December 24, 2019 • 25 mins
"The Queen's death must be dated from the Diamond Necklace Trial." The nation turned against Queen Marie Antoinette when she became an unwitting pawn in the most ambitious catfish in history.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Aaron Mankey. Listener discretion is advised. I've already told
a story about Marie Antoinette on this podcast, the show's
very first episode, in fact, but considering it's Christmas, I
figured I'd give myself the gift of getting to tell
(00:20):
one more story about my favorite doomed queen. In the
eighteenth century, a man named Louis renee de Rohan had
the good luck of being born to one of France's
most prominent families, the Roanne clan boasted bishops and princes,
ambassadors and dukes. In seventeen seventy one, at age thirty seven,
(00:45):
Louis renee de Rohan was sent as part of a
prestigious embassy to Vienna, Austria. He was just a vicar then,
but it was practically a foregone conclusion that in time
he would become a cardinal and then a minister of France.
But the future Cardinal de Rohan didn't quite act like
a man of the cloth. As soon as he arrived
(01:06):
in Vienna, he flirted extravagantly with almost everyone he met,
charming anyone from a duchess to a chambermaid people young
and old, beautiful and ugly. He hunted more often than
he prayed. He threw elaborate dinner parties where he openly
flaunted social conventions, and seated people wherever he liked. The
(01:27):
Cardinal brought with him an entourage to Vienna, who abused
the palace staff and brought goods in and out of
the country in bags with diplomatic seals. And so it
was no surprise that the Empress of Austria, Maria Teresa,
hated Cardinal de Rohan. Less than a month after the
French envoy arrived, the Empress was writing to the Austrian
(01:51):
ambassador in France that the future Cardinal was quote a
very wicked subject, without talent, without discretion, without morals. As
it so happened, the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa had some
power in France. Her daughter Marie Antoinette had just married
the Dauphine, the country's future king, the grandson of King Louis.
(02:17):
But that didn't matter to the future Cardinal de Rohan. Yet.
While he was still in Austria, he sent a letter
back to Madame de Berry, the official mistress of King Louis,
mocking the doughty two faced The Austrian Empress Madame de
Berry read the letter out loud to uproarious laughter at
one of her famous dinner parties. Word got back to
(02:40):
the Princess Marie Antoinette. When Marie Antoinette eventually became Queen,
Cardinal de Rohan received a blissteringly chilly reception at court.
Although the Rowans were too powerful to have allowed Marie
Antoinette to prevent their son from becoming a cardinal, she
could absolutely keep his career from advancing any further. He
(03:02):
would never become a Minister of France, not as long
as she was queen, and he would never again get
the gleeful courtly prominence that he had enjoyed in drawing
rooms with Madame de Barry. Marie Antoinette was many things,
but she was a queen and not a mistress. The
story should have ended there, just one of a thousand
(03:23):
examples of courtly slights and political maneuvers. In Versailles, a
place almost entirely fueled by gossip, rumors and political maneuvers,
and the story would have ended there if it hadn't
been for a con artist a diamond necklace and perhaps
the most ambitious catfish in history. One cardinal and one
(03:44):
diamond necklace set off a chain of events that would
end with Marie Antoinette's head on a guillotine. Years later,
Napoleon would write, the Queen's death must be dated from
the diamond necklace trial. It's only in retrospect that these
things come into clarity. The stakes always seem small until
(04:06):
they spiral out of control. I'm Dani Schwartz, and this
is noble blood. Madame de Berry, the mistress of Louis
the fifteenth, was born the illegitimate daughter of a seamstress.
But she was smart and she knew what she wanted.
(04:27):
She wanted to get into Versailles, and so she climbed
the social ladder via lovers, seducing men who then introduced
her to more prominent men, whom she then in turn seduced.
Eventually she made it to the bed of the King
of France. One convenient marriage to account later, and Madame
(04:48):
de Berry was officially a countess and eligible to be
crowned official royal mistress. You see, you couldn't get to
be the King's official mistress unless you held a title
your self Madame Duberry's marriage to Compte Guillaume de Berry
was sealed with a fake birth certificate that dated her
as three years younger than she actually was. Some royal
(05:12):
mistresses involved themselves in politics, Madame de Berry preferred to
be involved in fashion. The King gave her extravagant gifts, gowns, houses, jewelry,
and then in seventeen seventy two, the King set out
to give the ultimate gift, a necklace. But not just
(05:34):
any necklace. The King went to the luxury Parisian jewelers
Boehmer and BassaNge and demanded a necklace that would be
more extravagant than any other necklace that had ever been made.
