[Illustration:  Cardinal Rohan’s Discomfiture——­470]

The cardinal could scarcely stand; he leaned against the table.  “Sir,” he stammered, “I am too much overcome to be able to reply.”  “Walk into this room, cardinal,” rejoined the king kindly; “write what you have to say to me.”  The written explanations of M. de Rohan were no clearer than his words; an officer of the body-guard took him off to the Bastille; he had, just time to order his grand-vicar to burn all his papers.

The correspondence as well as the life of M. de Rohan was not worthy of a prince of the church:  the vices and the credulity of the cardinal had given him over, bound hand and foot, to an intriguing woman as adroit as she was daring.  Descended from a bastard of Henry II.’s, brought up by charity and married to a ruined nobleman, Madame de la Motte Valois had bewitched, duped, and robbed Cardinal Rohan.  Accustomed to an insensate prodigality, asserting everywhere that a man of gallantry could not live on twelve hundred thousand livres a year, he had considered it very natural that the queen should have a fancy for possessing a diamond necklace worth sixteen hundred thousand livres.  The jewellers had, in fact, offered this jewelry to Marie Antoinette; it was during the American war.  “That is the price of two frigates,” the king had said.  “We want ships and not diamonds,” said the queen, and dismissed her jeweller.  A few months afterwards he told anybody who would listen that he had sold the famous collar in Constantinople for the favorite sultana.  “This was a real pleasure to the queen,” says Madame Campan; “she, however, expressed some astonishment that a necklace made for the adornment of Frenchwomen should be worn in the seraglio, and, thereupon, she talked to me a long while about the total change which took place in the tastes and desires of women in the period between twenty and thirty years of age.  She told me that when she was ten years younger she loved diamonds madly, but that she had no longer any taste for anything but private society, the country, the work and the attentions required by the education of her children.  From that moment until the fatal crisis there was nothing more said about the necklace.”

The crisis would naturally come from the want of money felt by the jewellers.  Madame de la Motte had paid them some instalments on account of the stones, which her husband had sold in England:  they grew impatient and applied to the queen.  For a long while she did not understand their applications:  when the complaints of the purveyors at last made her apprehend an intrigue, she sent for Abbe de Vermond and Baron de Breteuil, minister of the king’s household both detested the cardinal, both fanned the queen’s wrath; she decided at last to tell the king everything.  “I saw the queen after the departure of the baron and the abbe,” says Madame Campan; “she made me tremble at her indignation.”  The cardinal renounced the privileges of his rank and condition; he boldly accepted the jurisdiction of the Parliament.