May 18, 2024 • 60 mins
Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy was a French countess with a dubious claim to nobility and one brilliant idea: she was going to steal a diamond necklace from Louis XVI. After weaseling her way into court, Jeanne impersonates Marie Antoinette in a series of letters, starts a tabloid scandal, and inadvertently lights the fuse of the French Revolution.
*
On the Very Special Episodes podcast, we tell one incredible story each week. Follow us down a different rabbit hole every Wednesday.
Hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zaron Burnett, Jason English
Research, Writing, and Interviews for today’s episode provided by Wonder Media Network
Produced by Josh Fisher
Story Editor is Marisa Brown
Editing and Sound Design by Emily Marinoff
Mixing and Mastering by Baheed Frazier
Voice Actors: Coco-Margeaux Rodale and Tom Antonellis
Original Music by Elise McCoy
Show Logo by Lucy Quintanilla
Executive Producer is Jason English
Special thanks to Jenny Kaplan, Emily Rudder, Carmen Borca-Carrillo, and Lauren Williams.
Thanks for listening! You don't owe us any favors. But if you enjoy the show and want to do us one anyway, could you head over to your favorite podcast platform(s) and leave us a rating?
Now you can email the show: veryspecialepisodes@gmail.com.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Art originals.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original. It's the summer of seventeen
ninety one. Trouble is brewing in the humid streets of Paris,
the first inklings of revolution. By this time next year,
the French royal family will be under house arrest, the
monarchy abolished. Within two years, Marie Antoinette will be taking
(00:35):
her place at the guillotine. But in seventeen ninety one,
our story is focused on a woman writing a memoir
trying to clear her name in one of the era's
most notorious scandals, a scandal that poured fuel on the
fire that enveloped the French monarchy.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Fain would I have imitated the retired warblings of the Nightingale,
and like her, poured out my tale of sorrows. But
cruel fate alas has denied me even the comforts of
obscurity and solitude.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
This woman, our memoir writer, is Jean de Valois Saint Remi.
She's strangely immune to the ire of the revolutionaries. While
they paraded down the street demanding noble head's role, this
countess found safety in the public eye, maybe because she
was less of a countess than a con woman. And
(01:40):
maybe because her greatest victim was their greatest enemy, Queen
Marie Antoinette. Herself, Jeanques spent most of her life pretending
to be nobility, most of her time in the Paris
court trying to approximate luxury, and now in her final years,
(02:00):
she's found herself trying to rewrite her own history one
last time.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
The names of a great queen and of a Prince
carnal unhappily united with mine have spread a blaze to
attract general notice. And as if I was doomed to
be the victim of painful splendor, the ingenuity of my
enemies found means to forge the chains of mightys honare
(02:29):
out of a diamond necklace.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
It was all very ironic. She was hated by the
nobility for conning her way into the upper class. She
was loved by the common folk for incriminating an already
unpopular queen. But in all her scheming and conniving, the
countess had helped harold the end of the very thing
(02:53):
she wanted to be so badly, the wannabe countess had
unwillingly toppled the French monarchy. Welcome to very special episodes,
and I heeart original podcast. I'm your host, Dana Schwartz,
(03:16):
and this is the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. I
do have to say, I'm obsessed with this story. I've
been obsessed with this story for a long time. We
actually covered it. I have another history podcast called Noble
Blood that talks about, you know, weird stories about royals
(03:37):
from history, and this was one of the first episodes.
Because it's just it's stranger than fiction.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
It's so good. It's real life, dangerous liaisons. It's just
absolutely the best, like power and precige and scammy people
in the courts. I love this one.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Also, is there anything more French than pulling a scam
with your lover and your husband?
Speaker 4 (03:57):
Eighteenth century catfish story, It's great, let's get into it.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Before the French Revolution, before the Diamond Necklace, Jean was
just someone, certainly not a tabloid darling. But when you
step back and look at this story, it's no wonder
Paris was buzzing with news of Jean, and no wonder
we're still talking about her right now. Before this episode
(04:25):
is over, a revolution will spill through the streets of Paris.
A woman will swoop down from a four s drawn
carriage to save a poor orphan and a priceless diamond
necklace will disappear. And despite the fact that this singular
episode might have changed the course of French history, there's
(04:48):
not one eyewitness account of the whole thing.
Speaker 5 (04:52):
So you've got this stranger than fiction scandal without one
reliable witness to tell it. There's that famous adage about
a lie can make its way twice around the world
before the truth has time to tire shoes, and that
is the world that we were in.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
That's Leslie Carrol. She's a writer across many genres. The
genre that concerns us is highly researched women's historical fiction.
For her book series about the French aristocracy just before
the Revolution, Becoming Marie Antoinette, Leslie became an expert on
this slippery tale from history and an expert on today's
(05:31):
main character, Jean de Bellois so Remi.
Speaker 5 (05:35):
Jean is an anti heroine in the most perfect sense
because she was a con woman from con girl from
the time she was about six years old. She also
had an ancestor who was kicked out of Velsai for
minting fake coins, so her carn artistry comes through genetically Jean.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Is born on July twenty second, seventeen fifty six in
the Champagne region of France. She's the third of six children,
only one of three who survived childhood. Her mother is
an illiterate housemaid. Her father, well, that's a bit more complicated.
Speaker 5 (06:14):
She is a descendant of King Henri the second of Valois, who,
for royal watchers, was married to Catherine de Medici when
he was only a teenager.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Jean's noble lineage is a bit convoluted, but basically, King
Henri the second had a son out of wedlock, Baron
de san Rami, and then the baron had kids who
had kids.
Speaker 5 (06:39):
Our anti heroine, Jenne is descended from the sixth and
last of the second Baron de Saint Remy's kids, which
means there's no money left to go around. So Jean's
family is noble but poor. And Jeanne's father says, hey,
I'm from the Vauois dynasty, so I deserve a royal pension,
(07:01):
And he starts going around to whoever will listen, and
he says, hey, I have a royal lineage and I
want a pension, and he makes so much trouble that
he ends up getting thrown in jail because nobody likes
a pretender to the throne.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
So by the time Jean's a kid, she's got no
clear prospects, no money, and her only tie to nobility
is locked up for being a blabbermouth. To make matters worse,
her mom leaves her and her siblings begging on the
side of the road in Paris, arming them with pamphlet
claiming their valois. You can't fault jean for her later ambition.
(07:38):
From the very beginning, she was dead set on reaching nobility.
Speaker 5 (07:42):
This early part of Jeanne's life, a carriage comes by
and a woman sticks out her head and sees these
three little kids begging on the street and believes the story.
And this woman is the Marquis de Boulbillier.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Somehow, the Marquise convinces her husband, one of the wealthiest
bankers in France, to take the kids under their wing.
It's like a fairy tale. The san Ramie kids are
education alongside the Boulaangnviers, sent to all the best schools.
Things are looking up for jean and then, like in
any good story, the other glass slipper dropped.
Speaker 5 (08:19):
Suddenly people smell something strange on the street. What is
this weird odor?
Speaker 2 (08:23):
According to Leslie, authorities found an illegal distillery in the
Marquise's home, and.
Speaker 5 (08:30):
The worst thing that can happen to any nobleman in
France is to be ostracized and sent to your country estate.
So bang, Jean's dreams of entering Paris society are dashed.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
From there, Jean is entered into the only other place
for a young woman of the era, a convent where
they have her apprenticing with seamstresses and millineries.
Speaker 5 (08:53):
And John is like, wait, wha, wha, wha, whoa, whoa whoa. Well,
I'm descended from a Vaulois. I don't do manual labor.
So she says, no, forget it, I'm going to try
this on my own. And she gets out of the
convent and in seventy in eighty she finds herself a
fella named Nicola de LaMotte, who is a weird, scrawny,
(09:16):
short guy.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Here's how Jean writes about Nicola in her memoirs.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
During my first abude at bersu Ob, I became acquainted
with Comte de LaMotte. But as it is not a
novel I'm writing, I shall pass over the circumstances which
brought him to a proposal or a marriage, as well
as the motives that determined me to accept it.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Jean was heavily pregnant with twins at the time. The
twins only lived for a few days after their birth,
but Nicola and John stayed together. As time went on,
they set up a life, growing their circle bit by bit.
Their acquaintances were hardly the noblemen and ladies of court
(10:02):
Jean wanted to rub elbows.
Speaker 5 (10:04):
With, and ultimately they end up forming a troika, and
the third leg of this stool is an army buddy
of Nicolas named Roteau du Billette, who is handsomer and
more interesting, and for some reason, Nicola doesn't seem to
(10:24):
mind too much when Redeau and Jane become lovers, because, oh, heck,
Nicola has a few mistresses of his own.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Still, what Jean wanted was to be nobility. That was
all she heard her father talk about when he'd been around.
The tale her mother had instructed her to tell. It
was her distant Valois name that had landed her in
the marquise's house, and here she was married, childless, and
still dirt poor. There had to be a way forward.
Speaker 5 (10:58):
They decide, well, heck, we need a profession. Lest's become
con artists.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Surely con artistry wouldn't be so different. And to these
steps that had gotten Jean this far, She'd just adorn
the truth of her beloir heritage until she was actually
able to restore her noble family name. Now she had
two partners in crime who could help her cause. By
(11:24):
this point, Nicola, Jean, and their quote unquote friend Routeau
decided they needed to make money. Between the three of them,
they had a failed military career, a sort of handsome face,
and a dubious claim to nobility. They decide to follow
that last lead. Nicola and Jean wanted to get into
(11:47):
the court of the current King and Queen, Louis the
sixteenth and Marie Antoinette. They need a connection to the crown,
so they head back to the Marquise, Jean's initial sponsor
before that illegal distillery incident, to get a good word.
And it just so happened that the Marquise and the
Marquis are staying with a very consequential host, Cardinal Prince
(12:13):
Louis de Roan.
Speaker 5 (12:15):
He's the highest ecclesiastical voice in France, and actually a
minor prince, so he's a prince of the Church and
a prince for real, and he's got Belgian Gobla tapistries,
and he's got crystal This is he does not live
like a man of the cloth by any means.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
When Jean shows up, it's not just the jewels and
artwork that catch her eye. She's accidentally walked into a
masterclass of con artistry right in the Cardinal Prince's home.
Speaker 5 (12:46):
He is hosting in his home the Man of the Hour,
a famous self proclaimed mesmeric healer, an alchemist, a man
named Count Cagliostro, and his wife Sarah Fina. Now in reality,
Count Cagliostro is really an Italian named Balsamo, and his
(13:10):
wife is the illiterate daughter of a blacksmith. Caliostro decks
himself out like Prospero in you know, capes that are
marked with signs, and he again lots and lots of perfume.
And he's one of these crazy guys in the eighteenth
century who has convinced the richest people in Europe that
(13:37):
he has the power to cure them. And the Cardinal
takes her up to Caliostro's little alchemy whatever his atolier
and goes, look, he made me this ring, and he
told me there was more where that came from. He's
gonna make all these diamonds. And John is like, oh
god boy, what a dummy.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Now, Jean's been looking for a target who's rich and
easy to fool. The last ingredient she'd need for a
successful con was motive. She needed the Cardinal Prince to
want something. Luckily, they had a common goal to get
the crown to notice them. To understand just how this
(14:21):
con worked, We've got to go back in time and
head east to the border of Austrian Germany, where a
young Marie Antoinette is making the long trek to France
to get married. There she meets the Cardinal Prince for
the first time.