The necklace they came up with could politely be described
as a monstrosity. It was constructed of six hundred and
(05:55):
forty seven diamonds with a combined weight of two thousand,
eight hundred carrots. The necklace began with a row of
massive diamonds in a choker. Three diamond arches dangled down
from it, each with their own pennant diamonds hanging down
like an inverted tiara, and then another layer of diamonds,
(06:17):
a deep v that would descend down lower on Madame
de Berry's chest, and then from that four more dangling
pieces that each ended in a dainty little diamond bow
and dainty little diamond tassels. The cost was estimated to
be over two million livres or what today would be
(06:38):
fifteen million dollars. The problem was, before the necklace had
been finished, Louis the fifteenth came down with smallpox and died.
His mistress was politely dismissed and sent to a nunnery,
(07:00):
and the necklace had never been paid for. Boehmer and
Bassage were left with a debt of millions of dollars,
a massive diamond necklace, and no one to sell it to.
The natural choice. Perhaps the only woman wealthy enough to
buy the necklace was the new Queen Murrie Antoinette. The
young Queen was already sending ripple waves through court for
(07:23):
her extravagance when it came to her dresses and hair.
As you know, her mother Maria Theresa wrote, I have
always been of the opinion that fashions should be followed
in moderation, but should never be taken to extremes. A
beautiful young woman, a graceful queen, has no need for
such madness. Murrie Antoinette did not heed her mother's advice.
(07:48):
If any one was going to buy the massive necklace,
it would be Murrie Antoinette. So in seventeen seventy eight,
the two jewelers came to Versailles bearing the massive necklace,
hoping to entice the Queen. The King Louis graciously offered
to buy it for his wife, but she turned it down.
(08:09):
It's too expensive. The young Marie Antoinette said the money
would be better spent on warships. That's what she said,
but whether or not she actually believed it is up
for debate. Marie Antoinette never did seem to be the
type of person who would have trouble spending money on
clothes or jewelry. What's more plausible, at least to your
(08:31):
humble narrator, is that Marie Antoinette didn't want to waltz
around Versailles and a massive, attention grabbing necklace that had
been designed for another woman, and not just any woman,
a mistress, and the despised Madame de Berry at that.
But whether it was her love of worships or her
(08:51):
hatred for Madame de Berry, the end result was the
same the jewelers were stuck with a multimillion dollar necklace
that nobody wanted. They tried other luxury markets all over
Europe no dice. In a desperate move, they came back
to Versailles three years later in the necklace still unsold,
(09:14):
and tried to sell it once again to Marie Antoinette
for her husband to gift her for the birth of
their son, Louis Joseph. The king is said to have
briefly considered it, but a military defeat distracted him and
took an expensive purchase off the table. At that point,
the jewelers admitted to themselves that there was no way
Marie Antoinette was ever going to buy their necklace, and
(09:38):
they were right. She never would, at least not the
real Marie Antoinette. It's about now that I should introduce
a woman named Jean Lemote in a tiny village in
the region of Champagne. Jean Lemote was born into poverty,
though her family had no money and no official title.
(10:00):
They were descended from an illegitimate son of the Valwois
king Henry the Second, but that had been back in
the mid sixteenth century and over the generations whatever money
the family once had had long since dissolved. By the
time we came to gen Le Moote's father, the sixth
and final child of a second son himself, the family
(10:21):
was heavily in debt, selling off pieces of their land
acre by acre. Gen Learmont's mother was the family housekeeper.
When Jean was eight years old, the three of them, father,
mother and daughter fled their village to escape creditors and
walked two hundred kilometers on foot to Paris. Jean spent
(10:43):
most of her childhood begging on the street, enticing passers
by with her story of being a descendant of royalty.
But all the while she kept her eyes to Versailles,
never wavering from the belief that she deserved wealth and
title and status, and that one day she would get it.
(11:08):
In see the twenty seven year old Jean, by then married,
made the acquaintance of a certain Cardinal de Rohan. Cardinal
de Rohan by this point was cursing his foolishness for
making an enemy of Marie Antoinette. His career had stalled.
Even his will connected and powerful family couldn't do anything
(11:29):
to cancel out the disfavor of the Queen and that's
part of the reason why this young Jean de LaMotte
was so appealing to him. She said that she was
a contest and a frequent guest at Versailles, and a
close personal friend of Murrie Antoinette. If the Cardinal wanted
(11:50):
to write a letter to Marie Antoinette extending an olive branch,
Jean de LaMotte would make sure that the queen received it.
The Cardinal de Rohan gleefully took Jean de LaMotte's advice.
The Cardinal was ecstatic when, just a few days later,
Jean delivered to him a reply from the Queen herself.
(12:12):
The letter was far more friendly than the Cardinal had anticipated,
flirtatious almost He was slightly flummixed, but quickly comforted himself
with his extraordinary self confidence in his natural animal magnetism.
