered to the cardinal on February I; the cardinal passed it on to Jeanne. Both are sitting in the drawing room admiring the necklace when a knock on the door is heard. D e Rohan steps back into an alcove, and a man in the Queen’s livery enters, announees himself as “ On Her Majesty s Ser* vice,”' and delivers a letter from the Queen ordering that the bearer shall be given the necklace. The messenger, of course, is an accomplice of Jeanne, one de Vilette, blessed with a remarkable facility for forging the Queen’s handwriting and signature. . . . Jeanne at once had the wonderful necklace broken up and the diamonds sold in batches in Paris and London. From Gray of New Bond street alone, says Mr Rhys, her husband carried oil £6OOO worth of jewellery in exchange for some of them. Jeanne “ set up house ” in earnest near her birthplace at Bar-sur-Aube. Jeanne and her husband apparently had no fear that a day of reckoning was bound to come. When an instalment was overdue, and the day did come, Jeanne resorted to every kind of duplicity. She even accused de Rohan, implying that an unsavoury affair with another woman had induced him to commit fraud. On August 15 the cardinal, dressed in his full canonicals, had to go to Versailles to conduct an important ceremony in the Chapel Royal. The King and Queen summoned him and demanded a written explanation. The interview terminated, and as soon as the cardinal left the private apartment m which it had taken place and entered the room where all the Court was assembled waiting for the religious ceremony to take place he was, by the King’s orders, publicly arrested and led away. The next day he was lodged in the Bastille. On the 20th Jeanne was lodged there, too. So was that arch-impostor, Cagliostro, whom Jeanne also sought to involve. Her husband fled to England. At the subsequent inquiry the cardinal and Cagliostro were freed; Jeanne was sentenced to be publicly flogged, branded on the shoulders with the letter V (for voleusc, thief), imprisoned for life, and to have her possessions confiscated. Jeanne languished in the Salpetnere only a year, then she contrived to escape and joined her husband in Loudon, where she staved off penury by writing her scurrilous memoirs. In June, 1791, a bailiff called about a de.bt. Mistaking him for Nemesis in the shape of a policeman, she leapt out 01 a seeond-stoi'ey window, died from her injuries two months later, and was buried at Lambeth. “The Diamond Necklace affair,” says Mr Rhys, “ was one of the sparks that started the conflagration which is called ‘The French Revolution.’” He is a captivating chronicler, not only of this incredible necklace affair, but of the Versailles Court and its ludicrous formalities. He writes with zest, and with astute irony.