Speaker 5 (14:37):
And she meets this cardinal draw and he's got gold
lace cuffs, and he reeks of expensive perfume, and he's
just seems oily and anxious and butterwood melt in his mouth.
He's just she just kind of wants to take a
bath after speaking to him.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
They don't exactly hit it off. The Cardinal Prince is powerful,
but Marie's still on her way to becoming queen and
they're relatelationship only worsens A few years later, at a
sparkling dinner party in Paris, the Cardinal really sticks his
foot in his mouth. He bad mouths Marie's mom. Marie's mom,
(15:21):
Maria Teresa, was a pretty big deal. She was one
of the three major players trying to partition Poland, which
was the subject of flight dinner conversation that night in Paris.
Speaker 5 (15:33):
And the Cardinal repeats a quote joke that.
Speaker 6 (15:37):
He heard, supposedly Frederick's great said that the Maria Tarisa
in one end wielded an ankerchief to cry for the
poor Poles, and in Zia's land wielded a sword against him.
Speaker 5 (15:56):
Well, news of this comment gets back to Marie Antoinette,
of course, and she's livid, and she said, never again.
I don't care. This man is dead to me. He
will never get higher up, will never get any other offices.
I don't want him to have anything to do with me,
my future children anything. He does end up baptizing her
children because he's the Grand Almoner of France, but she
(16:17):
won't even look him in the eye at the baptismal
font and it becomes known throughout France that Marie Antoinette
will have nothing to do with this man, that she
hates his guts more than anyone in France.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Back in Kaliostro's alchemy chamber in seventeen eighty one, Jean
puts the puzzle pieces together.
Speaker 5 (16:40):
More than anything. Now, the Cardinal is desperate to get
back into Marie Antoinette's good graces because now she's the queen.
The Cardinal is also an extremely gullible, credible man. He
has two weak points, money and power.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
And so Jean approaches the Cardinal prince praising Caliostro's skills.
Speaker 5 (17:05):
She realizes, now how credible this guy is. She's like, oh,
my god, if he'll believe Kliostro is an alchemist, good grief,
there's no such thing as an alchemist. Maybe he'll believe
my story. And then she starts with a sob story
and oh, I'm a descendant on the last balloon. All
(17:26):
I'm trying to do is get my estates by the
wholesob story. In her very low cut gown.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Jean has found her mark, one step closer to nobility.
Jean put her plan into action. She gets close to
the Cardinal prince, apparently becoming his lover, because if a
cardinal is already sinning with an alchemist, why stop there.
(17:54):
Soon he falls into the trap Jean has laid out
for him. He asks her for what he needs.
Speaker 5 (18:01):
He's like, oh, do you know Marie Antoinette, Because all
I want is to become an intimate of the queen
and to get back into her good graces, because for
some reason, I don't understand why the queen hates me
so much. And so she claims, well, if you'll help
me with the Queen, i'll help you with them. And
she claims to know everything about Versailles.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
There's one little hitch here. Jean does not know the queen,
and she's never been to Versailles. But John's never let
a little thing like the truth stop her before. According
to Leslie, for all the trouble Jean had in regaining
her noble title, it wasn't too hard to actually enter
(18:43):
the seat of the French monarchy.
Speaker 5 (18:46):
You know. Louis the fourteenth famously said, let tassinoi Versailles itself.
Anybody could go there as long as a man had
a hat and a sword, and they retailed those. If
you've ever been to Versailles, and you see the courtyards.
Imagine that they had vendors there. You could rent one,
and you could just walk around and go through all
of the official, the state suites of rooms and see
(19:08):
how the royals lived.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Which frankly wasn't very glamorous.
Speaker 5 (19:13):
And frankly, it was pretty stinky and pretty dirty because
all of the nobles felt that they were too high
placed in society to dust anything or lift a finger.
And there were no toilets at Versailles.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
So Jean starts nosing around Versailles, and to her credit,
she tries to get the Queen's attention. No success there.
She's not really making much progress on the quest. The
cardinal Prince thinks she's on, but John is learning the
layout of the court, the little details that will really
(19:48):
sell the stories she feeds to the cardinal. When she
gets home and starts asking for money.
Speaker 5 (19:54):
She decides to tell the Cardinal, well, you know, the Queen.
She wants to know she can trust you. So she
has this friend who's in deep financial distress and she
doesn't want to tell her husband, the king, about this,
so she only trusts me, and she needs sixty thousand francs,
and then the Cardinal ponies up the money while the
(20:17):
person in need is actually jam And then a few
months later it's fifty thousand francs, and a few months
after that it's one hundred thousand francs.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Jean keeps it going, seating her sob stories around Versailles.
She tells one noble her house burned down with all
her best serving wear inside, and gets a nice set
of china in return. Meanwhile, she and Nicolau get a
fancy Parisian townhouse with the Cardinal's money, outfitting it with
furniture from pawn chops. They're spending the Cardinal's allowance about
(20:48):
as quickly as they're able to ask for more, far
richer in their appearance than what's actually in their bank account,
but they're officially calling themselves the Countess and count de
la MoU Valois. The money is going towards one other
expensive pastime, impersonating Murray Antoinette. Remember this whole time, the
(21:14):
Cardinal is waiting on Jean to reintroduce him to the Queen.
Jean has no such way of doing that. She's never
met the Queen. She knows her about as well as
the Cardinal does, which is why Jean starts procuring responses
from the Queen the only way she can imagine. She
forges letters.
Speaker 5 (21:35):
They get this expensive blue stationary, and she's never seen
Marie Antoinette's stationary. She's saying, who do a queen use
to write?
Speaker 4 (21:42):
Then?
Speaker 5 (21:42):
What do you think her handwriting looks like? What do
you think her signature looks like?
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Jean gets Riteaux, Nicola's army buddy and her other lover
to help forge the signature on these letters.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
She writes, I cannot disapprove of the desire you have
of seeing me, but you would not have me act
imprudently to bring about the compendiously a thing which you
must be persuaded you will shortly obtain in the interim.
(22:16):
Be very cautious, above all discrete, and as there is
no foreseeing what may happen, be reserved and greatly perplexed
in what you hereafter right.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
To me, and the Cardinal falls for it. Hook Wine
and Sinker.
Speaker 6 (22:40):
Is a charming countess. Has imparted to me. How much
you seem affected with the account she gave you of
the little services I have rendered her the concern alone
which she inspires induced me to seize every opportunity of
obliging her, For certainly I was very far from foreseeing
(23:03):
she will one day be in a capacity of mentioning
me to you in such a manner as to remove
the evil impressions which my enemies have ever given you
of my disposition. But hope begins to shine in my heart,
(23:23):
and I presume to singly you will not disdain to
hear me. Let, but your beauteous smith pronounce the world. Yes,
you will be hold your slave at your feet, and
this day will be the happiest of his life.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Jeanne as Marie Antoinette responds, assuring the Cardinal that he
has achieved the impossible task of falling back into her
good graces, all due to their mutual friend.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Of course, the account which the contest has given to
me of your behavior towards her has made a stronger
impression on me than all you have written to me.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Yes, that Countess is jean She's writing about herself.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
I hope you will never forget that it is to
her you are indebted for her pardon, as also for
the letter I write to you. I have always looked
upon you as a very inconsistent and indiscreet man, Nothing
but a conduct quite the reverse of what you have
(24:37):
held can regain my confidence and merit my esteem.
Speaker 6 (24:42):
Yes, I am the happiest motel breathing. My master pardons me.
I know how to appreciate all the obligations I am
on there to the charming Countess in whatever cityas I
may chance to be, I shall be gratefully mindful of
(25:04):
all that she has done in my behalf.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Jean has done it. She's convinced the Cardinal. He's corresponding
with the queen.
Speaker 5 (25:14):
And the Cardinal is going, oh, I got this letter
from Marie Antoinette. She says this, this, this, and Jean's like,
oh really really all that's that's very interesting.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Of course, it's important to remember there's not one witness
to this tale. These letters are taken from Jean's memoirs,
so there her recollections of the letters she forged and
the ones she received from the Cardinal. But whatever their accuracy,
they could only go so far. In the spring of
(25:44):
seventeen eighty four months into this exchange of letters, the
Cardinal starts to get antsy. He hasn't seen the Queen
acknowledge this newfound relationship outside of their letters. What he
was after wasn't friendship. He wanted Marie Antoinette's support, her power,
whatever she could give him.
Speaker 5 (26:04):
So jean is getting nervous that this law coan that
she's playing is going to blow up in her face.
So she realizes she has to up the ante a
little or she's going to lose the trust of the Cardinal.
So she said, well, you know, the Queen is known
for taking midnight strolls behind the palace and the grove
(26:26):
of Venus. So now she said, well, let me set
up a secret rendezvoust for you with the Queen.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
It was one thing to sign Marie Antoinette's name at
the bottom of a piece of paper, but to impersonate
her in the flesh, jean is going to need a miracle.
Roteau finds his Nicolaus and Jean's saving grace in the
form of Nicole Legay, a sex worker with a striking
resemblance to Marie Antoinette.
Speaker 5 (26:56):
Jeanne says, I have a very important assignment for you,
and she tells her that we're going to go to
Versailles and you are going to engage in a midnight
Rendevoult with a very important man, and you're going to
give him a pink rose, and you're going to give
him a letter, and with the letter, you're going to say,
you know what this means.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
So they dress Nicole up like the Queen. They give
her this white linen dress with big puffy sleeves in
the style the Queen like to wear, and a big
hat and a cloak so the Cardinal can't look too
closely at her face.
Speaker 5 (27:32):
And she meets the Cardinal Deroent at midnight and the
grove of Venus behind Versailles, and she forgets to give
him a letter. So we don't know what was in
the letter, but ostensibly it was supposedly a forged I
forgive you kind of note, and she does. She thrusts
(27:52):
the pink rose at him. The Cardinal falls at her feet,
thinking that it's Marie Antoinette, of course, and he kisses
her slipper and he call does her job, and she
has now tricked the Cardinal into thinking that Marie Antoinette
has forgive given him all of his dress passes forever.
Everything is wonderful. Now we're onto the next part of
(28:12):
the con, the con that Jean never expected to have.
Now we come to the affair of the diamond necks.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
This affair starts one smoky and glitzy night at one
of Jean's dinner parties. Among her many guests is a
lawyer who starts talking about two of his clients, Boehmer
and Bassinge, jewelers to the Crown. They're in a bit
of a pickle.
Speaker 5 (28:41):
There are two Swiss German Jews who have sunk almost
all of their money into a twenty eight hundred carrot
diamond necklace called the Slave's Collar. It is massive. On
any normal human, it would go around your neck and
practically fall to your waist. It is diamond and baby
(29:05):
blue enameled bows and loops and pendants.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
They had made the necklace ten years ago for Madame
Duberry Louis, the fifteenth Mistress, but before they'd gotten the
chance to sell it to him, Louis died, leaving them
with the necklace. The necklace, two thousand and eight hundred carrots,
was breathtaking.
Speaker 5 (29:32):
And it's probably one of the ugliest things you've ever seen.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Jean de Valois san Remi had caught wind of a
necklace worth an unimaginable amount of money. If she could
get her hands on it, leveraging her relationship with the
cardinals she's worked so hard to strengthen, all of her
money woes would be over. The affair of the diamond
necklace is now in full swing, and it's time to
(30:04):
meet the shining jewel of this whole episode, the necklace itself.
