The Necklace Marie Antoinette Never Wanted

This story has everything. An outrageously expensive necklace. A disgraced noblewoman. A cardinal desperate to get back into the Queen’s good graces. Forged letters. A midnight meeting with a fake Marie Antoinette.

And, somehow, the one person who didn’t actually want the necklace ended up taking most of the blame.

First: The Necklace.

This thing was ridiculous. In the 1770s, Parisian jewelers Charles Auguste Boehmer and Paul Bassenge began assembling an enormous diamond necklace containing hundreds of diamonds. It was originally intended for King Louis XV to purchase for his mistress, Madame du Barry.

Unfortunately for the jewelers—and fortunately for this story—Louis XV died in 1774 before the sale was completed.

Now they had an obscenely expensive necklace and needed someone wealthy enough to buy it.

Enter Marie Antoinette.

The jewelers tried to sell it to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, but the Queen wasn’t interested. According to later accounts, she supposedly felt France had better things to spend that kind of money on. Which is extremely ironic considering what happened next.

Enter Jeanne de la Motte

Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, better known as the Comtesse de la Motte, claimed descent from the Valois royal family but lived with considerably less money than her ancestry might suggest. She was ambitious, clever, and very good at convincing people that she had connections she did not actually have.

One of those people was Cardinal Louis de Rohan. Rohan had managed to seriously offend Marie Antoinette and desperately wanted to repair his reputation with her.

Jeanne convinced him that she was secretly close to the Queen. She wasn’t. But why let that ruin a perfectly good scam?

Jeanne began producing letters supposedly written by Marie Antoinette, making Rohan believe the Queen was secretly corresponding with him.

Then things got even stranger.

They hired a fake Marie Antoinette. I need us to appreciate this part.

To convince Rohan that the Queen really had forgiven him, Jeanne arranged a nighttime meeting in the gardens of Versailles.

A woman named Nicole d’Oliva—who apparently bore some resemblance to Marie Antoinette—dressed up like the Queen.

Rohan met her in the dark.

She gave him a rose.

And apparently that was enough.

My favorite historical scams always contain at least one moment where you want to reach backward through time and yell: SIR. THINK ABOUT THIS FOR FIVE MORE MINUTES.

But he did not.

And that’s where the diamonds come in. Jeanne eventually convinced Rohan that Marie Antoinette secretly wanted the famous diamond necklace but couldn’t purchase it publicly.

So Rohan agreed to act as an intermediary.

He obtained the necklace from the jewelers and handed it over to someone he believed was acting on behalf of the Queen. Instead, the necklace disappeared.

The diamonds were reportedly broken apart and sold individually. Eventually, the jewelers wanted their money.

And Marie Antoinette essentially said: What necklace?

Because… remember… she had never agreed to buy it.

The entire scheme began unraveling.

And then everyone found out. Rohan was arrested dramatically at Versailles in 1785.

Jeanne was arrested. There was a sensational public trial.

And suddenly France had the eighteenth-century equivalent of the scandal everyone could not stop talking about. Rohan was ultimately acquitted of fraud, while Jeanne was convicted, publicly branded, imprisoned, and later escaped.

But politically? Marie Antoinette lost.

Even though she hadn’t orchestrated the scheme. Even though she hadn’t received the necklace. Even though she had previously refused to buy the thing.

The scandal fit perfectly into an image of Marie Antoinette that was already circulating throughout France: the extravagant foreign queen wasting money while ordinary people suffered.

And once people believe a story about you, sometimes the truth doesn’t stand much of a chance.

The Diamond Necklace Affair became another crack in Marie Antoinette’s already damaged public reputation only a few years before the French Revolution.

Which brings me to this painting. I didn’t want to paint the actual diamond necklace.

I wanted to paint the idea of Marie Antoinette that surrounds this story. The ridiculous excess. The candy colors. The bows. The jewels. The ornamentation piled on top of ornamentation.

Something beautiful enough to attract you—and excessive enough to become slightly absurd.

Because that’s what makes the Diamond Necklace Affair so fascinating to me.

Marie Antoinette didn’t need to own the necklace. The public already believed that she would.

And in the end, that was almost more damaging than if she actually had. History is messy like that.

And apparently, so are my paintings.

— Whitney