In this week’s episode we look a little further into the woman that would take down Marie Antoinette.
Jeanne de Valois Saint Rémy Comtesse de la Motte started out life being told she was descended from royalty. Her father Jacques de Valois was the illegitimate grandson to king Henri II and his mistress Nicole de Savigny. Henri was involved with her when he and Diane de Poitiers took a break. Never recognized they constantly lived far beneath where they believed they should be and by the time Jeanne came around, she wanted to do something about it.
It was 1785 and tensions were high in France and the Austrian queen was the subject for pointed criticism and hatred in France. Her appearance of lavish spending would be used by Jeanne de la Motte to her advantage.
In 1772 King Louis XV wanted to have a necklace made for his mistress Madame du Barry and asked jewelers Boehmer & Bassange to create a lavish gift. Taking years to gather the more than 600 diamonds needed, Louis XV would die before it was finished. Left with a very expensive necklace on their hands without being paid they reached out to Louis XVI thinking he would want to buy it for his queen. With a very high price tag, the queen refused telling her husband “we have more need of 24 ships”. However, it could also be that she never liked Du Barry and didn’t want to have anything intended for her.
Jeanne was the mistress of Cardinal Rohan who had a falling out with the Queen and her mother and was desperate to get back into her good graces. Jeanne told him she was friends with the Queen and that if he wrote her a letter she would get it to her. Jeanne had another agenda. She answered the letters herself, posing as the Queen and when he begged to have a private meeting with the Queen she hired a prostitute at the Palais Royal to impersonate the Queen and met him in the Grove of Venus at Versailles.
Once word had spread throughout Paris, the jewelers reached out to Jeanne in hopes to appeal to Marie Antoinette and to buy the necklace. Jeanne told Rohan that the Queen wanted the necklace but needed someone to get it for her. Jeanne forged a letter and a purchase order for the necklace and he took it to Boehmer. Handing over the necklace to Rohan, he then took it to meet Jeanne and what he thought was one of the Queen’s valets. It was Jeanne’s husband who promptly took the necklace, broke it apart and sent the jewels around Europe to be sold.
Months went by and when Boehmer still hadn’t been paid he went to the court with the order signed by the Queen. She had never seen it before. Rohan was arrested in the Hall of Mirrors, would go on trial and be found innocent.
For the Queen who was innocent in the plot, it was too late. It only fed into the rumors of her excess. People even thought she orchestrated the entire thing to get back at Rohan. The Affair of the Diamond Necklace led to her final fall that was to come in just a few years.
Jeanne de la Motte, would also be arrested and at trial she was convicted and her sentence included life in jail and her shoulders were branded with the letter V for voleuse, French for thief. A year later she broke out of prison dressed as a boy and fled to London. On August 23, 1791 in an attempt to evade creditors she fell out of a window and died. The report stated that she was “terribly mangled, her left eye cut out and her arm and both legs were broken.
Today that necklace would be worth over $15 million dollars and hold 2800 carats and 685 diamonds. When I saw a replica at the exhibit at the Conciergerie I gasped, but then again I love a statement piece.
Listen to the newest episode today, out now on La Vie Creative, Paris History Avec a Hemingway