And well, this fabled necklace, it's more of a chest piece.
It's got this enormous choker of oval stones across the top,
and then there's another necklace entirely connected to it. These
clunky cross body straps collarbone to belly button are riddled
(30:30):
with these huge, thick cut diamonds. Each strand ends in
a faux tassel, also of diamonds, and each tassel is
gilded with a little horrendous baby blue gemstone bow.
Speaker 5 (30:48):
But they had paid a fortune to create it, because
twenty eight hundred carrots, that's diamonds of the first water.
So they're desperate for a client, and they say to Jean,
I don't know, you know the Queen, would the queen
wanted and chance as well? I don't know. I could
(31:11):
ask her. Of course, she's never met the Queen.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
We know this, Marie Antoinette had already turned the necklace
down for several possible reasons. One it was made for
her grandfather in law's mistress, Two it was ugly, and
three it was ridiculously expensive. Marie Antoinette, of all people,
(31:33):
was not in the business of giving the French people
more ammunition to hate her. With her expensive taste had
already incurred their wrath, but for Jean it was still
the perfect opportunity.
Speaker 5 (31:47):
She says, uh, this is interesting. It might not be
a necklace for a Bourbon, but it's a necklace for
a Valois. Well, she goes to the cardinal and she says,
Marie Antoinette is far too anxios to tell the king
(32:08):
because you know how famous she is for extravagance, and
she's in so much hot water because of all the
dresses and the furbilows and the hats, and the expenses
and the jewelry and that she buys, and you know,
the public is now turning against her, and she really
has to be very careful with her expenditures. And she
really wants this diamond necklace. There's nothing else like it
(32:31):
in the world. But she trusts you to be so
discreet that if you would buy it on her behalf
as the go between the interlocutor, and then give it
to me and I will bring it to her, then
nobody need know that she's the one that really bought
the necklace.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Now the cardinal had money, well, he had had money,
he certainly didn't have the jeweler's asking price one million,
eight hundred thousand livre just under fifteen million dollars today.
This was what the queen wanted, right, and what the
queen wanted he wanted a favor like this could settle
(33:14):
the score forever. So the deal is set. The Cardinal
agrees to pay the jewelers in installments, while the necklace
itself is given to jean She, of course promises to
discreetly deliver it to the Queen.
Speaker 5 (33:31):
Now, I will ask our audience to give me a
show of hands of how many people really think that
this necklace made its way from Jeanne to Marie Antoinette. Okay,
none of you believed, right.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Jeanne got her end of the bargain, the diamond necklace
in her hands, but it never went to the queen. Instead,
she passed it off to her partners in crime. Nicola
and Riteau.
Speaker 5 (33:56):
So what happened was Nicola de l'amotte and Rete olivierte
very carefully and sometimes not so carefully, prized each one
of these hundreds of stones out of their setting and
started to hawk them all over the place.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Nicolaus sets sail to London with a bag of diamonds,
and if anyone asks him where they come from, he says,
it's a surprise inheritance. Meanwhile, the jewelers are already knocking
down the cardinal's door trying to collect. When nothing comes through,
they take the matter directly up the chain of command.
Speaker 5 (34:39):
So they write a letter to Marie Antoinette and her
lady in waiting, Madam kemp All, receives it and reads
it to her and said what is this about? And
Ryan Tooinette said, I have absolutely no idea what they
are talking about. It must be some kind of a joke.
And she takes this letter written to her by the
(35:00):
two jewelers and she rolls it up and she throws
it into the fireplace. So puff up and smoke.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
When a few more days go by without a response,
the jewelers forego the letter and show up in person.
The necklace makers have sunk all of their money into
this piece of jewelry, and now they don't have the
money or the necklace. Marie Antoinette has no idea. This
entire plot has taken place under her name, and she
(35:29):
just burned the only notice she would have gotten about it.
The jeweler takes out the contract he was given for
his necklace.
Speaker 5 (35:38):
And the contract is signed Marie Antoinette de France. She
looks at this contract and she said, you must know
that signature is a forgery. Royals never sign their name
with the country that they are the sovereign of. I
would only sign my name Marie Antoinette, son Marie Antoinette
(36:01):
of France. Obviously I am of France. So now the
jeweler realizes how dep is in this that he that
everybody on his end has been the dupe of a
forged contract. No money, no necklace, fake contract. Who was
(36:24):
responsible for this clearly not the queen, and he mentions
this Jean de la Motte Contesse de Valois. And she said,
I have never heard of that woman. I have never
met that woman. And the jeweler says, well, the cardinal insists,
(36:45):
you are intimates that she said absolutely not, no, none
of this is true.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
The alarm bells are going off. But how do you
go about tracking down a con artist who you've never
even heard of, much less met. It's now August fifteenth,
seventeen eighty five, the feast of the Assumption of Mary,
and it's a big day for the Cardinal, one of
(37:13):
his biggest masses of the year. Louis the sixteenth and
Marie Antoinette are supposed to attend themselves. It's all gold,
incense and excitement. But that afternoon, instead of officiating behind
the ambo, the Cardinal finds himself in Louis the Sixteenth's study,
staring white faced down at the faded contract.
Speaker 5 (37:37):
Louis is, you are a prince of the church and
a prince in nobility. You know how royals signed their names.
How could you be taken in? How could you be
such a credulous idiot? And he sits down at a
table and he heeds Louis's request to basically write down
(37:59):
an affidavit that explains every single thing that took place,
from soup to nuts.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Now the Cardinal and the jeweler have given their statements,
Jean figures heavily but that's not enough for the royals,
especially for Marie Antoinette. Discontent is brewing and she won't
stand to see her name dragged through the mud anymore
than it already has been.
Speaker 5 (38:23):
So the Cardinal is arrested right in the middle of
the Hall of Mirrors at Lsall, and it could not
be a more public place if you have ever been there.
All eyes literally of people, but all the mirrors and
everything I mean is magnified to the inth degree. Are watching.
This guy still has all the respect of all these people,
(38:45):
more so than the crown at this point.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
One thing to note Maris never had an easy go
of it exactly. Other than being a literal queen to
one of the most powerful monarchies in France, she had
little love from her people or the French nobility.
Speaker 5 (39:05):
Marie Antoinette has been blamed since the time she came
to Austrian seventeen seventy as an outsider. They made a
pun on her name as Lutricienne, which is the word
for an Austrian female. But Chienne in French is bitch,
so Lutrichien is the Austrian bitch, and that is how
(39:27):
she was nicknamed all even through the French court. So
I mean she was even mocked because she had strawberry
blonde hair. This poor woman could not win ever, I
mean she could wash the feet of every noble in
the Hall of mirrors while the cardinal was busy picking
their pockets, and the cardinal would still be immortalized in
(39:50):
Marie antoinette Villefi. This is the mood in France at
the time.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Back to the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. The cardinals
under arrest, but he reaches into his stocking where he's
got a little pencil and a little notebook stashed away.
He writes a note to his confidants to burn all
his papers, all of his letters from the queen. By
(40:18):
this point, the authorities are also out looking for the
people named in the cardinal's statement. Riteau and Nicole Legee
run for the border. Even poor Caliostro and his wife
were arrested. Jean's rounded up, but not before she gets
a chance to tell Nikola to flee out the window
(40:39):
with all of the goods he can carry.
Speaker 5 (40:42):
The cardinal is ultimately taken to the bastille, as is Jeanne,
and it's very interesting what happens.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
Sure the cardinal gets special treatment, gets good food and
luxuries from his noble relatives who come to visit him.
But the proletariat, the common folk, they start to take
an interest in this story too. They hear the cardinals
been having to sleep on a straw bed like the
other prisoners at his advanced age.
Speaker 5 (41:13):
So the women start wearing these straw hats with red ribbons,
because red is the color of a cardinal's cassock. So
they start wearing them, and they're called biretta a la cardinal,
and it just gets out of he and everybody believes
that it must be that Marie Antoinette really coveted the necklace.
(41:34):
Regardless of what these other people are saying.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
The general sentiment of the time only fanned the flames.
A funny thing about the French justice system of the time,
lawyers couldn't actually be in the same room as their defendants.
Speaker 5 (41:49):
So what they did the witnesses gave statements, and the
witnesses could question each other, so they would get into
these shouting matches between Joan and the cardinal and you
said what, and you did this, and you did it.
And the lawyers would write these quote trial briefs that
were pure fictions, because all they were intended to do
is exonerate their own clients, and they would sell them
(42:09):
on the streets or in bookstalls, or you know, like
kids hawking the nightly paper on the street, and they
sold like hotcakes.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
The scandal was going down in one of the most
legitimate gossip mills of history. The closest the public could
get to what went down in the courtroom were these
lawyer briefs. And the closest the lawyers could get to
what went down in the courtroom were their clients, the
same people trying to clear their own names, the same
(42:43):
people who had built the entire scandal on forgeries and lies.
Speaker 5 (42:49):
It's interesting because there isn't one reliable source for this
whole story. All the stories that have come down to
us were written either after the fact or were written
solely to propagandize the person who was the center of story.
And all of them pointed fingers at each other, and
(43:12):
all of them lied like crazy, and all of them
threw each other under the bus.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
So how did all of these players shake out? In
the end, Calostro our Alchemist was acquitted and released to
return to pooling. The rich people of France once more.
Nicole Lega was also acquitted. Riteau was banished, but good
luck finding him. The cardinal had to give up his
ecclesiastical offices and make a public apology for disrespecting the crown.
(43:46):
Nicola got a heavier sentence, all of his property forfeited
to the crown, and a public punishment of scorching, whipping,
and branding. Luckily for him, he had taken Jean's advice
and fled when he had the chance. Jean wasn't so lucky.
She got a similar punishment, to be whipped publicly and
(44:10):
branded with vo l values or thief. Since Jean's case
had already kicked up so much interest, officials tried to
keep her public punishment under wraps, but it wasn't enough.
Jean was the talk of the town and people were
jumping at the chance to see her in person.
Speaker 5 (44:32):
They sold tickets. Tickets for the trial were pricey. It
was like buying tickets to the Super Bowl. Absurd prices,
scalpers prices. Because normal citizens were trying to buy tickets
to the trial, especially aristocrats. Jean was screaming and yelling,
help me, help me. It is the blood of the Valois.
They're desecrating You heard that right.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
Even as she's being publicly humiliated, even as a hot
iron is being pressed to her skin, Jean is still
carrying on about her supposed nobility.
Speaker 5 (45:06):
Anybody who thinks the John was this woman of the
people who would have supported the destruction of the Bastille
not three years later. This woman wanted to claim her
royal lineage. This woman wanted to walk through the halls
of Versailles and say, hey, hey, I'm one of you.
(45:28):
She did not want to say I'm a woman of
the people, because the first thing that happened during the
French Revolution was the abolishing of royal titles. She would
not have been able to be the contest de la
mad Valois. She would have been one of the first
people taken to the guillotine.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
But as Jean's luck would have it, she'd never have
to see the powder keg she'd stuffed full of forged
letters actually go up in flames. In seventeen ninety, someone
springs her from her prison cell, apparently disguising her as
a boy to get her out of the city. She
escapes to London, where some nobles host her as a
(46:05):
guest but by the summer of the next year, we're
back at the top of our story. Jean's scribbling away
in some CD hotel room, writing her memoirs. According to her,
it's a harrowing experience.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
How often did the pen drop from my hand? How
often would the word blotted out by mighty ears?
