DIAMONDS AREN’T FOREVER

There’s a story told about the downfall of Marie Antoinette that doesn’t involve cake, but which in its own slightly obscure way is lightly scarier.

When the old king of France, Louis XV was dying, his mistress Mme du Barry demanded of him that he should buy for her the most expensive diamond necklace in the world. No suspicion there that she was only after his money or anything so sordid as that then. Anyway, because he was a gullible old so-and-so, and couldn’t refuse her anything, old Louis commissioned the court jeweller to create such a thing, and a rather vulgar creation was indeed made up, using 600 stones that had been brought together from all across Europe and it was worth a fortune.

Sadly, old Louis died before the court could take delivery and, because tastes and fashions change, his son and heir thought the thing was quite ghastly and refused to buy it from the luckless jeweller, describing the monstrosity as being rather like a “scarf”. Every time the Queen, Marie Antoinette, gave birth, this jeweller would hotfoot it over to the Palace of Versailles and try to persuade the Royal Couple to buy the thing as a christening present, but they never did.

However, the jewels themselves became the subject of an elaborate confidence trick played upon the Cardinal de Rohan who was not well thought of by the young Queen and was rather desperate to get back into favour. A woman called Jeanne de la Motte took advantage of this desire and, with the aid of some forged letters, persuaded him that she was a loyal and trusted friend of the Queen and arranged for him to meet up (in darkness) with a prostitute who happened to be a body double of the Queen who persuaded him that he was now amongst the royal favourites once more, and convinced the poor old devil that the Queen was in fact in love with him.

Jeanne offered to act as a go-between and persuaded the old rogue that the Queen wanted him to get her the hideous necklace and so he did. Then he handed it over to wicked old Jeanne who promptly had her husband whisk it off to merrie old England, break it up and flog it.

Apparently, it took the shy old Cardinal a good six months before he dared sidle up to the Queen and ask her why she never wore the jewels he had bought her and the scandal came out, and the poor old Cardinal was arrested and eventually the swindlers were put on public trial, alongside the hapless Cardinal who was, at least, acquitted, even though Louis XVI then had him exiled anyway.

The whole trial, of course, backfired on the Royal Couple because, despite the fact that Jeanne was found guilty and quite literally branded (with a “V” for voleur) a thief, and thrown into jail, the story was a source of much amusement around the court, and caused much scandal amongst the ordinary people of France, and the whole affair is, in fact, seen as being one of the sparks of the bloody French revolution, with the mob preferring to believe that the Queen and the Cardinal were in fact lovers and that he was buying her fabulously expensive gifts whilst the people starved, which led to the inevitable riots in the streets.

Jeanne was mysteriously released from her imprisonment and escaped to England where she died after falling from a window, possibly to escape her creditors, but not before writing to the newspapers to declare her own innocence and, naturally, the Queen’s guilt.

Nothing much was likely to save Marie Antoinette, of course, but that really can’t have helped matters much and she was questioned about the subject at her trial, and the mob refused to believe her when she said that she had never met Jeanne de la Motte, and, as history will tell you, Marie Antoinette was executed upon the guillotine on the 16th of  October 1793 at the age of 37, two years after the death of Jeanne, and less than ten months after the execution of her husband, the King, and also less than two months before Mme du Barry, who started the whole thing, was herself executed.

So why am I telling you this little historical tale today? Well, other than the fact that it caught my eye a few days ago, it just seemed to be the perfect example of an unfortunate series of events. One person persuading another to get them a present might seem, at first, to be the most innocent of requests, and is such a tiny moment, but one which ultimately begins a process that leads to scandal, exile and death for just about everyone who comes into contact with the wretched bling.

Or does it? We humans are always trying to find patterns that aren’t there. The French revolution was always likely to happen whether or not old king Louis wanted to buy his fancy woman a bit of a pressy. I suppose that it is a classic demonstration that “stuff”, no matter how fancy and expensive it may be is still just “stuff” and doesn’t have any value when it’s your head on the block, but just becomes another thing, like power and wealth and property of any kind, that people can find a way to take away from you if they wish to.

Someone’s downfall can come from the most unexpected places. For the French nobility perhaps it was just one man’s decision to go shopping that brought ruin upon them all, although I still doubt it was quite that simple, but, for a great many of us, our own financial ruin can sometimes be brought about simply because we decide that we really, really want something that we don’t actually need, and, even though it costs a bit more than we’d like we think we can probably afford it, and anyway, we can always pay for it later. Sometimes, once we remove that first keystone of our own security, that can cause our own avalanche of woe to begin.