Of course, the Queen would be interested in him, why
wouldn't she be, he wrote back. The queen wrote back again.
(12:36):
Before long, the two of them had become pen pals
of increasing intimacy, to the point where the Cardinal was
almost certain that the Queen, Marie Antoinette, was in love
with him. Perhaps you see where this story is going.
Because the Cardinal had not been receiving letters from the
queen at all. Jean de LaMotte had promised to deliver
(12:59):
his letters, but instead brought them to her lover, a
gigilow named Martas de Viollette, and together they forged notes
from the queen and delivered them to the love struck cardinal.
The cardinal, all the while gladly sent donations along to
the Queen's charities whenever she asked, and those donations went
directly into the pockets of Jeanne, her husband, and her lover.
(13:27):
One evening, Jean came to the cardinal and told him
that the queen had agreed to a secret rendezvous. Obviously,
due to the political complications of the situation, they couldn't
meet openly in public, but they could meet in the
gardens of Versailles at night, where no one would see them.
The meeting was arranged on a particularly moonless night. Jean
(13:51):
and her lover had hired a young prostitute named Nicolle
la Guay de'olivia, famous in certain circles for her resemblance
to the queen. The Cardinal, not picking up on the ruse,
presented the fake queen with a single red rose, and
in return Nicole told the Cardinal that all of their
(14:11):
past disagreements were forgiven, exactly what she had been told
to say. The Cardinal bowed deeply to the fake Marie Antoinette,
but before event could progress any further, Jean interrupted to
say that the meeting needed to end immediately. Someone was
coming and they would be caught. And so the Cardinal
(14:32):
left the gardens of Versailles more certain than ever of
the solidity of his special relationship with the Queen. It
was finally time for Jean and her lover to execute
the final stage in their plan. Pretending to be Marie Antoinette,
they wrote that there was a certain necklace that she
wanted to buy desperately. Unfortunately, though, due to the public
(14:55):
perceptions of her overspending, she couldn't be the one to
purchase it, at least not openly. Would her darling personal
friend the Cardinal cement their relationship by procuring the necklace
for her and sending it to Versailles care of their
mutual friend, Jean de LaMotte. The Cardinal brought the fake
(15:16):
letter from the queen to the jewelers and bought the
necklace for four point seven million dollars. I'm loan upon
the solemn promise that the queen would pay them back
in six months. The jewelers were delighted to finally be
rid of the necklace. They paid Jean de Lamote a commission,
(15:37):
which at first she graciously refused, before ultimately changing her mind.
Shortly thereafter, a footman from Versailles arrived to the cardinal's
home to take the necklace. The cardinal had never met
Jean's lover Atte de Volette. Of course he hadn't, but
if he had, he probably would have recognized that he
was not actually handing off the necklace to a real
(16:00):
footman from Versailles. Jean's lover and her husband broke up
the diamonds of the necklace together, brought them to London
and sold them on the black market. Everything went according
to plan, at least it did for six months, but
(16:21):
the jewelers still hadn't been paid. One of them asked
a chambermaid at firside whether the Queen had worn her
new diamond necklace, yet the maid had no idea what
he was talking about. Weeks went by, the jeweller's debts
had begun to catch up with them, and that's when
they gathered the courage to ask Marie Antoinette at court
(16:42):
whether payment for the massive and incredibly expensive diamond necklace
they had sold her might be forthcoming in the near future.
Marie Antoinette had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.
What do you mean, they said the necklace. The annoy
were miss diamond necklace. You mean the necklace that I
(17:03):
turned down multiple times. The Queen replied, as I'm sure
you recall I declined to purchase that necklace. Whatever this
joke is, it needs to end now. It's now that
the jewelers started to panic. Their stomachs turned sweat, began
to cling to their necks and their palms. The necklace,
(17:24):
they repeated, the one that we sent you through the
Cardinal de Rohan. Here the Queen just laughed, as did
everyone in earshot. The Queen hated the Cardinal de Rohan.
Everyone knew that. The jeweler swallowed hard and presented the
letters that the Cardinal had passed along to them as
promise of payment. The Queen stopped laughing. On August, the
(17:53):
Cardinal de Rohan was summoned to Versailles under the pretense
that he would be presiding over the feast of the
Assumption of Mary. But as he entered the palace, he
was ushered not to the chapel, but through the gilded
hall of mirrors to the King's private cabinet, where the
King and queen were waiting. Staring at him. The queen
(18:14):
was nearly shaking with frenetic energy. The King spoke for her.
I hear you purchased diamonds from the jeweler Boehmer, He said, calmly, yes, sire.
The cardinal replied, And what did you do with the
diamonds once you received them? The King asked, I had
them delivered to her Majesty. The queen began to exclaim something,
(18:37):
but was quickly quieted by the King, who spoke once again.
