Boehmer, the court jeweler, had collected a large number of diamonds of unusual size and brilliancy, which he had formed into a necklace, in the hope of selling it to the queen, whose fancy for such jewels had some years before been very great.  She had at one time spent sums on diamond ornaments, large enough to provoke warm remonstrances from her mother, though certainly not excessive for her rank; and Louis, knowing her partiality for them, had more than once made her costly gifts of the kind.  But her taste for them had cooled; her children now engrossed far more of her attention than her dress, and she was keenly alive to the distress which still prevailed in many parts of the kingdom, and to the embarrassments of the revenue, which the ingenuity of Calonne did not relieve half so rapidly as his rashness encumbered it.  Accordingly, her reply to Boehmer’s application that she would purchase his necklace was that her jewel-case was sufficiently full, and that she had almost given up wearing diamonds; and that if such a sum as he asked, which was nearly seventy thousand pounds, were available, she should greatly prefer its being spent on a ship for the nation, to replace the Ville de Paris, whose loss still rankled in her breast.

The king, who thought that she must secretly wish for a jewel of such unequalled splendor, offered to make her a present of the necklace, but she adhered to her refusal.  Boehmer was greatly disappointed; he had exhausted his resources and his credit in collecting the stones in the hope of making a grand profit, and declared loudly to his patrons that he should be ruined if the queen could not be induced to change her mind.  His complaints were so unrestrained that they reached the ears of those who saw in his despair a possibility of enriching themselves at his expense.  There was in Paris at the time a Countess de la Mothe, who, as claiming descent from a natural son of Henri II., had added Valois to her name, and had her claim to royal birth so far allowed that, as she was in very destitute circumstances, she had obtained a small pension from the crown.  Her pension and her pretensions had perhaps united to procure her the hand of the Count de la Mothe, who had for some time been discreditably known as one of the most worthless and dangerous adventurers who infested the capital.  But her marriage had been no restraint on a life of unconcealed profligacy, and among her lovers she reckoned the Cardinal de Rohan, who, as we have already seen, was as little scrupulous or decent as herself.

As, however, the cardinal’s extravagance had left him with little means of supplying her necessities, Madame La Mothe conceived the idea of swindling Boehmer out of his necklace, and of making de Rohan an accomplice in the fraud.  The one thing which in the transaction is difficult to determine is whether the cardinal was her willing and conscious assistant, or her dupe.  That his capacity was of the very lowest order was notorious, but he was a man who had been bred in courts; he knew the manner in which princes transacted their business, and in which queens signed their names.  He had long been acquainted with Marie Antoinette’s figure and gestures and voice; while, unhappily, there was nothing in his character which was incompatible with his becoming an accomplice in any act of baseness.