Speaker 2 (46:29):
But she finds the strength to publish them without too
much issue.
Speaker 3 (46:34):
I have taken up my pen and for going sleeping,
forgoing the impertinate cares of a boat brought to decay.
I will not lay it down till I have eased
my soul of its overwhelming load. The public must at
length pronounce between hermagiste and the atom she has crushed.
(46:57):
No matter truth has is false, grief has its eloquence.
I shall therefore write.
Speaker 2 (47:06):
In her memory. No Jean weaves a tale of a
young woman destined for greatness. It's the valeoirs name, after all.
Speaker 3 (47:14):
That accounts for the first act of my life, justifies
the deviations of natural ambition, and gives a conception why
scarce emerged from obscurity. Jeanne de Saint Remi du Valois
caught it favor in order to recover the rank to
(47:37):
which she was by birth.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
Entitled Jean in this recollection, stumbled into the open arms
of the Cardinal Prince. And yes, she admits she joined
forces with him, but it was only to further her
true and valorous ambition.
Speaker 3 (47:55):
I had no secrets concealed from him, e none from me.
We mutually read each other's mind aspective ambition. Ease was
to become prime Minister. Mine had no further views than
(48:17):
to be lady of the Manoir of Frontete.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
In this version, the Cardinal tells Jean that the Queen
has a vested interest in her, that there's something about
her that pleases the Queen. So Jean becomes a courier
between the Queen, an absent minded gossip, and the Cardinal,
a lascivious worm whose ill intent pours out into his letters.
(48:44):
She puts his letters under a metaphorical microscope, criticizing the
very non pious way he lingers on the Queen's beauteous
mouth the quote rays of hope shining in his heart.
Jean spares no detail in her version of the events. Rather,
(49:08):
she gives excuses for every open ended question, every incongruent
detail people could ask of her story. The fact that
the Queen denied ever knowing Jean, and that no nobles
knew of her and Jean's intimate friendship. Chalked up to
the fact that the Queen simply asked her to keep
their deep and meaningful friendship a secret, and that speaking
(49:32):
out about this relationship, as she was doing now would
quote ruin her past recovery. According to Jean, the Queen
really was in the garden that night at Versailles, the
Queen really did want the diamond necklace, And when the
Queen realized how public opinion would turn on her should
(49:54):
she receive the diamond necklace, she and the Cardinal joined
forces to throw poor Jean under the bus. Jean, who
had only ever wanted to reclaim the Valois name.
Speaker 3 (50:07):
By saving the Queen, I gave myself the blame erna
JUSTI was a powerful queen, the Cardinal as powerful a prince.
I have nothing but the name of Valois to render
me of any consequence.
Speaker 2 (50:27):
But despite Jean's short lived fame, despite throwing royalty and
peasantry under the bus, when she found it convenient, she
was alone, she had made more enemies than allies in
her double crossing. She still held out hope of joining
a social class that was actively in the process of disappearing.
(50:51):
It's hard to say what would have become of Jean
in the tumultuous years to come. In just six years,
she had gone from a beggar to a false countess
to a branded thief. She was just thirty five years old,
and she reached the final chapter of her tale. There's
(51:11):
a couple of stories about Jean's final days. The most
popular one has her trying to outrun a creditor, flinging
herself out the window of her London hotel and dying
on the street below. By this point, though, we should
know better than to think the story stopped there. After all,
(51:33):
Jean had always told her greatest stories through pen and paper.
Speaker 5 (51:38):
Jeanne is in some ways you have to admire her,
but she's not a likable person. She's not. It was
just what's in it for me? You know, what can
I get? And even when she got stuff, she wanted
more and then she got stuffed by you know, it
was all ill gotten gains too. This was not a
revolutionary and no one should be misconstruing anything that she
(52:01):
did as you know, revolutionary or pre revolutionary actions. This
is a crazy story that went awry with a woman
who was an abused child who grew up to be
a conwoman. That was the effect of trying to get
what she wanted that she claimed was her legacy.
Speaker 2 (52:28):
Jeanne's scheming, however, misguided, might not have rewritten history, but
she certainly nudged it in one particular direction, in this case,
towards one of the most famous revolutions of the eighteenth
century and the eventual demise of Queen Marie Antoinette.
Speaker 5 (52:49):
It was the beginning of the end for her. I
think because Jeanne's lies about Marie Antoinette persisted, most people
believed that she had a hand in it, that she
and the cardinal had conspired, or that she herself had
somehow secretly directed it. She became nicknamed Madame Deficit.
Speaker 2 (53:14):
In the process of pursuing her own ambition, jean helped
turn the tide against the very thing she had hoped
to become, and left a treasure trove of conspiracy in
her wake, so that today she still got us talking
about that ugly necklace, the piece of jewelry that caused
(53:34):
a monarchy to fall, heads to roll, and that keeps
us coming back centuries later.
Speaker 4 (53:49):
Okay, there's a term in movies, or at least on
this one Wikipedia page that I read earlier this week,
called twin films. It's where two movies about a similar
topic come out around the same time. A bugs life
and ants are are sited. Armageddon and Deep Impact Turner
Hootch and K nine the Fire Festival documentary.
Speaker 5 (54:11):
Here.
Speaker 4 (54:12):
Sure we have a bit of a twin films phenomenon
happening here with the Diamond Necklace story. Zarin, you host
Ridiculous Crime with Elizabeth, Great great podcast, and as this
episode was coming together, Ridiculous Crime covered the Diamond Necklace
and it's great. People should go listen to that one too.
If you're now obsessed with this, go listen to the
(54:33):
Early Noble Blood. Listen to the Ridiculous Crime. Just do
a full deep dive.
Speaker 1 (54:38):
See if from every possible angle take the cubest version
of this story.
Speaker 2 (54:41):
Yeah, I mean, it's a story that needs to be
retold as many times as possible until we finally figure
out the truth, because unfortunately it's we're going to be
biased no matter what. All of our sources are just
kind of protecting their own best interests.
Speaker 1 (54:54):
There's a lot of reading through the lines.
Speaker 2 (54:56):
So Darren, who are we casting on this? I feel
like there's a lot of potential.
Speaker 1 (55:00):
Yes, completely. I was kind of okay once again. I
was thinking a little bit about how do I have
fun with this? So for Jean douvois, I with Anne Hathaway.
Speaker 2 (55:08):
She's great, she's great, right.
Speaker 1 (55:09):
Playing against type a little bit. She has to believe, like,
you know, the dark version of what we think of
her as the Cardinal Prince. I'm thinking Vincent Cassel, the
French actor, Yeah, put sex seeing this, Yeah, so you
kind of like you believe it. You want him to
kind of get it, but then you're like, oh no,
you can't.
Speaker 2 (55:25):
He's a bad boy.
Speaker 1 (55:26):
Totally exactly. For Queen Marie Antoinette, I went with Marioncletillard.
I thought it once again French actress.
Speaker 2 (55:32):
Oh yeah. The French were very mad that Joaquin Phoenix
played Napoleon, so we better give them a French person
for this iconic French figure.
Speaker 1 (55:40):
Exactly. I think they deserve it. I mean, they give
us the whole idea of Lingua franca. We gott at
least respect him in cinema. So for King Louis the sixteenth.
I was thinking Jude Law an American, but he does
have period movie face. I mean, you look at that guy,
You're like, oh, okay, I can believe in almost any
other time than now.
Speaker 2 (55:54):
He's amazing.
Speaker 1 (55:55):
I love this idea, ever, cali Ostro, I was thinking
of Jeremy Irons. Just let him have fun, let him
play it campy, you know, let him do it up
like he's got the crazy outfits he comes in and
for his wife Sarah Fina, LEAs they do playing get
a little bit older.
Speaker 2 (56:09):
Oh all right. Look, if Adam Driver can be like
the dad in Ferrari, I feel like we can age
up LEAs they do.
Speaker 1 (56:15):
Right, Thank you. So, who's your very special episode character?
Speaker 2 (56:20):
You know what, honestly, I have to say, my very
special characters are the poor jewelers who made this diamond
necklace for the mistress of the king and then couldn't
find anyone to buy it. So I just feel so
sorry for them, these poor guys who just are stuck
with this kind of hideous diamond necklace.
Speaker 4 (56:37):
You did a very good job explaining the necklace various
times in the episode as hideous, and.
Speaker 2 (56:42):
You're so gaudy. I just like, I can't imagine anyone
actually wearing it. If Marie Antoinette was like, it's too much,
it's too much.
Speaker 1 (56:52):
If the thing is called the slaves Caller, I mean,
right there, you got to know you're making a mistake
even if you make it, if you're giving it, if
you're wearing it, if you're wearing the slaves collar, you're like, oh,
come on.
Speaker 2 (57:01):
Now, I mean something is wrong. I made a wrong turn.
Speaker 1 (57:04):
Yeah, right exactly. And also, by the way, I have
the same very special characters. I felt so bad for them.
I was like, I mean, normally you won't get me
on the side of the jewelers, but boom did it.
I was like, I feel so bad for these guys.
They get content. They're just trying to make a beautiful thing.
Speaker 2 (57:18):
They're just trying their best. Jason, what about you?
Speaker 4 (57:20):
Is it wrong to pick Murrie Antoinette.
Speaker 2 (57:24):
She doesn't do anything wrong in this episode. I'm actually
a big Marie Antoinette defender, not like because I believe
in a monarchy, which I don't, but just I think
she's gotten so much bad press that's undeserved for like
what she actually did and represented. If you want to
hear me talk about that in excessive detail. You just
listen to Noble Blood. But Jason, I think that's the
(57:45):
right pick.
Speaker 4 (57:46):
Well, I'm glad I sent me to the guillotine for that.
I felt pretty bad for her at various points in this.
Speaker 1 (57:52):
Oh my god, what about the plan to run away
to London and hawk the diamonds? Like why not just
go all the way to like French Canada? I mean, like,
just go on, you know, like go run to the colonies,
really get away, live it up. Those diamonds will go
far on the continent.
Speaker 2 (58:05):
You have London so convenient, and the food there truly
coming into its own, the food scene in London.
Speaker 1 (58:10):
Yeah, and you're gonna have much more of a market
for diamonds than you know, in French Canada. But still,
I'm still, I'm just I'm going to try to get
the heck out of there.
Speaker 4 (58:17):
I want to say that last week we registered a
Gmail address for the show Big Step Very Special episodes
at gmail dot com. We mentioned that, and I wasn't
sure anyone would reach out, but people did and wrote
very nice messages, and some people cast past episodes with
their choices. Oh I love it. Plenty of people who
are big fans of both of your other podcasts and
(58:39):
just wanted to pop in to say they've added this
one to the routine. Someone went through every episode and
rated it and ranked it. It was very thoughtful stuff,
and that's also it was heartening. So anyone wants to
write for any reason, we will read all the emails.
There's I checked before popping on here. There's a few
(59:00):
need to get back to. But we're gonna be inbox
zero with the show account. That's a promise, so keep
them coming.
Speaker 2 (59:06):
I really admire your skill and optimism with email because
I am bad at it.
Speaker 1 (59:12):
Yeah. Same, I'm with you again on that forty thousand
emails easy unread.