But now even his voice began to shake with anger.
Who he said, or what compelled you to do anything?
On behalf of her majesty? The Cardinal bowed deeply. I
was commissioned by a lady called the contest ill Emote,
(18:58):
a personal friend of her Majesty. He pulled from deep
within his robes a signed letter that Jean de LaMotte
had given him, one signed by the Queen, or at
least when he thought had been signed by the queen.
At this point, Marie Antoinette could hold her tongue no longer.
How could you possibly believe? She exclaimed, that I would
(19:21):
have selected you, of all people, someone I haven't even
spoken to in eight years, to negotiate a necklace that
I didn't even want, via a woman I have never
even heard of. The cardinal just bowed again and handed
the king of the letter he had been given. King
Louis the sixteenth barely glanced at the letter before he scoffed.
(19:44):
This was not written or signed by the queen, The
king said, how could a Prince of rowan one of
France's oldest and most noble families, a family so keen
on details of etiquette and status, not have noticed this.
The King brandished the letter in the cardinal's face and
jabbed with a pointed finger at the forged signature that
(20:07):
read Marie Antoinette de France. The king continued, everyone knows
that queens signed with their baptismal names only. The cardinal
was arrested and shipped back to Paris to the Bastille
awaiting trial. Two days later, Jean de LaMotte and her
lover were captured as well, her husband had already managed
(20:30):
to escape to London. The powerful de Rohan family came
out for the trial with the full force of their
status and majesty. Nineteen high ranking members of the family,
all wearing black and sitting stony face in two rows,
awaiting the judgment of their golden son, who had turned
(20:50):
out to be so so stupid. He was on trial
first for thievery, but then also for defamation of the monarchy,
for his humiliating error in mistaking a prostitute for the queen,
and for believing that the Queen would ever have been
so intimate in her writing with him. In the end,
he was found innocent. He was foolish, gullible, yes, but
(21:14):
not guilty of any actual crimes. Of course, Jean de
LaMotte was actually guilty. She was sentenced to be whipped
and branded with a V on her chest for the
French word for thief, and in prison for life. But
once a scammer, always a scammer. Almost as soon as
she arrived in prison, Jean de Lamote escaped, dressed like
(21:37):
a boy, and she made her way to London. But
the most important legacy of the Diamond necklace affair isn't
the actual trial itself. Before the verdict had even come in,
the public had already made up its mind. To the
people of France, there was no doubt that Marie Antoinette,
the despised Austrian queen who spent so much money on
(22:00):
clothes and hair while her constituent starved, who, according to
the broadsheets and caricatures that went around, was constantly involved
in lesbian orgies and bacchanals, there was no doubt that
she was the one to blame. She had probably just
wanted to buy the necklace herself and figured out a
way to throw the cardinal that she had always hated
(22:23):
under the bus. And since in court her enemy the
cardinal was found innocent, that means by default Marie Antoinette
must be guilty. As you know, this story doesn't have
a happy ending. I already told you that Napoleon wrote
the Queen's death must be dated from the Diamond necklace trial.
(22:43):
The diamond necklace affairs cemented in the minds of the
French people that the queen was a decadent and manipulative royal,
more concerned with jewels than with the welfare of her people.
In less than a decade, the queen would be on trial, herself,
found guilty and beheaded a guillotine blade sent through the
(23:04):
neck that had never wanted to wear that elaborate diamond
necklace in the first place. That's the story of the
diamond necklace affair. But keep listening after a brief sponsor
break to hear more unhappy endings from more of the players.
(23:35):
Like I said, this story has unhappy endings for almost
everyone involved. Although gend LaMotte had escaped prison, she died
only a few years later, falling from a window of
her London hotel while attempting to escape her creditors. But
tragedy also befell Madame de Berry. Remember her, she was
(23:56):
the woman the necklace had been originally designed for. After
the death of King Louis the fifteen, his mistress, Madame
de Berry was dismissed from Versailles. She was exiled to
a nunnery in the countryside. From there she took a
lover and bought some land and re established a life
for herself that eventually brought her back to Paris. But
(24:18):
eventually the French Revolution found Madame de Berry one night,
a bloody mass wrapped in a handkerchief was thrown through
her apartment window. With shaking hands, she opened the bloody
cloth to reveal the head of her decapitated lover. Just
a few weeks after the hated queen went to the guillotine,
(24:40):
Marie Antoinette's former palace rival went herself. Madame de Berry
was beheaded and her body was thrown into the same
mass grave as Marie Antoinette. Petty, agreements, resentments, daily dramas
that had fueled Versailles was all made invisible, covered by
the dirt of their shallow grave. Noble Blood is a
(25:06):
production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Mankey. The show
is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by
Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble
Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and
you can learn more about the show over at Noble
blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
(25:26):
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. M
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Aaron Mankey. Listener discretion is advised. I've already told
a story about Marie Antoinette on this podcast, the show's
very first episode, in fact, but considering it's Christmas, I
figured I'd give myself the gift of getting to tell
(00:20):
one more story about my favorite doomed queen. In the
eighteenth century, a man named Louis renee de Rohan had
the good luck of being born to one of France's
most prominent families, the Roanne clan boasted bishops and princes,
ambassadors and dukes. In seventeen seventy one, at age thirty seven,
(00:45):
Louis renee de Rohan was sent as part of a
prestigious embassy to Vienna, Austria. He was just a vicar then,
but it was practically a foregone conclusion that in time
he would become a cardinal and then a minister of France.
