Tea at Trianon: That Vulgar Necklace

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, April 20, 2026

That Vulgar Necklace

Marie-Antoinette was the victim of the entire debacle. From Country Life:

The story begins in 1772, when Louis XV commissioned an enormous diamond necklace for his maîtresse-en-titre, Madame du Barry. For 200,000,000 livres (about £12 million today), the royal jewellers Boehmer and Bassenge were to create a rivière consisting of 647 flawless, perfectly matched diamonds; a necklace so heavy that it would have to have diamond streamers down the back to prevent the wearer from toppling forward.
In 1774, Louis XV died. Undeterred, Boehmer and Bassenge completed the necklace and, in 1778, just after war had been declared on Britain, offered it to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. For whatever reason — Thomas Carlyle quotes the queen as saying ‘We have more need of seventy-fours [ships] than necklaces’ — she refused it.
For the next two years, Boehmer and Bassenge hawked the necklace around the royal courts of Europe without success. In 1781, following the birth of the dauphin, they again tried to sell it to Louis XVI — and again were rebuffed. This was the year in which Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, an impoverished and unscrupulous young woman, began to insinuate herself into royal circles by pretending to be one of Marie Antoinette’s closest confidantes. In 1783, she achieved her greatest social success when she was taken up by Cardinal de Rohan — nearly twice her age, extremely wealthy and, frankly, not that bright.
De Rohan had lost all chance of preferment, having publicly insulted Marie Antoinette’s mother. He yearned to be accepted back at court and de Valois offered to carry a letter of apology to the Queen. The forged response de Valois brought back was, unsurprisingly, encouraging. Further forged letters convinced de Rohan that the Queen was in love with him and that he should give money to de Valois, which he did. Her problem now was that the cardinal kept pressing for a meeting with sa Majesté. How relieved de Valois must have been when she encountered a prostitute, Marie Nicole Leguay d’Oliva, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the Queen and was willing, for a fee, to take part in a practical joke. (Read more.)