Speaker 4 (59:16):
I'll give you an update each episode. Thank you inbox
forty thousand. Hopefully we don't get to that. Very special
episodes is made by some very special people. This show
is hosted by Danish Schwartz, Zaren Burnett and me Jason. English. Research,
writing and interviews for today's episode were provided by Wonder
(59:36):
Media Network. Our producer is Josh Fisher. Editing and sound
design by Emily maronof mixing and mastering by Beheid Fraser.
Original music by Alis McCoy. Our story editor is Marissa Brown.
Show logo by Lucy Kintonia special thanks to our voice
actors Coco Margo Rodale and Tom Antonellis. I am your
(01:00:01):
executive producer. We'll see you back here next Wednesday. You'd
like to email the show, you can reach out anytime.
Very Special Episodes at gmail dot com. Very Special Episodes
is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Art originals.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original. It's the summer of seventeen
ninety one. Trouble is brewing in the humid streets of Paris,
the first inklings of revolution. By this time next year,
the French royal family will be under house arrest, the
monarchy abolished. Within two years, Marie Antoinette will be taking
(00:35):
her place at the guillotine. But in seventeen ninety one,
our story is focused on a woman writing a memoir
trying to clear her name in one of the era's
most notorious scandals, a scandal that poured fuel on the
fire that enveloped the French monarchy.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Fain would I have imitated the retired warblings of the Nightingale,
and like her, poured out my tale of sorrows. But
cruel fate alas has denied me even the comforts of
obscurity and solitude.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
This woman, our memoir writer, is Jean de Valois Saint Remi.
She's strangely immune to the ire of the revolutionaries. While
they paraded down the street demanding noble head's role, this
countess found safety in the public eye, maybe because she
was less of a countess than a con woman. And
(01:40):
maybe because her greatest victim was their greatest enemy, Queen
Marie Antoinette. Herself, Jeanques spent most of her life pretending
to be nobility, most of her time in the Paris
court trying to approximate luxury, and now in her final years,
(02:00):
she's found herself trying to rewrite her own history one
last time.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
The names of a great queen and of a Prince
carnal unhappily united with mine have spread a blaze to
attract general notice. And as if I was doomed to
be the victim of painful splendor, the ingenuity of my
enemies found means to forge the chains of mightys honare
(02:29):
out of a diamond necklace.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
It was all very ironic. She was hated by the
nobility for conning her way into the upper class. She
was loved by the common folk for incriminating an already
unpopular queen. But in all her scheming and conniving, the
countess had helped harold the end of the very thing
(02:53):
she wanted to be so badly, the wannabe countess had
unwillingly toppled the French monarchy. Welcome to very special episodes,
and I heeart original podcast. I'm your host, Dana Schwartz,
(03:16):
and this is the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. I
do have to say, I'm obsessed with this story. I've
been obsessed with this story for a long time. We
actually covered it. I have another history podcast called Noble
Blood that talks about, you know, weird stories about royals
(03:37):
from history, and this was one of the first episodes.
Because it's just it's stranger than fiction.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
It's so good. It's real life, dangerous liaisons. It's just
absolutely the best, like power and precige and scammy people
in the courts. I love this one.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Also, is there anything more French than pulling a scam
with your lover and your husband?
Speaker 4 (03:57):
Eighteenth century catfish story, It's great, let's get into it.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Before the French Revolution, before the Diamond Necklace, Jean was
just someone, certainly not a tabloid darling. But when you
step back and look at this story, it's no wonder
Paris was buzzing with news of Jean, and no wonder
we're still talking about her right now. Before this episode
(04:25):
is over, a revolution will spill through the streets of Paris.
A woman will swoop down from a four s drawn
carriage to save a poor orphan and a priceless diamond
necklace will disappear. And despite the fact that this singular
episode might have changed the course of French history, there's
(04:48):
not one eyewitness account of the whole thing.
Speaker 5 (04:52):
So you've got this stranger than fiction scandal without one
reliable witness to tell it. There's that famous adage about
a lie can make its way twice around the world
before the truth has time to tire shoes, and that
is the world that we were in.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
That's Leslie Carrol. She's a writer across many genres. The
genre that concerns us is highly researched women's historical fiction.
For her book series about the French aristocracy just before
the Revolution, Becoming Marie Antoinette, Leslie became an expert on
this slippery tale from history and an expert on today's
(05:31):
main character, Jean de Bellois so Remi.
Speaker 5 (05:35):
Jean is an anti heroine in the most perfect sense
because she was a con woman from con girl from
the time she was about six years old. She also
had an ancestor who was kicked out of Velsai for
minting fake coins, so her carn artistry comes through genetically Jean.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Is born on July twenty second, seventeen fifty six in
the Champagne region of France. She's the third of six children,
only one of three who survived childhood. Her mother is
an illiterate housemaid. Her father, well, that's a bit more complicated.
Speaker 5 (06:14):
She is a descendant of King Henri the second of Valois, who,
for royal watchers, was married to Catherine de Medici when
he was only a teenager.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Jean's noble lineage is a bit convoluted, but basically, King
Henri the second had a son out of wedlock, Baron
de san Rami, and then the baron had kids who
had kids.
Speaker 5 (06:39):
Our anti heroine, Jenne is descended from the sixth and
last of the second Baron de Saint Remy's kids, which
means there's no money left to go around. So Jean's
family is noble but poor. And Jeanne's father says, hey,
I'm from the Vauois dynasty, so I deserve a royal pension,
(07:01):
And he starts going around to whoever will listen, and
he says, hey, I have a royal lineage and I
want a pension, and he makes so much trouble that
he ends up getting thrown in jail because nobody likes
a pretender to the throne.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
So by the time Jean's a kid, she's got no
clear prospects, no money, and her only tie to nobility
is locked up for being a blabbermouth. To make matters worse,
her mom leaves her and her siblings begging on the
side of the road in Paris, arming them with pamphlet
claiming their valois. You can't fault jean for her later ambition.
(07:38):
From the very beginning, she was dead set on reaching nobility.
Speaker 5 (07:42):
This early part of Jeanne's life, a carriage comes by
and a woman sticks out her head and sees these
three little kids begging on the street and believes the story.
And this woman is the Marquis de Boulbillier.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Somehow, the Marquise convinces her husband, one of the wealthiest
bankers in France, to take the kids under their wing.
It's like a fairy tale. The san Ramie kids are
education alongside the Boulaangnviers, sent to all the best schools.
Things are looking up for jean and then, like in
any good story, the other glass slipper dropped.
Speaker 5 (08:19):
Suddenly people smell something strange on the street. What is
this weird odor?
Speaker 2 (08:23):
According to Leslie, authorities found an illegal distillery in the
Marquise's home, and.
Speaker 5 (08:30):
The worst thing that can happen to any nobleman in
France is to be ostracized and sent to your country estate.
So bang, Jean's dreams of entering Paris society are dashed.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
From there, Jean is entered into the only other place
for a young woman of the era, a convent where
they have her apprenticing with seamstresses and millineries.
Speaker 5 (08:53):
And John is like, wait, wha, wha, wha, whoa, whoa whoa. Well,
I'm descended from a Vaulois. I don't do manual labor.
So she says, no, forget it, I'm going to try
this on my own. And she gets out of the
convent and in seventy in eighty she finds herself a
fella named Nicola de LaMotte, who is a weird, scrawny,
(09:16):
short guy.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Here's how Jean writes about Nicola in her memoirs.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
During my first abude at bersu Ob, I became acquainted
with Comte de LaMotte. But as it is not a
novel I'm writing, I shall pass over the circumstances which
brought him to a proposal or a marriage, as well
as the motives that determined me to accept it.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Jean was heavily pregnant with twins at the time. The
twins only lived for a few days after their birth,
but Nicola and John stayed together. As time went on,
they set up a life, growing their circle bit by bit.
Their acquaintances were hardly the noblemen and ladies of court
(10:02):
Jean wanted to rub elbows.
Speaker 5 (10:04):
With, and ultimately they end up forming a troika, and
the third leg of this stool is an army buddy
of Nicolas named Roteau du Billette, who is handsomer and
more interesting, and for some reason, Nicola doesn't seem to
(10:24):
mind too much when Redeau and Jane become lovers, because, oh, heck,
Nicola has a few mistresses of his own.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Still, what Jean wanted was to be nobility. That was
all she heard her father talk about when he'd been around.
The tale her mother had instructed her to tell. It
was her distant Valois name that had landed her in
the marquise's house, and here she was married, childless, and
still dirt poor. There had to be a way forward.
Speaker 5 (10:58):
They decide, well, heck, we need a profession. Lest's become
con artists.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Surely con artistry wouldn't be so different. And to these
steps that had gotten Jean this far, She'd just adorn
the truth of her beloir heritage until she was actually
able to restore her noble family name. Now she had
two partners in crime who could help her cause. By
(11:24):
this point, Nicola, Jean, and their quote unquote friend Routeau
decided they needed to make money. Between the three of them,
they had a failed military career, a sort of handsome face,
and a dubious claim to nobility. They decide to follow
that last lead. Nicola and Jean wanted to get into
(11:47):
the court of the current King and Queen, Louis the
sixteenth and Marie Antoinette. They need a connection to the crown,
so they head back to the Marquise, Jean's initial sponsor
before that illegal distillery incident, to get a good word.
And it just so happened that the Marquise and the
Marquis are staying with a very consequential host, Cardinal Prince
(12:13):
Louis de Roan.
Speaker 5 (12:15):
He's the highest ecclesiastical voice in France, and actually a
minor prince, so he's a prince of the Church and
a prince for real, and he's got Belgian Gobla tapistries,
and he's got crystal This is he does not live
like a man of the cloth by any means.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
When Jean shows up, it's not just the jewels and
artwork that catch her eye. She's accidentally walked into a
masterclass of con artistry right in the Cardinal Prince's home.
Speaker 5 (12:46):
He is hosting in his home the Man of the Hour,
a famous self proclaimed mesmeric healer, an alchemist, a man
named Count Cagliostro, and his wife Sarah Fina. Now in reality,
Count Cagliostro is really an Italian named Balsamo, and his
(13:10):
wife is the illiterate daughter of a blacksmith. Caliostro decks
himself out like Prospero in you know, capes that are
marked with signs, and he again lots and lots of perfume.
And he's one of these crazy guys in the eighteenth
century who has convinced the richest people in Europe that
(13:37):
he has the power to cure them. And the Cardinal
takes her up to Caliostro's little alchemy whatever his atolier
and goes, look, he made me this ring, and he
told me there was more where that came from. He's
gonna make all these diamonds. And John is like, oh
god boy, what a dummy.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Now, Jean's been looking for a target who's rich and
easy to fool. The last ingredient she'd need for a
successful con was motive. She needed the Cardinal Prince to
want something. Luckily, they had a common goal to get
the crown to notice them. To understand just how this
(14:21):
con worked, We've got to go back in time and
head east to the border of Austrian Germany, where a
young Marie Antoinette is making the long trek to France
to get married. There she meets the Cardinal Prince for
the first time.
Speaker 5 (14:37):
And she meets this cardinal draw and he's got gold
lace cuffs, and he reeks of expensive perfume, and he's
just seems oily and anxious and butterwood melt in his mouth.
He's just she just kind of wants to take a
bath after speaking to him.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
They don't exactly hit it off. The Cardinal Prince is powerful,
but Marie's still on her way to becoming queen and
they're relatelationship only worsens A few years later, at a
sparkling dinner party in Paris, the Cardinal really sticks his
foot in his mouth. He bad mouths Marie's mom. Marie's mom,
(15:21):
Maria Teresa, was a pretty big deal. She was one
of the three major players trying to partition Poland, which
was the subject of flight dinner conversation that night in Paris.
