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4.5
France in the mid-1780s was a creaking old machine that was almost out of fuel. An uninspiring monarchy supported by a talentless nobility and an increasingly corrupt Church held all the political power, while the tax burdened bourgeoisie and peasantry struggled to survive in a declining economy strangled by debt and weakened by drought. In the middle of all this gloom and doom a sensational scandal erupted that implicated Queen Marie Antoinette herself in a byzantine plot that featured a garish piece of jewelry, an adventuress claiming royal ancestry, several other shady characters of both sexes, and the wealthy nobleman Louis Cardinal de Rohan. As Jonathan Beckman ably recounts, the Diamond Necklace Affair transfixed France and all of Europe for months and eventually led to the further discrediting of the House of Bourbon and the French nobility.The scandal began several years earlier with the creation of what must have been the ugliest diamond necklace ever constructed: 2800 carats arranged in several loops and flourishes that threatened to break its unlucky wearer's neck. Not surprisingly, the jewelers who created this monstrosity had difficulty selling it, and it lay in their vault for years while they searched for someone wealthy and tasteless enough to buy it. Then in the 1780s came Comtesse Jeanne de la Motte Valois, as she styled herself. Illegitimately descended from a former ruling dynasty, Jeanne spent her life figuring out ways to con other people out of money. She was quite good at it thanks to her beauty and total lack of any sense of morality. Jeanne and her husband (a former soldier who had no real title) inveigled themselves into the outer edges of French high society until they finally managed to make the acquaintance of the Cardinal de Rohan. Louis de Rohan must be considered one of the great chumps of history. Handsome, wealthy, but not very wise, he desired more than anything to become the friend of Queen Marie Antoinette. Unfortunately, the Queen couldn't stand him and refused to receive him. Jeanne and her husband, desiring to get their hands on the necklace, became friends with the Cardinal and convinced him that she was a close associate of the Queen. Marie Antoinette, according to the La Mottes, wanted the necklace but couldn't get King Louis XVI to buy it for her. Therefore, she wanted the Cardinal to obtain it for her with the promise that she would pay for it in stages. Rohan fell for this con-game, which also featured a prostitute standing in for the Queen in the gardens of Versailles; the infamous alchemist and con-artist Cagliostro; and a number of clumsily forged letters; and obtained the necklace, which promptly disappeared into the hands of the La Mottes. Things unravelled when the jewellers began pestering the Queen for payment. Rohan, Jeanne, and some of the other conspirators ended up in the Bastille while others fled the country. There was a sensational trial that lasted for weeks and ended in Jeanne's branding and imprisonment and Rohan's exile. But the real victims (besides the jewelers, who never got the necklace or their money) were the King and Queen. They lost much of their remaining credibility and were widely believed to have had a hand in the whole affair, darkening their last few years on the throne and accelerating the slide towards Revolution.This is a well written account of the scandal which left me shaking my head at the extreme gullibility displayed by so many of the characters, especially the Cardinal. The adventures of the La Mottes and their confederates were amusing to read for the sheer brazenness of their conduct and somewhat awe-inspiring by the amount of gall they displayed, even after their ruse had been uncovered. I also appreciated the final chapters which summarized the fates of most of the characters, from the King and Queen down to the La Mottes, Cagliostro, and even the prostitute. In the end, How To Ruin A Queen illuminates not just the Diamond Necklace Scandal, but the sorry state of affairs in pre-Revolutionary France itself.