But the future Cardinal de Rohan didn't quite act like
a man of the cloth. As soon as he arrived
(01:06):
in Vienna, he flirted extravagantly with almost everyone he met,
charming anyone from a duchess to a chambermaid people young
and old, beautiful and ugly. He hunted more often than
he prayed. He threw elaborate dinner parties where he openly
flaunted social conventions, and seated people wherever he liked. The
(01:27):
Cardinal brought with him an entourage to Vienna, who abused
the palace staff and brought goods in and out of
the country in bags with diplomatic seals. And so it
was no surprise that the Empress of Austria, Maria Teresa,
hated Cardinal de Rohan. Less than a month after the
French envoy arrived, the Empress was writing to the Austrian
(01:51):
ambassador in France that the future Cardinal was quote a
very wicked subject, without talent, without discretion, without morals. As
it so happened, the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa had some
power in France. Her daughter Marie Antoinette had just married
the Dauphine, the country's future king, the grandson of King Louis.
(02:17):
But that didn't matter to the future Cardinal de Rohan. Yet.
While he was still in Austria, he sent a letter
back to Madame de Berry, the official mistress of King Louis,
mocking the doughty two faced The Austrian Empress Madame de
Berry read the letter out loud to uproarious laughter at
one of her famous dinner parties. Word got back to
(02:40):
the Princess Marie Antoinette. When Marie Antoinette eventually became Queen,
Cardinal de Rohan received a blissteringly chilly reception at court.
Although the Rowans were too powerful to have allowed Marie
Antoinette to prevent their son from becoming a cardinal, she
could absolutely keep his career from advancing any further. He
(03:02):
would never become a Minister of France, not as long
as she was queen, and he would never again get
the gleeful courtly prominence that he had enjoyed in drawing
rooms with Madame de Barry. Marie Antoinette was many things,
but she was a queen and not a mistress. The
story should have ended there, just one of a thousand
(03:23):
examples of courtly slights and political maneuvers. In Versailles, a
place almost entirely fueled by gossip, rumors and political maneuvers,
and the story would have ended there if it hadn't
been for a con artist a diamond necklace and perhaps
the most ambitious catfish in history. One cardinal and one
(03:44):
diamond necklace set off a chain of events that would
end with Marie Antoinette's head on a guillotine. Years later,
Napoleon would write, the Queen's death must be dated from
the diamond necklace trial. It's only in retrospect that these
things come into clarity. The stakes always seem small until
(04:06):
they spiral out of control. I'm Dani Schwartz, and this
is noble blood. Madame de Berry, the mistress of Louis
the fifteenth, was born the illegitimate daughter of a seamstress.
But she was smart and she knew what she wanted.
(04:27):
She wanted to get into Versailles, and so she climbed
the social ladder via lovers, seducing men who then introduced
her to more prominent men, whom she then in turn seduced.
Eventually she made it to the bed of the King
of France. One convenient marriage to account later, and Madame
(04:48):
de Berry was officially a countess and eligible to be
crowned official royal mistress. You see, you couldn't get to
be the King's official mistress unless you held a title
your self Madame Duberry's marriage to Compte Guillaume de Berry
was sealed with a fake birth certificate that dated her
as three years younger than she actually was. Some royal
(05:12):
mistresses involved themselves in politics, Madame de Berry preferred to
be involved in fashion. The King gave her extravagant gifts, gowns, houses, jewelry,
and then in seventeen seventy two, the King set out
to give the ultimate gift, a necklace. But not just
(05:34):
any necklace. The King went to the luxury Parisian jewelers
Boehmer and BassaNge and demanded a necklace that would be
more extravagant than any other necklace that had ever been made.
