A presumed depiction of Jeanne de la Motte. Available here.

The root of the problem

The diamond necklace at the heart of the scandal was commissioned by King Louis XV in the early 1770s as a gift for his latest official mistress, Madame du Barry. The jewellers, Charles Boehmer and Paul Bassenge, spent years making a masterpiece with more than 600 diamonds and at enormous cost.

They took too long, though. Louis XV died of smallpox in 1774 and his grandson Louis XVI banished du Barry. Desperate to recoup their investment, they tried to sell it to Queen Marie Antoinette but she reportedly declared “we have more need of ships than of diamonds.”

By the early 1780s Boehmer and Bassenge were desperate. At this point Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, a self-styled countess known as Jeanne de la Motte, came up with an elaborate plan. 

The start of the con

Jeanne had already ingratiated herself with Cardinal Prince Louis de Rohan. He was out of favour with the Queen due to previous insults to her mother, and was desperate to restore his standing. Jeanne convinced Rohan that she was in the Queen’s inner circle as a way of getting money from him and began forging letters from Marie Antoinette. Promises of forgiveness were eventually mixed with hints that the Queen wanted to discreetly buy the diamond necklace. The letters were signed “Marie Antoinette de France” even though French royals signed with only their given names but Rohan did not realise this. (This mistake later helped convince the King that Rohan was involved, as he didn’t believe he would be unaware of this etiquette).

Rohan agreed to act as intermediary and signed a contract with the jewellers Boehmer and Bassenge to buy the necklace on the Queen’s behalf.

To persuade him the whole setup was genuine, Jeanne had arranged a night time meeting in the gardens of Versailles. She hired a prostitute, Nicole Le Guay d’Oliva, who resembled Marie Antoinette. Nicole greeted Rohan in the dark, dressed in a white gown and plumed hat, and gave him a rose as a mark of her favour. This encounter in the Queen’s private grounds, convinced Rohan he was truly back in her favour. Luckily for the conspirators, he had never had a private audience with Marie Antoinette and knew her only by sight and from a distance at court functions. He was also desperate to believe.

Once Cardinal de Rohan secured the necklace from Boehmer and Bassenge he gave it to Jeanne, who assured him she would discreetly deliver it to the Queen. Instead, she and her husband Nicolas de la Motte immediately smuggled it out of Paris. It was dismantled and the individual stones sold across Europe, many in London.

In the following months, Boehmer made repeated attempts to secure payment, first discreetly and then more forcefully.

Boehmer approached Rohan directly, pressing him for the money or confirmation that the Queen would soon pay.

Then, in desperation, he sent a letter directly to Queen Marie Antoinette in the summer of 1785, asking for payment. Unsurprisingly, the Queen demanded an investigation .Only then did Rohan realise he may have been duped – he was summoned to court on 15 August 1785 to explain himself. Up to that point, he still believed he had acted on the Queen’s behalf.

The fraud made public

Rohan turned up at Versailles in his full ecclesiastical regalia, preparing to officiate Mass in the Royal Chapel. Instead, he was confronted by King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette.

Rohan produced the forged letters from “Marie Antoinette” and described the midnight garden meeting with the woman he believed had been the Queen. She of course denounced it all as lies and fabrications and King Louis XVI ordered Rohan’s arrest. This was a bold move, given Rohan’s status as a cardinal and member of one of the most powerful noble families. He was imprisoned in the Bastille that same day.

But the Queen’s insistence he be arrested in public backfired. Instead of publicly clearing her name, the arrest gave the impression that she was embroiled in plotting and intrigue.

The aftermath in court

Meanwhile, Jeanne de la Motte fled, was caught and tried. Again, the Queen thought she would be vindicated. But it quickly became a referendum on her character and fuelled anti-royalty sentiment.

Rohan was tried by the Parlement of Paris, not a royal court, which made it more sympathetic to him and less controlled by the monarchy. Sympathy shifted away from the monarchy and toward Rohan, who appeared gullible but not malicious. He was acquitted. The court found he had acted foolishly but not criminally and he was stripped of his court positions but remained free. His acquittal was seen as a rebuke to the Queen.

Jeanne de la Motte claimed she was simply a go-between and scapegoat. She denied the forgeries and blamed everyone else, especially the Queen. She was convicted. She was publicly whipped, branded with a V (for voleuse – thief), and imprisoned in the Salpêtrière, a supposedly inescapable prison. She still managed to escape and fled to London (this is a tale in its own right).

Nicole d’Oliva was also acquitted, as she had been only a pawn in the deception.

The end result was that trial was seen as a symbol of royal corruption, even though the Queen had been 100% innocent. And the scandal hardened public cynicism – it was, as Napoleon noted, the first step on Marie Antionette’s path to the guillotine. 

About the author

Samuel Mee is founder of The Antique Ring Boutique (https://www.antiqueringboutique.com/), based in London. He’s a member of LAPADA and the Society of Jewellery Historians.

Further reading

The story of Jeanne de la Motte in London: https://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-diamond-necklace-affair.html

Affair of the diamond necklace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affair_of_the_Diamond_Necklace

Madame du Barry: https://en.chateauversailles.fr/discover/history/great-characters/madame-barry

Cardinal Rohan:https://queensransom.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/cardinal-rohan/