Speaker 5 (15:33):
And the Cardinal repeats a quote joke that.
Speaker 6 (15:37):
He heard, supposedly Frederick's great said that the Maria Tarisa
in one end wielded an ankerchief to cry for the
poor Poles, and in Zia's land wielded a sword against him.
Speaker 5 (15:56):
Well, news of this comment gets back to Marie Antoinette,
of course, and she's livid, and she said, never again.
I don't care. This man is dead to me. He
will never get higher up, will never get any other offices.
I don't want him to have anything to do with me,
my future children anything. He does end up baptizing her
children because he's the Grand Almoner of France, but she
(16:17):
won't even look him in the eye at the baptismal
font and it becomes known throughout France that Marie Antoinette
will have nothing to do with this man, that she
hates his guts more than anyone in France.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Back in Kaliostro's alchemy chamber in seventeen eighty one, Jean
puts the puzzle pieces together.
Speaker 5 (16:40):
More than anything. Now, the Cardinal is desperate to get
back into Marie Antoinette's good graces because now she's the queen.
The Cardinal is also an extremely gullible, credible man. He
has two weak points, money and power.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
And so Jean approaches the Cardinal prince praising Caliostro's skills.
Speaker 5 (17:05):
She realizes, now how credible this guy is. She's like, oh,
my god, if he'll believe Kliostro is an alchemist, good grief,
there's no such thing as an alchemist. Maybe he'll believe
my story. And then she starts with a sob story
and oh, I'm a descendant on the last balloon. All
(17:26):
I'm trying to do is get my estates by the
wholesob story. In her very low cut gown.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Jean has found her mark, one step closer to nobility.
Jean put her plan into action. She gets close to
the Cardinal prince, apparently becoming his lover, because if a
cardinal is already sinning with an alchemist, why stop there.
(17:54):
Soon he falls into the trap Jean has laid out
for him. He asks her for what he needs.
Speaker 5 (18:01):
He's like, oh, do you know Marie Antoinette, Because all
I want is to become an intimate of the queen
and to get back into her good graces, because for
some reason, I don't understand why the queen hates me
so much. And so she claims, well, if you'll help
me with the Queen, i'll help you with them. And
she claims to know everything about Versailles.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
There's one little hitch here. Jean does not know the queen,
and she's never been to Versailles. But John's never let
a little thing like the truth stop her before. According
to Leslie, for all the trouble Jean had in regaining
her noble title, it wasn't too hard to actually enter
(18:43):
the seat of the French monarchy.
Speaker 5 (18:46):
You know. Louis the fourteenth famously said, let tassinoi Versailles itself.
Anybody could go there as long as a man had
a hat and a sword, and they retailed those. If
you've ever been to Versailles, and you see the courtyards.
Imagine that they had vendors there. You could rent one,
and you could just walk around and go through all
of the official, the state suites of rooms and see
(19:08):
how the royals lived.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Which frankly wasn't very glamorous.
Speaker 5 (19:13):
And frankly, it was pretty stinky and pretty dirty because
all of the nobles felt that they were too high
placed in society to dust anything or lift a finger.
And there were no toilets at Versailles.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
So Jean starts nosing around Versailles, and to her credit,
she tries to get the Queen's attention. No success there.
She's not really making much progress on the quest. The
cardinal Prince thinks she's on, but John is learning the
layout of the court, the little details that will really
(19:48):
sell the stories she feeds to the cardinal. When she
gets home and starts asking for money.
Speaker 5 (19:54):
She decides to tell the Cardinal, well, you know, the Queen.
She wants to know she can trust you. So she
has this friend who's in deep financial distress and she
doesn't want to tell her husband, the king, about this,
so she only trusts me, and she needs sixty thousand francs,
and then the Cardinal ponies up the money while the
(20:17):
person in need is actually jam And then a few
months later it's fifty thousand francs, and a few months
after that it's one hundred thousand francs.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Jean keeps it going, seating her sob stories around Versailles.
She tells one noble her house burned down with all
her best serving wear inside, and gets a nice set
of china in return. Meanwhile, she and Nicolau get a
fancy Parisian townhouse with the Cardinal's money, outfitting it with
furniture from pawn chops. They're spending the Cardinal's allowance about
(20:48):
as quickly as they're able to ask for more, far
richer in their appearance than what's actually in their bank account,
but they're officially calling themselves the Countess and count de
la MoU Valois. The money is going towards one other
expensive pastime, impersonating Murray Antoinette. Remember this whole time, the
(21:14):
Cardinal is waiting on Jean to reintroduce him to the Queen.
Jean has no such way of doing that. She's never
met the Queen. She knows her about as well as
the Cardinal does, which is why Jean starts procuring responses
from the Queen the only way she can imagine. She
forges letters.
Speaker 5 (21:35):
They get this expensive blue stationary, and she's never seen
Marie Antoinette's stationary. She's saying, who do a queen use
to write?
Speaker 4 (21:42):
Then?
Speaker 5 (21:42):
What do you think her handwriting looks like? What do
you think her signature looks like?
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Jean gets Riteaux, Nicola's army buddy and her other lover
to help forge the signature on these letters.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
She writes, I cannot disapprove of the desire you have
of seeing me, but you would not have me act
imprudently to bring about the compendiously a thing which you
must be persuaded you will shortly obtain in the interim.
(22:16):
Be very cautious, above all discrete, and as there is
no foreseeing what may happen, be reserved and greatly perplexed
in what you hereafter right.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
To me, and the Cardinal falls for it. Hook Wine
and Sinker.
Speaker 6 (22:40):
Is a charming countess. Has imparted to me. How much
you seem affected with the account she gave you of
the little services I have rendered her the concern alone
which she inspires induced me to seize every opportunity of
obliging her, For certainly I was very far from foreseeing
(23:03):
she will one day be in a capacity of mentioning
me to you in such a manner as to remove
the evil impressions which my enemies have ever given you
of my disposition. But hope begins to shine in my heart,
(23:23):
and I presume to singly you will not disdain to
hear me. Let, but your beauteous smith pronounce the world. Yes,
you will be hold your slave at your feet, and
this day will be the happiest of his life.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Jeanne as Marie Antoinette responds, assuring the Cardinal that he
has achieved the impossible task of falling back into her
good graces, all due to their mutual friend.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Of course, the account which the contest has given to
me of your behavior towards her has made a stronger
impression on me than all you have written to me.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Yes, that Countess is jean She's writing about herself.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
I hope you will never forget that it is to
her you are indebted for her pardon, as also for
the letter I write to you. I have always looked
upon you as a very inconsistent and indiscreet man, Nothing
but a conduct quite the reverse of what you have
(24:37):
held can regain my confidence and merit my esteem.
Speaker 6 (24:42):
Yes, I am the happiest motel breathing. My master pardons me.
I know how to appreciate all the obligations I am
on there to the charming Countess in whatever cityas I
may chance to be, I shall be gratefully mindful of
(25:04):
all that she has done in my behalf.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Jean has done it. She's convinced the Cardinal. He's corresponding
with the queen.
Speaker 5 (25:14):
And the Cardinal is going, oh, I got this letter
from Marie Antoinette. She says this, this, this, and Jean's like,
oh really really all that's that's very interesting.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Of course, it's important to remember there's not one witness
to this tale. These letters are taken from Jean's memoirs,
so there her recollections of the letters she forged and
the ones she received from the Cardinal. But whatever their accuracy,
they could only go so far. In the spring of
(25:44):
seventeen eighty four months into this exchange of letters, the
Cardinal starts to get antsy. He hasn't seen the Queen
acknowledge this newfound relationship outside of their letters. What he
was after wasn't friendship. He wanted Marie Antoinette's support, her power,
whatever she could give him.
Speaker 5 (26:04):
So jean is getting nervous that this law coan that
she's playing is going to blow up in her face.
So she realizes she has to up the ante a
little or she's going to lose the trust of the Cardinal.
So she said, well, you know, the Queen is known
for taking midnight strolls behind the palace and the grove
(26:26):
of Venus. So now she said, well, let me set
up a secret rendezvoust for you with the Queen.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
It was one thing to sign Marie Antoinette's name at
the bottom of a piece of paper, but to impersonate
her in the flesh, jean is going to need a miracle.
Roteau finds his Nicolaus and Jean's saving grace in the
form of Nicole Legay, a sex worker with a striking
resemblance to Marie Antoinette.
Speaker 5 (26:56):
Jeanne says, I have a very important assignment for you,
and she tells her that we're going to go to
Versailles and you are going to engage in a midnight
Rendevoult with a very important man, and you're going to
give him a pink rose, and you're going to give
him a letter, and with the letter, you're going to say,
you know what this means.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
So they dress Nicole up like the Queen. They give
her this white linen dress with big puffy sleeves in
the style the Queen like to wear, and a big
hat and a cloak so the Cardinal can't look too
closely at her face.
Speaker 5 (27:32):
And she meets the Cardinal Deroent at midnight and the
grove of Venus behind Versailles, and she forgets to give
him a letter. So we don't know what was in
the letter, but ostensibly it was supposedly a forged I
forgive you kind of note, and she does. She thrusts
(27:52):
the pink rose at him. The Cardinal falls at her feet,
thinking that it's Marie Antoinette, of course, and he kisses
her slipper and he call does her job, and she
has now tricked the Cardinal into thinking that Marie Antoinette
has forgive given him all of his dress passes forever.
Everything is wonderful. Now we're onto the next part of
(28:12):
the con, the con that Jean never expected to have.
Now we come to the affair of the diamond necks.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
This affair starts one smoky and glitzy night at one
of Jean's dinner parties. Among her many guests is a
lawyer who starts talking about two of his clients, Boehmer
and Bassinge, jewelers to the Crown. They're in a bit
of a pickle.
Speaker 5 (28:41):
There are two Swiss German Jews who have sunk almost
all of their money into a twenty eight hundred carrot
diamond necklace called the Slave's Collar. It is massive. On
any normal human, it would go around your neck and
practically fall to your waist. It is diamond and baby
(29:05):
blue enameled bows and loops and pendants.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
They had made the necklace ten years ago for Madame
Duberry Louis, the fifteenth Mistress, but before they'd gotten the
chance to sell it to him, Louis died, leaving them
with the necklace. The necklace, two thousand and eight hundred carrots,
was breathtaking.
Speaker 5 (29:32):
And it's probably one of the ugliest things you've ever seen.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Jean de Valois san Remi had caught wind of a
necklace worth an unimaginable amount of money. If she could
get her hands on it, leveraging her relationship with the
cardinals she's worked so hard to strengthen, all of her
money woes would be over. The affair of the diamond
necklace is now in full swing, and it's time to
(30:04):
meet the shining jewel of this whole episode, the necklace itself.
And well, this fabled necklace, it's more of a chest piece.
It's got this enormous choker of oval stones across the top,
and then there's another necklace entirely connected to it. These
clunky cross body straps collarbone to belly button are riddled
(30:30):
with these huge, thick cut diamonds. Each strand ends in
a faux tassel, also of diamonds, and each tassel is
gilded with a little horrendous baby blue gemstone bow.
Speaker 5 (30:48):
But they had paid a fortune to create it, because
twenty eight hundred carrots, that's diamonds of the first water.