The necklace they came up with could politely be described
as a monstrosity. It was constructed of six hundred and
(05:55):
forty seven diamonds with a combined weight of two thousand,
eight hundred carrots. The necklace began with a row of
massive diamonds in a choker. Three diamond arches dangled down
from it, each with their own pennant diamonds hanging down
like an inverted tiara, and then another layer of diamonds,
(06:17):
a deep v that would descend down lower on Madame
de Berry's chest, and then from that four more dangling
pieces that each ended in a dainty little diamond bow
and dainty little diamond tassels. The cost was estimated to
be over two million livres or what today would be
(06:38):
fifteen million dollars. The problem was, before the necklace had
been finished, Louis the fifteenth came down with smallpox and died.
His mistress was politely dismissed and sent to a nunnery,
(07:00):
and the necklace had never been paid for. Boehmer and
Bassage were left with a debt of millions of dollars,
a massive diamond necklace, and no one to sell it to.
The natural choice. Perhaps the only woman wealthy enough to
buy the necklace was the new Queen Murrie Antoinette. The
young Queen was already sending ripple waves through court for
(07:23):
her extravagance when it came to her dresses and hair.
As you know, her mother Maria Theresa wrote, I have
always been of the opinion that fashions should be followed
in moderation, but should never be taken to extremes. A
beautiful young woman, a graceful queen, has no need for
such madness. Murrie Antoinette did not heed her mother's advice.
(07:48):
If any one was going to buy the massive necklace,
it would be Murrie Antoinette. So in seventeen seventy eight,
the two jewelers came to Versailles bearing the massive necklace,
hoping to entice the Queen. The King Louis graciously offered
to buy it for his wife, but she turned it down.
(08:09):
It's too expensive. The young Marie Antoinette said the money
would be better spent on warships. That's what she said,
but whether or not she actually believed it is up
for debate. Marie Antoinette never did seem to be the
type of person who would have trouble spending money on
clothes or jewelry. What's more plausible, at least to your
(08:31):
humble narrator, is that Marie Antoinette didn't want to waltz
around Versailles and a massive, attention grabbing necklace that had
been designed for another woman, and not just any woman,
a mistress, and the despised Madame de Berry at that.
But whether it was her love of worships or her
(08:51):
hatred for Madame de Berry, the end result was the
same the jewelers were stuck with a multimillion dollar necklace
that nobody wanted. They tried other luxury markets all over
Europe no dice. In a desperate move, they came back
to Versailles three years later in the necklace still unsold,
(09:14):
and tried to sell it once again to Marie Antoinette
for her husband to gift her for the birth of
their son, Louis Joseph. The king is said to have
briefly considered it, but a military defeat distracted him and
took an expensive purchase off the table. At that point,
the jewelers admitted to themselves that there was no way
Marie Antoinette was ever going to buy their necklace, and
(09:38):
they were right. She never would, at least not the
real Marie Antoinette. It's about now that I should introduce
a woman named Jean Lemote in a tiny village in
the region of Champagne. Jean Lemote was born into poverty,
though her family had no money and no official title.
(10:00):
They were descended from an illegitimate son of the Valwois
king Henry the Second, but that had been back in
the mid sixteenth century and over the generations whatever money
the family once had had long since dissolved. By the
time we came to gen Le Moote's father, the sixth
and final child of a second son himself, the family
(10:21):
was heavily in debt, selling off pieces of their land
acre by acre. Gen Learmont's mother was the family housekeeper.
When Jean was eight years old, the three of them, father,
mother and daughter fled their village to escape creditors and
walked two hundred kilometers on foot to Paris. Jean spent
(10:43):
most of her childhood begging on the street, enticing passers
by with her story of being a descendant of royalty.
But all the while she kept her eyes to Versailles,
never wavering from the belief that she deserved wealth and
title and status, and that one day she would get it.
(11:08):
In see the twenty seven year old Jean, by then married,
made the acquaintance of a certain Cardinal de Rohan. Cardinal
de Rohan by this point was cursing his foolishness for
making an enemy of Marie Antoinette. His career had stalled.
Even his will connected and powerful family couldn't do anything
(11:29):
to cancel out the disfavor of the Queen and that's
part of the reason why this young Jean de LaMotte
was so appealing to him. She said that she was
a contest and a frequent guest at Versailles, and a
close personal friend of Murrie Antoinette. If the Cardinal wanted
(11:50):
to write a letter to Marie Antoinette extending an olive branch,
Jean de LaMotte would make sure that the queen received it.
The Cardinal de Rohan gleefully took Jean de LaMotte's advice.
The Cardinal was ecstatic when, just a few days later,
Jean delivered to him a reply from the Queen herself.
(12:12):
The letter was far more friendly than the Cardinal had anticipated,
flirtatious almost He was slightly flummixed, but quickly comforted himself
with his extraordinary self confidence in his natural animal magnetism.
Of course, the Queen would be interested in him, why
wouldn't she be, he wrote back. The queen wrote back again.
