Versailles

Necklace

It was hideous, an abomination. It looked like a collar a circus horse would wear, a huge clanking thing in four tiers (not counting the knotted tassels and pendants), consisting of 647 diamonds the size of robins' eggs. It weighed more than the Dauphin. The Queen wouldn't have been caught dead in it.

Created for Madame Du Barry by the court jewelers, Böhmer and Bassenge, the necklace in question was of a type called rivière, as in river of diamonds, and was the discerning benefactor's gift of choice for his Palais Royal whore. "Rivières flow very low," sneered the pamphleteers, "because they're returning to their source."

Unfortunately Louis XV died before he had a chance to pay for the necklace, and despite Böhmer's best efforts to interest Marie Antoinette — even threatening to hurl himself in the Seine if she refused to buy it — for a while it looked as if the jewelers were going to be stuck with the thing. The diamonds in it were worth over one and a half million livres, not to mention the time that had gone into its creation. Böhmer and Bassenge were desolate, desperate. They were two nice Belgian men, getting on in years, alone in the world, without a leg to stand on.

And then, melodrama!

And then, a miracle!

Jeanne de La Motte, who was a very shrewd woman, managed to convince Cardinal Rohan, who was a very silly man, that the Queen secretly loved him, even though everyone knew she'd despised him for years. La Motte conjured a heady mix of romance and the occult, of love letters and a starlit assignation — finally tricking the Cardinal into authorizing the purchase of the necklace on behalf of his Queen.

Once the jewelers had handed the necklace over to La Motte's lover, disguised as the Queen's private courier, he immediately broke it into pieces and began to fence it around Paris and London. "I love imagining the most beautiful diamonds in the world on the world's most beautiful neck," Böhmer said in a note to Antoinette, which she burned to bits, going on the not unreasonable assumption that the man was mad.

That neck! Rohan was baffled. That perfect white neck, but why was it not wearing the necklace? Candlemas had come and gone, and still no sign of it. The skin so smooth, so white, so creamy and delicious! That perfect white column where he longed to press his lips.

He couldn't believe it when the King had him arrested on the Feast of Corpus Christi, and sent him to the Bastille. His lawyer spread the news that he was languishing there in irons, but in fact he was lounging in a very comfortable apartment, dining on oysters and drinking the finest wine.

Popular sentiment held that Rohan exhibited an "excess of candor," meaning everyone knew that he was stupid. Meaning everyone knew he was somehow worthy of their forgiveness, of their love. He was tried before the Parliament of Paris and acquitted on May 31, 1786.

The necklace ceased to exist except as a diamond here, a diamond there. A pair of pendant earrings. A brooch. A single stone hidden in a black velvet bag in a mahogany box, traded for a snuffbox and a pair of silver asparagus tongs.