So they're desperate for a client, and they say to Jean,
I don't know, you know the Queen, would the queen
wanted and chance as well? I don't know. I could
(31:11):
ask her. Of course, she's never met the Queen.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
We know this, Marie Antoinette had already turned the necklace
down for several possible reasons. One it was made for
her grandfather in law's mistress, Two it was ugly, and
three it was ridiculously expensive. Marie Antoinette, of all people,
(31:33):
was not in the business of giving the French people
more ammunition to hate her. With her expensive taste had
already incurred their wrath, but for Jean it was still
the perfect opportunity.
Speaker 5 (31:47):
She says, uh, this is interesting. It might not be
a necklace for a Bourbon, but it's a necklace for
a Valois. Well, she goes to the cardinal and she says,
Marie Antoinette is far too anxios to tell the king
(32:08):
because you know how famous she is for extravagance, and
she's in so much hot water because of all the
dresses and the furbilows and the hats, and the expenses
and the jewelry and that she buys, and you know,
the public is now turning against her, and she really
has to be very careful with her expenditures. And she
really wants this diamond necklace. There's nothing else like it
(32:31):
in the world. But she trusts you to be so
discreet that if you would buy it on her behalf
as the go between the interlocutor, and then give it
to me and I will bring it to her, then
nobody need know that she's the one that really bought
the necklace.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Now the cardinal had money, well, he had had money,
he certainly didn't have the jeweler's asking price one million,
eight hundred thousand livre just under fifteen million dollars today.
This was what the queen wanted, right, and what the
queen wanted he wanted a favor like this could settle
(33:14):
the score forever. So the deal is set. The Cardinal
agrees to pay the jewelers in installments, while the necklace
itself is given to jean She, of course promises to
discreetly deliver it to the Queen.
Speaker 5 (33:31):
Now, I will ask our audience to give me a
show of hands of how many people really think that
this necklace made its way from Jeanne to Marie Antoinette. Okay,
none of you believed, right.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Jeanne got her end of the bargain, the diamond necklace
in her hands, but it never went to the queen. Instead,
she passed it off to her partners in crime. Nicola
and Riteau.
Speaker 5 (33:56):
So what happened was Nicola de l'amotte and Rete olivierte
very carefully and sometimes not so carefully, prized each one
of these hundreds of stones out of their setting and
started to hawk them all over the place.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Nicolaus sets sail to London with a bag of diamonds,
and if anyone asks him where they come from, he says,
it's a surprise inheritance. Meanwhile, the jewelers are already knocking
down the cardinal's door trying to collect. When nothing comes through,
they take the matter directly up the chain of command.
Speaker 5 (34:39):
So they write a letter to Marie Antoinette and her
lady in waiting, Madam kemp All, receives it and reads
it to her and said what is this about? And
Ryan Tooinette said, I have absolutely no idea what they
are talking about. It must be some kind of a joke.
And she takes this letter written to her by the
(35:00):
two jewelers and she rolls it up and she throws
it into the fireplace. So puff up and smoke.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
When a few more days go by without a response,
the jewelers forego the letter and show up in person.
The necklace makers have sunk all of their money into
this piece of jewelry, and now they don't have the
money or the necklace. Marie Antoinette has no idea. This
entire plot has taken place under her name, and she
(35:29):
just burned the only notice she would have gotten about it.
The jeweler takes out the contract he was given for
his necklace.
Speaker 5 (35:38):
And the contract is signed Marie Antoinette de France. She
looks at this contract and she said, you must know
that signature is a forgery. Royals never sign their name
with the country that they are the sovereign of. I
would only sign my name Marie Antoinette, son Marie Antoinette
(36:01):
of France. Obviously I am of France. So now the
jeweler realizes how dep is in this that he that
everybody on his end has been the dupe of a
forged contract. No money, no necklace, fake contract. Who was
(36:24):
responsible for this clearly not the queen, and he mentions
this Jean de la Motte Contesse de Valois. And she said,
I have never heard of that woman. I have never
met that woman. And the jeweler says, well, the cardinal insists,
(36:45):
you are intimates that she said absolutely not, no, none
of this is true.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
The alarm bells are going off. But how do you
go about tracking down a con artist who you've never
even heard of, much less met. It's now August fifteenth,
seventeen eighty five, the feast of the Assumption of Mary,
and it's a big day for the Cardinal, one of
(37:13):
his biggest masses of the year. Louis the sixteenth and
Marie Antoinette are supposed to attend themselves. It's all gold,
incense and excitement. But that afternoon, instead of officiating behind
the ambo, the Cardinal finds himself in Louis the Sixteenth's study,
staring white faced down at the faded contract.
Speaker 5 (37:37):
Louis is, you are a prince of the church and
a prince in nobility. You know how royals signed their names.
How could you be taken in? How could you be
such a credulous idiot? And he sits down at a
table and he heeds Louis's request to basically write down
(37:59):
an affidavit that explains every single thing that took place,
from soup to nuts.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Now the Cardinal and the jeweler have given their statements,
Jean figures heavily but that's not enough for the royals,
especially for Marie Antoinette. Discontent is brewing and she won't
stand to see her name dragged through the mud anymore
than it already has been.
Speaker 5 (38:23):
So the Cardinal is arrested right in the middle of
the Hall of Mirrors at Lsall, and it could not
be a more public place if you have ever been there.
All eyes literally of people, but all the mirrors and
everything I mean is magnified to the inth degree. Are watching.
This guy still has all the respect of all these people,
(38:45):
more so than the crown at this point.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
One thing to note Maris never had an easy go
of it exactly. Other than being a literal queen to
one of the most powerful monarchies in France, she had
little love from her people or the French nobility.
Speaker 5 (39:05):
Marie Antoinette has been blamed since the time she came
to Austrian seventeen seventy as an outsider. They made a
pun on her name as Lutricienne, which is the word
for an Austrian female. But Chienne in French is bitch,
so Lutrichien is the Austrian bitch, and that is how
(39:27):
she was nicknamed all even through the French court. So
I mean she was even mocked because she had strawberry
blonde hair. This poor woman could not win ever, I
mean she could wash the feet of every noble in
the Hall of mirrors while the cardinal was busy picking
their pockets, and the cardinal would still be immortalized in
(39:50):
Marie antoinette Villefi. This is the mood in France at
the time.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Back to the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. The cardinals
under arrest, but he reaches into his stocking where he's
got a little pencil and a little notebook stashed away.
He writes a note to his confidants to burn all
his papers, all of his letters from the queen. By
(40:18):
this point, the authorities are also out looking for the
people named in the cardinal's statement. Riteau and Nicole Legee
run for the border. Even poor Caliostro and his wife
were arrested. Jean's rounded up, but not before she gets
a chance to tell Nikola to flee out the window
(40:39):
with all of the goods he can carry.
Speaker 5 (40:42):
The cardinal is ultimately taken to the bastille, as is Jeanne,
and it's very interesting what happens.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
Sure the cardinal gets special treatment, gets good food and
luxuries from his noble relatives who come to visit him.
But the proletariat, the common folk, they start to take
an interest in this story too. They hear the cardinals
been having to sleep on a straw bed like the
other prisoners at his advanced age.
Speaker 5 (41:13):
So the women start wearing these straw hats with red ribbons,
because red is the color of a cardinal's cassock. So
they start wearing them, and they're called biretta a la cardinal,
and it just gets out of he and everybody believes
that it must be that Marie Antoinette really coveted the necklace.
(41:34):
Regardless of what these other people are saying.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
The general sentiment of the time only fanned the flames.
A funny thing about the French justice system of the time,
lawyers couldn't actually be in the same room as their defendants.
Speaker 5 (41:49):
So what they did the witnesses gave statements, and the
witnesses could question each other, so they would get into
these shouting matches between Joan and the cardinal and you
said what, and you did this, and you did it.
And the lawyers would write these quote trial briefs that
were pure fictions, because all they were intended to do
is exonerate their own clients, and they would sell them
(42:09):
on the streets or in bookstalls, or you know, like
kids hawking the nightly paper on the street, and they
sold like hotcakes.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
The scandal was going down in one of the most
legitimate gossip mills of history. The closest the public could
get to what went down in the courtroom were these
lawyer briefs. And the closest the lawyers could get to
what went down in the courtroom were their clients, the
same people trying to clear their own names, the same
(42:43):
people who had built the entire scandal on forgeries and lies.
Speaker 5 (42:49):
It's interesting because there isn't one reliable source for this
whole story. All the stories that have come down to
us were written either after the fact or were written
solely to propagandize the person who was the center of story.
And all of them pointed fingers at each other, and
(43:12):
all of them lied like crazy, and all of them
threw each other under the bus.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
So how did all of these players shake out? In
the end, Calostro our Alchemist was acquitted and released to
return to pooling. The rich people of France once more.
Nicole Lega was also acquitted. Riteau was banished, but good
luck finding him. The cardinal had to give up his
ecclesiastical offices and make a public apology for disrespecting the crown.
(43:46):
Nicola got a heavier sentence, all of his property forfeited
to the crown, and a public punishment of scorching, whipping,
and branding. Luckily for him, he had taken Jean's advice
and fled when he had the chance. Jean wasn't so lucky.
She got a similar punishment, to be whipped publicly and
(44:10):
branded with vo l values or thief. Since Jean's case
had already kicked up so much interest, officials tried to
keep her public punishment under wraps, but it wasn't enough.
Jean was the talk of the town and people were
jumping at the chance to see her in person.
Speaker 5 (44:32):
They sold tickets. Tickets for the trial were pricey. It
was like buying tickets to the Super Bowl. Absurd prices,
scalpers prices. Because normal citizens were trying to buy tickets
to the trial, especially aristocrats. Jean was screaming and yelling,
help me, help me. It is the blood of the Valois.
They're desecrating You heard that right.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
Even as she's being publicly humiliated, even as a hot
iron is being pressed to her skin, Jean is still
carrying on about her supposed nobility.
Speaker 5 (45:06):
Anybody who thinks the John was this woman of the
people who would have supported the destruction of the Bastille
not three years later. This woman wanted to claim her
royal lineage. This woman wanted to walk through the halls
of Versailles and say, hey, hey, I'm one of you.
(45:28):
She did not want to say I'm a woman of
the people, because the first thing that happened during the
French Revolution was the abolishing of royal titles. She would
not have been able to be the contest de la
mad Valois. She would have been one of the first
people taken to the guillotine.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
But as Jean's luck would have it, she'd never have
to see the powder keg she'd stuffed full of forged
letters actually go up in flames. In seventeen ninety, someone
springs her from her prison cell, apparently disguising her as
a boy to get her out of the city. She
escapes to London, where some nobles host her as a
(46:05):
guest but by the summer of the next year, we're
back at the top of our story. Jean's scribbling away
in some CD hotel room, writing her memoirs. According to her,
it's a harrowing experience.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
How often did the pen drop from my hand? How
often would the word blotted out by mighty ears?
Speaker 2 (46:29):
But she finds the strength to publish them without too
much issue.
Speaker 3 (46:34):
I have taken up my pen and for going sleeping,
forgoing the impertinate cares of a boat brought to decay.
I will not lay it down till I have eased
my soul of its overwhelming load. The public must at
length pronounce between hermagiste and the atom she has crushed.
(46:57):
No matter truth has is false, grief has its eloquence.
I shall therefore write.
Speaker 2 (47:06):
In her memory. No Jean weaves a tale of a
young woman destined for greatness. It's the valeoirs name, after all.
