F ew characters in history have been as synonymous with extravagance and frivolity as Marie Antoinette, the last Queen of France before the French Revolution of 1789. Yet ironically it was a moment of uncharacteristic prudence that may have contributed to her downfall, with a little help from a peerless diamond necklace.
And what is believed to be part of that necklace has now come into the possession of the Victoria & Albert Museum, through an offer in lieu of tax negotiated by Sotheby’s, after a journey that would have taken in the mistress of Louis XV, a con woman, a Cardinal, and one of the British aristocracy’s great families. The story of these jewels is so thrilling that it has been retold in many forms, from Alexandre Dumas’s 1849 novel The Queen’s Necklace to the 2001 Hilary Swank film The Affair of the
Necklace.
It's a complex tale, and it begins with Madame Du Barry, a courtesan at the Bourbon court who was Louis XV’s final maîtresse-en-titre, or chief mistress. In 1772, Louis commissioned from the Parisian jewellers Boehmer and Bassenge a necklace to match her beauty – and the result was a 2 million livre (£11.7 million) masterpiece, made from 647 exceptional diamonds. Unfortunately, Louis died of smallpox in 1774, before he had a chance to pay for and receive the necklace.
The new Queen Consort, Marie Antoinette, known for her love of adornment, seemed a likely prospect for the jewellers – eager to sell the necklace, as they were now catastrophically out of pocket on the commission. But in a moment of fateful frugality, she turned it down, saying (according to Thomas Carlyle), ‘We have more need of Seventy-Fours [ships] than of necklaces.’
Meanwhile, an illegitimate descendent of Henry II, Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, had arrived in Paris deeply in debt, but strong in the belief that she deserved to be at court, showered in riches and status. Marrying an officer of the gendarmes, Nicolas de la Motte, the pair began to call themselves the Comte and Comtesse de la Motte and infiltrate aristocratic circles.
After starting an affair with the gigolo, gendarme and master forger Rétaux de Villette, she met the Cardinal Rohan, an out-of-favour aristocratic desperate to seek the approval of Marie Antoinette.
The Comtesse de la Motte became Rohan’s mistress, while also seeking to be noticed by Marie Antoinette, in the hope of petitioning her for a stipend. Though the Queen refused to see her, de la Motte created the impression of being the royal confidante, and the rumours of their closeness reached the Cardinal. When he asked her to make representations on his behalf, she and the forger, de Villette, faked a correspondence that led him to believe he was loaning money to the extravagant Queen. In fact, he was simply funding de la Motte’s lifestyle.
When Boehmer and Bassenge heard of her supposed popularity with the Queen, they too asked her to offer the necklace to her once again. With incredible audacity, she persuaded Rohan to act as a go-between, with her letters from ‘the Queen’ asking Rohan to arrange the secret purchase of the necklace.
When in 1784 he asked to meet the Queen, at a clandestine night-time appointment, Jeanne found a local prostitute with a remarkable likeness to Marie Antoinette, and he was satisfied. Jeanne de la Motte was asked to give the necklace to the Queen – but instead, her husband began the process of trying to find a buyer in Paris and London.
The Sutherland necklace is believed to have come into the hands of the jeweller Robert Gray of Bond Street, from whom it was subsequently purchased by Earl Gower, the British ambassador to France and later the first Duke of Sutherland, for his wife Elizabeth. (She, during their time in Paris, would strike up a friendship with the doomed Marie Antoinette.)
And doomed she was. For even though the scam was uncovered, and de la Motte imprisoned (eventually escaping to London, where she died running from creditors), Cardinal Rohan was acquitted, damaging the Queen’s already fragile reputation. The people of France believed the worst of her – that she had, in fact, tried to buy the necklace and that she had scandalously met Rohan alone after dark - inferring that her contempt for him, reflected her feelings for the Catholic church.
'The affaire du collier de la Reine was so destructive to Marie Antoinette that it is considered one of the pivotal moments in bringing on the French Revolution – and her own death by guillotine in 1793'
The affaire du collier de la Reine was so destructive to Marie Antoinette that it is considered one of the pivotal moments in bringing on the French Revolution – and her own death by guillotine in 1793.
Nevertheless there is, in fact, an alternative history for the necklace – that Marie Antoinette asked the Duchess of Sutherland to smuggle it out of France at the start of the Revolution, though this is considered the less likely scenario.
So, which is true? And does it matter? There is certainly strong physical evidence, and the original painted design shows just such a rivière from which further swags of diamonds hang.
Yet even without this remarkable provenance, the Sutherland Necklace would be a pre-eminent piece of jewellery. An 18th century rivière of 20 collet-set old-mine-cut diamonds, as great as 15 carats in size, of a quality which could at that time only have been assembled for royalty, it has been worn at coronations from Victoria to Elizabeth II and to London’s greatest social occasions over the past 200 or so years.
‘It was such an iconic piece of jewellery as the Sutherland necklace, and [it] always had that air of mystique of the connection with Marie Antoinette,’ says Felix Hale, Deputy Director, Tax, Heritage, and UK Museums at Sotheby’s. ‘Although we can’t be 100% certain, people were talking about that Marie Antoinette connection in the 19th century.’
Indeed, as Richard Edgcumbe, formerly Senior Curator of Jewellery at the V&A notes, ‘With the dismemberment, or sale abroad of many diamond jewels, the Sutherland Necklace has become an extraordinary rarity in British private or public ownership.’