(12:36):
Before long, the two of them had become pen pals
of increasing intimacy, to the point where the Cardinal was
almost certain that the Queen, Marie Antoinette, was in love
with him. Perhaps you see where this story is going.
Because the Cardinal had not been receiving letters from the
queen at all. Jean de LaMotte had promised to deliver
(12:59):
his letters, but instead brought them to her lover, a
gigilow named Martas de Viollette, and together they forged notes
from the queen and delivered them to the love struck cardinal.
The cardinal, all the while gladly sent donations along to
the Queen's charities whenever she asked, and those donations went
directly into the pockets of Jeanne, her husband, and her lover.
(13:27):
One evening, Jean came to the cardinal and told him
that the queen had agreed to a secret rendezvous. Obviously,
due to the political complications of the situation, they couldn't
meet openly in public, but they could meet in the
gardens of Versailles at night, where no one would see them.
The meeting was arranged on a particularly moonless night. Jean
(13:51):
and her lover had hired a young prostitute named Nicolle
la Guay de'olivia, famous in certain circles for her resemblance
to the queen. The Cardinal, not picking up on the ruse,
presented the fake queen with a single red rose, and
in return Nicole told the Cardinal that all of their
(14:11):
past disagreements were forgiven, exactly what she had been told
to say. The Cardinal bowed deeply to the fake Marie Antoinette,
but before event could progress any further, Jean interrupted to
say that the meeting needed to end immediately. Someone was
coming and they would be caught. And so the Cardinal
(14:32):
left the gardens of Versailles more certain than ever of
the solidity of his special relationship with the Queen. It
was finally time for Jean and her lover to execute
the final stage in their plan. Pretending to be Marie Antoinette,
they wrote that there was a certain necklace that she
wanted to buy desperately. Unfortunately, though, due to the public
(14:55):
perceptions of her overspending, she couldn't be the one to
purchase it, at least not openly. Would her darling personal
friend the Cardinal cement their relationship by procuring the necklace
for her and sending it to Versailles care of their
mutual friend, Jean de LaMotte. The Cardinal brought the fake
(15:16):
letter from the queen to the jewelers and bought the
necklace for four point seven million dollars. I'm loan upon
the solemn promise that the queen would pay them back
in six months. The jewelers were delighted to finally be
rid of the necklace. They paid Jean de Lamote a commission,
(15:37):
which at first she graciously refused, before ultimately changing her mind.
Shortly thereafter, a footman from Versailles arrived to the cardinal's
home to take the necklace. The cardinal had never met
Jean's lover Atte de Volette. Of course he hadn't, but
if he had, he probably would have recognized that he
was not actually handing off the necklace to a real
(16:00):
footman from Versailles. Jean's lover and her husband broke up
the diamonds of the necklace together, brought them to London
and sold them on the black market. Everything went according
to plan, at least it did for six months, but
(16:21):
the jewelers still hadn't been paid. One of them asked
a chambermaid at firside whether the Queen had worn her
new diamond necklace, yet the maid had no idea what
he was talking about. Weeks went by, the jeweller's debts
had begun to catch up with them, and that's when
they gathered the courage to ask Marie Antoinette at court
(16:42):
whether payment for the massive and incredibly expensive diamond necklace
they had sold her might be forthcoming in the near future.
Marie Antoinette had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.
What do you mean, they said the necklace. The annoy
were miss diamond necklace. You mean the necklace that I
(17:03):
turned down multiple times. The Queen replied, as I'm sure
you recall I declined to purchase that necklace. Whatever this
joke is, it needs to end now. It's now that
the jewelers started to panic. Their stomachs turned sweat, began
to cling to their necks and their palms. The necklace,
(17:24):
they repeated, the one that we sent you through the
Cardinal de Rohan. Here the Queen just laughed, as did
everyone in earshot. The Queen hated the Cardinal de Rohan.
Everyone knew that. The jeweler swallowed hard and presented the
letters that the Cardinal had passed along to them as
promise of payment. The Queen stopped laughing. On August, the
(17:53):
Cardinal de Rohan was summoned to Versailles under the pretense
that he would be presiding over the feast of the
Assumption of Mary. But as he entered the palace, he
was ushered not to the chapel, but through the gilded
hall of mirrors to the King's private cabinet, where the
King and queen were waiting. Staring at him. The queen
(18:14):
was nearly shaking with frenetic energy. The King spoke for her.
I hear you purchased diamonds from the jeweler Boehmer, He said, calmly, yes, sire.
The cardinal replied, And what did you do with the
diamonds once you received them? The King asked, I had
them delivered to her Majesty. The queen began to exclaim something,
(18:37):
but was quickly quieted by the King, who spoke once again.
But now even his voice began to shake with anger.
Who he said, or what compelled you to do anything?