Speaker 3 (47:14):
That accounts for the first act of my life, justifies
the deviations of natural ambition, and gives a conception why
scarce emerged from obscurity. Jeanne de Saint Remi du Valois
caught it favor in order to recover the rank to
(47:37):
which she was by birth.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
Entitled Jean in this recollection, stumbled into the open arms
of the Cardinal Prince. And yes, she admits she joined
forces with him, but it was only to further her
true and valorous ambition.
Speaker 3 (47:55):
I had no secrets concealed from him, e none from me.
We mutually read each other's mind aspective ambition. Ease was
to become prime Minister. Mine had no further views than
(48:17):
to be lady of the Manoir of Frontete.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
In this version, the Cardinal tells Jean that the Queen
has a vested interest in her, that there's something about
her that pleases the Queen. So Jean becomes a courier
between the Queen, an absent minded gossip, and the Cardinal,
a lascivious worm whose ill intent pours out into his letters.
(48:44):
She puts his letters under a metaphorical microscope, criticizing the
very non pious way he lingers on the Queen's beauteous
mouth the quote rays of hope shining in his heart.
Jean spares no detail in her version of the events. Rather,
(49:08):
she gives excuses for every open ended question, every incongruent
detail people could ask of her story. The fact that
the Queen denied ever knowing Jean, and that no nobles
knew of her and Jean's intimate friendship. Chalked up to
the fact that the Queen simply asked her to keep
their deep and meaningful friendship a secret, and that speaking
(49:32):
out about this relationship, as she was doing now would
quote ruin her past recovery. According to Jean, the Queen
really was in the garden that night at Versailles, the
Queen really did want the diamond necklace, And when the
Queen realized how public opinion would turn on her should
(49:54):
she receive the diamond necklace, she and the Cardinal joined
forces to throw poor Jean under the bus. Jean, who
had only ever wanted to reclaim the Valois name.
Speaker 3 (50:07):
By saving the Queen, I gave myself the blame erna
JUSTI was a powerful queen, the Cardinal as powerful a prince.
I have nothing but the name of Valois to render
me of any consequence.
Speaker 2 (50:27):
But despite Jean's short lived fame, despite throwing royalty and
peasantry under the bus, when she found it convenient, she
was alone, she had made more enemies than allies in
her double crossing. She still held out hope of joining
a social class that was actively in the process of disappearing.
(50:51):
It's hard to say what would have become of Jean
in the tumultuous years to come. In just six years,
she had gone from a beggar to a false countess
to a branded thief. She was just thirty five years old,
and she reached the final chapter of her tale. There's
(51:11):
a couple of stories about Jean's final days. The most
popular one has her trying to outrun a creditor, flinging
herself out the window of her London hotel and dying
on the street below. By this point, though, we should
know better than to think the story stopped there. After all,
(51:33):
Jean had always told her greatest stories through pen and paper.
Speaker 5 (51:38):
Jeanne is in some ways you have to admire her,
but she's not a likable person. She's not. It was
just what's in it for me? You know, what can
I get? And even when she got stuff, she wanted
more and then she got stuffed by you know, it
was all ill gotten gains too. This was not a
revolutionary and no one should be misconstruing anything that she
(52:01):
did as you know, revolutionary or pre revolutionary actions. This
is a crazy story that went awry with a woman
who was an abused child who grew up to be
a conwoman. That was the effect of trying to get
what she wanted that she claimed was her legacy.
Speaker 2 (52:28):
Jeanne's scheming, however, misguided, might not have rewritten history, but
she certainly nudged it in one particular direction, in this case,
towards one of the most famous revolutions of the eighteenth
century and the eventual demise of Queen Marie Antoinette.
Speaker 5 (52:49):
It was the beginning of the end for her. I
think because Jeanne's lies about Marie Antoinette persisted, most people
believed that she had a hand in it, that she
and the cardinal had conspired, or that she herself had
somehow secretly directed it. She became nicknamed Madame Deficit.
Speaker 2 (53:14):
In the process of pursuing her own ambition, jean helped
turn the tide against the very thing she had hoped
to become, and left a treasure trove of conspiracy in
her wake, so that today she still got us talking
about that ugly necklace, the piece of jewelry that caused
(53:34):
a monarchy to fall, heads to roll, and that keeps
us coming back centuries later.
Speaker 4 (53:49):
Okay, there's a term in movies, or at least on
this one Wikipedia page that I read earlier this week,
called twin films. It's where two movies about a similar
topic come out around the same time. A bugs life
and ants are are sited. Armageddon and Deep Impact Turner
Hootch and K nine the Fire Festival documentary.
Speaker 5 (54:11):
Here.
Speaker 4 (54:12):
Sure we have a bit of a twin films phenomenon
happening here with the Diamond Necklace story. Zarin, you host
Ridiculous Crime with Elizabeth, Great great podcast, and as this
episode was coming together, Ridiculous Crime covered the Diamond Necklace
and it's great. People should go listen to that one too.
If you're now obsessed with this, go listen to the
(54:33):
Early Noble Blood. Listen to the Ridiculous Crime. Just do
a full deep dive.
Speaker 1 (54:38):
See if from every possible angle take the cubest version
of this story.
Speaker 2 (54:41):
Yeah, I mean, it's a story that needs to be
retold as many times as possible until we finally figure
out the truth, because unfortunately it's we're going to be
biased no matter what. All of our sources are just
kind of protecting their own best interests.
Speaker 1 (54:54):
There's a lot of reading through the lines.
Speaker 2 (54:56):
So Darren, who are we casting on this? I feel
like there's a lot of potential.
Speaker 1 (55:00):
Yes, completely. I was kind of okay once again. I
was thinking a little bit about how do I have
fun with this? So for Jean douvois, I with Anne Hathaway.
Speaker 2 (55:08):
She's great, she's great, right.
Speaker 1 (55:09):
Playing against type a little bit. She has to believe, like,
you know, the dark version of what we think of
her as the Cardinal Prince. I'm thinking Vincent Cassel, the
French actor, Yeah, put sex seeing this, Yeah, so you
kind of like you believe it. You want him to
kind of get it, but then you're like, oh no,
you can't.
Speaker 2 (55:25):
He's a bad boy.
Speaker 1 (55:26):
Totally exactly. For Queen Marie Antoinette, I went with Marioncletillard.
I thought it once again French actress.
Speaker 2 (55:32):
Oh yeah. The French were very mad that Joaquin Phoenix
played Napoleon, so we better give them a French person
for this iconic French figure.
Speaker 1 (55:40):
Exactly. I think they deserve it. I mean, they give
us the whole idea of Lingua franca. We gott at
least respect him in cinema. So for King Louis the sixteenth.
I was thinking Jude Law an American, but he does
have period movie face. I mean, you look at that guy,
You're like, oh, okay, I can believe in almost any
other time than now.
Speaker 2 (55:54):
He's amazing.
Speaker 1 (55:55):
I love this idea, ever, cali Ostro, I was thinking
of Jeremy Irons. Just let him have fun, let him
play it campy, you know, let him do it up
like he's got the crazy outfits he comes in and
for his wife Sarah Fina, LEAs they do playing get
a little bit older.
Speaker 2 (56:09):
Oh all right. Look, if Adam Driver can be like
the dad in Ferrari, I feel like we can age
up LEAs they do.
Speaker 1 (56:15):
Right, Thank you. So, who's your very special episode character?
Speaker 2 (56:20):
You know what, honestly, I have to say, my very
special characters are the poor jewelers who made this diamond
necklace for the mistress of the king and then couldn't
find anyone to buy it. So I just feel so
sorry for them, these poor guys who just are stuck
with this kind of hideous diamond necklace.
Speaker 4 (56:37):
You did a very good job explaining the necklace various
times in the episode as hideous, and.
Speaker 2 (56:42):
You're so gaudy. I just like, I can't imagine anyone
actually wearing it. If Marie Antoinette was like, it's too much,
it's too much.
Speaker 1 (56:52):
If the thing is called the slaves Caller, I mean,
right there, you got to know you're making a mistake
even if you make it, if you're giving it, if
you're wearing it, if you're wearing the slaves collar, you're like, oh,
come on.
Speaker 2 (57:01):
Now, I mean something is wrong. I made a wrong turn.
Speaker 1 (57:04):
Yeah, right exactly. And also, by the way, I have
the same very special characters. I felt so bad for them.
I was like, I mean, normally you won't get me
on the side of the jewelers, but boom did it.
I was like, I feel so bad for these guys.
They get content. They're just trying to make a beautiful thing.
Speaker 2 (57:18):
They're just trying their best. Jason, what about you?
Speaker 4 (57:20):
Is it wrong to pick Murrie Antoinette.
Speaker 2 (57:24):
She doesn't do anything wrong in this episode. I'm actually
a big Marie Antoinette defender, not like because I believe
in a monarchy, which I don't, but just I think
she's gotten so much bad press that's undeserved for like
what she actually did and represented. If you want to
hear me talk about that in excessive detail. You just
listen to Noble Blood. But Jason, I think that's the
(57:45):
right pick.
Speaker 4 (57:46):
Well, I'm glad I sent me to the guillotine for that.
I felt pretty bad for her at various points in this.
Speaker 1 (57:52):
Oh my god, what about the plan to run away
to London and hawk the diamonds? Like why not just
go all the way to like French Canada? I mean, like,
just go on, you know, like go run to the colonies,
really get away, live it up. Those diamonds will go
far on the continent.
Speaker 2 (58:05):
You have London so convenient, and the food there truly
coming into its own, the food scene in London.
Speaker 1 (58:10):
Yeah, and you're gonna have much more of a market
for diamonds than you know, in French Canada. But still,
I'm still, I'm just I'm going to try to get
the heck out of there.
Speaker 4 (58:17):
I want to say that last week we registered a
Gmail address for the show Big Step Very Special episodes
at gmail dot com. We mentioned that, and I wasn't
sure anyone would reach out, but people did and wrote
very nice messages, and some people cast past episodes with
their choices. Oh I love it. Plenty of people who
are big fans of both of your other podcasts and
(58:39):
just wanted to pop in to say they've added this
one to the routine. Someone went through every episode and
rated it and ranked it. It was very thoughtful stuff,
and that's also it was heartening. So anyone wants to
write for any reason, we will read all the emails.
There's I checked before popping on here. There's a few
(59:00):
need to get back to. But we're gonna be inbox
zero with the show account. That's a promise, so keep
them coming.
Speaker 2 (59:06):
I really admire your skill and optimism with email because
I am bad at it.
Speaker 1 (59:12):
Yeah. Same, I'm with you again on that forty thousand
emails easy unread.
Speaker 4 (59:16):
I'll give you an update each episode. Thank you inbox
forty thousand. Hopefully we don't get to that. Very special
episodes is made by some very special people. This show
is hosted by Danish Schwartz, Zaren Burnett and me Jason. English. Research,
writing and interviews for today's episode were provided by Wonder
(59:36):
Media Network. Our producer is Josh Fisher. Editing and sound
design by Emily maronof mixing and mastering by Beheid Fraser.
Original music by Alis McCoy. Our story editor is Marissa Brown.
Show logo by Lucy Kintonia special thanks to our voice
actors Coco Margo Rodale and Tom Antonellis. I am your
(01:00:01):
executive producer. We'll see you back here next Wednesday. You'd
like to email the show, you can reach out anytime.
Very Special Episodes at gmail dot com. Very Special Episodes
is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.