On behalf of her majesty? The Cardinal bowed deeply. I
was commissioned by a lady called the contest ill Emote,
(18:58):
a personal friend of her Majesty. He pulled from deep
within his robes a signed letter that Jean de LaMotte
had given him, one signed by the Queen, or at
least when he thought had been signed by the queen.
At this point, Marie Antoinette could hold her tongue no longer.
How could you possibly believe? She exclaimed, that I would
(19:21):
have selected you, of all people, someone I haven't even
spoken to in eight years, to negotiate a necklace that
I didn't even want, via a woman I have never
even heard of. The cardinal just bowed again and handed
the king of the letter he had been given. King
Louis the sixteenth barely glanced at the letter before he scoffed.
(19:44):
This was not written or signed by the queen, The
king said, how could a Prince of rowan one of
France's oldest and most noble families, a family so keen
on details of etiquette and status, not have noticed this.
The King brandished the letter in the cardinal's face and
jabbed with a pointed finger at the forged signature that
(20:07):
read Marie Antoinette de France. The king continued, everyone knows
that queens signed with their baptismal names only. The cardinal
was arrested and shipped back to Paris to the Bastille
awaiting trial. Two days later, Jean de LaMotte and her
lover were captured as well, her husband had already managed
(20:30):
to escape to London. The powerful de Rohan family came
out for the trial with the full force of their
status and majesty. Nineteen high ranking members of the family,
all wearing black and sitting stony face in two rows,
awaiting the judgment of their golden son, who had turned
(20:50):
out to be so so stupid. He was on trial
first for thievery, but then also for defamation of the monarchy,
for his humiliating error in mistaking a prostitute for the queen,
and for believing that the Queen would ever have been
so intimate in her writing with him. In the end,
he was found innocent. He was foolish, gullible, yes, but
(21:14):
not guilty of any actual crimes. Of course, Jean de
LaMotte was actually guilty. She was sentenced to be whipped
and branded with a V on her chest for the
French word for thief, and in prison for life. But
once a scammer, always a scammer. Almost as soon as
she arrived in prison, Jean de Lamote escaped, dressed like
(21:37):
a boy, and she made her way to London. But
the most important legacy of the Diamond necklace affair isn't
the actual trial itself. Before the verdict had even come in,
the public had already made up its mind. To the
people of France, there was no doubt that Marie Antoinette,
the despised Austrian queen who spent so much money on
(22:00):
clothes and hair while her constituent starved, who, according to
the broadsheets and caricatures that went around, was constantly involved
in lesbian orgies and bacchanals, there was no doubt that
she was the one to blame. She had probably just
wanted to buy the necklace herself and figured out a
way to throw the cardinal that she had always hated
(22:23):
under the bus. And since in court her enemy the
cardinal was found innocent, that means by default Marie Antoinette
must be guilty. As you know, this story doesn't have
a happy ending. I already told you that Napoleon wrote
the Queen's death must be dated from the Diamond necklace trial.
(22:43):
The diamond necklace affairs cemented in the minds of the
French people that the queen was a decadent and manipulative royal,
more concerned with jewels than with the welfare of her people.
In less than a decade, the queen would be on trial, herself,
found guilty and beheaded a guillotine blade sent through the
(23:04):
neck that had never wanted to wear that elaborate diamond
necklace in the first place. That's the story of the
diamond necklace affair. But keep listening after a brief sponsor
break to hear more unhappy endings from more of the players.
(23:35):
Like I said, this story has unhappy endings for almost
everyone involved. Although gend LaMotte had escaped prison, she died
only a few years later, falling from a window of
her London hotel while attempting to escape her creditors. But
tragedy also befell Madame de Berry. Remember her, she was
(23:56):
the woman the necklace had been originally designed for. After
the death of King Louis the fifteen, his mistress, Madame
de Berry was dismissed from Versailles. She was exiled to
a nunnery in the countryside. From there she took a
lover and bought some land and re established a life
for herself that eventually brought her back to Paris. But
(24:18):
eventually the French Revolution found Madame de Berry one night,
a bloody mass wrapped in a handkerchief was thrown through
her apartment window. With shaking hands, she opened the bloody
cloth to reveal the head of her decapitated lover. Just
a few weeks after the hated queen went to the guillotine,
(24:40):
Marie Antoinette's former palace rival went herself. Madame de Berry
was beheaded and her body was thrown into the same
mass grave as Marie Antoinette. Petty, agreements, resentments, daily dramas
that had fueled Versailles was all made invisible, covered by
the dirt of their shallow grave. Noble Blood is a
(25:06):
production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Mankey. The show
is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by
Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble
Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and
you can learn more about the show over at Noble
blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
(25:26):
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. M
Host
Dana Schwartz
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